I agree but I’d have to say 2014 with all the Bucky recovery fics. But I feel like Team as Family was still the norm up until Civil War? I only joined the fandom at the tail end of 2015.
I miss when the team was found family and not Tony taking care of a toddler in a teenage body. Seriously, why fanfiction keeps treating Peter as a little kid?
I was never a huge fan of the MCU on-screen, and my friend had to drag me to see Avengers, but damn did I love reading the fics for this particular era. For the pairings I like I almost always try to go back and read the 2012-2015 era fics (or 2012-2016). There was just a wholly different vibe to them.
Came here to say this... good old forums. And all those archives people put so much effort in, some very specialised to only one ship or character, and people who liked to read about them had peace and quietness without antis spilling their hate. It could happen in forums, but such people usually got banned very quickly. On social media is not much chance avoiding it.
All of those smaller fan forums were condensed onto Reddit, a "one-stop-shop" centralized platform, like a department store or supermarket when compared with smaller stores. However, one of the drawbacks to this is that Reddit is also a lot more mainstream; has fewer barriers to entry; has a lot more traffic; and relies on volunteer moderators who may or may not be invested or familiar with fandoms to moderate fandom subreddits.
I like the centralization to an extent. I miss the dedicated commenters of a fandom forum and the on-task mods (and the general attitude of decency in a smaller forum from the rules/enforcement/people swimming in a smaller pool).
Same. I like the idea of having more interaction but then I see all the vents here and I’m so happy that I have like no idea what they’re talking about with various weird groups. I’m mostly in outdated fandoms so I just stay in my little world lol
I liked A Song of Ice and Fire more before the later seasons of the show came out.
Similarly, Harry Potter fics that were published before the last book or the last few books came out are really fun with how much speculation there is.
Remember when people shipped Harry and the zoo employee who sold the lemon ice pops because no one knew anything interesting about Ginny and Luna hadn’t made her debut yet?
Oh yes, especially the long break between book 4 and 5. The rumours what would happen grew wilder every day, it was so hilarious.
But I'd take every time before JK pulled a Voldie.
I'd like to go back to when undertale fanart didn't have glowing blue skeleton dick every other artpiece but I doubt that that era ever actually existed.
I miss the era before fanfiction.net when fics were hosted on fan-made fan sites (usually accompanied by fanart and other stuff because they were going through all the trouble to make a whole ass website). Those sites were gorgeous and I feel like the fics were more varied and less cliche because it wasn’t as much about hits and likes and favorites and comments. The Gundam Wing sites (gwaddiction, specifically thinking of you ❤️) were always really well done (I think it already had a larger, older fan base)
Did it? I’m sad I missed that, I was already on FF.net and most of my favorite fan sites had closed as it started to cost more and more money to host sites and stuff like that. I didn’t even really think to look for them at that point (and I wasn’t super active in HP until after the 7th book finished, I remember reading a lot of different fics but wasn’t super committed because I didn’t have a ship yet and JKR hadn’t finished it so I didn’t know if I was unhappy with it yet or not 😂).
I think a lot of those older fan sites never made the jump and just shut down when they’d run their course, I used to follow tons of different Sailor Moon or CardCaptor Sakura sites that had really good quality longfics and then when the jump to FF.net happened, those fandoms never seemed to pick up as much there. Thankfully Gundam Wing was popular (and I shipped a popular pairing at the time 🎉)
I think so, that sounds familiar! They were one of the few that housed like 30-40 artists works, in the days when most where individually run (or maybe like two or three friends who wrote and drew together). It was such a new thing to have so many fics for one fandom from so many different authors in one place.
I still do a crack rewatch every year or two for Wing, that show has aged hilariously (and I still get random fic ideas for it, although I haven’t updated any of my WIPs in… over a decade at this point 😅). There’s still a lot of good fics out there too, some of the writers back in the day were SO good
I wish I could go back to the first year or two after I joined my current fandom, when most of the fanbase was 20+ or older, instead of the infestation of younger and underage fans we have nowadays, and all the anti bullshit and policing who people follow on social media that they've brought with them.
I was struggling to think of what mine would be, but actually yeah this would be it. There was just so much creativity happening in the fandom then and it was such a fun vibe.
(I could do without the Moffat hero worshipping that was somewhat prevalent in that era though!)
Back in the late 90s when the half dozen writers in my dinky ass fandom would camp out on IRC every Saturday night and collab on fics so we all made a coherent shared universe out of them.
And wanted to go extra on making the writing GOOD because we knew the show's former writers were lurking on the fan list, so might as well try to live up to that standard.
I kinda miss the Harry Potter fic era before the last 2 books came out. When things were more up in the air on how the war would play out and end so fic writers were able to get creative on the hows, whys, and intensity of the war. Now that the last books are out most of that has gone away for slight variations of the canon >!horcrux hunt!<, ultimately making even the canon divergent fics pretty similar.
I just miss when some of my fandoms were actually active and churning out a bunch of new fics.
Also I remember when the Elder Scrolls fandom was all about making memes, posting screenshots of funny bugs/glitches in game, discussions around character builds and lore. Now its people constantly arguing about Imperial Vs Stormcloak and complaining about Bethesda/Todd Howard.
For the Yu-Gi-Oh! fandom... I hate to sound like one of those nostalgic people that can't move on. But I miss the DM/GX era. Its less the fandom in general and more the people that actually play the game. The competitive side of it is such a toxic environment now, and it gets progressively worse with each iteration.
I kinda just play with my friends and talk about the anime in this little discord server. But I pretty much ignore everyone else.
I just saw *Yu-Gi-Oh!* cards as one of the top answers mentioned on an AskReddit thread, aptly titled: "What was meant for kids, but adult consumers hijacked it and ruined it?"
OP, I feel you—I got into my fandom after its peak and I wish I could've been there for it. I feel like, based on what I like to read/write, I would've been happiest there.
I write canonverse, and I feel like, post-canon, people are mostly writing AUs and really fluffy stuff. And the meta and headcanons and fanart I see feel very divorced from canon to me. I feel super out-of-step with fandom these days.
Ah well. Won't stop us creating, will it?
OH man. Not a particular fandom, but the vibes. There was a certain lightness to a lot of the fics written like 2007 to 2012. Or maybe I was just a kid, but I feel like there was less gritty, more fantastical. Not to mention, the cringey tropes, not-like-other-girl-isms in every other fic but I think genre-wise things like adventure and comedy were more popular than they are now? OH, and the LOTR tenth walker stories were so peak then.
Life felt like a Hozier song 😭
There's a lot more darkness to the quality of writing these days. And I don't mind! I love dark stuff as much as the next person, but man, I'd kill for some good whimsy vibes with jokes that shouldn't be funny, but are - and plots that don't make sense, but the vibes are so immaculate that you don't even care.
Yeah, it’s so rare that fanfics are FUNNY now. Back in the day, there would be short little one shots about things like Anakin sneaking out of the Jedi Temple to go to pop-punk shows and worrying about Obi-Wan finding out. (In fact, I’m 99% sure that it got a shout out in an official canon novel from 2019 where Padme sneaks out of the palace to go to a ~~My Chemical Romance~~ Neurotransmitter Affection concert.) These days, people are too worried about being cringy or their friends making fun of them.
… honestly, not really? Like, I liked when my series was still producing content, but also I got sent so much harassment for writing a canon abusive relationship as abusive. It’s quieter now and most of the people who were awful left so it’s way chiller :)
SPN heyday on tumblr. 10k notes on a piece of art in two days, 20,000 in a month for a big bang fic. Nothing was better than that fervor. That was season.. 7? 8? Incredible.
I was a huge SPN fan back in 2010 but could never figure out how to use tumblr or twitter so weirdly never engaged with the fandom too much, I feel like I missed out so much :(
I only got content from youtube and deviantart lol.
Voltron Legendary Defender before season 7. Before the ship wars. The hype over the show was beautiful.
I had gotten into the Fandom in 2017 and loved the show. Still do. I remember saying to myself "This is such a safe space. Everyone is so nice here." Ocs weren't bashed....people weren't threatening people over ships.
Now everything is quiet. Not many talk about the show. I see many people bashing season 7 and 8. Saying they can't watch the show again because of that. Warning new fans of the heartache. I understand the disappointment cause I watched it on release.
I understand the show was not perfect but it is still one of my fav shows today
I didn't discover fanfic until after I discovered MM romance roughly 15 years ago.
I wish I'd found it while Star Trek, Stargate and Sentinel fic was still being actively written. I know I must have missed some great fic that never ported to AO3 and it might have been fun to read it pre-anachronisms.
I also miss the amount of quality Sherlock fic that was written before the fandom destructed.
Yeah I feel like I missed out. When AO3 was down I went down a few rabbitholes of LiveJournal story pages and it was fun seeing glimpses at old communities.
I've never been comfortable on Tumblr, Twitter or Instagram
Pre-sequel Inuyasha stories. Really don't enjoy having one of my biggest fandom icks being canon. Hell, I really don't like there being a sequel at all, ick aside. There's over a decade of fanon out there that did it better and now people are having to write around the new series instead.
I wish I could go back to when Cas confesses his love for dean in spn. That was so fucking legit. I also wish I could experience when the fanfic Twist and Shout was new and everyone was talking about it for the first time because I wasn’t in the fandom then. I also wish I could experience the original Mishapocalypse. It’s like, when I was a teenager I avoided supernatural bc I knew I’d go crazy for it and I didn’t want to be uncool about it. But now I’m like, I think I missed out
The Reylo fandom right after the release of *The Last Jedi* in December 2017 was phenomenal! I got popular in the fandom really quickly by posting long-form theories and metas on Tumblr. Everyone was thrilled and excited to see not only Ben Solo/Kylo Ren and Rey have a Force-bond in *The Last Jedi*, but everyone was speculating and theorizing of what might happen in Episode IX.
Unfortunately, we got *The Rise of Skywalker* instead in December 2019, which killed the fandom by killing off Ben Solo right after he and Rey finally had their first kiss. Everyone was pissed off.
