ABOUT ME

Name: Latte
Age: 31
Pronouns: she/they
Orientation: biromantic asexual
Occupation: artist
Other notes: ASD, ADHD, Bipolar II

INTERNET & FANDOM HISTORY

At the very tail end of my preschool year in 1995, just before Summer break, our class was fortunate enough to get its first desktop computer, complete with the Windows 3.11 operating system. Immediately, I was OBSESSED. No other children stayed glued to the computer screen quiet like I did. I was in love with using Microsoft Write and Paintbrush in particular. The teacher told my parents about how passionate I was about the PC and encouraged them to get a computer for me to use at home. Later that same year, little 5 year old me was blessed with my very first desktop computer featuring Windows 95.

A year later in 1996, my family got dial-up internet. Admittedly, I wasn't too interested in using it at the time, as I was still preoccupied with the applications included with Windows 95, as well as other PC software, such as video games and various graphic design programs.

However, something happened in 1997 that caused me to fall head-first into the deep depths of the world wide web...

Something completely new and captivating that changed society, something so extraordinarily momunmental that it single handedly defined an entire generation of people and continues to do so to this very day.

You may have heard of it before, but Pokemon in the late 1990s was a force to be reckoned with.

I can't even describe to you how extremely hyperfixated with Pokemon I was. And it wasn't just me who experienced this obsession with such an intensity. Every kid did. There's a reason the term "Pokemania" was coined during the height of the fad; there was literally no other pop culture phenonmenon like it at the time.

Since the day I was born, I have had hyperfixations, and all of them revolved around my main special interest: cartoons and animation.

But Pokemon was special. It was the driving force behind the person I am today. My desire to consume all things Pokemon drove me to the internet, and from there I discovered the wonders of fansites, which immediately introduced me to fandom as a whole.

Through my Pokemania and access to the internet, I learned what "anime" was, and discovered the existence of other anime series beyond Pokemon. From these fansites, I learned that I wasn't the only one who obsessively drew my favourite characters and wrote stories about them, and I learned that those activities were known as "making fanart" and "writing fanfiction."

By the end of 1998, my Pokemon hyperfixation was waning, but my desire to stay online as much as possible remained.

Soon, a new hyperfixation took Pokemon's place and for several months I was hooked on The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time. Cue the Zelda fansites!

This fandom marks my discovery of fictional pairings, or "shipping" as its most commonly known today. At the time it was an exciting discovery, since I had been shipping characters my entire life up to that point, and once again (like with fanart and fanfiction), I had no idea that it was a thing other people did too! You could imagine how validating each of these fandom-related discoveries were for me.

Fictional pairings also led me to the discovery of... sex and porn? I know, how terrible! Little 8 year old me being exposed to such things all because of the bad evil internet! Well, oddly enough, it didn't traumatize me at all. I do remember being very curious and fascinated by it, though, and purposefully looking at it because it was just so... bizarre to look at and was completely different from anything I had ever seen before. But the curiosity and newness of this type of content quickly wore off, I didn't care or think too much about that stuff until I turned 10, about two years later.

A few months pass and it was now April of 1999. A new cartoon was scheduled to premier on Nickelodeon soon, and I had seen tons of commercials and promos about it. It looked really cute and I was very excited to watch it, so I made sure to not miss the air date, which was May 1st, right after the Kids Choice Awards.

May 1st finally rolls around, and I reluctantly sit through most of the Kids Choice Awards, waiting for the new cartoon to air. I distinctly remember watching this promo:

What happened during and after the premier is a blur to me, however I do know that by the end of that summer, SpongeBob SquarePants had become my new favourite cartoon, and my new hyperfixation.

Now, around this time, my hyperfixations start to get a little weird. For most of my life, my hyperfixations had gone through phases, with each one existing one at a time and never overlapping. But it was the turn of the 21st century, and a lot of amazing media existed at this time. My mind couldn't focus on just one thing anymore, and so it focused on several all at once. Because of this, my memories from the end of 1999 to 2001 aren't the clearest.

Sadly, the only memories I have that stand out vividly from this time are the Y2K scare and 9/11. However, I do remember what some of my hyperfixations were during those years, and they were SpongeBob, The Legend of Zelda: Majora's Mask, Dragon Ball Z, Godzilla, Hey Arnold!, Gorillaz, and Yu-Gi-Oh!, just to name a few.

2002-2003 marked the years I joined FanFiction.net and Fanart Central. During this time, I started taking my art and writing more seriously. I was really into Hey Arnold!, Spirited Away, Majora's Mask, Ocarina of Time, and t.A.T.u. during these years.

The following year in 2004, my hyperfixation was My Life as a Teenage Robot, and I had joined a fan forum to talk about the show and share my fanart. One of the users there recommended that I get a DeviantART account to post all of my fanart. I had never heard of DeviantART before, and this made sense considering dA was a brand new website that had just been launched that year. I checked it out and it looked amazing, so I immediately made an account there.

2005 was the year I got into Invader Zim, Johnny the Homicidal Maniac, Tim Burton movies, and the Moldovan/Romanian boy band known as O-Zone. I also joined a Yahoo! Group for O-Zone fans, as it seemed to be the only place to find any fanart/fanfic for them. This was also the year I joined YouTube, a new video streaming site where users could upload and share videos. YouTube in 2005 was vastly different than it is today. Back then, I spent a lot of my time watching AMVs, funny edits of my favourite cartoons/video games/anime.

