Early 2000′s Internet Fandom Gothic

Someone has been leaving increasingly bizarre messages on your guestbook.
You get a favorite on one of your drawings featuring a character’s death. You go to thank them, but have second thoughts when you see their page consists only of a bloated gallery of faves that are all about that one character dying.
Just who else is a sock puppet of that BNF?
Your favorite fansite still hasn’t come back from hiatus. Rumors swirl on the forums of a different site that the webmistress died, the broken banner on her splash page her online epitaph.
You swear you’ve read this songfic set to My Immortal before, but it’s the most recent submission. You couldn’t have.
Your computer doesn’t support Japanese characters but that doesn’t stop you from trying to navigate your fandom’s doujin circles. You somehow stumble onto a page dedicated to lovingly-rendered anatomical dissections of every character.
Your favorite fanfiction is getting progressively weirder and more incoherent with every update. You hope the author is okay.
You get the feeling you shared this positive fanart of a female character with the wrong crowd.
There’s a new batch of icons posted on one of your LJ communities! None of them are loading. Everybody else is commenting on them; why are you the only one who can’t see them?
You make a new friend on a forum, and you exchange AIM handles. After a few days of chatting, she begins to tell you about her experiences in something called “the Astral Plane”.
This video is taking an eternity to buffer.
DxHxR citrus, PWP, H/C, NC, CBT, WS, M/M, M/M/M, WAFF ^_^ WIP please R&R!!!
As you finally turn out the light and close your eyes to go to sleep, you swear you can hear it coming from outside: the dial-up noise.

I think the best part about this is it’s not even really meme-ified, this was LITERALLY what fandom was like.

That’s exactly what I was going to say. People who didn’t experience this probably think it sounds bizarre. No, that’s basically what it was like. Early internet fandom was a strange place.

roachpatrol

i think like two thirds of the things on this list happened to me in middle school.

chrissysky

I have a feeling that the ‘Astral Plane’ story was just someone encountering a fan of Slayers for the first time. And also roleplaying.

shithowdy

#japanese characters being not readable on computer aaahhh memories #level hard: being into vocaloid and pc not rendering the characters #'how many squares your fav song has'#aND ALL JAPANESE ARTISTS HAD SEPARATE PAGES FOR THEIR OWN ART #ALL CAREFULLY BOOKMARKED AND CHECKED WEEKLY #AHHHH OLD TIMES #and icons on lj... boi #also: megaupload #oh boi #also chats on gadu-gadu #ahhhh