Have I not told you guys this story?????
I must have mentioned it. I must have mentioned it at some point.
HAVE I SERIOUSLY NOT TOLD YOU GUYS ABOUT MY HORRIBLE 7TH GRADE PHANTOM FIC????
Okay, buckle up, buckaroos, here we go. This might get long because I can’t shut up, but I’ll put some nice pictures in here to break up the wall of text:
The year is 2004. The film has just come out. I, a 13-year-old closet goth for whom everything is worthy of an overdramatic Shakespearean reaction, watch the movie. It is my first exposure to Phantom besides the silent film; I have never seen the musical before now. So I watch it.
And that’s it. I am gone.
I know, with the single-minded conviction of a medieval Christian martyr, that this is what I have been waiting for. This is now what I would live for.
Me, stumbling into the Phantom fandom, aged 13:
But, like any 13 year-old in 2004 whose sole ambition was to be Amy Lee and also Anna Valerious from Van Helsing at all times, I had to rewrite the Phantom’s ending.
And it had to be dramatic.
I actually remember sitting down to write this thing in my brown, spiral-bound, Mead 5 Star notebook at, like, 10 pm on a Saturday night after aggressively photosynthesizing the entirety of Fanfiction.net’s Phantom section on my dial-up AOL connection.
Above: Me at 13 about to pen a cultural touchstone with my hot pink gel pen while the Lizzie McGuire Movie soundtrack plays in the background.
I was ready, people, I was flexin’ my knuckles for a fix-it fic and I was full of whirling hormones and crying for no discernible reason other than the fact that I’m a crier, but also, I was 13 and “Erik is so lonely!”
The fic essentially went something like this:
The story plays out as usual, and at the end, Christine leaves with Raoul. Erik–-who looked like Gerard Butler in my brain because I had no other basis of comparison and also, I thought he was hot, thereby completely missing the “ugly” point, but whatever–-Erik breaks all the mirrors and cries and wanders down a corridor and cries some more.
Above: “He’s so SENSITIVE.”
The mob breaks into his lair, but they can’t find him. Even though, ostensibly, they should have been able to, because he really didn’t go far. I think I wrote that he “stumbled through a nearby corridor,” nearby being the operative word here, meaning the mob was either the worst mob in history or just really, really stupid.
Above: “The mob will never find me here.”
Okay, so the mob leaves after looting his lair (he’s got, like, millions of francs stuffed in the walls down there, can you blame them?), and at this point, Erik lets out the breath he’d been holding–-oh, also, I should emphasize again that this is Gerard Butler Erik, so he’s ripped and wearing that torn puffy shirt and those unreasonably tight leather pants and riding boots, even though he has not been anywhere near a horse. And I amended the film so that thick, dark Dracula hair was actually his hair and not a wig, because I wanted it to “fall wetly” into his–here we go, I definitely remember this–“piercing, ice-blue eyes.”
Above: Truly hideous. Look at it for at least eight more minutes to take in the full scope of abjection laid before you. You can even zoom in if you want.
Actually, I think I gave him two different colored eyes à la Crawford, but I don’t remember what the other color was; probably red, let’s be real, because I was toying with a “HE WAS A VAMPIRE THE WHOLE TIME” reveal that then 13-year-old me thought was a stroke of literary genius.
Ripped Erik is stumbling away and crying in his torn puffy shirt, his 8-pack heaving with his sobs, when he lets out the breath he’s been holding and collapses to his knees.
(I don’t remember why he was faint with hunger?? I just remember writing that phrase, which is truly a baffling little tidbit because obviously, he’d been well-fueled enough to stage the whole Don Juan fiasco, and I hadn’t even established that hunger was an issue at play, here, so unless Erik was hypoglycemic and needed to keep his blood sugar levels up, I cannot explain his hunger fainting. My only explanation is that I was a fainter as a kid, so I just assumed most people passed out whenever things became vaguely inconvenient.)
Above: Fanfic Erik after not eating for about 2 minutes, which, honestly? Same.
–faint with hunger, he passes out on the banks of the underground lake and eventually rolls straight into the water.
Meanwhile, upstairs, the entire opera house is on fire from the chandelier crash. People are screaming. I wrote that “hundreds were dead” and that “mothers wept over their children,” which also concerns me in hindsight, because while I fully support introducing children to the arts at an early age, can you imagine trying to explain to your friends why you took your 5-year-old to see the horniest self-insert opera of all time, Don Juan Triumphant?
Above: “I’ll find her if I have to burn down all of Paris and also this bastion of cultural and artistic nourishment, the very things I have sworn to protect and honor, but whatever.”
So the opera is burning down and Paris is in an uproar. Cut back to the cellars. Erik, still passed out, is now borne by the “furious currents”–I kid you not, I remember that phrase–of the opera lake–
(the underground, stationary, man-made lake, mind you, with no currents at all in real life; like, none)
–and his unconscious body starts to float out into the lake, spurred on by those furious underground lake currents with which we’re all so intimately familiar, until he drifts out from underneath the opera straight into the Seine.
Above: Turn your face away from the garish light of day.
Side note: I have never been to Paris, but I am reasonably certain that the Seine does not connect to the underground lake in the opera house. Which makes the fact that Erik floated all the way out to the Seine even more impressive.
Oh, by the way, the whole Seine was on fire.
I wrote some inexplicable science into the fic about the opera’s “oil stores” exploding in the chandelier crash fire and then leaking into the Seine, which caused an oil spill that subsequently set the entire river on fire.
I had no idea the Paris opera house was as oil-rich as a field in Texas, who knew?
