Okay, I'm not even sure why I'm putting this out on the internet because it's embarassing af.
I'm not going to go into BIG detail because the evidence is still all over the internet.
When I was a kid I had a huge obsession with an anime. I'm not gonna say which one, but yeah, OBSESSED I was.
I eventually discovered Fanart Central, a website dedicated to fanart and fanfiction (duh). I saw that they had a category for this anime I loved and so I signed up.
Now let me just say I was DOGSHIT at drawing. Everything I posted was horrendous. There's only so much a 13-year-old can do when they refuse to learn how to draw properly. I tended to write fanfictions instead, but they were equally as horrible.
There were 2 very popular artists in this anime category on Fanart Central. These girls actually knew how to draw. Their art was amazing and I was always so jealous, wishing I could draw like that.
They both ended up with a pretty decent following. I'll call them Bunny and Emily (fake names, of course). They became friends and somehow I managed to worm my way into the group.
These girls were about 15-17? I was 13, but lied and said I was also 15 (LOL - the good old days of the internet).
Eventually 2 other girls joined our group. I'll call them Kayla and Tammy. Kayla was an artist also, while Tammy wrote fanfictions.
Kayla had the idea of giving our group a name and the rest was history. Our little group became so popular. People would do fanart of our characters. People had my character as their avatar. We had fan accounts. We had a fan group. It was crazy! All this just from riding coattails (at least for me lol).
I loved these girls and we would sit on MSN every evening together, drawing and chatting. We were based all over the world so never got to acually meet in person, but our timezones sometimes overlapped. Some of us would end up branching out into other fandoms and having a lot of fun with that. We were such a tightknit group considering the distance between us all.
Now, I know what you're thinking. This is the rise, right? So where is the fall?
WELL! I logged in one day to see Bunny getting a barage of hate. It turns out she'd been tracing. My dumbass had even seen the originals she'd traced but I just assumed she was amazing at copying. She had some other petty albeit problematic issues, but the main reason for the witchhunt was the tracing. One person started calling her out and then it just snowballed.
She ended up having an article on Encylopedia Dramatica. If you don't know what that is, it's basically if Wikipedia and 4Chan had a baby. It was an infomation website but ran by the most unhinged, chronically online people. The article was huge and said all sorts of awful stuff. I would try to edit it and take it down and it would immediately come back up.
Due to this, Bunny ended up leaving Fanart Central. She deleted all her art and completely wiped her account.
Once this happened, the witchhunt turned to Emily who had ALSO been tracing. Since she was the more popular one out of the 2, I think she got even more shit. Her Encylopedia Dramatica article was even longer than Bunny's.
Our little group even ended up with a page on there, going through each of our characters and saying why they were so shit and Mary Sues.
Not gonna lie, looking back our characters definately were. But, we were teenagers. I don't know how much character depth knowledge people expect teenagers to have.
After this, Emily also left Fanart Central. They both went over to Deviantart, but the "haters" followed. Bunny completely gave up and left. I think Emily pushed through it and is still on there now.
As for me, when the Deviantart transistion happened I was already growing out of my obsession for that anime and moving onto other things. I think by that point I was getting ready to do my GCSEs. We all kind of fell out of touch.
Once I started college I moved onto Tumblr, finding an Emily hate account. I messaged to say I used to be a part of [GROUP NAME] and was suprised to see the hate train still going. The account messaged back. It turns out it was ran by KAYLA! She'd always had beef with Bunny and Emily's popularity. After all, she was actually trying to create her own art while they got popular with their tracing. Either way, I was shook.
As I said, we all fell out of touch and don't speak anymore. I still have some of the art from our group on a memory stick and ocassionally I'll go back to Fanart Central and have a little look at my old account, remembering the good times!
Looking back, the early days of the internet were absolutely wild and NOT for the faint-hearted!
END
It all started when I was about 8 years old.
I had a Funky Friends pencil case. If you know what Funky Friends are, then you'll know it’s a real throwback. With the pencil case came a link for a chatroom.
Until then, I'd only ever really used the computer to play Cartoon Network flash games and Tomb Raider games on a CD-ROM, but with this chatroom I got speaking to other people.
One person was showing off a webpage they had made with a site called Matmice. It was just a singular page, with some cute graphics, but I was shook.
Things like Instagram and Tumblr didn’t exist back then. It was difficult to leave your mark on the Internet. After seeing this I knew I had to make my own.
For those that don’t know, Matmice is a website designed to help young’uns learn basic HTML. It was quite difficult to mess things up as everything was just in blocks, so you could easily decide what went where.
The name of my first “website” was pretty_ang_l25. My dumbass was so surprised this name was available, not realising I had not only misspelt angel, but also managed to ruin the formatting.
It was so fun learning about marquees (which are still a favourite coding element of mine) and finding cute little graphics from all across the web. The community was also a lot of fun to interact with.
Eventually I moved on from Matmice to Freewebs, which a lot of people tended to do.
This website I called Cherry Jungle. I used a site name generator and I loved this name so much, I stuck with it for years!
Now, Freewebs was pretty much exactly like Neocities, and nothing like Matmice.
Matmice held your hand, but with Freewebs, you were on your own. You can only imagine my surprise when I first logged in, only to be greeted by a blank page that I was expected to code all by myself!
It took me a really long time to get to grips with it. No longer was I just sticking cute graphics on a page. I had to create a layout, code that layout, and then learn CSS on top of that.
I started off with using layouts other people had made and then slowly started to branch out, trying out my own things.
When you got good, you could “graduate” from Freewebs and get hosted by someone with a .com domain (basically someone who had the cash to pay for their own website). I actually managed it, which meant learning FTP. That was a whole other challenge, but the girl hosting me was a great teacher.
Eventually I started applying for college and ended up becoming too busy to maintain my website. The skills I learnt did end up becoming useful for my career in digital marketing. Basic HTML has been a big help when working with company websites.
When I discovered Neocities I really wanted to:
- Relive my childhood
- Make the best website I could with my skillset
I’ve learned a lot over the past few years, so I wanted to see if I could make something better than Cherry Jungle.
The coding I've used for Bruised Fairy would seem super daunting to little ol’ me.
I'm not a big advocate of AI, especially when it comes to the arts, but when it comes to coding issues it has been genuinely helpful. There are things I would have been stuck on for hours that AI has explained in minutes.
If you’re thinking about starting your own website, please go for it! It’s such a fun and creative outlet. AI has made things much easier for beginners, but you totally don’t need it if you’d rather not use it.
There are so many fun things you can do with code and people are still finding new things.
If you have any questions feel free to get in touch! I can try to help, but there’s still some things I’m getting to grips with myself.
This page was inspired by the old Diva Starz website from the 2000s.
I really wanted to use Alexa's diary as the template but it wasn't working out so I had to draw it myself.
I also really wanted the background for this page to be her room, but it was just too hard trying to get a decent image, so I settled for the Bratz which I also loved as a kid!
Lip icon is from the GIPHY Bratz account.
The code for the menu and the content box is from here. I have slightly altered it though.