RIP Kurt you would’ve hated the 21st century </3
Out of curiosity
And put the fandom its from in tags if you like reblog for sample size yadda yadda
it really is insane how waking up early will grant you access to some of the most beautiful sights and sensations in the world that will make you want to live forever, but only if you overcome the gauntlet of a thousand razors that is getting out of bed early. truly one of life's little saw traps.
addendums: cult classic tv overlaps with early supernatural seasons somewhat, i am aware, just choose based on the cultural context in which you read your first fic.
for weeaboo crew i was thinking of examples like hetalia, black butler, soul eater, etc--popular anime absolutely included but the distinction is that people who were into dragon ball weren't necessarily going to anime club every week and making deviantart stamps about yaoi, but people into ouran high school host club ABSOLUTELY were.
homestuck is in its own category because homestuck changed fandom forever at a critical time which just happened to be when i was growing up in fandom. harry potter, lotr, star wars, and twilight are in their own categories because they were such multimedia juggernauts they had entire archives dedicated solely and only to their fic that spanned multiple franchise reboots (books -> movies -> extended universes). (i acknowledge star trek technically would fit under this but at the time culturally it had more overlap with other cult classic tv fandoms.)
honorable mentions that didn't make it to the list because i had to pick-and-choose with the 12 answer limit: the final fantasy franchise (axed because i am not familiar enough with the fic scene to know if it was as iconic of a gateway drug as, like, naruto or twilight or star wars fic), a general YA lit category (YA lit outside of twilight only went mainstream slightly after this time period), the MCU (i have a hate boner for the MCU), a broader "american superhero comics" category (this would be valid as an option but i don't have the space)
ⓘ This user is tired.
what people don't tell you about maximalism is the Dust
my body, tearfully: when sleep???
me: my dude we just woke up!! It’s time for wakefulness and doing things and Productivity
my body, weeping: but???? when sleep?????
me: okay, finally now is sleep
my body: no. wrong.
fun fact!! it turns out that now when u make a new blog, tumblr forces you to follow 3-4 people before you can change your icon or modify your blog in any way!! this, of course, means that, yes, some of the "potential bots" many of us have been automatically blocking could have possibly been genuine new users who were only just seconds in to having an account!!! tumblr is literally screwing new users over!!!!
OK, SO!
Just to confirm for myself that this was true, I went and made a new account and took some screenshots.
After the usual inputting of email, username and birthday (which, I don't remember if tumblr used to require you to enter your birthday? I feel like it didn't??) it takes you to this page:
it requires you to follow five tags from a selection of categories (I didn't count the exact number of categories, but there's a lot. The right section of the screen scrolls down). I followed some very neutral tags:
The "Next" button doesn't become click-able until you pick all five.
After that, it took me to this page:
it suggests 10 different users for each tag that you selected in the previous page (the right side of the page scrolls down to all five tags). As far as I could tell, there wasn't a way to ask for more users in each tag.
Again, the "Next" button doesn't become clickable until you follow three people.
And finally after that it took me to the dashboard:
There wasn't any way to change my icon before this point. So long story short, seems like the og post is true y'all :/
That being said, this only applies to blogs that still have the standard tumblr-generated icons, which is pretty easy to distinguish from the pretty-lady-icon porn bots 🤷🏻
REBLOG IF THIS RELATES TO YOU:
AHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH!!!!!!!!!!!