#western weebdom history

[centrally-unplanned]

Today is the 20th Anniversary of the release of Haibane Renmei, which is a great time to post art. Good art, you ask? Oh the best - early 2000′s wallpapers from the dregs of the internet, of course! 

Nothing says “graphic design is my passion” like throwing black font on a black background because, like, its the Black Parade? It has to be black???

Another genre of Wallpaper at the time was the ‘anime + poetry’ blend, which Haibane was a poster child for:

Posted by “Knight Of Lain” in 2005 as their first wallpaper, King tier shit. This genre really died out by ~2010, but I think early internet had a lot of quasi-spiritual, “Christian-ish but I don’t like, read the bible ya know?” teens for whom Haibane’s ennui & iconography really hit home. Those people are either practicing capital-W Witches or Gwyneth Paltrow now.

Something I did discover when browsing DeviantArt was the people who uploaded “wallpapers” that were just screenshots? Of their desktops? So like their UI was still there, so you couldn’t really download it as a wallpaper:

At the time that would be frustrating, now its perfect Y2K-core vibes. “Posted in 2006″ yeah I gathered that, show me the Warcraft 3 mods don’t tease me like this!!

To diversify a bit, I did find this Winamp skin in the Museum, fully ‘flipped image’ and everything like how it was done at the time:

I find this particularly amusing because I know why it exists - Serial Experiments Lain was hugely popular with the techno scene for obvious reasons, so there are tons of winamp skins for that show, and Haibane is related to Lain, so even though Haibane shares like none of Lain’s aesthetic in that regard...why not right?

On the more professional side, Megatokyo Author Fred Gallagher absolutely did a Haibane-inspired sidestory in his webcomic in 2007! He loved the anime and I think its ‘genre’ was something he was trying hard to emulate in the late 2000′s:

Link if you want to read it, though the Haibane elements are more aesthetics than plot.

To end this a little meta, Haibane wallpapers, like everything back then, were built out of “constituent parts”, official art from scanned artbooks and promotional material, cut & recoloured in photoshop. One of the big source ones at the time came from this image, if I recall correctly:

Which is funny, because it kindof isn't from Haibane Renmei? That isn’t Rakka. Its from Yoshitoshi Abe, in a doujin he published in 1998 *called* Haibane Renmei, but it was extremely different from the show. Its just a collection of standalone art jumping between cute and gothic-creepy, and these angels live in modern Japan:

The latter creepy stuff is actually kindof funny, as you can tell this guy is definitely designing for Serial Experiments Lain at the time - which shares that sensibility deeply - but its an aesthetic that would barely survive in the actual product by the time the *true* predecessor doujin of the anime, Haibane of Old Home, would be released in 2001. But since so many Haibane fans *were* alt-edgy goth loving freaks due to how Haibane was situated & transmitted in western anime cultural spaces at the time (and its inherent themes, not taking that away), pulling from the extant creepy art out there was a natural instinct. So that og image just...became Rakka.

You can check out the 1998 doujin here in full if you want - if you are a fan of NieA under 7, the other anime based on one of ABe’s doujin, you will definitely notice some proto-characters for that story in this.

(Also since it has happened before, every art featured here is unironically great, their creators are great for making them. Cringe is dead, I love all of this) 

#haibane renmei #2000s internet #western weebdom history

[centrally-unplanned]

I would love to know more about the social dynamic on the megatokyo forums. Half the people didn't even read the comic? What brought them there? What kind of tensions kept bubbling up? Fascinating to me

I obviously don't have the objectively correct answers, but Megatokyo as a comic started in 2000, and reached its peak in popularity around 2003-2006. This timing is *right* around the start of the 'second wave' internet-inspired boom in Anime in the west (which would crest and then crash spectacularly in 2008). Megatokyo was the right blend of influences at the right time - 50% western gaming/internet humor, 50% bishoujo manga aesthetics. As such it was a gateway drug for a lot of people to get into anime, and a lot of readers started with the comic and took the plunge into actual anime/manga from there. I would argue that Megatokyo actually played a small but notable role in making that boom happen.

