Jan 15 2008
What ever happened to fansites anyway??
You know back in ye olden’ days before anime blogging and Deviantart the place to go for stuff on your favorite show was: fansites. I remember when I’d be like “oh man I wanna look up my favorite Taichi x Sora from Digimon site” and you searched it up (via Excite or Yahoo of course cause there was no google - or my favorite Mamma.com) and got tons of fansites with fanfics, fanarts, screencaps, manga scans, downloads, winamp skins, wallpapers you name it.
Nowdays, I google up something all I get are blogs, youtube links, someone’s livejournal, fanfiction.net links and completely irrelevant spam. (You know one of those haruhixkyon.click.here.to.get.spammed.com/haruhixkyon/ that you click on and your screen gets filled with popups and trojans making you want to stab the mother**** who came up with this b/s in the first place.)
I mean what happened? It’s like nowdays if I wanna find a site that has some fanart of my favorite chars or pairings, I gotta go find those Japanese fanart site directories and search by category or something. Where did all the US fansite makers go? Did we all grow up or is the new thing now to slap your myspace page with said “fansite content” but in a shitty way so that no one wants to visit it in fear of crashing their browser or getting a trojan horse?
I miss the good old days. 
Tags: disappointment, good old days, meh
36 Responses to “What ever happened to fansites anyway??”
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I think part of the problem is the lack of payoff. Once a series has been out for a while, the amount of official art and news starts to slow to a trickle. Then the admin usually ends up moving on to a new interest. So you put a bunch of work in, and after a little while it feels like it was a waste of time.
I remember winamp skins and you forgot to mention awesome midi bgm *happy sigh*.
Nowadays running a fansite isn’t as fun as it used to be. People complain too much and send lots of hatemail… plus steal bandwith.
I thought http://suppi.net/slg/ was one of the best websites out there. At least the webmistress kept it for lots of years. Too bad there aren’t more like this one.
Adding to Kabitzin’s comment above… Other websites (dA, LJ etc.) are much easier to manage. Rather than having to design/manage your own fansite, it’s much easier to just submit art, screenshots etc. on those sites. Not to mention this gives the submitter much more publicity (no need to fight to be known in the vast seas of the Net), as well as the gratification of seeing favourites/comments and the like. Viewers also tend to drift towards these sites, because it’s quite easy to search.
Before I started blogging, I kind of hated blogs since it looked like they were swallowing or drowning out the fan sites/shrines.
I could see why they faded. After a while, there’s nothing new to post on that same show and the domain expires, etc. when the owner hasn’t had anything new to add after a year. At least with an anime blog, the author can move onto a new show while still keeping the old stuff in the archive. That said, fan sites definitely gave off more of a labor of love feeling than a blog entry ever could. Plus blogs tend to give a standardized look to all your pages, making it hard to pull off dedicated eye candy for each show. Anyway, yeah, I miss the day of the anime shrine. Maybe shrines could live on if there was a central shrine site where shrine makers wouldn’t have to worry about paying the domain fees for a site that’s ten years old that they never plan on updating again.
lol winamp skins!
I used to visit lots of Sailor Moon fansites back in the day for my Sailor Senshi fix. I used webcrawler for some reason I can’t remember.
Perhaps the lack of fansites nowadays might have something to do with the fact that there is more official art floating around (getting official art back then had Holy Grail implications) , and even some of the official art plays with some of the fandom ideas (Kagami and Konata married lol), so there is no need for fans to fill a void. There is also access to more semi-pro stuff thanks to the more widespread use of the internet, so “lesser fans” don’t feel the urge to create.
Oh, and geocities ruled.
Also, I think with the ready availability of anime through torrents, fans can be watching multiple shows and have more than they can possibly watch. There was a time when getting anime took effort and most people could only be a fan of one or just a few shows at a time. They could obsess over one show, because that’s all they had.
You watched Digimon? And I thought you were deep!
Seriously, I think you answered your own question. Blogs, DeviantArt, etc simply replaced them. Imagine in a few years when blogs are declasse, much like Email is now. I only get email from people that work at a computer (like I do) or those who have text-ed me something and are miffed I haven’t responded to them yet. Change happens.
My other points have already been discussed by others so I won’t repeat them, and the winamp comment was a flashback like no other. And a firewall/virus scanner will fix/prevent all Trojans.
And my final comment, people are lazy. Back in the day the internet was new. I was elementary when Pokemon came around, everything was new and fascinating. It’s all mundane now and myspace is for pedophiles. It’s all about facebook.
for now.