Hey, 13-year-old me, that’s not really possible because the Seine didn’t even connect to the lake underneath the–
You know what? Forget it.
Above: The Paris Opera House is the world’s leading petroleum supplier, followed only by Saudi Arabia.
So the Seine is on fire, and all of Paris is panicking, and here comes unconscious Erik floatin’ on down the river like the world’s ugliest, most ripped baby Moses.
Immediate resuscitation, followed by violent choking and spluttering up water.
Death in some other, inescapable way because there’s water, water, everywhere, and also, it’s ON FIRE.
Above: Fanfic Erik, awash in a fiery river, just vibin’.
But Erik didn’t drown or catch on fire or die in any other inescapable way. Miraculously, as if guided by the hand of God, he kept on floating down the fiery Seine, FACE DOWN, without needing to breathe, apparently, because he was a vampire. Maybe.
But I hadn’t established that at all and wasn’t even sure that’s where I wanted to go with the story, so really, Erik was just some guy floating face-down in the river, miraculously not dying the entire time.
And this is where it gets so-bad-it’s good:
He just kept floating. He kept on going.
On through the Seine out of Paris, out of France, and into–
–into the ATLANTIC OCEAN.
Above: Renaissance trade route with the New World? NOPE. This is roughly the route fanfic Erik went.
Does the Seine even empty into the Atlantic? Does it? I don’t know; I’m an American. None of us know anything about any geography, ever; we’re all idiots, and apparently, we don’t know anything about how DROWNING or BEING MORTAL work, because in my fanfiction, Erik just kept right on floatin’ all the way across the ATLANTIC MOTHERFUCKING–sorry, Mom, but sometimes a well-placed f-word is just great–the ATLANTIC MOTHERFUCKING OCEAN.
This, I wrote, took “approximately six weeks.”
Which, sure, may have been a realistic travel time for, say, a steamboat, but for an unconscious Frenchman who is floating FACE DOWN in a LARGE BODY OF SALT WATER for SIX WEEKS without proper FOOD OR HYDRATION?
Now, I did very well in science class. I did. You probably read that sentence and went
but I promise you, I did. I theoretically understood that it was impossible to survive such a journey.
But I just artistically decided that Erik could do anything he set his mind to.
Plus, I obsessively binge-watched I Shouldn’t Be Alive, and documentaries about parents who lifted cars off of their children in a surge of adrenaline that gave them superhuman powers, so I assumed that sure, an average 40-something-year-old guy could absolutely survive a six-week journey floating across the Atlantic Ocean face-down in a coma.
Oh, yeah, here’s another fun little tidbit: on his way across the Atlantic, he passed the iceberg that would sink the Titanic, because sure, why not at this point?
So eventually, he floats across the ocean and right into where all that tea wound up in 1773: Boston Harbor.
I remember writing something to the tune of “he bobbed into the harbor” which makes me picture his head banging up against a dock or Erik floating stiffly into American waters like a buoy.
Above: Oh, lawd, he comin’.
Yes, he was still unconscious. And face-down.
It’s nighttime when he finally drifts into the harbor, his sexy, Byronic antihero clothes still miraculously intact, and lo and behold, a hot Mary Sue (American, unnamed in the fic because I couldn’t decide between “Lena” and something else that was incredibly awful like “Persephone” or “Artemis”) just happens to be walking along the shores of Boston Harbor when she spots an unconscious man, face-down, in the sand.
(The Boston beach in my mind looked like a California beach, because that was the only beach I’d ever been to, never mind that Massachusetts and California are absolutely nothing alike other than being unbelievably expensive to live in and full of very loud, very opinionated people, heyo, same.)
She “exclaimed, her voice as pure as a bell”–yeesh–and dropped her “basket of violets”–what the hell? Who is carrying violets on a deserted Boston Harbor beach at, like, 2 am? –to rush over to help the man, her skirts rustling, her black hair flying.
And just at the moment she falls to her knees beside him, he wakes.
Perfectly fine, mind you; just ill enough to be romance-novel sexy. You know. “Faint, delirious, heaving.” Whispering and/or moaning, “Christine.”
Naturally, the unnamed OC isn’t bothered by his hideous (it’s really not that bad, it’s more like mild acne, calm down like 85%) face, because her father was a former–
–a former Civil War general who was also a doctor who was also Abraham Lincoln’s best friend.
(You bet your ass I found a way to wriggle Abraham Lincoln into a Phantom fanfic. This is America. I can do whatever I want.)
Above: Don’t hate the player, hate the game.
So she was like, “I don’t care about your perfectly fine and objectively extremely handsome face, you are beautiful exactly as you are and also, I, too, am a trained doctor and also a singer and a dancer and impossibly strong, because I am able to lift up this ripped stranger and haul him over my shoulders and drag him back to my spacious apartments overlooking Boston Harbor.”
Erik fell back asleep/into a coma at that point, just so you know.
And that’s where it ended. I didn’t know where it was going, other than “hot American Mary Sue nurses Erik back to health and teaches him to love again and they live happily, sexily ever after, but in America, and they open a school where Erik is the head music teacher and his hot wife is the hot Other Teacher and they love all the little children equally,” which still sounds more plausible than Love Never Dies.
Thirteen-year-old me shelved the fic and then forgot about it, until I was cleaning out my room in 10th grade, found my handwritten magnum opus, and, so mortified I could feel my butthole shriveling up into my trachea, I shredded the whole thing.
Now, look, I’m not saying the loss of that piece of literature was equivalent to the fire at the Library of Alexandria, but, I mean….
…he floated across an ocean.
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