Empress Theresa (Website)

In 2010, Norman Boutin created a **website** to promote *Empress Theresa*. In January 2023, the site was no longer being updated. As of April 2023, the website no longer exists. Either hosting for the website was discontinued or the author deleted the website.

## Content:

The strangest of all places about Empress Theresa is the Yahoo hosted webpage. It’s reminiscent of early websites and looks like something someone built as they were just learning HTML or JAVA. Almost all of it is written in bold Times New Roman, varying chaotically in size and color. On the first page alone, Boutin used the colors brown, red, lime, dark green, blue, purple and dark pink to write. As well as being a long run of text that spans many pages of nonsensical ramblings about the many virtues of the book or ravings about his enemies.

It bears a copyright of 2010, which most likely means that after it was originally built, he never touched the code for it again. This can easily be seen if one examines the JAVA source code. Where a large number of Dev-notes, the kind associated with demo or instruction code, can be found. Whether this is due to it being Yahoo stock code or something he incorporated has yet to be determined.

It seems to have recently turned into a place where he can complain about how horrible the internet is toward him. A safe-space where nobody can point out the obvious or contradict anything he says.

Norman has implemented a section where he decries reviews (specifically from Amazon) while often avoiding or skewing the intention of the review to suit his narrative.

More recently, Norman has created a ''If they make a movie'' section, where he fantasizes about the acceptance speech of a young actress who plays the role of Theresa. Nevermind the fact that the book has been the subject of ridicule by multiple critics, but its highly unlikely that any Hollywood producers or directors would throw money out the window for a relatively unknown book from a controversial author.

#### Empress Theresa's Religiousness and the Website:

The website, more than anywhere else, is where the book's very clear and obnoxious religious message can be seen. As literally the first sentence of the "Study Guide" begins with, "**We're lost in this confusing world unless we follow the directions of its Maker."** This, despite the constant denial of the author, is a rather obvious tip of the hat to a certain religion, especially since Theresa herself repeatedly mentions her views.

A large amount of Catholic scripture is placed in many parts of the site, usually in the most obnoxious and condescending way possible. An example is when he is describing Theresa herself, as a large part of her character is pitched as her religiousness.

## Style:

The text of the site is crammed into a thin column at the center of the page. This column cannot be adjusted in any way. There have been several hypotheses postulated about why this is. Often, this is accredited to his outdated computer, or just his incompetence with anything related to technology.

As stated above, the site is nothing more than an acid trip in terms of color choice and layout. This is all without taking any note as to what font he's using. It ranges in size, color, and even type from paragraph to paragraph which makes it look more like a parody rather than an author's professional website.

## Norman's Review

In his usual fashion, the site plays host to a variety of things, the oddest of which is a review of Empress Theresa by the author. This especially, but not excluding all the other sections, is essentially a rant about how fantastic his work is. In a website update in late July or early August of 2019, the "Author's Review" page was removed.

## 'Genius' Section

On, or around, 18 December 2019, Norman added a new "page" titled GENIUS. It is written in the same rambling style as the rest of the site, albeit lacking the color problem.

He lists 15 "points", which are, to the suprise of no one, not properly formatted, nor are they even complete. In fact, only a third are in any way partially backed up.
Below is a summary of them...

### Point 1:

The story is about a teenage girl just setting out to finding her place in the world. The flexibility and potential of youth define the future. This is illustrated in Theresa who changes the world with her firm moral compass and bravery.

(The first half of this is fine, and could define almost every book ever written with a young protagonist. However, the last sentence is where the bullshit starts to spill out and stink up the place.

Theresa's moral compass isn't very firm, mostly due to her character never actually being developed during the book. We are TOLD she is good and pure all the time while her actions tell a different story.

In fact the bit about her moral compass and bravery is not even an invention of the writer of the blurb, it was coopted by the writer after being written in by a vandal. Originally the blurb simply included the sentence "This is illustrated in Theresa who changes the world", which was later vandalized to also include "with her ~~unstoppable comic book super powers~~ firm moral compass and bravery". This was to mock the original writer for not telling the whole story, saying Theresa changes the world to make the character sound inspiring, but failing to also include that Theresa is able to do so because she has super powers that make any daunting task she faces a trivial issue for her to accomplish. Yes, Theresa does change the world, but only because all logistics and opposition are take out of the equation for her.)

### Point 2:

(Note: This section has an abundance of spacing and formatting issues, which is typical of his writing.)

The bookstores are full of young adult novels, but most of them are about teenage problems, bad parenting, bullying, drugs, alcohol, bad friends, depression, and such personal problems, or they are about dystopian futures like The Hunger Games, or some such scifi. There are very few stories in which young people deal with a realistic adult world. I can think of Treasure Island, Tom Sawyer, Huckleberry Finn, To Kill A Mockingbird, and that’s about all I’m aware of. Empress Theresa deals with issues in the adult world: the weather, food supply, oil supply, the Arab/Israel conflict, the North Korean dictatorship, and terrorism

Norman's age and ignorance is again on display here. He believes that most books are sold in physical bookstores., r he's using a general term, which may be the case. Either way, his ignorant snobbishness shows. Almost all coming of age stories deal woth issues in the adult world. That's literally the entire point, which he doesn't seem to understand.)

