rindeservedbetter-deactivated20 answered:

I went to go play video games for a few hours and when I came back my post about this had gained over 16k notes and I had a bunch of messages in my inbox identical to this one where tf have you people been. anyway.

I’m going to go over the events to the best of my ability according to what I remember but it’s gonna get long and shittily written so.

a little background: My Immortal is a notoriously bad Harry Potter (and also possible Back to the Future and Star Wars crossover) fanfiction that was published on Fanfiction.net in 2006 by someone under the name Tara Gilesbie. it’s a pretty blatant self-insert fic of a teenage girl living out her fantasy of being a sexy vampire who all the hot guys fight over and there’s time travel and it’s fucking batshit and the writing becomes more and more illegible as the story goes on and I love every part of it. it’s hilarious and a great insight into the mind of the author (regardless of whether Tara Gilesbie was actually a teenage girl who wrote the fic in seriousness, or if it was a parody and Tara is a character herself). many people have speculated over the years that it is a trollfic but I’ve always disagreed; the main reason people think this is because the genre has become so diluted with its own parodies of My Immortal that it seems to blend in with all the parodies and thus seems like a joke to the average person (see: this trope). it’s unlikely for My Immortal to be a parody because before My Immortal, there were no fanfics quite like it. bad fanfiction was an entirely different type of thing. also. every single person from age 10 to 18 I knew on the internet in 2006 wrote exactly like this. so I think My Immortal is genuine. but I digress.

chapter 44 of My Immortal ended with a cliffhanger and then the fic never updated again. since then, many people have claimed to have been the writer but nobody has ever been able to provide concrete proof. until September of 2017, over ten years after the fic was published, Tara Gilesbie’s fanfiction.net account updated with a message letting everyone know that she was okay and that the main reason she never went back to her account is because it was hacked. she also briefly mentioned she had a tumblr, but didn’t give the name. people found it though.

the tumblr url was rosechristo1 and her real name was apparently Rose Chriso and she’s a published author whose books can be bought on Amazon. according to her tumblr, she was a Native American lesbian in her late 20s. she was super nice to everyone who interacted with her, was an abuse survivor but was recovering smoothly, blogged and wrote about activism - it all seemed too good to be true. and most of all, she was writing a memoir about My Immortal called “Under the Same Stars: The Search for My Brother and the True Story of My Immortal” that was going to be published in May of 2018.



according to Christo, My Immortal started out as stupid fun between her and her friend Raven, but as it became more and more popular, she started using it as a means of trying to reach her brother by putting little shoutouts in there. when people asked her for proof, she stated that in the process of trying to get her memoir published, she was vetted by a lawyer over the course of three days in order to prove her authenticity, and provided things like a flash drive with the original fanfiction on it, the original email account that was linked to her fanfiction.net account, etc. even though she never actually provided any of this information to the public, it seemed pretty legit considering how she was getting her book published and all. and everyone just decided to believe that she was indeed the true author of My Immortal. either way, we’d find out for sure when the book was published the following year. right?

it’s around this time that a thread emerges on Kiwifarms by someone claiming to be Rose Christo’s brother - the same brother that she had tried to get in touch with through her fanfiction. but before I go into detail, it must first be noted that Kiwifarms is a notoriously bad website that basically serves as a platform for members of the alt-right to harass, slander, and gang up on marginalized people. so under normal circumstances, as with everything from that website, it should have been ignored EXCEPT for the fact that Rose Christo herself not only acknowledged the existence of the thread but also claimed that the original poster was indeed her brother, and she made several public attempts to contact him.

in the thread, he stated that she was lying about many things, including her race. he said they were both “white as snow” and that she was delusional about being Native and had made up all the stuff about her being abused by her family in the past (here we get into a lot of touchy stuff because of gaslighting and also ofc someone’s appearance is not an indication of their race, and according to Rose Christo they are half siblings and that her father was the one who was Native, but she never knew him so that’s why her brother had no knowledge of this) it’s clear that they hadn’t actually talked in years, and did not have a good relationship, which is weird because some things Rose Christo said previously suggested that she was in touch with her brother (stuff like “my brother is okay” and “he is too hard on himself sometimes even though he is amazing”)

her brother had allegedly been informed about the memoir via the Buzzfeed article which stated that the book was about her writing My Immortal AS an attempt to find her brother who was in foster care. her brother says this was not true and that he was never in foster care and that he felt manipulated and used, and that she was making up a sob story in order to sell books. then Rose Christo stated she never claimed her brother was in foster care - the person who wrote the Buzzfeed article was misinformed, and all she said was that she and her brother were separated when they were younger and were raised by different people. so either she lied, or it was a huge misunderstanding between her and Buzzfeed.

around the time things started falling apart, Rose Christo announced that her memoir publication was cancelled and would never be published. the reason for this was apparently that she had photomanipulated legal documents to protect the integrity of the real people she wrote about in her book. since she was branded a liar, everything fell through. but as others have pointed out, this would not have necessarily been a reason to cancel her book, and that publishing companies actually encourage the changing of real names for legal reasons and why would she give up so easily when this was her chance at a bestseller and blah blah. so either it was worse or more complicated than she let on, or she had to come up with an excuse not to go through with publication since there was someone who knew the truth and could ruin her career. things were crazy. she deleted all her accounts and disappeared off of social media. and that’s that. for now.

it got really strange and there’s a lot of info and drama but when all is said and done, Rose Christo was never actually able to provide any concrete proof that she was Tara Gilesbie. it was a huge mess.