I weirdly love that there are crotchety fandom elders around who say shit like “in my day, (insert fandom term) meant this specifically, but now you kids just use it to mean any old thing.”
It seriously gives fandom such a sense of heritage and family, like yes grandma, tell me more about how you had to write fic uphill both ways in the snow when you were my age.
When I joined fandom in 1993 most fanfic was posted to the usenet, which had a 72-characters-a-line limit. If you posted using certain clients, at 72 characters a short sequence of gibberish would occur before it broke to the next line, making for an “interesting” reading experience.
Imagine writing your fanfic and then going back through and making sure no single line was longer than 72 characters. Without Microsoft Word.
When I joined fandom in the early to mid-90s, very few of my friend-group had the internet at home, and could only access it in the (very Catholic) school library. We made fan comics in Chemistry class and traded them between periods. Illicit, racy, and frequently lesbian Sailor Moon and Xena fanfic was printed on actual paper, and traded like one would trade contraband. Mama Sage has some stories, younglings.
When I first started participating in fandom stuff, it was the very beginning of widespread Internet use at home. Very slow dial-up modems, AOL floppy disks, the works. I was part of several ancient Yahoo groups and owned three (THREE) geocities pages dedicated to Dragonlance. I was also emailed very racy fanart of Raistlin Majere, which fuelled my burgeoning gayness like whoa.
This was also the period in which I was introduced to anime that wasn’t on YTV. I was in love with Gravitation, but had never actually seen a damn episode of it because you could NOT easily download videos at this time. It would take many hours upon hours of eating up your entire bandwidth, and if the download was interrupted even once, it ruined the entire download and you had to start again. This on a dial-up modem which would boot you off the Internet if someone called the house. So I had a very nice friend in Toronto who MAILED ME CDs with episodes of Gravitation and Weiss Kreuz burned onto them. EACH CD HELD MAYBE 2 or 3 EPISODES. For years I treasured my album of 30 shitty quality anime cds. Bless.
This is true; I remember those spindles of shitty anime cds from our old apartment. I’m glad you finally had the courage to throw them out.
I still have a few binders of those shitty CDs. I still have my Gravitation, and the whole run of Inu Yasha. I keep meaning to BUY a box set of the shows, but there’s something nostalgic about loading up the crappy disc. I do occasionally rewatch them (though I wrote my undergrad thesis on IY so sometimes rewatching it gives me angry-professor-flashbacks)
In my day, there were no internet shops or create-run shops like Etsy and StoreEnvy where you could buy cosplay-accurate contact lenses, wigs, or accessories. You had to source them yourself from your local party store, raid the supplies when Halloween popups arrived at malls, or take your luck with eBay.
We poured over images of the characters we downloaded to floppy discs, printed using the school library printer, begged overseas fans to scan or send copies of Cosmode to us, and spent hours in Value Village searching for clothing that could be altered to resemble a character’s costume in FabricLand, pouring over patterns that could be altered. And Simplicity hadn’t cottoned on to the fact that we were using their patterns yet – there were some wizard and princess patterns, but not the wide variety of options there are now.
There were also much fewer tutorials on how to make/paint/style/create things. I remember Fimo, but I’d never heard of ModgePodge before, had no idea what to do with or where to acquire lightweight crafters foam, and had no idea what resin was and how to use it. There was no Facebook groups, so you had to find a Yahoo Cosplay Group that would let you join so you could ask for tips and tutorials and help.
Cosplay was, in some ways, just giving it a good try and showing off to everyone at the con that you Love This Thing – to wear your heart on your sleeve, literally. There were no TV competitions, and little of this weird new flamming-shaming if you didn’t look ENOUGH like the character or weren’t “hot enough” to be cosplaying, WTF that means. (Though I recall that horrible website that collected and displayed galleries of “ugly people in ugly cosplays” What an arse.)
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