Yeah, ironically I kind of disappeared from Sailor Moon fandom after the dub because I got tired of arguing with people who didn't believe the old-timers that things in the dub were mistranslated--badly :) Esoteric ways of getting shit online were kind of fun way back when, but...we lived in Columbus, Ohio then, so we went to Koyama Shoten and rented tapes a lot.
I think part of it might also be due to online fandom culture having changed a lot over the years? Like, I've been involved with that kinda thing since I was ten or so (so 2003-ish), and it's changed a LOT since I was first dipping my toes into fandom. Now, granted, I was never really involved in anime fandom early on (save for a brief stint on a Rozen Maiden forum), but there was a huge difference between the types of fellow preteens and young teens I saw in fandom at that age and the ones I see nowadays. Like, nowadays a lot of younger fans seem to be either antis, anti-adjacent, or just generally anti-smut, but uh...that was NOT the case when I was their age. (I didn't POST any of my weird porn, but it existed, and many of my same-age-group peers were quite similar there. :P) Granted, that doesn't explain the sheer WTFery that is that fic, but I do think fandom culture among Baby's First Fandom-type things has changed a lot?
See for me, Harry Potter was the one where I found the worst, most over the top badly written shit, so it's pretty ymmv. Pokemon had an absolute wealth of godawful fic too. FMA was mixed-- some really bad shit (usually the massive crossovers) and some really good shit (though that might be the nostalgia talking.) Death Note has some really, really out there fic too. Kingdom Hearts though, now there's a fandom with some fucking massive crossovers that were absolute shit.
I mean, to be fair, that's not remotely surprising since KH is itself a sprawling multifandom megacrossover.
Oh there is truly scary HP shit out there. This isn't even a matter of my mileage because I've never been in Naruto fandom, it's just the stories I've heard about it? I would expect there to be terrifying Death Note fic, given...Death Note. :) It's funny though because as you would expect from WT I actually quite like massive crossovers, provided there's some mechanism in place to explain how universes that are very different can be easily connected.
"I'm sorry, but no, Zoisite is not really a girl." "Stop talking about how homophobic you think Mamoru is. His childhood sweetheart was a boy." "No, really, Zoisite is not a girl."
IRC is the form of technology that's indistinguishable from magic not because it's advanced, but because it's desperately finicky, filled with ephemeral tricksters (some malicious) who may or may not take any notice of your passing, and every informational tome is filled with so many warnings about all the shit that you must not do, lest grave consequences befall you, that it takes weeks or possibly years to extract a real working knowledge of it.
Yeah, I am kinda freaked out by how anti teenagers are these days. When I was a teenager there was no internet so any scrap of porn you got your hands on was a precious thing to be shared with all your friends, including bodice-rippers, alternative comix, and gay novels with sex in them. And in HP fandom it was like, impossible to keep teenagers out of your stuff no matter how hard you tried. Even on Yahoogroups. If you had an adult-labelled yahoogroup you'd have to go through it every few DAYS to remove people who were actually dumb enough to say in their profiles what their real age was and that it was under 18. There were regular scandals about people sneaking into adult RPs, etc. But now there are SO many antis. That is the thing that freaks me out the most tbh. When I was a teenager, if I had been in a forum where people were discussing sexual topics, it wouldn't have occurred to me to say "I am 13 and what is this please stop". I would have noped out on my own if it bothered me, but frankly I would probably have listened raptly to it, unless somebody actually hit on me and then I would have just said "no, fuck off".
also I am like super glad the internet was not around for the weird porn I wrote between the ages of 11 and 14 when I really didn't know much about anatomy.
Holy shit, I never watched Sailor Moon, it was that fucking blatant, holy shit. "Brad", oh my god. It fucking. It pans over to her girlfriend with the romantic background, fuck me.
I still remember the first time baby!PR ran into lube in a fic and was deeply offended by how unrealistic this whole 'lube' shit was. You just stick it in, don't you know! Lubricant, hah.
In the actual Japanese it was blatant af. They were lesbians. Everybody knew they were lesbians. Also, people who watched the dub--did they cut out the bits where Haruka felt up some of the other girls? It was played for laughs, but I think if Michiru had known about it Haruka would've been in the doghouse until the return of Crystal Tokyo.