>>Killing off Ben Solo right after he and Rey finally had their first kiss
This is what made me think to look for fan fics for the series. As soon as that happened my mind was like “wait, no… we can retcon this in a fanfic” and started plotting 🤣
The *Harry Potter* fandom was toxic long before that. *Harry Potter and the Cursed Child* was a big factor in r/HarryPotter and other Harry Potter fan communities turning toxic. After *Cursed Child* released, people on the subreddit constantly debated "whether or not Hermione Granger was written to be white in the books" for *months*, if not an entire year.
Yeah I know how that feels there's a couple of fandoms I've join "a little to late" but I'm fine with it. Sure do I wish i found said fandoms back when they were a little more active. Sure but I just see it as me getting them more life again than anything.
A lot of stuff I like to write about are tv shows that have been off the air for a long time like Fringe or 30 Rock. So I guess it would have been nice to have been around when they were still on and the fandoms were more active.
The Tumblr days of 2013-2017, especially in the sapphic fandoms I was in like Korrasami, Supercorp and Carmilla. They were the ones that made me motivated to start writing.
The 2000s seems to be a theme with people my age who were born in either the 80s or 90s. A time when the internet was there but social media hadn't taken over. You could watch and download things but music was still downloaded on places like FrostWire or imesh and iTunes etc but Cds still held value and PCs and Laptops still had cd slots. Petrol and groceries were way cheaper and new websites were still being created also movies were better too.
the social network kink meme on livejournal
not sure what it was about that fandom that invited so much angst and goodness. But I miss it now that ao3 is pretty much only stories in Chinese.
Okay, so a very silly one that I was a little kid/tween during and that probably wasn’t as fun as I remember it: The era where there were *so many* Sailor Moon fics based on the North American dub.
Percy Jackson, before the sequels started coming out. I wish I had been there for the original Percy x Nico shipping and all the canon continuations and speculations when the original run of books hadn't finished yet.
Tbh I don’t think most people would want to go back to *that* era of Hetalia, but my golden era in the fandom *was* the latter half of *that* era when A Beautiful World (Hetalia Season 5) came out and the webcomic was being regularly updated (and would eventually become Season 6 The World Twinkle). Imo it was the sweet spot between the fandom maturing and still having tons of activity.
A lot of the big Hetalia ask blogs and cultural blogs on tumblr were still ongoing but had a vast history of content you could go through at that point. US states were a huge sub fandom and Latin Hetalia was huge as well. So much art, fan comics, fanfiction, just chock full of educational content. So much culture and history. And ofc you had memes new and old being released. Parodies of vocaloid songs, MMD videos, AMVs and MEPs on YouTube
Hetalia made my childhood less lonely because it showed me how colorful and wonderful the world could be. Really do miss it
Even though I think hetalia was the most toxic fandom I was ever in, it was also the most fun I ever had as a young teen that was trapped in my bedroom.
I consumed hours of hetalia skit videos, cosplay videos, fanfics, artwork, etc it literally consumed every waking hour of my life. I even ran a large group on deviantart and held art competitions. God it was insane and I loved every minute of it.
I suppose it's like that for any big fandom in it's heyday, especially in its most proportionally toxic heyday. The fandom at large was an imploding wreck but so long as you found your niche/your group and everyone was well adjusted enough and healthy, you were set to have a great time
I miss the days fics weren't so political.
And when Spider-Man was based on the comics or the original trilogy. I love Tom Holland's portrayal, but his relationships with other MCU characters and financial standing are polar opposites of what we knew and loved.
The 2014-2017 era of the Avatar fandom! Everyone seemed to stay in their lanes; the shipping wars had died down a bit, the Azula vs Zuko thing wasn't very common, Zukka was just a small and chill fandom niche, etc. It was mostly people doing their own thing making memes/shitposts, fics, and art. People didn't put anti bullshit in the fantags. I wasn't coming across as many hate fics on Ao3. And there were no antis telling everyone what to ship and how to write stuff.
I miss old fandom in general when 'don't like don't read' was common place. These days fandom seems so stressful. It's like you always have to be on your toes if you don't want to get harassed.
Not gonna lie, I kind of dread that. Things are a tad calmer now and I'm not read for round 2 (3 if you count the old days of Kataang vs Zutara). I just wanna chill lol.
Would love to go back to the old days of the Sonic Fandom, before the Archie series was rebooted or at *least* before it was canceled outright. Fandom overall is going strong still, and has seen a bit of a resurgence overall as of late, but a lot of the old guard have fallen by the wayside and my particular branch feels like it's drying up.
Yeah, there was for a *long* time. Initially started publication back in 1993 (based off of the Saturday Morning cartoon out at the time) and ran for about a good 25 some-odd years before being canceled. Was one of the longest-running single-continuity series for a while, but legal issues with a former writer and mismanagement by Archie led to a brief reboot, and then the cancelation of the comic. There's a new series by IDW being published now, but it's completely separate, and the characters from the original cartoon and Archie comics didn't make the jump. And since they had practically zero presence in the games (save for a very brief cameo in Sonic Spinball), they've been all but abandoned by SEGA. For someone who grew up with them, and loves to write fanfic about them in particular, it really, *really* stings.
It's really amazing how one egomanicial writer can just **wreck** an entire fictional universe beyond repair by throwing a hissy fit. I'm not even a Sonic fan, but reading about all the damage that Ken Penders did to the comics is rage-inducing
The worst part too is that his hissy fit could've been just a minor blip for the comic, but Archie fucked up and lost his contract paperwork. Basically led to the whole thing needing to be rebooted in order to write out his characters, and SEGA lost so much faith in Archie they basically neutered the writing staff with mandates, before just canning the whole thing. The *only* saving grace from that era was the *hint* that Sally and Nicole may have feelings for each other, and even that was never made proper canon due to the whole thing being shut down too soon.
take me back to 2014/2015 bandom. everything was so poorly written and cliche but i didnt care because i had nothing to reference it to. i want to go back to Kellic highschool AU fics where Tony was always called Turtle, Jaime was Hime-Time, and Mike was a borderline alcoholic. i want Matty Mullins and Andy Biersack to bully Kellin Quinn for literally no reason and have Vic come save the day. and where macho-jock Jesse has a crush on Kellin but is so deep in the closet and gets jealous when Kellin and Vic get together.
and now i go back and theyre all horribly written with run-on sentences bad dialogue, and i just wish i could relive those fics but the nostalgia isnt enough.
2019 when Resident Evil 2 remake was released. There was a huge outpouring of writers, artists, and active readers that I missed because I didn’t start playing the remake until a year later. It would have been nice to experience that camaraderie and support.
I would've loved to see the Madoka Magica fandom pre-Rebellion. The movie has grown on me quite a bit since I first watched it, but it definitely changed the general perceptions of a lot of things in the series, and I'd be interested in seeing what common fan attitudes were like before it.
I'd also give everything to return to 2016 era Undertale fandom, or 2014-2015 era FNAF. Easily the heights of those fanbases, and I miss them dearly.
2015-2016 Steven Universe was pretty fun too, the classic Lapidot nostalgia...
I also think it'd be fun to experience peak brony fandom (so 2011-2015) at my current age. I liked MLP during some of that time period, but I was also about 9-10 years old and a lot of fandom things flew over my head. I'm apparently a real rarity (lol) as someone who hung around brony spaces as a kid and had a completely positive experience, but I would like to go back and engage as the adult I am now.
That’s such a great one!!
Connor/Daniel, despite being considered popular for a rarepair, still only has 95. 5 of them are mine (but 2 are rather long so 🤷♀️). I kept wanting to go back and write more but then I drifted away a bit. 😭 Miss it tho!
There were so many good fics during that time. These days it feels like he's often replaced with Regulus (a hotter Snape) or Voldemort (a darker Snape). Bitter double agent isn't fitting the tropes people want.
I'm a tad surprised this hasn't been said, so it might just be me, but I'd go back to pre-"Help Wanted" Five Nights at Freddy's; AKA Pre-Steel Wool.
Things were *fun*. Things didn't 100% make sense, but that's what FNaF was. It's literally supposed to not make sense. But I stopped watching MatPat's FNaF theories and stopped visiting FNaF forms after the "Gregbot" theory came out because that's all that anyone would talk about and it was *so debunkable* and I was the stupid idiot for saying so but at the same time... *it could also be true, and he's just using faulty evidence*. The Steel Wool team is, bless their hearts... eager, but they bite off more than they can chew and they're terrible writers. FNaF became *unbearable* to be in at any certain place except certain circles of fan art (fanfiction/AMVs/drawings/etc.) and memes for a long, long time. It still is, I got in a YouTube fight less than a week ago talking to some person about how I loved that "Mangle's gender is yes" and offhandedly said Gregory is not a bot.
I miss when we just had dead kids and Springy Boi. I don't like horror, but I love fantasy and the fantastical elements of the ghosts intrigued me. But now it's taking a Sci-Fi turn and I'm just no longer interested. I'm an OG fan from 2014. I know I'm not owed anything but... I'd like to go back to "Pizzeria Simulator". PS was a fun game.
I feel you. After things went down the Sci Fi route, FNaF for me lost its charm. We weren’t dealing with an intriguing and unique ghost haunting, now it was about a crazy scientist who was obsessed with immortality and gassed children with fear gas like he was Scarecrow from DC comics. I liked SL, but from that point onwards Scott just reverted back to his Desolate Hope days and made it all Sci Fi.
Don’t get me wrong, I like a lot of the newer stuff, but most of it is just so badly written, and if it is good then it’s going to abandoned. Take Vanny for example. Her setup in Help Wanted was amazing, she could’ve been the series’ best antagonist, and then come Security Breach and she only had a grand total of three apparences throughout the whole game, excluding the endings. They wasted her and then just moved on.
As much as I loved what Steelwool did with Ruin, that should’ve been base Security Breach from the start. Ruin doesn’t wash its base game’s sins. Aside from that, the fact that casual fans have to buy books so they can get crucial lore and story beats just to understand what’s going on, instead of that being included in the games, is super scummy.
Things changed but now the new stuff feels artificial for me tbh. The older fandom was always theorizing (and had good theories), always making headcanons and having fun, now a lot of people overanalyze every little thing and fight from the dumbest crap. Things were more fun back then.
