/retro/ - Y2K

...I still cruise fanfiction.net and feel like not a whole lot has really changed there in the past twenty years.

>>123

True, but that's because all the new fanfic writers moved over to Archive of Our Own

>>120 (OP) 
i remember reading silent hill fanfiction on a tiny forum before discovering ff.n. it's interesting how things became so centralized. i really do think that ao3's tagging is great, but it's also sort of sad how individual fansites have largely disappeared.

As a kid I visited fanfiction.net and read some weird fanfiction about how Misty from Pokemon secretly had a micropenis and it went into uncomfortable detail about how she used it and hid it from everyone. I was really confused and yet intrigued by it. This might have been around 2007.

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>>3430

>>3430
Unsupervised internet access is one helluva thing, huh?

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>>120 (OP) 
I was reading this surprisingly good Nadesico/Sailor Moon crossover fic from 2003 where the whole cast gets warped to late 90's Tokyo and Ruri, Yurika and Inez are magical girls, and also the only characters who have memories of their original lives. It's not really a crossover though since no SM characters even appear in it.

>>3430
That's the kind of thing that turns a kid into a porn addict for the rest of their lives.
One of my irl friends discovered Kingdom Hearts porn on Newgrounds and well during our teen years he was that weird kid who had fuck tons of Naruto hentai on his flip phone and now he sends me random hentai when he wants to chat.
He's still a pretty cool guy, but a bit of an autist sometimes.

It still exists. I mean, some sites are gone, but the big ones like Archive of Our Own and FF.NET are still there. Deviantart too, if people still use that for fics these days...Anyway, the former two tend to have a lot of older fanfiction writers, which is a wonderful thing, however, there's a chance if you are in a 'newer' fandom, you will get some flavor of pozz. Good thing AO3 let's you exclude tags so you can mostly avoid it.

>>3433
>>3432
>>3431
I found the fanfiction. It's called "Misty's Big Secret" last updated in 2003. Apparently it's yaoi, too.
https://www.fanfiction.net/s/1207930/1/Misty-s-Big-Secret

>>3458
Truly the love story of all time.

>>3456
>AO3
>FF.net
>DA
Yeah, it really doesn't feel like much has changed in the last 20 years.  What kind of surprises me is how bad most modern art sites are at hosting text content.  They let you upload PDFs and other files, which usually display well enough, but pure text often has very few formatting options.  FIMFiction, a site dedicated to MLP fanfiction, lets you control the color scheme/width/justification/indentation/font with a lot of customization but I've never seen any other site that came close.  Even DA and FF.net only have a few toggles for size and font.

>>3479
Yeah, the customization sucks for the bigger sites, which shouldn't be the case. Even on AO3, the customization is somewhat limited, since the whole work has to have a 'skin' and can't have multiple themes. For a horror themed fanfiction that I was writing, I wanted to implement a Higurashi flavored effect where during the chapters with gruesome horror moments, I could just make the background black with dark red text (and some other color like grey outside of these moments) and then switch back to a normal white background and black text in another chapter. I feel like in order to do something like this I'm going to have to upload my work onto my own personal site.

>>3482
>black background with dark red text
Hell yeah.

Experimentation with different HTML/CSS is something that has become far too rare these days; at most you get someone figuring out how to use an animated JPG on a social media site.  I think the best example I ever saw was the nightmare sequence in Prequel Adventure where Katia walked down a really long staircase and the page itself broke apart into pieces the deeper she went before ultimately becoming a twitching, flickering, insane mess.

A personal website is what I ended up doing for my writing.  Neocities is super easy to work with, especially if all you want to do is spray text onto a webpage.

>>3488
>Experimentation with different HTML/CSS is something that has become far too rare these days
Yeah, uniform account profiles and style guidelines like Material Design have really sucked the life out of most websites.
>animated JPG
Animated JPG? I knew about MJPEG but haven't heard of that before.
>Neocities is super easy to work with, especially if all you want to do is spray text onto a webpage.
What's your site anon? There's quite a few Neocities users on the webring.

>>3488
>>3489
Everything is barely customizable nowadays. Remember the customizable youtube and myspace pages? I'm surprised normalfags caved in, I thought they loved that stuff.

>>3490
>I'm surprised normalfags caved in, I thought they loved that stuff.
What choice did they have? Normalfags go where everyone else is which is why the big sites can get away with basically anything.

Reporting in from /fanfic/. Yes, we yet live, if you want to see some of the things we talk about.

