The 'Author' of My Immortal Emailed Me, And Then It Got Worse 

Inside of all of us are two wolves. One is Toby. The other is Toby. Both wolves are Toby. You are Toby.

bottom line: we hope that the person who wrote My Immortal is a healthy well-adjusted person, but the people who claim to be them definitely aren't...

"I just want to put My Immortal behind me but I keep being haunted by my past" My brother in Christ, you reached out to Sarah yourself

...how on earth this guy managed to run 25 different accounts _and post multiple fanfictions on nearly all of them_ is beyond me. I'm actually kind of impressed.

Turns out the real Toby was the friends we made along the way. All of them. Every last friend you thought you had? They were Toby. Deal with it.

I'm freaking shaking. I'm afraid everyone in this comment section is Toby and we're all talking to ourselves

So the "Bible Fanfiction" community is like 80% one teenager's alt accounts by volume, is what I'm getting here.

The weirdest thing for me is… I think this guy has missed his true calling/creative medium, as it seems like he would be really good at running something like an ARG??? He’s great at prompting and leaving breadcrumbs, he’s clearly got a pretty good handle on playing multiple characters and their dynamics, he seems to love watching people untangling his weird little mysteries… I genuinely think it would be a way healthier outlet and a really natural fit for his particular… erm… *style of Expression*, and give him a type of creative project where it seems like he could really thrive and meet people who would actually truly enjoy all the work he puts into it for its own sake??? Whatever he ends up doing… this guy sounds troubled, and I hope he’s since found something that makes him happy. 😔

So, just to be clear, Toby is everyone EXCEPT the author of My Immortal?

TLDR: This dude wrote every bad fanfiction EXCEPT for My Immortal

The idea of this 2010 vigilante group trying to purify a fanfic website sounds like a fanfic of reality

My childhood pet rat was named Toby, and the section summarizing all of Toby's actions had me visualizing a particularly tech-savvy little tan rat spending all my school hours online arguing with himself.

honestly i want my grave to say “used to live in the british isles and moved to australia, is dyslexic, likes bible fanfiction, writes poetry, has written my little pony fanfiction, has a problem with the author of the book of seamus, has a fixation with gareth vandersleld and claimed to write my immortal in 2011”

I like to imagine that the real author is just out there being normal and has no idea that people care this much about who she is

God, he was dodging the question about account access because he wanted you to doubt him and do more research. There`s no other explanation, because it wasn`t actually that hard of a question, it would`ve been easy to either answer definitively or come up with a lie. He was acting suspicious on purpose.

the rewatchability of this video is insane, i swear i’ve watched it like 7 times. my immortal’s author remains one of my favorite internet histories, and this video just serves to make that hyperfixation grow lol.

Plot twist: Sarah Z is Toby and has been planning this video for 15 years

Plot twist: The author of My Immortal is a completely normal person who just wrote a trollfic when they were a bored young teenager

The reveal of Taylor being Toby blew me away. This is camp, this is drama, this is the tyoe of thing that I realized i wanted to live for. Im afraid that I`m Toby, but also comforted by knowing that I`m not Toby. I couldnt reach those heights Not all of us were meant to touch the sun lol

i’ve watched this video a million times, but what gets me about the tara account updating in 2009 could have EASILY been explained by toby saying “i personally lost access in 2008, someone must have genuinely hacked it in 2009”. no one would’ve believed him, but god it would have been so easy for him to explain it away but he just doesn’t

If ya girl uses a weird apostrophe, has a name starting with T And likes bible fanfiction that aint ya girl, That's Toby

'Apparently Bible fanfiction is a thing' lads who's gonna tell Sarah about everything written during the Renaissance ever

That talk at the end about digital self-harm reminds me of an episode of the Simpsons, where Bart fumbles catching a baseball during a little league game, losing the game. The entire town of Springfield turns on him, and someone starts a major harassment campaign against him. And the reveal is that the one perpetrating the campaign was Bart himself, expressing his own self-loathing compounded by the entire town treating him like shit.

Look, there's not a lot of things to do in New Zealand. Toby's just creating his own unrestrained summer fun

Everyone and anyone who claims to have written My Immortal is lying. No one wrote My Immortal. It simply appeared out of the primordial fanfiction ooze that was laying around the site.

The world building of this dude rivals Tolkien

Forget true crime, I need more incredibly in-depth looks into obscure internet nonsense from the early to late 2000s. This was riveting. Thank you so much, this must've been an insane amount of work.