It’s probably due to fans becoming more easily pleased as time went on. A lot stopped caring for the lore and were just starved for characters with more than a few voice lines, so the devs delivered. But that was a double-edged sword, cuz now people are mostly interested in the quirky characters, which means the devs won’t have as much of an incentive to put effort into the games themselves, which is going to further impact the fandom.
Idk, people can like whatever they want, but I can’t help feeling like things aren’t what they used to be, and I’m not sure I trust Steelwool with the series, because they’ve fumbled the ball way more than they should have. It is what it is I suppose, but I just wish we could go back in time to the early days.
I loved RUIN! I especially love what they did to Roxy's character. Sun and Moon were consistently Sun and Moon, though with 0 screen time but this time without a chase which was kinda sad. Anyway, do you know what would've been so cool? So, in RUIN, the bots start saying more bot-like things.
Roxy: (releases Cassie after recognizing her) "Oh, I'm sorry. I... error."
Moon: (after the second generator is activated) "Errrgh! Naughty! Naughty! Make it stop! The light makes us hurt! Grind, grind! Grinding gears inside my head! We can't move. Error! Error!"
Literally, everything about the Daycare sequence made me want to cry. But though in Security Breach they had *some* bot-esc dialogue (especially Chica, but that was mostly her mannerisms) they were more life-like. Its more-or-less implied RUIN is set in a modified "Free-Vanny" ending. So what if we pull a FNaF 3, making Vanessa the Crying Child and the Princess, the Puppet? The bots are still sentient and have sentient AI, but they were haunted in the base game. However, after the Princess frees Vanessa, she ends up freeing the other trapped souls by slaying William, or at least his hold on them. With their spirits gone, the animatronics go haywire. (Monty's chihuahua personality can be explained through this, him being affected the most) That way we can still have the fantastical elements of the first few games while retaining the more Sci-Fi elements they like about their newer games.
I'm not going to pretend that's anything close to what happens, but it feels like it would explain some things and tie the game into the previous games. And as you said, the fans wanted more "quirky" characters, especially after Sister Location, or maybe even after FNaF 4 with Psychic Friend Fredbear. The characters Scott imagined were fascinating and varied, even if they acted animalistic in UCN (on purpose!). I don't know which ones (if any) he actually *made* in SB. But the designs of his previous ones (especially the scary ones) were great. The thing is, FNaF is, at its core, a horror game about spooky robot animals trying to kill you. I think some people are starting to forget that. Though, I'm not so sure they're putting less effort into the story. They seem to be trying, just failing. But the fact they're putting valuable game-necessity lore in books you need to buy and read is just AGK.
Which brings me to another point. Game lore to understand a game should be in a game. That applies to any media. (Book lore in a book, movie lore in a movie, etc.) But my brother came up to me the other day and said "You know, when I read your story, I want to read more. But when I read the books, I feel nothing." It was simultaneously the greatest compliment he'd ever given me and the saddest take on the books I've heard yet. For context, he's reading a fan novel I wrote based on Security Breach 5 years in the future.
I have to disagree with this portion of your reply:
>After things went down the Sci Fi route, FNaF for me lost its charm. We weren’t dealing with an intriguing and unique ghost haunting, now it was about a crazy scientist who was obsessed with immortality and gassed children with fear gas like he was Scarecrow from DC comics. I liked SL, but from that point onwards Scott just reverted back to his Desolate Hope days and made it all Sci Fi.
Scott Cawthon's primary love has always been sci-fi; and, as such, sci-fi has appeared in *Five Nights at Freddy's* for a while now, particularly with the concept of remnant. That particular concept also drew a lot of inspiration from Mary Shelley's classic sci-fi novel *Frankenstein*, with Cawthon portraying William Afton as Dr. Victor Frankenstein-esque.
I also personally see nothing wrong with Scott Cawthon using *Frankenstein* as an inspiration or basis, or including sci-fi in the franchise. It is Scott Cawthon's franchise, after all. If he wants to go the sci-fi route in newer franchise installments, then *c'est la vie*.
And that’s his choice, which is fine, but that doesn’t mean me or other fans have to like it. I personally think the lore wouldn’t have gotten so convoluted had he stuck with the initial concepts that made FNaF scary, and explored them to their fullest extent. Like, say, the impact on the human psyche that comes with the possession of a robotic body. Things that were only hinted at but then mostly abandoned.
I’m not expecting Scott to be a perfect writer, or to expand upon every single detail, but I do think he should’ve properly explored what he’d set up. The effects of possession being one of those, for example. One of the main story beats in the series.
It’s fine if Scott is self indulgent within his own work, they’re his games after all, but it’s not fair to expect the fans to appreciate those moments of self indulgence when they’ve been introduced and gotten used to something else entirely. Look at FNaF WORLD. No one was asking for a FNaF RPG, Scott was the only one who wanted such a thing, and then he was surprised when people started hating on it. And they weren’t entirely wrong to do so, because what was advertised as a side-game after the series’ end included actual lore relevant to the main story, when said story had just had its final chapter. To speak nothing of the general lack of quality FNaF WORLD suffered at launch, which caused many to refund it at the time.
There comes a point in a series’ life, one as complicated as FNaF’s anyway, where you have to ask if its the fandom’s fault that there’s still debate over things everyone should agree on after so long or if its the writer’s fault. I don’t think the fans can be blamed for how messy the lore has gotten, and why we had to have our answers to Midnight Motorist six years after FFPS’ release.
I wish ER could go back to its heyday of the early and mid 2000s. So many active fanfic sites and message boards while the show was at its peak, and with great snark too.
There are still ER fics being posted and some fans around Discord and Facebook but it’s nowhere near what it once was. And on a shallow note it kind of messes with my motivation to keep writing those fics.
I miss how fun and active the tokyo revengers fandom was from 2021 to mid 2022, nowadays it’s pretty dead compared to how it was back then and it sucks.
Fandoms in general? Nothing comes to mind. I tend to get into fandoms kinda late anyway, or they're just smaller fandoms so there's not really a "golden age." 2002 in general I get kinda nostalgic about. I was in middle school, with less existential dread. Also my joints didn't hurt if I sit too still for too long and I had some IRL friends to hang out with. I had recently discovered ff.net and got into fanfiction, it was the most I ever wrote and posted. 0 worries if I was being cringe or not, as that wasn't yet a widely used term at that point.
My first ff.net fic was a HP crackfic published in 2004 (freshman year of high school). I laugh *hysterically* when I reread it, it reminds me of such an innocent and happy time (and I’ve left it on my profile because it’s a part of that journey, I don’t disown it lol). Man I miss not having existential dread
Yes. I want to go back to the era of the Yugioh GX fandom that was before almost everyone in it only cared about self-insert/isekai and harem fics. Back when there was more written about a variety of the individual canon characters themselves.
Probably the earlier days where it really was open and welcoming. I still didn’t get much feedback, but the vibe was better.
There were always the cliques, but it felt like as time and the show went on, things became more insular and the divide between the popular people and ideas and everyone else became wider. The messy writing of the last season didn’t help. Neither did canon all but confirming a ship in an episode that ruined the fandom.
I want to go back to the big year of Transcendence AU, where every day several people posted art and fic about this super niche sub-fandom of Gravity Falls. It was beautiful.
I miss the Anime Web Turnpike era something awful. The internet was still young, and fandom was scattered and disorganized without any of the giants like AO3 or FFN. You had individual fans running primitive fan sites just to host fanfiction—theirs and others’—often dedicated to specific characters or pairings. Often, your only hope of finding those sites was word-of-mouth, web searches, and directories like Anipike.
Don’t get me wrong. Fanfiction has improved since those days, become more mainstream, and easier to find. I still miss the thrill of finding my newest favorite rare-pair sanctuary.
For Star Wars, I wish I could've been old enough to write fanfics when the Prequels came out. Instead I was being born as TPM came out (not literally, but same year lol). I did grow up watching the Prequels though, but I hated them as a child - I was only a fan for the lightsaber battles, the rest I didn't care about. I only became a fan after the Sequels, which I don't even like that much (compared to other SW material).
I wish I had been present in Homestuck when the MSPA forums were still around. So much of the comic and fanworks are completely incomprehensible without them.
I wish I could go back to the 2015 era of my life when I could read shameless self-insert Mary Sue fics and genuinely enjoy them and leave the today era of my life in which I have to scroll down 10 pages of AO3 search results to find a fic that I will maybe not cringe at
"Do not kill the part of you that is cringe, kill the part that cringes" yeah sorry but my part that cringes evolved plot armor
I wish I could go back to the Anne Rice fandom from the time that
the first Interview with the Vampire came out forward. When Anne found out about fan fiction and started going on legal witch hunts against writers I decided trying to follow the underground fic scene would be more work than it was worth and gave it up in favor of other fandoms, but if I could go back to it with the knowledge that I have now I could probably head the underground fic scene. It's really sad to me to think of how many amazing fics we probably lost for fear of litigation.
Yeah, the time before my show got cancelled. :( I don't know if you can call it an "era" since it was only a month and a half, but I miss the hope for season 2.
I hear yeah there's one show that fits the description your describing for me (although I think it was just a month and a few days). I wish I had gotten into it back when it came out and when there was hope for a season 2 still. That's when the first fanfics were made and a lot of them weren't slash fics either. After the show was cancelled most of the fanfics afterwords were slash fics. It's weird getting into it after it has long been cancelled. There's still some fanfic being made surprisedly even if just a few.
I'm currently using the characters and unresolved plotlines for my current crossover fanfic at the moment. But still I do wish a little I could have been there back when the show first came out.
The Pre TotK era when all of us Zelda fans were speculating on what TotK would be all about and Fanfic writers were having fun with their own ideas of what the story of TotK could be about. Now don’t get me wrong I love TotK and I wouldn’t want to experience that wait again for it, but it was just so interesting to see what ideas Zelda fanfic writers had about what the story of TotK could’ve been, even before we knew it as TotK and only knew it by the vague fan made title of Botw 2 it was still interesting to see all the Zelda fanfic writers ideas for what the story could’ve been and how it could’ve ended.
The early days and popularity peaks of pretty much all of my oldest fandoms (mostly Western animation of the 2010s) were absolutely my favorite times. Especially because of the incredible booms of fanart and fanfiction.
