#VHS tapes were in the bargain bins at that point for the few things that released alongside dvd releases

[angelicsentinel]

....i don't know who needs to know this but we had dvd players and also flatscreens in 2006

[cookinguptales]

Omg with TokyoPop 😂 Please share the early 2000's anime days this is new to me and sounds hilarious.

they were dark-ass times, my friend

TERRIBLE AMERICAN PUBLISHING (idk how it was in other countries; I went to Paris many years later and was impressed with their...everything when it came to different kinds of comics but) Tokyopop which was basically run by people who only half knew what they were doing, Viz which mirrored manga for a long time bc they assumed Americans were too stupid to learn how to read the other way (which was particularly annoying in comics where like a right arm or something was important), ADV which probably couldn’t actually release an entire series if their goddamn lives depended on it (yes, I’m still mad about MaLoki), and various other publishers that would publish like one title ever

No legal streaming!! Which meant you either had to buy super expensive DVDs or pirate them online. (BACK IN THESE DAYS, CRUNCHYROLL WAS A PIRATING WEBSITE. NEVER FORGET.) This was right at the end of VHS days, though, so it could be worse!! If you got a VHS, it would be subbed or dubbed. When I watched Evangelion it was on bargain bin VHS tapes so it was like 70% subbed and 30% dubbed and it was a painful time.

Fansubs online were a huge thing. Legit companies had pretty slow turn around (you were lucky if something like the Anime...Network? I can’t remember. or Toonami or Funimation picked it up, bc they had tv channels -- though you’d usually have to put up with a shitty-ass dub) and you’d usually have to wait for a large-chunk release. If you wanted to watch something as it aired, you had to watch it raw or depend on fansubs. These were uh. Of varying quality. They’d usually have a 2-24 hour turnaround depending on the size of the group, with Shounen Jump titles having the fastest turnaround. Those were anime that were already published in manga form in the US via Viz, so they were already mostly familiar with how they’d go, plus...lbr, a lot of those shows were....easier to translate. If you catch my drift. (They tended to be dumb and repetitive. That is what I’m saying.) Also a larger fandom, so greater pool to get workers from and a greater reward re: downloaders. (And people usually torrented new fansub releases bc there were fewer online streaming sites, so popular shows downloaded faster.)

So like, picture if you will, a group of tween-teen nerds sitting around a computer watching fansubs of suspicious quality and shrieking the theme songs in unison because a fansub wasn’t a fansub without bouncing karaoke at the top. We got a DVD player that could play avis at one point and that was kind of mind blowing. Otherwise, you could use an AV cable or buy a DVD.

You bought things legit if you wanted to really support the industry or you really loved a show, not because they were always better quality. I’ll leave it at that.

There were also a lot of scanlation communities, which were basically fansubs but for manga. These were also of extremely variant quality, and there were a lot of rules for a very weird online translation subculture. I always kind of got the impression that most of them hated each other. A lot of these groups required IRC use, which was confusing af, and I honestly believe that’s the biggest reason why most of these ended up getting put on online manga reader sites. There were fewer of those back then.

Most anime fandom was very strongly demarcated. Most of the fandom I engaged with was on livejournal, which meant it was like...maybe 95% female. You’d get more men on forums, which is why we all fled the forums and went to LJ. lol. Trash spaces. Trash.

The whole yaoi/shounen-ai/BL situation was very different. LGBT stuff was considered more niche and still something you needed to “warn” for in most environments. For a long time, the only legit published stuff was like. FAKE and Gravitation and CLAMP and maybe Eerie Queerie or Loveless or something. So basically, it was shit. lol. (As a young teen, I was particularly attached to CLAMP/Kaori Yuki stuff. Thank god my parents never caught on.) Anyway, to get to scanlated BL works, you usually had to go to special communities/sharing circles online or figure out the prominent scanlators and follow them. Very, very little doujinshi was scanlated. Very few (English-speaking) people ventured onto pixiv. There were a lot of arguments about the differences between yaoi, shounen-ai, and BL. Don’t let anyone nowadays fool you. When I was a teen, 90% of all “yaoi fangirls” were queer, and half of that annoying sex-focused excitement was because it was the first gay sex we’d seen in any publication anywhere. It was a different time in the media landscape. BL has a lot of shitty-ass tropes, but we were basically starving in a desert. We took our Gravitation and we liked it. F/F manga was very rarely translated, and I guess that’s still the case today. There’s less of it, and I think we’ve all been trained to prioritize male sexuality. (Plus most of the shoujo-ai that got posted online was like uber-innocent schoolgirl stuff.) People make fun of “yaoi fangirls” and “fujoshi” and all that now, but I can honestly say I would have never understood my own sexuality without that subculture. Like the anime clubs were full of obnoxious little weebs, but let’s be straight about something, no pun intended. They were full of obnoxious little gay weebs. People are all about gay (western) cartoons nowadays, but when I was a teen, they were all about that anime.

Because almost all published anime/manga was in hard copy, you’d get mini congregations of fans in stores. See: hordes of manga fans sitting in the manga aisle of the book store, fans chatting with each other in...suncoast, or wherever they could find DVDs/VHS. The level of social skills in these areas was...not high. Also, a lot of fuckin creepy predatory dudes going after girls. Hooooly shit. I was so glad when they started releasing anime/manga online. Y’all livestreamers on Crunchyroll don’t know how good you have it. You used to have to deal with the fedora bros who were a good 10-20 years older than you but still following you around in stores, conventions, etc. any time you wanted to get new stuff. Like it was a legit problem.

LIKE I’M TRYING TO CONVEY HERE THAT JUST GETTING ANIME/MANGA WAS A PAIN IN THE REAR END. not as bad as the dark days when people had to physically mail each other shit, but it was still definitely a subculture and you’d definitely be thrown in with a lot of people you wouldn’t want to be around. (Similar to how things are in modern western comics fandom...)

Fandom itself was basically a tire fire. In every possible way. Like I’m nostalgic for it in some ways, because in some ways I really miss how text-based it was. There was a lot more meta and conversation, and fanfic was much better supported. Comment culture was a lot stronger and you’d become friends with people who read your work and/or people who wrote stuff you liked. But on the other side of that, there was a lot of weird fanfic gatekeeping. Sporking communities and flaming and fic rating communities were much more of a problem back then. You release stuff to crickets nowadays, which is demoralizing, but back then there was a solid chance you’d wake up to an inbox full of hate mail, especially if you wrote slash. It definitely happened to me a few times as a kid. I think they really targeted teens, too. So writing fic could be shitty. There was less fanart in American spaces, too.

I do agree that to some degree things have gone too far with the whole virtue-signaling/issuefic thing, with a lot of people yelling very loudly about things they may not always understand very well, but you gotta understand. Fandom was a hateful place in many ways back then. Sexist, racist, homophobic, you name it. Female characters are still ignored now, but they’re typically treated less horribly than they were back then. People try to be more educated about other ethnicities and sexualities and such now. You’re less likely to get bullied because you were gay. I think the big problem is that sometimes people hijack important movements to be giant dicks, and a lot of people, especially younger people, get swept up in that.

There was a very specific kind of anime badfic back then. I could write literally an entire post on that. Like god. Where do I even begin??? The bluenettes? The super kawaii fangirl nihongo? Script fic? “Tell me what to write next!” fic? lolololcrack fic? I mean, there were a lot of varieties of suck back then.

Weird subcultures. Like...really weird ones. Things got kind of cult-y relatively often. Just say no to cults.

if you want more details on anything, I’m having particularly painful flashbacks right now. ugh, the free hugs signs.