Interesting side note and something to remind ANYONE who loves Atlas Shrugged specifically or Ayn Rand generally: Despite considering all government handouts of any kind immoral, she herself applied for and received social security and medicare in 1974 and continued to receive those benefits until 1982 (when she died).

My Immortal is our generation's Zodiac Killer.

Maybe the real author of My Immortal was the friends we made along the way...

“In short, Toby or not Toby” made me laugh for ten minutes.

"You were caught red-handed, smoking gun in the victim's mouth, surrounded by eye-witnesses and holding a notorized confession. What is your defense?" Well, I was hacked.

Toby basically started a cult where there are a bunch of members but he’s also the only member

The scariest thought to me is the possibility that the real author of My Immortal wrote it for a laugh and then forgot about it. They don’t know about the drama surrounding it, they never watched the live action web series, they haven’t seen this video or have even thought about My Immortal for a decade.

I think THIS was the goal. To create some sort of weird augmented reality-esque online drama/mystery for the perceived audience of the internet. With this video you've put together a comprehensive overview of the saga, and based on the evidence from the apostrophe calling card, followed an INTENDED trail of breadcrumbs to sleuth your way into the truth of it all.

Is it just me, or does anyone else find all this drama, manufactured or genuine, about fanfiction, far more interesting than the actual fanfiction?

I'm just picturing Toby in a leather armchair with a glass of scotch, quietly chuckling to himself and shaking his head like "they found me. They finally found me." Edit: thanks for all the likes, Toby!!

Theory: The entire internet is just Toby. Everyone you` ve ever interacted with online was just one of Toby` s alts. We are all Toby.

I wouldn't have been surprised if at any point you had told me that Toby was also behind Critics United

Hi, my name is Tobi, and I'm not related to this drama in any way shape or form, but watching this video and hearing my name repeated so much has me filled with a unique kind of existential dread. Love the video.

I can't believe we found out who EVERYONE involved in My Immortal was EXCEPT TARA! She haunts me. She's out there somewhere. Living her life. Existing. Knowing she wrote it. And honestly if she didn't come forward when the Rose Christo scandal happened then she's probably never coming forward. Which is honestly the internet's greatest tragedy.

"The fact that these accounts only seem to interact with one another." And yet...they apparently interacted with _you,_ Ms. Z. Are...are you also Toby...??

Ooh, God, the "gothic Harry Potter trio" edit my uncle made back in 2005, in the thumbnail 😳😱!!! We thought it was lost forever, I'm so glad to know it's still out "alive" around internet 😭😄...!

Thank you Sarah, I could have lived my whole life without the knowledge that an Atlas Shrugged x My Little Pony fanfiction existed.

2000: What if everyone in power is secretly a lizard 2020: what if everyone in power is secretly toby

JKR just tweeted that Toby's actually been gay this entire time.

Toby has to be some sort of SCP. But imagine if he just like. Dedicated all this time and energy into a poetry book or something. He’d be out publishing even the most prolific published writers.

I've interacted with Todd, Thomas and Ebony on some small FFN forums back in 2012. I feel like at least some of those forums had to do with drama surrounding Critics United and their copycats from that time period, but I can't say for sure. I don't remember what my interactions with them were like or what they did on those forums, but I do remember Todd claiming to be Tara and having like this weird sort of rivalry with Thomas and Ebony...? He had this strong derision towards the Prayer Warriors fics and was kinda just another person who liked to make fun of them. It's crazy to know that Todd, Thomas and Ebony are all the same person, and that story has been this expansive and crazy. I remember two specific people called Quaker and Cathylove who were involved in the drama as well, but I'm fairly certain that neither of them are Toby (especially in Cathy's case.) But hey, I could be wrong, I could've just been talking to a bunch of Tobies the whole time! Thanks for unraveling this tale. I know I'm like a year late, but it's crazy to hear about... all of this, really.

Just got to the end, can't believe Sarah took off her mask and was Toby the whole time

I think further investigation will reveal that 95% of people on FFN are just one person, and that it's actually just M. Night Shyamalan's alt accounts.

I doubt Sarah Z sees this considering the overwhelming amount of comments, but I've talked to the person here, "Toby", before. I couldn't place it, but Toby was in several places asking people to help ghostwrite projects for him. A majority of the writings were not his, we wrote the bulk text for him and he put in some references. It's a whole thing, but Toby had a very large amount of people backing him, that's how he learned to make music while trolling people online. He posted it, but asked us to add to it. I don't know nor care about My Immortal, but if Sarah wants, I can prove I'm not him, that I'm from the states, that I've always lived here, and that I'm part of internet culture. I can even confirm that some people had their own alternate accounts to help Toby, so as to post when he posted, to make it seem like there were others active. I am (as far as I am aware) only a part of two weird internet trends; Toby and Final Fantasy House. If I'm going to offer to talk about one, it's going to be Toby, because the Final Fantasy House stuff makes me consider vomiting tbh.