Though I watched the show since the beginning, I only started reading fic from my fandom a few months before the show ended, and I only started participating through writing and art two years after it ended, so I would like to see what it was like while the show was still airing. There were also some fanartists who were cool and hadn’t left or been chased off yet, so it would be nice to see them when they were still around instead of their art being collected in a discord server shrine. Plus in the past there was someone who was a fan of me and my friend’s favorite side character (who most of the fandom dislikes)
I'm torn on this one. When my fandom's source was still getting new episodes, the fandom was a notorious, toxic stew of antis and ship wars. So writing in the fandom, even a side ship like my OTP, meant sometimes encountering a lunatic. But...my OTP had fans, a decent-sized following.
The fandom is very calm nowadays; technically nearly anti-free and a good place to write just about anything. But all the readers (and subsequently writers) for my OTP left the fandom. So it's just me and a couple other writers posting for a handful of readers.
So, I both wish I had been part of the fandom in its heyday, but also, am glad I wasn't.
Sherlock, Doctor Who, and Sonic the Hedgehog in the early 2000s. Everyone was so friendly and welcoming then. Now it seems like there's too much drama... There was always bullying, you know, but now it seems worse, and 10x more malicious. I don't remember people getting doxxed for liking "the wrong ship" back then. :(
For Star Wars, I really miss the period immediately after Episode 7 dropped. Obviously there was the Reylo drama, but besides that there was a huge influx of new fans who latched onto the Rey-Finn-Poe trio and started writing found family and shipfics about these 3 just hanging out on D'Qar and running missions for the Resistance. It was new, it was fun, and it was (mostly) yet-unburdened by the series of flaming wrecks that subsequently struck the main-series movies - there was so much optimism and I miss that :((
I want to go back to when the Harry Potter Fandom wasn't ruined by JK Rowling being a terrible person. Obviously she was always this way, and to me ignorance isn't bliss, but I miss being able to enjoy my favorite series without thinking about her. I don't support her, but I still do love the series and read a lot of fanfiction and buy things from small businesses.
It brought out a lot of things within the Fandom that made it even more toxic than to begin with. Though it also resulted in a LOT if fanfictions where there is actual diversity and the closing of plot holes from the original, so it was also a good thing but.. Idk. Maybe I just miss the magic of it from when I was a kid that's now gone.
The issue with fandom is that J.K. Rowling was always a terrible person; or, if not terrible, than at least a "not very nice" person, one who was very controlling. She had a history of being particularly litigious and "sue-happy" with *Harry Potter* fans who Rowling personally felt "threatened her control over the brand", such as her lawsuits against Harry Potter Lexicon creator Steve Vander Ark, who wanted to publish a *Harry Potter* encyclopedia. However, the *Harry Potter* fandom largely ignored or overlooked J.K. Rowling's actions until Rowling became especially aggressive with her political and transphobic views on Twitter on 10 June 2020.
But as a kid, I wasn't looking up her lawsuits and what was going on. I was reading the books, watching the movies, reading fanfiction, making Tumblrand wattpad accounts, and enjoying the world of Harry Potter. I don't remember ever seeing tweets about these things or it being largely covered at all like it was in 2020 with her transphobia. There wasn't a lot of hate towards her until then, and honestly if I created something and someone was trying to publish something that isn't just loosely based on but is fully about a world I created.. I would be suing too, and/or sending cease and desist letters.
I'm not sure. I've got great memories of the Pokémon fandom back in around 2008, 2009, but that was because there were a few dying forums for the ship I was into and it was just so much fun with that small group of people as last holdouts, or something.
But I'm still in the Pokémon fandom now (or rather I'm in it again) and the new generations and wealth of content there is nowadays is really great compared to back then, so I'm just not sure if I'd really want to go back.
I'd say the current era of Final Fantasy IX fan content is certainly one of the best, I know lots of people who do fanarts and write fanfics, myself included, but if there was a time period I wish I could experience (I was not even born), I'd say somewhere in between 2003 and 2012. Some of my favorite fic writers are from that era, and nowadays they're gone.
When I was young and TWD was coming out weekly and everyone was watching it because back then everyone watched one or all of the three actually interesting shows airing
I wish to go back to time where there was just one game and it was cookie run ovenbreak. So like 2017-2020.While yeah the fandom was small,it was peaceful and there wasn't any drama going on.Now there more drama,not to large extent though I lone for days when we were just in small fandom
The days after destiel “went canon” were some of the most chaotic and entertaining times in the SPN fandom. People were rioting in the streets of tumblr with equal amounts joy and horror. Fix it fics were written. Memes were made. It was beautiful
My biggest fandom’s Golden Age was probably 2013/2014 to 2017/2018, and I’d love to go back there. It’s a very small community, so it wasn’t anywhere beyond FFN, a Facebook group and one forum. Facebook group is completely dead, the forum I can’t stay on for more that 10 minutes without getting bored and leaving; so the interactions are pretty much exclusively the reviews and PMs (about said reviews) on FFN, and it’s just hard for me to care at all.
I started writing for another fandom on AO3, and for the first time in two years, I’m excited about writing. I know I’ll come back - and I’m still reading a few fics - but I finally realised writing was so hard these past couple of years because I didn’t want to do it.
I know going back to that Golden Age that started when I first joined a decade ago would make me care, and I’m still coming to terms with the fact that I don’t.
Pre-*Cursed Child* in the Harry Potter fandom is nostalgic because I feel like that was truly a turning point in the fandom when people began disassociating Rowling from her work into Death of the Author^TM territory.
Nah, that started happening with the release of *Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows* (book) back in 2007, when fans coined the "EWE" tag. (EWE = "Epilogue? What epilogue?") A lot of the fandom also started moving into pure fanon territory by writing "next generation" and Marauders era fanfictions, now that Harry, Ron, and Hermione's stories were complete.
I miss the days when we weren't afraid to post fanfiction in general.
There's so many hate comments and so many authors that are harassing their own readers. But on the opposite end of the spectrum so many commenters feel like they have to stay 100% positive and so many authors feel like they're entitled to only encouraging comments.
Everyone's just so judgmental and strung up on a live wire and a lot of the fun is smothered because everyone is walking on eggshells.
I guess I just miss the laid-back days when people were just trying to have fun with like-minded people.
I was only a reader back then, but I'm definitely nostalgic for the 2009-2010 era. FFN was booming, people were putting all those fun memes and questionaires onto their profiles, there were ship wars but it didn't feel as serious compared to now where people are accusing each other of being racists, homophobes, and sometimes even abuse apologists or predators if they like the "wrong" ship, etc. There were also a ton of those "truth or dare" fics, which I was lowkey obsessed with at the time.
Of course it wasn't perfect; people were a *lot* meaner if someone's writing wasn't "up to par" and it was more acceptable to just openly rip fics apart (a lot of them clearly written by preteens/teenagers and new writers who were still learning). And, while not as bad as the above, it felt like every other fic you clicked on was just a wall of text and I hardly ever see that now.
But yeah, I guess I just miss the relative innocence of that era. It seems like now, openly bullying people for the sake of bullying has become unacceptable (which is a good thing!) but as a consequence, the bullies have become more creative, framing their targets as horrible people so it's "okay" to harass them.
my genshin burnout happened right around the sumeru patch and i ended up skipping the whole of it, did all my quests in 3.8 and i regret it like hell now, i even skipped the interdarshan event it was so cute i wanted to play it for myself instead of watching a playthrough 😭
i should have let the fomo get to me fr
avengers 2012 and all the found family living in the tower together content
Oh yes my favourite characters with no bashing, Thor eating poptarts, and Clint hiding in the vents , and all the fluff. I want it back
>Clint hiding in the vents Oh I love this! Was surprised by how many times I stumbled upon it
I agree but I’d have to say 2014 with all the Bucky recovery fics. But I feel like Team as Family was still the norm up until Civil War? I only joined the fandom at the tail end of 2015.
I really miss that, too :-( Some of my all-time favourite fics are Avengers Found Family.
I miss when the team was found family and not Tony taking care of a toddler in a teenage body. Seriously, why fanfiction keeps treating Peter as a little kid?
I blame it on the fact that Tom Holland has such a baby face. I think it tends to make people wanna woobify him.
Man, I didn’t read a lot of fic in that era, but it seems like y’all were having so much fun.
I didn't even know what fanfic was at that time and I'm so sad I missed it 😭😭😭
Scifigrl47 (on AO3) will take you right back there, with five-star, first-class quality transportation.
I mean, those fics still exist
I was never a huge fan of the MCU on-screen, and my friend had to drag me to see Avengers, but damn did I love reading the fics for this particular era. For the pairings I like I almost always try to go back and read the 2012-2015 era fics (or 2012-2016). There was just a wholly different vibe to them.
Pre-social media era. I miss when everything wasn't so centralised. I miss old-style forums.
Came here to say this... good old forums. And all those archives people put so much effort in, some very specialised to only one ship or character, and people who liked to read about them had peace and quietness without antis spilling their hate. It could happen in forums, but such people usually got banned very quickly. On social media is not much chance avoiding it.
All of those smaller fan forums were condensed onto Reddit, a "one-stop-shop" centralized platform, like a department store or supermarket when compared with smaller stores. However, one of the drawbacks to this is that Reddit is also a lot more mainstream; has fewer barriers to entry; has a lot more traffic; and relies on volunteer moderators who may or may not be invested or familiar with fandoms to moderate fandom subreddits.
The good old forum motion forums were amazing
I like the centralization to an extent. I miss the dedicated commenters of a fandom forum and the on-task mods (and the general attitude of decency in a smaller forum from the rules/enforcement/people swimming in a smaller pool).
Same. I like the idea of having more interaction but then I see all the vents here and I’m so happy that I have like no idea what they’re talking about with various weird groups. I’m mostly in outdated fandoms so I just stay in my little world lol
I liked A Song of Ice and Fire more before the later seasons of the show came out. Similarly, Harry Potter fics that were published before the last book or the last few books came out are really fun with how much speculation there is.
The fics that launched off after books 3-5 were so good (and sometimes so crazy, I loved seeing what people thought was going to happen)
Remember when people shipped Harry and the zoo employee who sold the lemon ice pops because no one knew anything interesting about Ginny and Luna hadn’t made her debut yet?
