Anime Shrine

I have vague memories of old English dubs of Sailor Moon episodes playing in the morning before school, but anime didn’t really come onto my radar until Cartoon Network started airing Cowboy Bebop and Inuyasha. My sister and I were completely hooked. It felt like discovering a a new world of gorgeous art and storytelling where the "goodo guys" did not always win and the "bad guys" had backstories that humanized them and even made you feel pitty for them dispite all the horrible things they were doing.

Fruits Basket, Rurouni Kenshin, Trigun, and Saiyuki were the shows that defined those early years. We watched whatever we could get our hands on, which wasn’t much. Anime was incredibly hard to come by back then. You paid a lot of money for poor quality DVDs with barely intelligible subs. We preferred subs over dubs, but honestly both were difficult to find. A page that delves deeper into my classic faves is coming soon.

I definitely had a Geocities anime shrine back in the day. I remember learning Photoshop just so I could make anime wallpapers, most of them very bad but made with so much love. I had a Photobucket account where I stored all the anime gifs I was making. Like so many things from the old internet, it is all lost media now. Sometimes I wish I could see those old creations again.

Anime fanfiction was everywhere back then. Entire webrings were dedicated to it, and personal shrines often had whole sections of stories. My sister was a prolific and fairly popular writer, posting chapters late at night and getting excited whenever someone left a comment on one of her stories. Those stories were heartfelt, dramatic, and full of the kind of creativity that defined early fandom culture. It was a special time and people today who love modern fanfic/AO3 owe a lot to these early writers.