This entire ordeal is the definition of "congratulations, you played yourself."

This is the closest I’ve ever gotten to reading the bible

this is like a weird episode of scooby doo, where they take off the villains mask to reveal it's toby and then one by one the scooby gang takes off all their masks to reveal they're all toby as well.

i was thinking how strange it is for a Christian especially to write Bible fanfic... and then i remembered Narnia. lmao i'll accept Narnia.

Girlfriend Reviews recently cracked a case of someone with several alternate accounts sending themselves death threats that also used the weird apostrophe. In retrospect, he was probably also just Toby.

The whole Toby situation is just the “Spider-Men pointing at each other” meme in fanfiction form.

The only person that wasn’t Toby was the ONE PERSON we’re trying to find

I really like the term "digital self-harm", I see it a lot in some of my friends and family, and I never knew how to talk about it without sounding like one of those "everybody is on their dang phones too much" kind of people

Imagine being one of the few real people following The Prayer Warriors at the time, finding out through this that pretty much everyone they were interact with at the time were all the same person...

SO weird that “ebony” doesn’t even sound like the real word anymore after seeing it almost exclusively as “enoby” for so long

that one scene from radio rebel where everyone is like "i'm radio rebel" but it's just a bunch of sockpuppet accounts saying "i'm toby"

I really, REALLY want someone to make an edit/parody of "Agatha All Along" from Wandavision that's like "it was Toby Alts all along" because OH MY GOD how much time does this person have???!!?

There’s something inherently creepy to me about hearing stories abt the same person using multiple accounts. It’s not like I don’t have multiple accounts on many social medias so I’m not totally sure why it freaks me out so much. But it does lol. Spookier than true crime

my biggest fear is that those are just the accounts toby wanted us to find

"Who deleted My Immortals?" "Toby of course" "Then who was trolling Toby?" "Very clever, young man, but it's Toby's all the way down."

I've always been convinced that the author of My Immortal was a child and wrote it in earnest. Not a young teen, a child, in the range of 8-12. Hear me out, I think people usually assume the author was at least teenaged because of the mature content, the sex and swearing, but if you read it assuming the author was sincere, it kinda seems like she didn't really know what sex was? And didn't use the swears in a very natural way? Same with the goth subculture and satanist stuff, she seemed to only have a vague idea of what that stuff entailed. I think it's plenty plausible that a 10 year old would have added those things in to make herself seem more mature. But now I'm kinda convinced it was Toby. Honestly given everything we've now learned about him it kinda checks out.

Who's to say Toby ISN'T Tara? I mean, he turned out to be everyone else. I'm starting to wonder if I'm Toby. Maybe Toby is all of us?

“Wait, it’s all Toby?” “Always has been.” 🌍 👩🏻‍🚀🔫👨🏻‍🚀

I hope the real Tara is watching this all go down, a glass of good wine in her hand and a satisfied smirk on her face.

Maybe the real Toby were the friends we made along the way

0:00 - Intro 5:15 - The Conversation 26:38 - Enter Toby 38:14 - The Prayer Warriors 51:45 - An Abundance of Tobies 1:03:34 - TL;DW 1:10:28 - Sponsor

I'm starting to think that Toby has just formed an entire fandom just through sock puppets

You know, he's claiming credit for My Immortal, but he's honestly written a much more ...interesting meta-fan fiction in the process.

Imagine telling Sarah Z right after she uploaded this video that one day Andrew Hussie would play the same evasion game with her.

I might add my own theory: So when it comes to hacking into an account, there are two possibilities: Either someone guesses the password (usually using a bot) or the list of stored passwords is leaked. I don't really know that much about fanfiction history, but I have seen multiple videos about My Immortal and I assume that a password leak around 2008 would be something to note, so that's ruled out (Correct me if I'm wrong). The thing about Toby is that 1. He never hacked any other accounts and 2. His activity doesn't suggest that it was something he did multiple times and 3. He doesn't seem like the kind of person who would bother with either a bot to guess the password or by guessing it manually. Now consider that the timeline for My Immortal's posting slowed down towards the end and ended with a bunch of chapters dropped all at once. With the evidence considered, I propose a likely scenario: Toby knew the real author of My Immortal personally. My Immortal's author got bored and decided to give both accounts to Toby not knowing the kind of nonsense he did on Fanfiction during his free time.