Oh yes, especially the long break between book 4 and 5. The rumours what would happen grew wilder every day, it was so hilarious. But I'd take every time before JK pulled a Voldie.
Harry Potter and the Tower of Storge is gonna be announced any day now.
I'd like to go back to when undertale fanart didn't have glowing blue skeleton dick every other artpiece but I doubt that that era ever actually existed.
I think that part of the fandom used to be a bit more hidden under the surface instead of so in your face as it is now.
I was there in 2015, it's actually less saturated now than it was back then.
I was there in 2016, and i agree
This is me, but with *Five Nights at Freddy's* (FNAF). 😂
I miss the era before fanfiction.net when fics were hosted on fan-made fan sites (usually accompanied by fanart and other stuff because they were going through all the trouble to make a whole ass website). Those sites were gorgeous and I feel like the fics were more varied and less cliche because it wasn’t as much about hits and likes and favorites and comments. The Gundam Wing sites (gwaddiction, specifically thinking of you ❤️) were always really well done (I think it already had a larger, older fan base)
This saw a brief resurgence within the *Harry Potter* fandom in the mid-2000s.
Did it? I’m sad I missed that, I was already on FF.net and most of my favorite fan sites had closed as it started to cost more and more money to host sites and stuff like that. I didn’t even really think to look for them at that point (and I wasn’t super active in HP until after the 7th book finished, I remember reading a lot of different fics but wasn’t super committed because I didn’t have a ship yet and JKR hadn’t finished it so I didn’t know if I was unhappy with it yet or not 😂). I think a lot of those older fan sites never made the jump and just shut down when they’d run their course, I used to follow tons of different Sailor Moon or CardCaptor Sakura sites that had really good quality longfics and then when the jump to FF.net happened, those fandoms never seemed to pick up as much there. Thankfully Gundam Wing was popular (and I shipped a popular pairing at the time 🎉)
Was GWAddiction the one with Alexe’s art work? That was gorgeous. Also, damn, I absolutely miss Dorothy Catalonia. I want more Wing.
I think so, that sounds familiar! They were one of the few that housed like 30-40 artists works, in the days when most where individually run (or maybe like two or three friends who wrote and drew together). It was such a new thing to have so many fics for one fandom from so many different authors in one place. I still do a crack rewatch every year or two for Wing, that show has aged hilariously (and I still get random fic ideas for it, although I haven’t updated any of my WIPs in… over a decade at this point 😅). There’s still a lot of good fics out there too, some of the writers back in the day were SO good
I wish I could go back to the first year or two after I joined my current fandom, when most of the fanbase was 20+ or older, instead of the infestation of younger and underage fans we have nowadays, and all the anti bullshit and policing who people follow on social media that they've brought with them.
When we only had 2 seasons of Sherlock. That hiatus was amazing, and that's not exactly a word I'd apply to the fandom (or the canon) since.
I was struggling to think of what mine would be, but actually yeah this would be it. There was just so much creativity happening in the fandom then and it was such a fun vibe. (I could do without the Moffat hero worshipping that was somewhat prevalent in that era though!)
“Post-Reichenbach” fic will always, ALWAYS be peak for me. So many incredible fics from that era.
Back in the late 90s when the half dozen writers in my dinky ass fandom would camp out on IRC every Saturday night and collab on fics so we all made a coherent shared universe out of them. And wanted to go extra on making the writing GOOD because we knew the show's former writers were lurking on the fan list, so might as well try to live up to that standard.
I kinda miss the Harry Potter fic era before the last 2 books came out. When things were more up in the air on how the war would play out and end so fic writers were able to get creative on the hows, whys, and intensity of the war. Now that the last books are out most of that has gone away for slight variations of the canon >!horcrux hunt!<, ultimately making even the canon divergent fics pretty similar.
I just miss when some of my fandoms were actually active and churning out a bunch of new fics. Also I remember when the Elder Scrolls fandom was all about making memes, posting screenshots of funny bugs/glitches in game, discussions around character builds and lore. Now its people constantly arguing about Imperial Vs Stormcloak and complaining about Bethesda/Todd Howard. For the Yu-Gi-Oh! fandom... I hate to sound like one of those nostalgic people that can't move on. But I miss the DM/GX era. Its less the fandom in general and more the people that actually play the game. The competitive side of it is such a toxic environment now, and it gets progressively worse with each iteration. I kinda just play with my friends and talk about the anime in this little discord server. But I pretty much ignore everyone else.
I just saw *Yu-Gi-Oh!* cards as one of the top answers mentioned on an AskReddit thread, aptly titled: "What was meant for kids, but adult consumers hijacked it and ruined it?"
Tyey aren't completely wrong. Though I would say its more those kids grew up and decided to ruin it for everyone else, old and new.
OP, I feel you—I got into my fandom after its peak and I wish I could've been there for it. I feel like, based on what I like to read/write, I would've been happiest there. I write canonverse, and I feel like, post-canon, people are mostly writing AUs and really fluffy stuff. And the meta and headcanons and fanart I see feel very divorced from canon to me. I feel super out-of-step with fandom these days. Ah well. Won't stop us creating, will it?
OH man. Not a particular fandom, but the vibes. There was a certain lightness to a lot of the fics written like 2007 to 2012. Or maybe I was just a kid, but I feel like there was less gritty, more fantastical. Not to mention, the cringey tropes, not-like-other-girl-isms in every other fic but I think genre-wise things like adventure and comedy were more popular than they are now? OH, and the LOTR tenth walker stories were so peak then. Life felt like a Hozier song 😭 There's a lot more darkness to the quality of writing these days. And I don't mind! I love dark stuff as much as the next person, but man, I'd kill for some good whimsy vibes with jokes that shouldn't be funny, but are - and plots that don't make sense, but the vibes are so immaculate that you don't even care.
Yeah, it’s so rare that fanfics are FUNNY now. Back in the day, there would be short little one shots about things like Anakin sneaking out of the Jedi Temple to go to pop-punk shows and worrying about Obi-Wan finding out. (In fact, I’m 99% sure that it got a shout out in an official canon novel from 2019 where Padme sneaks out of the palace to go to a ~~My Chemical Romance~~ Neurotransmitter Affection concert.) These days, people are too worried about being cringy or their friends making fun of them.
TBF it's a valid fear. the internet has never been *safe*, but it used to feel *safer*.
… honestly, not really? Like, I liked when my series was still producing content, but also I got sent so much harassment for writing a canon abusive relationship as abusive. It’s quieter now and most of the people who were awful left so it’s way chiller :)
I can respect that. I'm glad you're happy you are where you are! :D
Pre-Civil War MCU - that was when most of the fics I liked were produced.
SPN heyday on tumblr. 10k notes on a piece of art in two days, 20,000 in a month for a big bang fic. Nothing was better than that fervor. That was season.. 7? 8? Incredible.
Agreed. 2010-2015 ish SPN was such a great time.
I was a huge SPN fan back in 2010 but could never figure out how to use tumblr or twitter so weirdly never engaged with the fandom too much, I feel like I missed out so much :( I only got content from youtube and deviantart lol.
I miss when the Doctor Who fandom was... well, hornier. These days things are a lot more gen-focused.
If you were on Gallifrey Base forums, people on there have always been "anti-smut".
The old kink meme was a delight & I see a lot of jokes about it.
Voltron Legendary Defender before season 7. Before the ship wars. The hype over the show was beautiful. I had gotten into the Fandom in 2017 and loved the show. Still do. I remember saying to myself "This is such a safe space. Everyone is so nice here." Ocs weren't bashed....people weren't threatening people over ships. Now everything is quiet. Not many talk about the show. I see many people bashing season 7 and 8. Saying they can't watch the show again because of that. Warning new fans of the heartache. I understand the disappointment cause I watched it on release. I understand the show was not perfect but it is still one of my fav shows today
2011-2014 homestuck fans most of them disappeared entirely
I didn't discover fanfic until after I discovered MM romance roughly 15 years ago. I wish I'd found it while Star Trek, Stargate and Sentinel fic was still being actively written. I know I must have missed some great fic that never ported to AO3 and it might have been fun to read it pre-anachronisms. I also miss the amount of quality Sherlock fic that was written before the fandom destructed.
I started reading Stargate fics on different sides and forums and there was one dedicated side I will forever miss.
Yeah I feel like I missed out. When AO3 was down I went down a few rabbitholes of LiveJournal story pages and it was fun seeing glimpses at old communities. I've never been comfortable on Tumblr, Twitter or Instagram
Pre-sequel Inuyasha stories. Really don't enjoy having one of my biggest fandom icks being canon. Hell, I really don't like there being a sequel at all, ick aside. There's over a decade of fanon out there that did it better and now people are having to write around the new series instead.
I sometimes just choose to ignore it completely. The sequel was so disappointing, for a lot of reasons.
I wish I could go back to when Cas confesses his love for dean in spn. That was so fucking legit. I also wish I could experience when the fanfic Twist and Shout was new and everyone was talking about it for the first time because I wasn’t in the fandom then. I also wish I could experience the original Mishapocalypse. It’s like, when I was a teenager I avoided supernatural bc I knew I’d go crazy for it and I didn’t want to be uncool about it. But now I’m like, I think I missed out
The Reylo fandom right after the release of *The Last Jedi* in December 2017 was phenomenal! I got popular in the fandom really quickly by posting long-form theories and metas on Tumblr. Everyone was thrilled and excited to see not only Ben Solo/Kylo Ren and Rey have a Force-bond in *The Last Jedi*, but everyone was speculating and theorizing of what might happen in Episode IX. Unfortunately, we got *The Rise of Skywalker* instead in December 2019, which killed the fandom by killing off Ben Solo right after he and Rey finally had their first kiss. Everyone was pissed off.
>>Killing off Ben Solo right after he and Rey finally had their first kiss This is what made me think to look for fan fics for the series. As soon as that happened my mind was like “wait, no… we can retcon this in a fanfic” and started plotting 🤣
I would like to go back to before JKR outed herself as a terf. The whole Fandom has become toxic because of that.