Super Rats pretty much has it - now more than ever anime is a really, really disposable form of entertainment. Now that relatively easy to find something new to watch every single day, people no longer put in the kind of obsessive interest required to actually put a site together - I mean, why rewatch something when you’ve got a stack of new content you could be watching, and why spend all your time writing obsessively about said show when you could be watching something?
I remember those days too actually….remember anime shrines? LOL xD
I’m pretty sure fansites died out with the introduction of blogs and all that interactive stuff….some still exist and are popular, but it’s all Naruto and Bleach. T.T
I miss dumb anime fansites with stolen Japanese fanart…
I miss the trend of fansites. Even if they end up not being updated much after a show has ended, the information and pictures would still be there. ;_; Now you have wikipedia for information and a billion image sites.
My friend owned a Taichi x Sora site back when, lol.
i used to go for those sites when i lacked info on a certain series or something like that
nowadays, animedb or wikipedia do the job
for images… google it.
for some good(questionable) review. just roll over a few blogs hehehe
although most of them only rant about mainstream anime =_=
eg. i really liked “terra e” yet, i found only one blog about it and barely no replies
so blame on google, wikipedia and animeblogs =p
Totali> Lol Shrines! I once ran a Sailormoon site called “Sailor Sanctuary” lmao in like 2000 then after less than a year I got bored and quit. I think my last fansite was one dedicated to Cacao from Trouble Chocolate but after like 6 months or so I quit that too XD;;; I wish people weren’t like me!
Sabrain> Omigod Sabrina facebook me! lol
super rats> I know that feeling
Nemo> Geocities taught me HTML!
algelic> So that site finally kicked the bucket too I see
berz> Yep
ik> Taichi x Sora ftw !I was so mad when she ended up with Yamato lol
digi> I think the exception to your statement are things like Naruto and Bleach lol
I’ve only really been a follower of anime after the age of blogs got into full flow and I guess in the end it suits the current anime scene where anime is more ‘disposable’ and there’s so much of it that everyone follows and have seen a large number of series anyway.
Ah Winamp…. why doesn’t itunes have more varied skins….
I thought I was the only one who went to fansites back in the 90s. Anipike lol
Ahh…yes…what happened to them? D:
I used to take care of incoming fan-arts for a Mega Man-character fan shrine and it all was working until a year ago or something, when a server move (or something alike) reseted the settings, so I (who was not the admin) couldn’t log in any more, the person who kept it said “I’ll fix it soon”, comments started to get filled with spam and…it’s been like that ever since…
However, the other day, I stumbled over some fansite which still were alive. They even had cells from older series which I like (but don’t see anywhere today) and that felt wonderful
Well…the site in question, not to mention the places it linked to were not the best but, it still felt good XD
Hm, also…I’m starting to think that sites like danbooru/akibakko/other tag-based, large image collection sites have replaced the need for new fan-sites, from an official-art/fan-art kind of view….but that comfy feeling isn’t there in the same way
Koji: LOL anipike! Oh man I once entered a mascot into their contest and won so my mascot was displayed for like a month!! XDXD
TehShien> I need to get more of these image board links I mean the ones I always visit don’t seem to update as much
oh fansites. Back in the days where if you wanted to watch anime, you watched it in english on Cartoon Network. I used to frequent Outlaw Star sites particularly. I still find a few here and there (for example, this lovely: http://www.ouran-koukou.org/), but it’s mostly for shows that haven’t ended yet or seem like they never will (Naruto/Bleach/etc.). Nope. They don’t grow them like they used to.
Still, I’m content with Livejournal communities and wikipedia entries.
mmm… fanfic… karin x himeka… kazune x micchi… waitaminutethere… x_x
wow, I suddenly had flashes of the first sites I visited when I got the taste of the internet, yahoo, then otakuworld and anipike! oh anipike~ my favorite site back then 8D I feel like going back to the bishie fansites I used to visit… now that I think about it, I might just have gotten into your Sailor Sanctuary site back then , Hinano xD
The lack of access to different animes or anime media back in the 90s made people more enthusiastic and into the fandom, unlike the recent years. What used to be such a “rare commodity” has now become so common that people don’t give as much importance to it anymore. Not being able to have the convenience of readily downloading animes also allowed people to immerse themselves more into the fandom (and I recall my fanart days…)
I actually think bloggers can make a fansite out of their blog, given enough passion and enthusiasm, and supposedly undying love for a certain series. Dedicate pages in the blog for the series, or something. o__o
XD lol visiting my old site
Yea
I remember AniPike. Ah, the warm, fuzzy memories of finding similar crazies, the joy of dead sites, etc…
Nowadays, it seems like people have grown fat and lazy.
