I geolocated the author of My Immortal
I'm sure that most of you reading will be at least slightly familiar with the infamous My Immortal, an early and enduring badfic of the popular Harry Potter Series. If you haven't heard of it, My Immortal follows the adventures of Ebony Dark'ness Dementia Raven Way, who is a goth vampire at Hogwarts and a stand-in for the author. All the other characters are HP characters, but they're mostly goth vampires too, or otherwise preps. The 40-some chapters are fraught with hilariously bad mistakes and spelling. I know this because my friends and I decided to read all of this awful fanfic.
At some point in our reading, I began to wonder where the author was from. While the spelling is consistently atrocious and we laugh our heads off trying to understand what words she possibly could have meant to write, there are a few patterns in the misspellings that led me to believe that our tween writer may not be from America. I set it upon myself to figure out their true nationality, and this is a written account of my logic.
Right off from the Author's Note in the first chapter we can see some interesting choices.
The above observation is entirely consistent with how some accents of English lack "th" and instead use "f" or "d". Most notably, this change is most associated with Northern England. So, I thought that our pubescent genius must be from there as well. I found further proof with misspellings that dropped or added an "r".
So I thought I had cracked it. But then I realized my conclusion, that the author was in Northern England, had one glaring mistake: Hot Topic. (Well, that and the fact that she says she goes on vacation to England at some point. But I didn't know that at the time.)
Hot Topic is mentioned in every other chapter as the place to go if you want gothic clothing. If our poor little preteen lived in England, she probably never even would have heard of Hot Topic, let alone be enchanted with it. So, I searched far and wide to figure out where she could possibly be from, and I think I've cracked it.
Newfoundland. Or that area, anyway. It meets all the criteria. Hot Topic, check. Strong regional accent, check. The accent is even described as "Northern Irish or Scottish", which suits me perfectly.
So if you ever wanted to know, that's my best guess right now. As a corollary, the video of the girls claiming to be the devilish duo behind the fic is probably a fake, since the accents are unabashedly American.
At some point in our reading, I began to wonder where the author was from. While the spelling is consistently atrocious and we laugh our heads off trying to understand what words she possibly could have meant to write, there are a few patterns in the misspellings that led me to believe that our tween writer may not be from America. I set it upon myself to figure out their true nationality, and this is a written account of my logic.
Right off from the Author's Note in the first chapter we can see some interesting choices.
AN: Special fangz (get it, coz Im goffik) 2 my gf (ew not in that way) raven, bloodytearz666 4 helpin me wif da story and spelling. U rok! Justin ur da luv of my deprzzing life u rok 2! MCR ROX!Man, I hope she didn't pay Raven. Her spelling needs some work, and it's in the ways that she messes up that we can see something suspicious emerging. This spelling "mistakes" are pretty consistent in their differences. "thanks"->"fangz" is a pun, obviously (yes, we got it!), but if you look closely, you'll notice that wherever a word usually has "th" the author chose to write an "f" or "ff". The only exception is "da"="the", which is because "the" has a voiced "th" whereas all the other examples have voiceless "th"s.
The above observation is entirely consistent with how some accents of English lack "th" and instead use "f" or "d". Most notably, this change is most associated with Northern England. So, I thought that our pubescent genius must be from there as well. I found further proof with misspellings that dropped or added an "r".
AN: Fangz 2 bloodytearz666 4 helpin wif da chapta! BTW preps stop flaming ma story ok!
AN: fuk off PREPZ ok! Raven fangz 4 helpin agen. im sory ah kudnt update but I wuz derperessed n I had 2 go 2 da hospital kuz I slit muh rists. PS im nut updating til u giv me 10 god revoiws!Those Author's Notes were taken from Chapter 2 and Chapter 14, respectively. You can see how words like "chapta" are missing their final r and words like "derperessed" have extra "r"s after vowels and even extra syllables. This makes sense because in most British dialects of English, vowel+r sounds very similar to just the vowel, so any spell-as-you-say-it attempts may add or remove "r"s willy-nilly. If you look closely, you can also see some evidence of vowel shape changing the spelling as well, but this is harder to associate to any regional dialect.
So I thought I had cracked it. But then I realized my conclusion, that the author was in Northern England, had one glaring mistake: Hot Topic. (Well, that and the fact that she says she goes on vacation to England at some point. But I didn't know that at the time.)
Hot Topic is mentioned in every other chapter as the place to go if you want gothic clothing. If our poor little preteen lived in England, she probably never even would have heard of Hot Topic, let alone be enchanted with it. So, I searched far and wide to figure out where she could possibly be from, and I think I've cracked it.
Newfoundland. Or that area, anyway. It meets all the criteria. Hot Topic, check. Strong regional accent, check. The accent is even described as "Northern Irish or Scottish", which suits me perfectly.
So if you ever wanted to know, that's my best guess right now. As a corollary, the video of the girls claiming to be the devilish duo behind the fic is probably a fake, since the accents are unabashedly American.
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