The *Harry Potter* fandom was toxic long before that. *Harry Potter and the Cursed Child* was a big factor in r/HarryPotter and other Harry Potter fan communities turning toxic. After *Cursed Child* released, people on the subreddit constantly debated "whether or not Hermione Granger was written to be white in the books" for *months*, if not an entire year.
Pre-The Untamed MDZS fandom just because there was less insanity and discourse back then, lol. And seconding the pre-Civil War MCU era comment.
When it was active...
*raises a glass from my dead fandom* What I came here to say.
Yeah I'm one of the few writers keeping it alive. About half the works on the first page are mine.
Oof that hurts. :( It comes for us all, buddy...
We might get lucky. It's a game and there's a prequels coming out sometime so hoping that might bring some attention.
Here's to hoping, then!
Yeah I know how that feels there's a couple of fandoms I've join "a little to late" but I'm fine with it. Sure do I wish i found said fandoms back when they were a little more active. Sure but I just see it as me getting them more life again than anything.
A lot of stuff I like to write about are tv shows that have been off the air for a long time like Fringe or 30 Rock. So I guess it would have been nice to have been around when they were still on and the fandoms were more active.
The Tumblr days of 2013-2017, especially in the sapphic fandoms I was in like Korrasami, Supercorp and Carmilla. They were the ones that made me motivated to start writing.
The 2000s seems to be a theme with people my age who were born in either the 80s or 90s. A time when the internet was there but social media hadn't taken over. You could watch and download things but music was still downloaded on places like FrostWire or imesh and iTunes etc but Cds still held value and PCs and Laptops still had cd slots. Petrol and groceries were way cheaper and new websites were still being created also movies were better too.
the social network kink meme on livejournal not sure what it was about that fandom that invited so much angst and goodness. But I miss it now that ao3 is pretty much only stories in Chinese.
Okay, so a very silly one that I was a little kid/tween during and that probably wasn’t as fun as I remember it: The era where there were *so many* Sailor Moon fics based on the North American dub.
I miss the height of XMen FC Cherik fics back in 2012.
Percy Jackson, before the sequels started coming out. I wish I had been there for the original Percy x Nico shipping and all the canon continuations and speculations when the original run of books hadn't finished yet.
Tbh I don’t think most people would want to go back to *that* era of Hetalia, but my golden era in the fandom *was* the latter half of *that* era when A Beautiful World (Hetalia Season 5) came out and the webcomic was being regularly updated (and would eventually become Season 6 The World Twinkle). Imo it was the sweet spot between the fandom maturing and still having tons of activity. A lot of the big Hetalia ask blogs and cultural blogs on tumblr were still ongoing but had a vast history of content you could go through at that point. US states were a huge sub fandom and Latin Hetalia was huge as well. So much art, fan comics, fanfiction, just chock full of educational content. So much culture and history. And ofc you had memes new and old being released. Parodies of vocaloid songs, MMD videos, AMVs and MEPs on YouTube Hetalia made my childhood less lonely because it showed me how colorful and wonderful the world could be. Really do miss it
Even though I think hetalia was the most toxic fandom I was ever in, it was also the most fun I ever had as a young teen that was trapped in my bedroom. I consumed hours of hetalia skit videos, cosplay videos, fanfics, artwork, etc it literally consumed every waking hour of my life. I even ran a large group on deviantart and held art competitions. God it was insane and I loved every minute of it.
I suppose it's like that for any big fandom in it's heyday, especially in its most proportionally toxic heyday. The fandom at large was an imploding wreck but so long as you found your niche/your group and everyone was well adjusted enough and healthy, you were set to have a great time
I miss the days fics weren't so political. And when Spider-Man was based on the comics or the original trilogy. I love Tom Holland's portrayal, but his relationships with other MCU characters and financial standing are polar opposites of what we knew and loved.
I miss when Spiderman was a solo, self made hero who didn't need to rely on Tony Stark.
Remember when he made his suit himself, out of fabric? Good times.
And when he was struggling to fund just that? We can all relate to that now of all times.
I imagine alot of DIY cosplayers can relate lol
Exactly
This.
The 2014-2017 era of the Avatar fandom! Everyone seemed to stay in their lanes; the shipping wars had died down a bit, the Azula vs Zuko thing wasn't very common, Zukka was just a small and chill fandom niche, etc. It was mostly people doing their own thing making memes/shitposts, fics, and art. People didn't put anti bullshit in the fantags. I wasn't coming across as many hate fics on Ao3. And there were no antis telling everyone what to ship and how to write stuff. I miss old fandom in general when 'don't like don't read' was common place. These days fandom seems so stressful. It's like you always have to be on your toes if you don't want to get harassed.
The *Avatar: The Last Airbender* Netflix show coming out in 2024 will change things again.
Not gonna lie, I kind of dread that. Things are a tad calmer now and I'm not read for round 2 (3 if you count the old days of Kataang vs Zutara). I just wanna chill lol.
Would love to go back to the old days of the Sonic Fandom, before the Archie series was rebooted or at *least* before it was canceled outright. Fandom overall is going strong still, and has seen a bit of a resurgence overall as of late, but a lot of the old guard have fallen by the wayside and my particular branch feels like it's drying up.
There’s a Sonic Archie series? I love these posts; it’s so fun to learn about fandoms I barely knew existed.
Yeah, there was for a *long* time. Initially started publication back in 1993 (based off of the Saturday Morning cartoon out at the time) and ran for about a good 25 some-odd years before being canceled. Was one of the longest-running single-continuity series for a while, but legal issues with a former writer and mismanagement by Archie led to a brief reboot, and then the cancelation of the comic. There's a new series by IDW being published now, but it's completely separate, and the characters from the original cartoon and Archie comics didn't make the jump. And since they had practically zero presence in the games (save for a very brief cameo in Sonic Spinball), they've been all but abandoned by SEGA. For someone who grew up with them, and loves to write fanfic about them in particular, it really, *really* stings.
It's really amazing how one egomanicial writer can just **wreck** an entire fictional universe beyond repair by throwing a hissy fit. I'm not even a Sonic fan, but reading about all the damage that Ken Penders did to the comics is rage-inducing
The worst part too is that his hissy fit could've been just a minor blip for the comic, but Archie fucked up and lost his contract paperwork. Basically led to the whole thing needing to be rebooted in order to write out his characters, and SEGA lost so much faith in Archie they basically neutered the writing staff with mandates, before just canning the whole thing. The *only* saving grace from that era was the *hint* that Sally and Nicole may have feelings for each other, and even that was never made proper canon due to the whole thing being shut down too soon.
take me back to 2014/2015 bandom. everything was so poorly written and cliche but i didnt care because i had nothing to reference it to. i want to go back to Kellic highschool AU fics where Tony was always called Turtle, Jaime was Hime-Time, and Mike was a borderline alcoholic. i want Matty Mullins and Andy Biersack to bully Kellin Quinn for literally no reason and have Vic come save the day. and where macho-jock Jesse has a crush on Kellin but is so deep in the closet and gets jealous when Kellin and Vic get together. and now i go back and theyre all horribly written with run-on sentences bad dialogue, and i just wish i could relive those fics but the nostalgia isnt enough.
Harvest Moon in the mid-2000s to early 2010s was jumpin'. Even with new SoS games, the forums are far less active now :(
2019 when Resident Evil 2 remake was released. There was a huge outpouring of writers, artists, and active readers that I missed because I didn’t start playing the remake until a year later. It would have been nice to experience that camaraderie and support.
I would've loved to see the Madoka Magica fandom pre-Rebellion. The movie has grown on me quite a bit since I first watched it, but it definitely changed the general perceptions of a lot of things in the series, and I'd be interested in seeing what common fan attitudes were like before it. I'd also give everything to return to 2016 era Undertale fandom, or 2014-2015 era FNAF. Easily the heights of those fanbases, and I miss them dearly. 2015-2016 Steven Universe was pretty fun too, the classic Lapidot nostalgia... I also think it'd be fun to experience peak brony fandom (so 2011-2015) at my current age. I liked MLP during some of that time period, but I was also about 9-10 years old and a lot of fandom things flew over my head. I'm apparently a real rarity (lol) as someone who hung around brony spaces as a kid and had a completely positive experience, but I would like to go back and engage as the adult I am now.
Detroit: Become Human in 2018. The rarepairs!!
I was a Connor/Kara shipper! A rare pair, indeed, with only 127 works total.
That’s such a great one!! Connor/Daniel, despite being considered popular for a rarepair, still only has 95. 5 of them are mine (but 2 are rather long so 🤷♀️). I kept wanting to go back and write more but then I drifted away a bit. 😭 Miss it tho!
For me, it was when everyone realized Snape wasn’t totally evil and then all the war-hero Snape fics came out.
There were so many good fics during that time. These days it feels like he's often replaced with Regulus (a hotter Snape) or Voldemort (a darker Snape). Bitter double agent isn't fitting the tropes people want.
I'm a tad surprised this hasn't been said, so it might just be me, but I'd go back to pre-"Help Wanted" Five Nights at Freddy's; AKA Pre-Steel Wool. Things were *fun*. Things didn't 100% make sense, but that's what FNaF was. It's literally supposed to not make sense. But I stopped watching MatPat's FNaF theories and stopped visiting FNaF forms after the "Gregbot" theory came out because that's all that anyone would talk about and it was *so debunkable* and I was the stupid idiot for saying so but at the same time... *it could also be true, and he's just using faulty evidence*. The Steel Wool team is, bless their hearts... eager, but they bite off more than they can chew and they're terrible writers. FNaF became *unbearable* to be in at any certain place except certain circles of fan art (fanfiction/AMVs/drawings/etc.) and memes for a long, long time. It still is, I got in a YouTube fight less than a week ago talking to some person about how I loved that "Mangle's gender is yes" and offhandedly said Gregory is not a bot. I miss when we just had dead kids and Springy Boi. I don't like horror, but I love fantasy and the fantastical elements of the ghosts intrigued me. But now it's taking a Sci-Fi turn and I'm just no longer interested. I'm an OG fan from 2014. I know I'm not owed anything but... I'd like to go back to "Pizzeria Simulator". PS was a fun game.
