My generation was the first to grow up on the internet. Now, obviously, there’s a difference between growing up on the internet in the 90s and growing up on the internet today. Now children have their own iPhones and social media accounts under their real names; a ten-year-old recently told me he’d die if he didn’t get to watch Tik-Toks every single day. That’s a far cry from the 15 minutes I’d get at the end of class in elementary school to look up “school related facts” on Netscape Navigator on our old-school iMacs, 15 minutes which I’d inevitably use to look up Dragonball Z episode summaries instead.
I’ve seen the internet grow, shrink, and change dramatically over my life, but when I say I grew up on the internet, I’m often specifically thinking of forums. Also known as message boards, forums these days are a rarity, shambling along in the cesspool of GameFAQs, retrofitted into Reddit, but mostly replaced in function by social media. But what message boards had that social media never will was specificity and anonymity. My Twitter or Instagram is meant to represent my entire life, to sum me up as a person, or at least as a persona or “brand” (ugh); on message boards you could find entire communities who just wanted to talk about weird anime or 00s radio rock with you, who could become friends you spoke to daily but never even knew their names or how they looked or anything else about them besides their favorite Gundam series. You could try on new personas until you found one that fit, with no one the wiser to your failures. We will likely never have anything like it again.
The very first forum I ever joined — my foundational internet experience — was called Unrivaled Forums. This was the message board for the Unrivaled Dragonball Source website, a site devoted to Dragonball facts which, by the time I stumbled across it, was already mostly abandoned and rarely updated, but which supported a loyal and active online community for another seven or eight years until the owner stopped paying his server fees. I joined this forum just looking for a place to talk about Dragonball Z with people, but it became a place where I needed to prove myself. At times posting there felt like I was constantly being put through a gauntlet.
Unrivaled was an incredibly competitive forum, which took “debating” Dragonball ludicrously seriously. The longest-tenured members knew every detail of the franchise inside and out, and had very specific parameters around what counted and what didn’t — only the manga was canon, not the filler added to the anime, and even only respected certain specific translations. There was a lot of odd Japanese words and spelling thrown about. Every so often one of the moderators would “rank” all the active members based on how good they were at debating Dragonball. At my best, I only made it to the mid-tier — I could regurgitate the accepted forum arguments well enough, with sources to back me up, but never brought any new insights to the table. Later, a different member ranked every single member of the board, not as a debater, but simply based on how “good” they were at being a member of Unrivaled (in other words, a mix of a popularity contest and his subjective opinions; I think, again, that I was thoroughly mid-tier), which seemed perfectly normal to me at the time after years of breathing in the Unrivaled air, but, looking back at it now, just feels unhealthy.
Still in high school at the time, I was one of the younger members of the forum (the youngest was a thirteen-year-old girl named Roxy, who the forum treated with a mix of derision and protectiveness; people got pissed when she was dating a much older guy, and I really wish I knew how that worked out). I was joining fairly late into its lifespan, and the members were notoriously cliquey. My first couple of years as a member I didn’t have internet at home yet and could only post at school, meaning that I disappeared at night, on the weekend, and all summer. Thus, it was quite difficult to muscle my way into being a regular, and the fact that I did at all felt like a major victory, even if it was largely earned through simple endurance. In retrospect, a part of me thinks I mostly hung around because I refused to be told I didn't belong, which is the kind of gumption I don’t know if adult Spencer could — or should — muster.
I don’t want to act like I was bullied1. There were only a small handful of people who were outright mean to me, and it was never a targeted or persistent thing, usually just someone overreacting to some dumb, cringeworthy thing I said as a dumb, cringeworthy seventeen-year-old. Some of it was actually funny — like when several of my schoolmates all joined the forum as well, and because we all shared the same IP address, the moderators thought I’d created an army of sockpuppet2 handles and threatened to ban me. At one point, for some godforsaken reason, I posted a baby picture of myself and it became a meme, with everybody on the forum making the picture their avatar and signatures; to this day I don’t know if this was an insult or a compliment, but after initially pitching a fit, I eventually learned to find the humor in it.