I'm not so about the lack of change. Last year (?) I discovered some early 00s NGE fanfic (An Unwilling Angel and other material), and it felt like a breath of fresh air because of how little it overtly referenced other stories (and especially by name).

>>3458
>account only has this Ash x Misty yaoi fanfic
>is still active on the site to this day
>name and "original date" at the bottom of the story state he's been posting fanfiction for a long while before 2003
>this was the only one he was proud enough to repost
I think that may be funnier than the actual story.

>>3515
I suppose it's the one and only. And thank goodness for that.

>>3499
http://www.users.on.net/~tbusai/Fanfiction/Evangelion/Variations%20on%20a%20Theme/voat-v01.txt
https://archives.eyrie.org/anime/Evangelion/
https://web.archive.org/web/20120317134901/http://rakna.angelfire.com/toili01.txt
https://web.archive.org/web/20100325193224/http://rei-shinji.cjb.net/
https://forum.evageeks.org/thread/20222/The-Highly-Incomplete-And-Inofficial-Encyclopedia-of-Fanfictions/
https://www.angelfire.com/anime4/shinjirei/fanfics.html
https://www.jimmys-desktop.de/2ndtry.pdf

This went over on /fanfic/, might as well post it here too. See anything you like?

>>3458
for some odd reason this made think of a few other out there Pokemon fics I read way back in the early 2000s. Though there are two that continue to bug me and I've been searching for for years. One where Giovanni captured Ash and turned him into a mechanical pokemon thing sent him to fight his friends. And another where Ash spirals after the death of his mother, having a breakdown before ultimately offing himself.

A bit fucked up, but I was like 12ish when I found them and they were the first dark fanfic stories I'd read back then. Probably lost in one of the ff.net purges sadly with a lot of older fics I used to read.

>>3571
Pokemon was a natural home in the 2000s to early 2010s for either sexual awakenings or depressive episodes of the adolescents. 
Hence the existence of so many Pokemon creepypastas that were either self-insert shit or pure projection (and all shit) that they got banned from the creepypasta wiki back when it was alive. Think you can post them now, but the site hasn't been maintained in years.

>>3578
So it would seem, it was very much the wild west and FF.net wasn't as relatively moderated as it is now or prowled by groups like Critics United. Sex fics were a dime a dozen in a lot of the fandoms. Sorta like how they are now on AO3 which is minorly annoying but at least can be filtered out. On a side note I finally found one of the ones I was thinking of:

https://www.fanfiction.net/s/2702364/1/Beyond-the-Shattered-Looking-Glass

>>3580
Were there any spectacularly good Pokefics from that heady time? Not just spectacularly edgy or disgusting.

>>3582
It's been years since I've browsed PKMN but I'm sure I could find a couple. Just gotta dig through all 20k of them. Not like I have much else to do.

>>3584
Looking forward to it, anon.

I dunno, what else was huge back then for fanfics? DBZ? Rurouni Kenshin?

>>3571
>Ash spirals after the death of his mother, having a breakdown before ultimately offing himself
Wait this sounds vaguely familiar to a fanfiction I wrote back in circa 2010 (on paper with pencil only for myself) that I think I based off of a fanfiction I read similar to that. I may be confusing my own fanfiction with whatever I based it on, but I think that Officer Jenny was involved, Ash got arrested, died his hair blonde and went under a new name (I think the writer unoriginally just went with Ash's Japanese name Satoshi). I don't remember if Ash actually died or not. I threw away my paper story in 2017 so I can't go back and read it.

>>3602
Must not have been the next great American (fan) novel if you can't remember it.

>>3602
It was Beyond the Shattered Looking Glass that I was thinking of. I too once based a fanficiton off of that. Course it'll never see the light of day because the old windows xp kicked the bucket. Probably for the best.

>>3608
Have you (or anyone else here) ever thought of writing fanfiction deliberately styled after some of the better ones of yesteryear?

Found these while looking for stuff related to Lexx. Take of it what you will.
http://www.lexxdomain.com/fanfic.php

>>3634
Is that show any good? I downloaded a torrent of it a while ago but never got around to watching it.

>>3639
Looks wacky and unpleasantly perverse, but with some good points.

>>3639
One of my favorite shows, if not my #1 favorite. Like >>3640 says you'll either love it or hate it.

>>3634
I remember watching a few episodes of Lexx as a kid, didn't really gravitate towards it at the time. I remember a few years ago coming across streams on CyTube and thought about actually giving a series a try. Definitely love the link you provided. Going to have to back up my HDD and make space and download some shows from that period, starting with Lexx.

I wonder, is Inuyasha worth trawling for fics?