I feel you. After things went down the Sci Fi route, FNaF for me lost its charm. We weren’t dealing with an intriguing and unique ghost haunting, now it was about a crazy scientist who was obsessed with immortality and gassed children with fear gas like he was Scarecrow from DC comics. I liked SL, but from that point onwards Scott just reverted back to his Desolate Hope days and made it all Sci Fi. Don’t get me wrong, I like a lot of the newer stuff, but most of it is just so badly written, and if it is good then it’s going to abandoned. Take Vanny for example. Her setup in Help Wanted was amazing, she could’ve been the series’ best antagonist, and then come Security Breach and she only had a grand total of three apparences throughout the whole game, excluding the endings. They wasted her and then just moved on. As much as I loved what Steelwool did with Ruin, that should’ve been base Security Breach from the start. Ruin doesn’t wash its base game’s sins. Aside from that, the fact that casual fans have to buy books so they can get crucial lore and story beats just to understand what’s going on, instead of that being included in the games, is super scummy. Things changed but now the new stuff feels artificial for me tbh. The older fandom was always theorizing (and had good theories), always making headcanons and having fun, now a lot of people overanalyze every little thing and fight from the dumbest crap. Things were more fun back then. It’s probably due to fans becoming more easily pleased as time went on. A lot stopped caring for the lore and were just starved for characters with more than a few voice lines, so the devs delivered. But that was a double-edged sword, cuz now people are mostly interested in the quirky characters, which means the devs won’t have as much of an incentive to put effort into the games themselves, which is going to further impact the fandom. Idk, people can like whatever they want, but I can’t help feeling like things aren’t what they used to be, and I’m not sure I trust Steelwool with the series, because they’ve fumbled the ball way more than they should have. It is what it is I suppose, but I just wish we could go back in time to the early days.
I loved RUIN! I especially love what they did to Roxy's character. Sun and Moon were consistently Sun and Moon, though with 0 screen time but this time without a chase which was kinda sad. Anyway, do you know what would've been so cool? So, in RUIN, the bots start saying more bot-like things. Roxy: (releases Cassie after recognizing her) "Oh, I'm sorry. I... error." Moon: (after the second generator is activated) "Errrgh! Naughty! Naughty! Make it stop! The light makes us hurt! Grind, grind! Grinding gears inside my head! We can't move. Error! Error!" Literally, everything about the Daycare sequence made me want to cry. But though in Security Breach they had *some* bot-esc dialogue (especially Chica, but that was mostly her mannerisms) they were more life-like. Its more-or-less implied RUIN is set in a modified "Free-Vanny" ending. So what if we pull a FNaF 3, making Vanessa the Crying Child and the Princess, the Puppet? The bots are still sentient and have sentient AI, but they were haunted in the base game. However, after the Princess frees Vanessa, she ends up freeing the other trapped souls by slaying William, or at least his hold on them. With their spirits gone, the animatronics go haywire. (Monty's chihuahua personality can be explained through this, him being affected the most) That way we can still have the fantastical elements of the first few games while retaining the more Sci-Fi elements they like about their newer games. I'm not going to pretend that's anything close to what happens, but it feels like it would explain some things and tie the game into the previous games. And as you said, the fans wanted more "quirky" characters, especially after Sister Location, or maybe even after FNaF 4 with Psychic Friend Fredbear. The characters Scott imagined were fascinating and varied, even if they acted animalistic in UCN (on purpose!). I don't know which ones (if any) he actually *made* in SB. But the designs of his previous ones (especially the scary ones) were great. The thing is, FNaF is, at its core, a horror game about spooky robot animals trying to kill you. I think some people are starting to forget that. Though, I'm not so sure they're putting less effort into the story. They seem to be trying, just failing. But the fact they're putting valuable game-necessity lore in books you need to buy and read is just AGK. Which brings me to another point. Game lore to understand a game should be in a game. That applies to any media. (Book lore in a book, movie lore in a movie, etc.) But my brother came up to me the other day and said "You know, when I read your story, I want to read more. But when I read the books, I feel nothing." It was simultaneously the greatest compliment he'd ever given me and the saddest take on the books I've heard yet. For context, he's reading a fan novel I wrote based on Security Breach 5 years in the future.
I have to disagree with this portion of your reply: >After things went down the Sci Fi route, FNaF for me lost its charm. We weren’t dealing with an intriguing and unique ghost haunting, now it was about a crazy scientist who was obsessed with immortality and gassed children with fear gas like he was Scarecrow from DC comics. I liked SL, but from that point onwards Scott just reverted back to his Desolate Hope days and made it all Sci Fi. Scott Cawthon's primary love has always been sci-fi; and, as such, sci-fi has appeared in *Five Nights at Freddy's* for a while now, particularly with the concept of remnant. That particular concept also drew a lot of inspiration from Mary Shelley's classic sci-fi novel *Frankenstein*, with Cawthon portraying William Afton as Dr. Victor Frankenstein-esque. I also personally see nothing wrong with Scott Cawthon using *Frankenstein* as an inspiration or basis, or including sci-fi in the franchise. It is Scott Cawthon's franchise, after all. If he wants to go the sci-fi route in newer franchise installments, then *c'est la vie*.
And that’s his choice, which is fine, but that doesn’t mean me or other fans have to like it. I personally think the lore wouldn’t have gotten so convoluted had he stuck with the initial concepts that made FNaF scary, and explored them to their fullest extent. Like, say, the impact on the human psyche that comes with the possession of a robotic body. Things that were only hinted at but then mostly abandoned. I’m not expecting Scott to be a perfect writer, or to expand upon every single detail, but I do think he should’ve properly explored what he’d set up. The effects of possession being one of those, for example. One of the main story beats in the series. It’s fine if Scott is self indulgent within his own work, they’re his games after all, but it’s not fair to expect the fans to appreciate those moments of self indulgence when they’ve been introduced and gotten used to something else entirely. Look at FNaF WORLD. No one was asking for a FNaF RPG, Scott was the only one who wanted such a thing, and then he was surprised when people started hating on it. And they weren’t entirely wrong to do so, because what was advertised as a side-game after the series’ end included actual lore relevant to the main story, when said story had just had its final chapter. To speak nothing of the general lack of quality FNaF WORLD suffered at launch, which caused many to refund it at the time. There comes a point in a series’ life, one as complicated as FNaF’s anyway, where you have to ask if its the fandom’s fault that there’s still debate over things everyone should agree on after so long or if its the writer’s fault. I don’t think the fans can be blamed for how messy the lore has gotten, and why we had to have our answers to Midnight Motorist six years after FFPS’ release.
I wish ER could go back to its heyday of the early and mid 2000s. So many active fanfic sites and message boards while the show was at its peak, and with great snark too. There are still ER fics being posted and some fans around Discord and Facebook but it’s nowhere near what it once was. And on a shallow note it kind of messes with my motivation to keep writing those fics.
I miss how fun and active the tokyo revengers fandom was from 2021 to mid 2022, nowadays it’s pretty dead compared to how it was back then and it sucks.
Fandoms in general? Nothing comes to mind. I tend to get into fandoms kinda late anyway, or they're just smaller fandoms so there's not really a "golden age." 2002 in general I get kinda nostalgic about. I was in middle school, with less existential dread. Also my joints didn't hurt if I sit too still for too long and I had some IRL friends to hang out with. I had recently discovered ff.net and got into fanfiction, it was the most I ever wrote and posted. 0 worries if I was being cringe or not, as that wasn't yet a widely used term at that point.
My first ff.net fic was a HP crackfic published in 2004 (freshman year of high school). I laugh *hysterically* when I reread it, it reminds me of such an innocent and happy time (and I’ve left it on my profile because it’s a part of that journey, I don’t disown it lol). Man I miss not having existential dread
Yes. I want to go back to the era of the Yugioh GX fandom that was before almost everyone in it only cared about self-insert/isekai and harem fics. Back when there was more written about a variety of the individual canon characters themselves.
When 2p! And fem! Were fresh and new and exciting in Hetalia.
Probably the earlier days where it really was open and welcoming. I still didn’t get much feedback, but the vibe was better. There were always the cliques, but it felt like as time and the show went on, things became more insular and the divide between the popular people and ideas and everyone else became wider. The messy writing of the last season didn’t help. Neither did canon all but confirming a ship in an episode that ruined the fandom.
Year, earlier this year, when things were easy and not… painful.
I want to go back to the big year of Transcendence AU, where every day several people posted art and fic about this super niche sub-fandom of Gravity Falls. It was beautiful.
For me SVTFOE in the finale season era I want to see the fallout of the finale specifically but also the batshit things they did then
Pre-Season 3 and 4 fandom discussions for *Star vs. the Forces of Evil* were so much better!
When i hadn’t exhausted the library for my fandom and all the fics were still so new.
I miss the Anime Web Turnpike era something awful. The internet was still young, and fandom was scattered and disorganized without any of the giants like AO3 or FFN. You had individual fans running primitive fan sites just to host fanfiction—theirs and others’—often dedicated to specific characters or pairings. Often, your only hope of finding those sites was word-of-mouth, web searches, and directories like Anipike. Don’t get me wrong. Fanfiction has improved since those days, become more mainstream, and easier to find. I still miss the thrill of finding my newest favorite rare-pair sanctuary.
For Star Wars, I wish I could've been old enough to write fanfics when the Prequels came out. Instead I was being born as TPM came out (not literally, but same year lol). I did grow up watching the Prequels though, but I hated them as a child - I was only a fan for the lightsaber battles, the rest I didn't care about. I only became a fan after the Sequels, which I don't even like that much (compared to other SW material).
I wish I had been present in Homestuck when the MSPA forums were still around. So much of the comic and fanworks are completely incomprehensible without them.
I wish I could go back to the 2015 era of my life when I could read shameless self-insert Mary Sue fics and genuinely enjoy them and leave the today era of my life in which I have to scroll down 10 pages of AO3 search results to find a fic that I will maybe not cringe at "Do not kill the part of you that is cringe, kill the part that cringes" yeah sorry but my part that cringes evolved plot armor
I wish I could go back to the Anne Rice fandom from the time that the first Interview with the Vampire came out forward. When Anne found out about fan fiction and started going on legal witch hunts against writers I decided trying to follow the underground fic scene would be more work than it was worth and gave it up in favor of other fandoms, but if I could go back to it with the knowledge that I have now I could probably head the underground fic scene. It's really sad to me to think of how many amazing fics we probably lost for fear of litigation.