The fact that this guy is still, over a decade later, trying to get my immortal fame? My guy. My dude. Get a life, you ain’t a teenager anymore.

“Now you might have guessed that the story was going in this direction” Babes I couldn’t even guess my own name at this point let alone where this story is going.

Bro- This is probably one of the CRAZIEST internet mysteries ever. Seriously, I've been shaking in my seat the entire time, lol. It is so difficult to keep up with though.

this is incredible. i had no idea that other people were out there pretending to be 50 people and starting their own communities of themselves. it honestly makes me wonder just how many of us are out there; a weird quirk of the combination of severe depression, processing issues, loneliness, and access to the internet that no other society could quite have created. i used to do something similar; i created many accounts and they often fought with each other, were rude to each other, dated, etc. it was a maladaptive form of imaginary friends, but i also put it to less innocent uses, like vetting people who i was becoming friends with online under fake names and learning about them before they knew i was curious. it actually helped protect me from being abducted once, because i had, through my alt, learned that the person who was trying very hard to meet up with me in real life was lying about key details as their story didn't line up to both my accounts. the late oughts were a very damaging time to be young, and a lot of our trauma came out in ways nobody had ever seen before, or noticed (i can imagine someone with a similar tendency publishing articles under various names, or op-eds, or whatever, but the ability to have multiple alter egos interacting with people you actually know either online or in real life and have them have no idea it's all you is a very modern thing. i kinda want to meet this guy, just because i don't know anyone who did this to such a pathological extent as i did (and i did these things up until my early 20s, so i'm not surprised he hadn't quite grown out of it 2 years ago.) i'd be curious to find out if he's been diagnosed with similar mental illness, and if it's a trait of the specific intersection of certain disorders or just a trait some people have a tendency towards. anyway, great video and fabulous sleuthing, thank you for this content!

"He closed his account, and my initial correspondence was over" * looks down at the play bar to see there's still 50 minutes of video left * "oh it is so not over"

Pretty Little Liars wishes it was this complex

every month i watch this video and every time i rewatch im always creeped out by the uncanny valleyness of ebony brown's profile pic

this is genuinely the most interesting and batshit insane thing i’ve ever seen

"Toby confessing to be Thomas Brown does not mean he is Thomas Brown," holy guacamole the entirety of My Immortal is just one long Danganronpa case that never ends.

gonna be real when you got to the point of "toby foster" being a name and it seemed like we were building up to something i was half convinced you were gonna reveal this guy is actually toby fox developer of the hit 2015 video game undertale

Toby really took you are your own worst enemy too literally

Imagine if Sarah was the one who wrote My Immortal, but she has tv style amnesia and doesn’t remember.

As someone with no history or experience in fanfic, this hits me like a true crime podcast from another *planet*

Permission to ship all the tobies with each other like the onceler

If I'm ever in New Zealand, I want to go and see as many musicians as I can so I can shout "HEY TOBY!" at them just to see if any respond.

Listening to this in the background was super surreal. Like, here I am, a dude named Tobie with a Christian upbringing, a propensity for lying, and a habit of making alts (Not to stir up drama with myself and definitely not 20+ accounts, jfc), and boom, I learn about some other eerily similar guy for an hour straight. I even used to have the weird messed up apostrophe, though that was only on my school Chromebook and because I never realized I accidentally changed the keyboard language setting until like 8th grade. It's like hearing about a weird parallel or alternate timeline version of myself.

Internet is just three Tobies in a trenchcoat.

At this point I'm convinced that all Bible fanfiction that has ever existed is the work of one guy

Imagine being Tara’s child and finding out your mom wrote the most infamous fanfic of all time. Like it’s a right of passage for her bloodline. Like it’ll be a time honored family tradition within the next 5 or 6 generations.

Imagine if Toby used his powers for good. He would write phenomenal ARGs

"I'm self centered." Yeah because you literally don't know anyone who isn't you, Toby.

"Apparently Bible fanfiction is a thing" Yeah, the biggest one is Dante's Inferno

so i was around at the time all the midnitegoff stuff went down and what your man is leaving out here is that my immortal 2 was probably taken down by him because real tara (i.e. the actual bloodyrists666 account) commented on the story and called him out for impersonating her. he then did a public apology and they apparently reconciled which is why the two accounts are friends. might be somewhere up on waybackmachine, i swear i remember reading all this in real time lol

I wonder if he wants to be the next Ms. Scribe He wanted the attention she got and also the satisfaction of being the one to expose himself