I was feeling nostalgic for the old wild west internet in the 2000s. It made me feel blessed that I was able to still remember when the internet wasn’t corporatised and when people were honest with their feelings in a way?

Like, not just showing the highlight reels or a cute ~aesthetic~ workplace, but just showing whatever because they found them interesting regardless if it’s aesthetic or not.

Now obviously some people became too personal, haha and aired their bad laundry out there but then again, nothing was perfect.

I’m not saying everyone now in the internet is being fake but it is a fact that many, if not all people nowadays are focused on branding (profilicity) and impressing others and I get it. People need to make ends meet especially with the economic recession now but it makes me wish that I could go back in time and appreciate and archive websites I used to browse as a kid.

Most would be fansites of ships and anime series I loved.

Ahh, fansites.

It’s A LOT of work, haha.

Back when there wasn’t an “official” wikia for so many anime series and when social media wasn’t a big thing yet, fans would make websites (usually html coded ones) for their favourite ship, character or series. Fansites were quite diverse in their purpose. Some were info/wikia-like sites; just giving out the general information of the series. Some fansites were dedicated to a single character (often called a “shrine”, lol.), a group of characters, a ship, etc.

The first fansite I followed was some Hoennshipping fansite I stumbled in google results because as a kid, I was so in love with May and Brendan being a couple. Eventually, I learned the term “shipping” and pokemon ship names from bulbapedia. Turns out, May and Brendan as a couple is called, “Hoennshipping.”

It all started from there with me being some shadow in the internet constantly searching for more content and info on my favourite anime series and characters. And with that, came the endless stumbling upon so many fansites. The individuality and creativity that these fans had was wonderful and inspiring to see. Yeah, some of ’em were elitist, some of ’em were petty but those were still wacky, fun times.

I’m not saying wikias are bad. They are very useful for info ofc but they’re super clunky. For example, when you click on the search box esp on the B+ wikia, they load a list of pages and only then can you search. Additionally, just the idea of a corporation/company that likes to call themselves “Fandom” is quite dubious.

One thing that I liked from fansites was their Independence. You can upload what you want, as you want. No dumb formatting rules or wiki politics like power users who want to run it like their own petty fiefdom. And Wikia can’t up and pull the plug on you or force it to be designed around their corporate layout.