MoreWrite preface: I wanted to get this out of my system and now that I’ve written it, I’m not sure if I want to post it anywhere else. Due to the sneer-like attitude of it I seem to have ended up writing it with the imagined audience of awful.systems readers, but since it’s not really about anything rationalist or techbro adjacent, it’s kind of off topic for anywhere on this site except MW. If any of you know a place where this essay might be appreciated, I can consider editing it for publication elsewhere. Most likely I’ll just leave it here as a practice piece, though.

I know I could rephrase much of this with shorter sentences and fewer ten-dollar words, but I like to indulge a little: reach for some juicy words to spice up the task of putting thoughts to words. It feels good when writing for the sake of myself, but makes the final product sound pretentious, which is embarrassing, and possibly harder to understand, which should be the main concern but isn’t. I don’t feel like editing down the indulgence right now, so please be gentle about it.

A seemingly genuine invocation of a particularly annoying thought-terminating meme made me think about a great work of contemporary literature occasionally mentionied on this very website: the ostensible Harry Potter fanfic My Immortal by XXXbloodyrists666XXX, alias Tara Gilesbie.

The story begins with the protagonist’s self-introduction:

Hi my name is Ebony Dark’ness Dementia Raven Way and I have long ebony black hair (that’s how I got my name) with purple streaks and red tips that reaches my mid-back and icy blue eyes like limpid tears and a lot of people tell me I look like Amy Lee (AN: if u don’t know who she is get da hell out of here!).

Let’s dive deeper into the hair color specifically. What does the description tell us? The color black carries some very strong connotations in western cultures. It’s associated with death, darkness, fear, sorrow and cold. Purple, on the other hand, is a somewhat uncommon color in nature, mostly found among things that have evolved to intentionally stand out, such as flowers signaling to pollinators. Historically its rarity has made it desirable and expensive, even a royal color sometimes only worn by kings and emperors. It’s a color of mystique, magic and arcane arts. Red is associated with blood and fire, danger and warnings. It’s a color of passion and emotions of love, desire, anger and elation. It’s considered an especially strong complement and contrast with black both visually and symbolically.

Ebony Way is a moody teenager obsessed with the dark side of human emotions, who romanticizes death and depression. She’s devoted to emo pop (or in her terms, “goffik”) bands like My Chemical Romance and Good Charlotte and the fashion associated with the genre. Even among her cohort of witches, wizards, vampires and “preppies” she stands out, simultaneously seeking attention and lamenting the burden of being at the center of it. She often becomes smitten with love and sexual lust, and can be driven to anger and violence. Her hair color is literary shorthand for her entire personality.

This characterization through the colors of Ebony’s hair — and soon afterwards, other fashion choices — works on multiple levels. On a surface reading My Immortal is just an exceptionally badly written piece of fiction. The story suffers from an unstructured plot, inconsistent characterization, ignorance of source material, lack of continuity, shaky grammar and chaotic orthography that both overuses deliberate non-standard spelling for an effect and also contains a plethora of non-stylistic misspellings. Despite the numerous faults, the author’s use of color symbolism is perfectly fluent and idiomatic. Ebony’s hair colors communicate exactly what the author seemingly wants to communicate through them.

Another way of reading the story is as a self-aware parody of bad writing. In this reading, Tara Gilesbie is a caricature of the worst possible fan fiction author. The ur-author maintains the persona of a dreadful writer and deliberately indulges in all the hallmarks of poorly written fanfics. The passage parodies the tendency of self-insert characters to describe their appearance in excessively florid detail to match an idealized version of the writer. The description is misplaced and disproportionately detailed and the author persona’s fashion sense is gaudy and juvenile. Ebony’s hair color is exactly what Tara-in-kayfabe would consider cool precisely because of the connotations associated with those colors and how they reflect her (misidentified) subculture.

Whether you read My Immortal as failed sincere writing or as ironic metafiction about bad writing, Tara Gilesbie is obviously a terrible writer. The work is disastrously bad on nearly all conventional metrics, but even as a simulacrum of the worst conceivable writer she understands the semiotics of her character’s hair color. The choice to specify Ebony’s hair color is indisputably a deliberate one and it successfully communicates both how Ebony Dark’ness Dementia Raven Way is meant to be seen and how the character herself wants to be seen.

So the next time someone spins a tale of a book saying “the curtains were blue”, an English teacher insisting on reading symbolism into the color of the curtains, and the author of the book confirming the passage only means the curtains were blue, remember that the author of My Immortal has a better grasp of color symbolism and conservation of detail than your anti-intellectual interlocutor and the imagined author in the thought experiment.