In 2006, I joined LiveJournal and began blogging and joining fan communities there. To this day, I consider my experience on LiveJournal to be the best fandom/community experience I have ever had online. I was into a lot of cartoons at this time, including SpongeBob Squarepants, Fairly OddParents, Danny Phantom, Ed Edd & Eddy, Powerpuff Girls, Animaniacs, and Looney Tunes.

2007 to 2009 was a slow period online for me. Not much changed during this time, and my hyperfixations on various cartoons stayed the same. I kept using DeviantART, I blogged consistently on LiveJournal, and I watched videos (especially YouTube Poops) on YouTube nearly everyday. The only new addition to my online experience was 4chan and Paheal. These days, many people recoil when they hear about these sites, however in the mid to late 2000s, many of the hobby boards on 4chan were nowhere as toxic as they are today, and were heavily moderated and maintained well. I spent most of my time on /co/ (comics and cartoons), but would occasionally browse the other boards if /co/ was having a slow day.

2009 marked the year that people began to leave LiveJournal and move to Dreamwidth and Tumblr. LiveJournal had been bought by a Russian media company, and many blogs and communities were being purged due to containing "adult content." These types of conservative sanitation efforts are unfortunately a recurring theme for fandom spaces over the next decade.

I continued to use DeviantART and Livejournal into 2010, but popularity with these sites had been rapidly waning, as most people were joining Tumblr and abandoning both dA and LJ for the new micro-blogging platform. Because of this, dA and LJ were suddenly very lonely places to be, and in 2011, I finally followed suit and created my own Tumblr blog.

In 2013, FanFiction.net suddenly purged all of its adult fanfiction from the site in an effort to appease advertisers. This led many users, including myself, to migrate to Archive of Our Own, an amazing and wonderful user-funded archive of fanfiction that I still use to this very day.

In 2014, I was beginning to grow unwell while using Tumblr. At first, Tumblr seemed to be an amazing place to be. It was easy to use, the content was endless, and the tagging system was great. But the lack of moderation, the lack of privacy, the ability to send/receive anonymous messages, and a lack of closed communities soon made it an absolute hellscape of negativity/bullying and it began to take a toll on the mental health of myself and millions of others who used the site.

By 2015, tumblr had become known all over the internet as the most toxic social media site on the web. Besides the problems listed above, the biggest contributor to the toxicity within fandom spaces was a lack of separation between certain communities and their subject matter. Tumblr was heavily used not only by the nerd and fandom community, but also by activists who wanted progress and change in the real world. Soon, fictional content along with serious real life events and issues began to get intertwined. People started having a hard time differentiating between fictional tropes/preferences and real life problems that actually negatively affected people. People began applying real world morality and laws to fictional worlds/characters in an effort to be an advocate for social justice, and appear morally supperior or unproblematic. This marked the beginning of a fandom movement that became so far left that it ended up in right-wing puritanical conservative terriroty, and to this day continues to try and police how fans enjoy their favourite media in an effort to "purify" it and keep it clean of anything they find "perverted" or "problematic."

More and more, fandom was becoming divided between people who used it as a safe escape from real life, and people who used it merely as a tool for performative activism, harrassment, and clout.

I wish I could say that from 2015 and onward things got better for fandom online, but unfortunately it only got worse. In 2018, once again, adult content was being purged, and this time it was on Tumblr. Artists and writers quickly jumped ship and migrated to Twitter, leaving years of fandom content to die on Tumblr, just as years of fandom content died on LiveJournal before it. Ironically, the fandom puritans got exactly what they wanted and all the "icky bad gross" content and all its creators left the site, but for some reason... those same people who claimed to hate adult content followed all the adult content creators to Twitter during the migration.

If Tumblr was toxic due to a lack of separation of subject matter, privacy, and moderation, then Twitter was the 9th circle of Hell. While on Twitter, fandom spaces have become more unsafe than ever before. People have no way to curate their content on Twitter, causing people to become exposed to things they don't want to see, resulting in extreme levels of harrassment and even violence. Tags are rarely used, making blacklists and organization obsolete, and there is no way to find content or keep track of certain things you're actually interested in. Fandom discussion is reduced to 280 characters, artwork is cropped and compressed into horrible quality images, fanfiction is impossible to share there, and posts from users you follow get pushed off of the timeline within minutes (if they were ever displayed on your timeline at all), quickly being replaced by tweets concerning celebrities, politicians, world news, tragedies, corporations, and advertisements.

It is 2022 as I write this, and I wish my little internet biography here had a more positive note to leave off on, but... I can say with 100% certainty that after experiencing fandom communities online since 1998, I never expected that fandom spaces online would become... whatever it is now.

My only hope is that if fandom migrates again, I hope it's to a place that addresses the issues that are causing so many problems for fan communities. I hope there is a way to tag, organize, isolate subject matter, and allow its users to curate the content they WANT to see. If you don't want to see certain things, you shouldn't have to.

Who knows, maybe Neocities can be where fandom goes from here. How funny would it be if that were the case? Fandom on the internet would have come full circle, back to the good ol' Geocities days in the late 1990s.

Only time will tell. Until then, I'll be waiting eagerly to document my experience with it here.