Forums on the early internet were a total crapshoot; quality of discourse varied based on how good the mods were, how nice frequent posters were, etc. Megatokyo was lucky in that it had some great ones with a wide variety of interests & a lot of time to devote to the forums. It actually had a ton of subforums, reflecting that mixed crowd:

(A 2004 screenshot). You had the gamers, the weebs, the deviantartists, and as far as webcomic forums went Megatokyo was really smart about setting up infrastructure as soon as new interests bloomed.

In the early days of the internet, its important to remember there was NO default. If you want to talk about visual novels, you don't go to the subreddit, that doesn't exist, you just have to stumble on a place. Which means when you do stumble on a place, you have a very high tendency to stick with it. Here is where a little bit of webcomic history is needed: Megatokyo was founded by Fred 'Piro' Gallagher and Rodney 'Largo' Caston - Fred was the weeb side, Rodney the gamer side. Fred did the art and half the scripting, Rodney did the other half of the scripting. As you can probably guess that put a lot more work on Fred than Rodney, and eventually creative differences lead to them separating and Fred continued the comic as a solo project.

This event ushered in a tone shift in the comic - not at first actually, Megatokyo's peak as a 'gamer comic' was actually under Fred's solo direction, but soon enough he took it in more bishoujo anime directions. And honestly, webcomics were just so new back then! You gave *anything* a shot, you didn't give a fuck if it was good or not. I *still* read El Goonish Shive, a god damn fetish genderswap transformation webcomic but-I-was-too-stupid-to-realize-that, and its early comics looked like the mad scrawlings of a 12 year old because *they were*. As such, the schism in the webcomic combined with the fact that a bunch of middle school readers became highschools and their tastes changed, meant that half the audience of the comic just didn't like it anymore.

But the forums...those readers learned about Tokyo Mew Mew there! They found their Warcraft 3 guildmembers there! They trolled through Colin Powell's UN report on South African deliveries of uranium yellowcake to Sadaam Hussein and debated what that meant for his IRBM capabilities (spoiler alert: fucking nothing) there! So they don't even read the comic any more, but why leave - the way the forum is structured, "Story Discussion" is in its own subreddit anyway, its *built* for you to not care about the comic. And your friends are all here anyway right?

Back to the webcomic history, there was a LOT of drama around the split when it happened, and the growing weebdom of the internet was contested territory - weebs and gamers would sling mud at each other to paint the blueprint for how left-Tumblr/Social Justice Twitter would fight their endless civil wars with each other today. I - and I shit you not here, I am not making this up - was there for when 4chan launched a raid on the Megatokyo Forums because the Megatokyo folk were, by being 'anime fans', a bunch of loli pedophiles. 4chan! Accusing someone of being lolis!! It was great, the raid totally fizzled and people counter-raided /b/ with like Cardcaptor Sakura fanart, good times. All of this is to say, the people who stopped reading the comic didn't just sit quietly back - they got into tons of fights big and small with those who still read the comics, saying it was "bad now" and Fed had "Betrayed Rodney" and all that, and it was really just a proxy war for the weeb/gamer conflicts throughout the internet at the time.

That Hamtaro poster I mentioned in my original comment was at some point banned because he stirred up political drama in non-political threads, got temp-silenced, and evaded his timeout to spam the forums with an anarchist manifesto about how the only thing we posters have to lose if we kill the mods is our chains. Shit was lit.

Of course the drama is what people remember but most people posted discussions of the latest Haruhi episode in peace. Still, the different subforums became very silo'd as a result of these trends. and they became in their own way separate groups. Then of course the 1st wave webcomic bubble settled down, Megatokyo's popularity waned, and the Forum Age of the internet died as Reddit+ rose. The forum slowly fell into disuse as a result, though it definitely stuck around with active members well into the 2010's and people posted about the Good Old Days, till eventually the old forum was archived and new one, primarily devoted to the comic which is still trundling along, replaced it a few years back. Still, hopefully this is a neat history of the forums from say ~2003 to ~2008.

#megatokyo #old internet history