Worse Than Fanfic?

Something has been brought to our attention which is actually a step below mary-sue fanfic. It’s ghostwritten mary-sue fanfic and it comes from www.bookbyyou.com. But the horror doesn’t stop there. They’re not even proper mary-sues! They’re mary-sues set in faux-fandoms!

For obvious copyright reasons they can’t just plop you into Bella’s spot in Twilight, but there seems to be a variety of Twilightesque titles at the moment. There’s also Pirates of the Carribeanesque titles and something that appears to be trying to suggest Star Trek. Vaguely.

Near as we can tell, there’s a questionnaire you fill out from which the characters’ names, hair and eye colour are changed to fit the IRL versions of you and your friends. Kind of like Mad-Libs, only more gingy.

Book By You does have “kids book” options and those could conceivably be really great gifts for children. Really, this sounds like an idea that would be great applied to Choose Your Own Adventures. That could actually be a lot of fun.

But the thought of a 35-year-old woman having herself inserted—by someone else or, possibly, a computer—into a pre-written pirate romance hurts the soul in a previously uncharted way. It’s stuff like this that makes the Cylons hate us.