### Point 3:

(Note: This section is formatted in multiple fonts and, of course, has spacing errors everywhere and acid-trip colours)

Empress Theresa is fun to read. Most stories written today are too grim. Writers probably do this to make their stories look 'powerful'. Why would you read something that doesn't give you pleasure? Here are comments by Amazon five star reviewers: Robert Shuler's long review ends with the remark, "I say good work....let's have a sequel" Karrit wrote, "A gem of modern literature." Kevin Brown wrote, "Love this book." Non mess wrote, "To say I loved it would be an understatement." Joe Blow wrote, "It ought to be recipient of Best Novel by Hugo Awards." Iggy wrote, "Nice work, Norman Boutin. Keep up the good work. I enjoyed the story thoroughly."**﻿**

(It can be seen here that he lacks the ability to decern an ironic or trollish statement. As almost all of those "reviews" were made by trolls, or sock accounts.)

### Point 4:

Empress Theresa has an outstanding role model. Theresa is a wonderful girl.  Amazon five star reviewer Non mess writes, ‘’Give empress theresq a try if you're seeking a good role model.’’ A mother who read the book with her nine yo daughter wrote. ‘’ My daughter's words.....I like Theresa. She is a nice girl and there are not many of those these days. I hope I am a good girl. I want to be good too.’’﻿

(The review by 'Non Mess" is a common copypasta of his to brush off criticism.

### Point 5:

(Note: There's almost zero spacing between point four and five, making it hard to read. This is also in a different font, **bold**, and has different line spacing.)

Empress Theresa has simplicity. The recent bestseller "The Girl With A Dragon Tattoo" according to the wikipedia article about the book has twenty-nine characters.  Empress Theresa has only ten major speaking roles: Theresa and Steve Hartley, Jan Struthers, Father Donuoughty, Prime Minister Blair, Prime Minister Scherzer, President Stinson, and in the Parker mansion,  Edmund and Helen Parker, and Arthur Bemming.  Their relationships with each other and with Theresa are simple because they have no conflicting interests.  They all want Theresa to succeed.

Besides few characters Empress Theresa is simple in not requiring the reader to  have knowledge of any career.  Theresa never has a job. She is a student, and then she is technically speaking unemployed.

## Omitted Original Sections

Two contestants for the strangest on Norman's website are two pages accessed through a drop-down menu from the "Home" button named, respectively, "Picture" and "Hitler's yo-yo". They appeared only on very early versions of the site, being removed at some point between April 10th and September 2nd in 2014, although they are still accessable through the oldest two snapshots on "Wayback Machine".

### Picture

The "Picture" page consists of a title at the top of the page reading "Picture", followed by a short sentence reading:

"Empress Maria Theresa

YIKES !  I like my Empress Theresa better."

This statement is followed by the first image, a picture of a 1:4 scale historically accurate sculpture of the Austrian empress Maria Theresa by the artist George S. Stuart. Notably, this image is currently the first image result in Bing when searching for "Empress Theresa", though not in Google. The use of this image is somewhat explicable: Boutin must have found it while searching up his own book and found it amusing enough to put on his website, with a header which explained why it was there.

However, the two following images completely lack context and are *not* explained, being a picture of Jennifer Lawrence playing Katniss Everdeen in the 2010 film, "The Hunger Games" and a colour-coded map of Panem, the fictional dystopian America where both the book and the film of "The Hunger Games" are set. Norman has stated that he was inspired by "The Hunger Games" and that it was the reason why "Empress Theresa" is in the Young Adult genre- however, why he would put both a still from the film and a fanmade map of the setting on his website is... perplexing.

### Hitler's yo-yo

This page contains only one image: a picture of Adolf Hitler, former leader of the Third Reich, with a yo-yo poorly drawn onto his saluting right hand in what appears to be MS Paint. A patchily shaded speech bubble reading: "MY NEXT YO-YO TRICK IS REALLY GOOD!" in mouse-drawn letters appears to the left of his head.

### Reasons for creation

Why Norman Bouton created these pages is somewhat unclear, and it is frankly baffling why he decided that these two pages were important enough to attach to the "Home" button. The most convincing explanation is that he created the pages to test the dropdown menu functionality and the ability to upload images, although the main "Home" page did have images at this point. Notably, the website had a disclaimer that it was "IN THE EARLY STAGES OF DEVELOPMENT", which explains other oddities, such as the fact that clicking on the "Home" button takes you to a second home page, with no way to return to the first other than exiting and rentering the website, and that the drop down menu is only available from the second home page.

The fact remains, however, that these two pages odd but mostly inoffensive, barring the Hitler reference.

## References

1. ↑ http://empresstheresa.com/home
2. ↑ http://empresstheresa.com/genius
3. ↑ 3.0 3.1 http://web.archive.org/web/20120418063908/http://empresstheresa.com/
4. ↑ http://web.archive.org/web/20130914131519/http://empresstheresa.com/home/picture
5. ↑ http://www.writingforums.com/threads/133885-Empress-Theresa-is-here?p=1571442&viewfull=1#post1571442
6. ↑ http://web.archive.org/web/20130914122552/http://empresstheresa.com/home/hitlers\_yo-yo