Excuse me, but I have the urge to go learn about effective CSS now.
Ten years ago Anipike was THE place to go to find sites about a particular series. A bunch of shrines would be listed, but even back then, a lot of them would be broken links already ^^;
Also, back then, Fushigi Yuugi and Rurouni Kenshin were big among college anime fans. There were shrines for different characters, and I remember how on mailing lists these fangirls would claim titles, like “Tasuki no Miko” and “Chichiri no Miko” and so on. Then, if someone else used that title, they’d have a flame war or something, lol. They even kept “official” lists of these titles!
All this nostalgia brings back another memory. I remember 10 years ago I joined a Kimagure Orange Road Mailing List. They’d get together at cons and have shirts made. I remember a guy called Fred Gallagher did the art for them. I wonder what happened to him, lol
He became a sell out
lol
MAn I never realized you were on the same level of anime watching history as me Dan xD
Yep, I actually remember the “For Richer or Poorer” since a friend of mine used to show me this fansite and I really thought it’s very well done. However, it is disturbing how I do not even visit any more of those. The replacement is so sudden and rapid that the trends and transformation of the Internet is quite vast.
Maybe one day, blogs will become the rarity to be replaced by…something?
I used to run a Ranma fansite with manga downloads but it took up way to much bandwidth and after a while there really isn’t anything to update on. And even when there are, its usually the same ol’ stuff. Plus, it’s not exactly interactive so it gets lonely and boring after a while and you just forget about it.
Besides, blogs are much more easier to set up and manage. It used to be that you actually need to know html or work with FrontPage (which really suks IMO) unless you’re fortunate enough to have Dreamweaver.
In a way, I do miss the times when I coded all my sites with notepad
Although it’s not really practical anymore since more and more people are going for interactivity rather than static content.
http://myanimelist.net/blog/DS
(Check out my January 16 Post!)
Ah… not answering when straight from getting up and now have free time… sooo…
RANTTIME!
Fansites require lots of time to kill. And dedication and commitment. Most people who ran them usually are in uni but after a while they get boring especially if isn’t updated to often or there isn’t much to add on. Then the webperson starts losing interest in keeping it going. There are very few sites from the old days when I started out that are actually still alive. dejiko.org died twice. Usually once a series gets old a bit, the interest isn’t there very much and the site either dies or evolves into the new interest with the old interest in a hyperlink somewhere.
Most of the surviving one from the pre-2000 days are those that have something that is still ongoing. Animelyrics is an example although there was a long period of stagnation. Anipike changed hands because Kevin lost interest.
I think I may have run into hinano’s old sites but never noted who the person was >_> All I know is Maria from choco and all the Di Gi Charat. >_>
I don’t do sites even though I can afford the costs now because I am this: L-A-Z-Y plus the interest would fade quite quickly. Same reason why I don’t run a blog. Too lazy so I take the next best option and spam elsewhere. >_> That and I don’t watch much these day. Do you know that there’s only TWO shows that is on the watch list and it’s not from this season?
- End of Rantyness -
Now I want my Hamaji # 3 review. :3 Maid Hamaji was cute and so was dress Hamaji. :3 Did you know that Hamaji has a sister Yukiji?
Digi> XD I dont think my fansub site counts since it was mostly a reference page for people to see what I’m releasing. I mostly had art sites like “Maria’s Art Page” and then I had a Japanese version called “Mixture Style” - both are pretty dead now that I can just upload my crap on deviantart. Also Yukiji = voice of Plue from Rave?_?
I disagree. You still get alot more fansites, just they are more specific. If you look you will find sites dedicated to this pair or this character.
More often and not though, these are characters/pairs from games or the more popular anime.
Also, they are more text than image. However, they do still exist!
I remember those days… course I only started getting into anime way back when they were just starting to disappear off the internet. But I recall the fanlistings. You’d always find those when looking for stuff on a show. Great big websites with absolutely nothing on them content wise. But on occasion one would have a decent collection of art…
Firstly, the news will always run out. Remember those FFVII:AC movie sites? No? Thought so.
Secondly: for games, GameFAQs rocks.
for anime… if I haven’t watched it, why would I read up on its characters? once I’ve watched it, please tell me something I don’t know… or on second thought, don’t, I hate spoilers (Serial Experiments Lain is an exception, I never get that series).
So that’s probably why.
yey maybe ill see you, i live right next to where they have that event, still trying to figure what ill go as :\
Yeah, age of the Geocities/Angelfire/Tripod/Homestead/insert free web provider here has died with web 2.0.
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