But scholars since Jung have also interpreted the opus symbolically, as a process of spiritual transformation.
The Stone is supposedly a substance that can transmute lead into gold and grant immortality. Medieval alchemy centered around the Great Work, or magnum opus, of creating the Philosopher’s Stone. We’ll start by going over these traditions, then delve into the text to unveil the hidden meaning. Its otherwise-inscrutable symbolism is a combination of three traditions: the medieval opus, the 17th century Rosicrucians, and the native German traditions encoded in Goethe’s Faust. My Immortal is a description of the Great Work of alchemy. Might this shed more light on My Immortal? After spending way too long investigating this, I find strong evidence in favor. But they’re typical of alchemical texts, which are usually written in a layer of dense allegory. Even its language is fluid, somewhere between misspelled English and a gibberish that can at best produce associations suggestive of English words.Īll these features are unusual in a modern fanfiction. Like: what is going on with it? Its plot makes little sense – characters appear, disappear, change names, and merge into one another with no particular pattern. The Vox article investigates and finds it was probably small-time author Theresa Christodoupolos, who goes by the pen name Rose Christo.īut this leaves other mysteries unresolved. Everyone agrees that it must have taken a genius to make something so awful, but until recently nobody knew who had authored the pseudonymous work. You wouldn’t think you could get The Guardian to write an article about how bad your fanfiction was, but here we are. Worse than it should be possible for anything to be. It’s famous for being really, really bad. The fanfic is “My Immortal”, a Harry Potter story so famous that it has its own Wikipedia page, and articles about it in Slate, Buzzfeed, and The Guardian. From Vox: Solving The Mystery Of The Internet’s Most Beloved And Notorious Fanfic.