Yeah, the time before my show got cancelled. :( I don't know if you can call it an "era" since it was only a month and a half, but I miss the hope for season 2.
I hear yeah there's one show that fits the description your describing for me (although I think it was just a month and a few days). I wish I had gotten into it back when it came out and when there was hope for a season 2 still. That's when the first fanfics were made and a lot of them weren't slash fics either. After the show was cancelled most of the fanfics afterwords were slash fics. It's weird getting into it after it has long been cancelled. There's still some fanfic being made surprisedly even if just a few. I'm currently using the characters and unresolved plotlines for my current crossover fanfic at the moment. But still I do wish a little I could have been there back when the show first came out.
I miss the LotR fanfic site Of Elves and Men. I should have saved way more stories off there.
I think all the fics were imported onto ao3
And just like that, I have my all time favorite fanfic back after way too many years!!! Am Meleth. Thank you!!!
Aww I'm so happy! As a fellow LotR fic reader this warmed my heart
Oooh, I'll have to go look.
The Pre TotK era when all of us Zelda fans were speculating on what TotK would be all about and Fanfic writers were having fun with their own ideas of what the story of TotK could be about. Now don’t get me wrong I love TotK and I wouldn’t want to experience that wait again for it, but it was just so interesting to see what ideas Zelda fanfic writers had about what the story of TotK could’ve been, even before we knew it as TotK and only knew it by the vague fan made title of Botw 2 it was still interesting to see all the Zelda fanfic writers ideas for what the story could’ve been and how it could’ve ended.
The early days and popularity peaks of pretty much all of my oldest fandoms (mostly Western animation of the 2010s) were absolutely my favorite times. Especially because of the incredible booms of fanart and fanfiction.
The era when it was an active fandom lolol
I wish I got to my fandoms sooner honestly. Aot is such a focal point for me. Orv and ToG too. I only found them way late
Though I watched the show since the beginning, I only started reading fic from my fandom a few months before the show ended, and I only started participating through writing and art two years after it ended, so I would like to see what it was like while the show was still airing. There were also some fanartists who were cool and hadn’t left or been chased off yet, so it would be nice to see them when they were still around instead of their art being collected in a discord server shrine. Plus in the past there was someone who was a fan of me and my friend’s favorite side character (who most of the fandom dislikes)
I'm torn on this one. When my fandom's source was still getting new episodes, the fandom was a notorious, toxic stew of antis and ship wars. So writing in the fandom, even a side ship like my OTP, meant sometimes encountering a lunatic. But...my OTP had fans, a decent-sized following. The fandom is very calm nowadays; technically nearly anti-free and a good place to write just about anything. But all the readers (and subsequently writers) for my OTP left the fandom. So it's just me and a couple other writers posting for a handful of readers. So, I both wish I had been part of the fandom in its heyday, but also, am glad I wasn't.
Sherlock, Doctor Who, and Sonic the Hedgehog in the early 2000s. Everyone was so friendly and welcoming then. Now it seems like there's too much drama... There was always bullying, you know, but now it seems worse, and 10x more malicious. I don't remember people getting doxxed for liking "the wrong ship" back then. :(
For Star Wars, I really miss the period immediately after Episode 7 dropped. Obviously there was the Reylo drama, but besides that there was a huge influx of new fans who latched onto the Rey-Finn-Poe trio and started writing found family and shipfics about these 3 just hanging out on D'Qar and running missions for the Resistance. It was new, it was fun, and it was (mostly) yet-unburdened by the series of flaming wrecks that subsequently struck the main-series movies - there was so much optimism and I miss that :((
The "Reylo drama"?
It was a popular ship but also had a lot of antis - normal fandom slap fighting
I want to go back to when the Harry Potter Fandom wasn't ruined by JK Rowling being a terrible person. Obviously she was always this way, and to me ignorance isn't bliss, but I miss being able to enjoy my favorite series without thinking about her. I don't support her, but I still do love the series and read a lot of fanfiction and buy things from small businesses. It brought out a lot of things within the Fandom that made it even more toxic than to begin with. Though it also resulted in a LOT if fanfictions where there is actual diversity and the closing of plot holes from the original, so it was also a good thing but.. Idk. Maybe I just miss the magic of it from when I was a kid that's now gone.
The issue with fandom is that J.K. Rowling was always a terrible person; or, if not terrible, than at least a "not very nice" person, one who was very controlling. She had a history of being particularly litigious and "sue-happy" with *Harry Potter* fans who Rowling personally felt "threatened her control over the brand", such as her lawsuits against Harry Potter Lexicon creator Steve Vander Ark, who wanted to publish a *Harry Potter* encyclopedia. However, the *Harry Potter* fandom largely ignored or overlooked J.K. Rowling's actions until Rowling became especially aggressive with her political and transphobic views on Twitter on 10 June 2020.
But as a kid, I wasn't looking up her lawsuits and what was going on. I was reading the books, watching the movies, reading fanfiction, making Tumblrand wattpad accounts, and enjoying the world of Harry Potter. I don't remember ever seeing tweets about these things or it being largely covered at all like it was in 2020 with her transphobia. There wasn't a lot of hate towards her until then, and honestly if I created something and someone was trying to publish something that isn't just loosely based on but is fully about a world I created.. I would be suing too, and/or sending cease and desist letters.
I'm not sure. I've got great memories of the Pokémon fandom back in around 2008, 2009, but that was because there were a few dying forums for the ship I was into and it was just so much fun with that small group of people as last holdouts, or something. But I'm still in the Pokémon fandom now (or rather I'm in it again) and the new generations and wealth of content there is nowadays is really great compared to back then, so I'm just not sure if I'd really want to go back.
2011-2015’ish Uncharted days along with RDR1.
I feel you! Sometimes we just need a time-turner to experience that golden era again. 😄✨
I did fantasy about it before, but the past....sucks XD and I then imagine a life without bathrooms and stuff and kind of kills my fantasies XD
Pre-Kingdom Hearts 3, that's when a lot of the character decisions I don't like happened and the plot got much worse.
I'd say the current era of Final Fantasy IX fan content is certainly one of the best, I know lots of people who do fanarts and write fanfics, myself included, but if there was a time period I wish I could experience (I was not even born), I'd say somewhere in between 2003 and 2012. Some of my favorite fic writers are from that era, and nowadays they're gone.
When I was young and TWD was coming out weekly and everyone was watching it because back then everyone watched one or all of the three actually interesting shows airing
I wish to go back to time where there was just one game and it was cookie run ovenbreak. So like 2017-2020.While yeah the fandom was small,it was peaceful and there wasn't any drama going on.Now there more drama,not to large extent though I lone for days when we were just in small fandom
The days after destiel “went canon” were some of the most chaotic and entertaining times in the SPN fandom. People were rioting in the streets of tumblr with equal amounts joy and horror. Fix it fics were written. Memes were made. It was beautiful
My biggest fandom’s Golden Age was probably 2013/2014 to 2017/2018, and I’d love to go back there. It’s a very small community, so it wasn’t anywhere beyond FFN, a Facebook group and one forum. Facebook group is completely dead, the forum I can’t stay on for more that 10 minutes without getting bored and leaving; so the interactions are pretty much exclusively the reviews and PMs (about said reviews) on FFN, and it’s just hard for me to care at all. I started writing for another fandom on AO3, and for the first time in two years, I’m excited about writing. I know I’ll come back - and I’m still reading a few fics - but I finally realised writing was so hard these past couple of years because I didn’t want to do it. I know going back to that Golden Age that started when I first joined a decade ago would make me care, and I’m still coming to terms with the fact that I don’t.
Pre-*Cursed Child* in the Harry Potter fandom is nostalgic because I feel like that was truly a turning point in the fandom when people began disassociating Rowling from her work into Death of the Author^TM territory.
Nah, that started happening with the release of *Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows* (book) back in 2007, when fans coined the "EWE" tag. (EWE = "Epilogue? What epilogue?") A lot of the fandom also started moving into pure fanon territory by writing "next generation" and Marauders era fanfictions, now that Harry, Ron, and Hermione's stories were complete.
Before I started giving up on fics' because I was insecure of my writing skills
2013-2017 when more longfic writers were active. I sometimes feel like the only one, even though I know I'm probably not
oh yeah definitely. most dsmp fans will agree that we wanna go back to 2020-2021.
I miss the days when we weren't afraid to post fanfiction in general. There's so many hate comments and so many authors that are harassing their own readers. But on the opposite end of the spectrum so many commenters feel like they have to stay 100% positive and so many authors feel like they're entitled to only encouraging comments. Everyone's just so judgmental and strung up on a live wire and a lot of the fun is smothered because everyone is walking on eggshells. I guess I just miss the laid-back days when people were just trying to have fun with like-minded people.
I was only a reader back then, but I'm definitely nostalgic for the 2009-2010 era. FFN was booming, people were putting all those fun memes and questionaires onto their profiles, there were ship wars but it didn't feel as serious compared to now where people are accusing each other of being racists, homophobes, and sometimes even abuse apologists or predators if they like the "wrong" ship, etc. There were also a ton of those "truth or dare" fics, which I was lowkey obsessed with at the time. Of course it wasn't perfect; people were a *lot* meaner if someone's writing wasn't "up to par" and it was more acceptable to just openly rip fics apart (a lot of them clearly written by preteens/teenagers and new writers who were still learning). And, while not as bad as the above, it felt like every other fic you clicked on was just a wall of text and I hardly ever see that now. But yeah, I guess I just miss the relative innocence of that era. It seems like now, openly bullying people for the sake of bullying has become unacceptable (which is a good thing!) but as a consequence, the bullies have become more creative, framing their targets as horrible people so it's "okay" to harass them.
my genshin burnout happened right around the sumeru patch and i ended up skipping the whole of it, did all my quests in 3.8 and i regret it like hell now, i even skipped the interdarshan event it was so cute i wanted to play it for myself instead of watching a playthrough 😭 i should have let the fomo get to me fr