Much of the time, when other members were tough on me, I’d done something to bring it on myself, and even ended up learning from it. I remember one topic where I was making posts amounting to “That’s a great point, I agree!” after every single post until I was sternly told to “please stop.” It doesn’t sound like much, but it really stuck with me, helping me to notice for the first time how my insecurity sometimes made me try to dominate a conversation just to get attention even when I had nothing to say, and helped me start curbing that and learning to hold back a bit until I had something worthwhile to contribute. I started noticing myself agreeing with people or making points I didn’t really believe in simply because it was the popular opinion amongst the rest of the forum, and it helped me start to learn to think for myself and have a bit of a backbone. I learned a lot about people in general just from spending so much time on this forum with people who were so unlike any of my friends or schoolmates; Unrivaled Forums was actually the first place I ever spoke to someone who wasn’t straight.
As much as it sometimes felt like I hung around simply because I refused to be pushed out, I really did legitimately enjoy spending time on Unrivaled. I made a lot of friends who I’d talk to on AIM, who actually enjoyed having me around. One member had befriended both myself and my best friend at the time, someone I kinda idolized and put myself down in comparison to, and told me I was much more interesting to talk to than my friend, and that did wonders to build up my self-esteem. After I graduated high school another member, who lived in the Netherlands, invited me to come out and work at his family’s bar for a while (I was flattered but couldn’t do it, and in retrospect, I’m not sure exactly what was up with this offer and how to feel about it, whether to take it at face value or wonder whether I was about to be human trafficked). I, somehow, briefly, had an online girlfriend on the forum, though I don’t think either of us ever took it seriously. Perhaps most importantly, at a time in my life when I was incredibly depressed, Unrivaled helped me meet some friends who would listen to me whine, but also were old enough to have more perspective, and could help me see beyond my own suffering. It was a skill that was, and continues to be, invaluable, and I’m eternally grateful for it.
Over the years I drifted away from Unrivaled at times — once for a whole year, when I, regrettably, started feeling uncomfortable about spending so much time with “strangers” — but as long as it existed, I always returned. For so long, it was my internet home.
For much of the time I was on Unrivaled, I was also a member of the MFG — or “My Favorite Games” — forum, named after the site it was hosted on. Much like Unrivaled, MFG was a site devoted to Dragonball Z, but overshadowed by the large online community it had created on its forum. MFG was as DBZ-centric as Unrivaled, but in a different way, more fannish and juvenile in its devotion. I tried to “debate” Dragonball there once or twice and mostly received cricket sounds in return, or people who just refused to believe my well-researched DBZ talking points (I’m rolling my eyes at myself right now, if you can’t tell). In fact, the entire culture and membership was a bit more juvenile than Unrivaled’s. I remember one very popular member of MFG actually signed up on Unrivaled at one point and was chased away after only two or three posts.
But I didn’t join this forum to debate anyway; I joined for FanFiction. At the time I was deep into writing a novel-length Dragonball FanFiction, and while it had a few admirers at Unrivaled, I wanted to find it a broader audience. Fanfiction.net and LiveJournal would have been the most popular websites for the medium at the time, but I only knew about forums, so to forums I went, and MFG had a bustling FanFiction board that was interested in the kind of shows I was writing about. Where at Unrivaled I had some good friends but was, overall, a “mid-tier” member, I became a big name at MFG. And, thus, every time Unrivaled taught me a bit of humility, MFG just inflated my head right back up.
Shortly into my tenure at MFG, after my story had started to make a name for itself, two other members and myself were made the moderators of the MFG’s FanFiction board after its longtime steward stepped down. I loved the position, more than I should have. I never abused my power — I never banned anyone or used it to deliberately hurt people — but I was definitely fond of showing it off. If people asked me a question, I would edit my answer into their post instead of replying in my own post just because I could, and probably spent a bit too much time moving topics around and generally just tidying up the board to my liking. It’s a pathetic thing to say, but earning this role was one of the coolest things that had ever happened to me up to that point, and I wanted to be the best moderator ever.
Fortunately, I never dealt with any real abuse or harassment during my time at MFG, but there was plenty of drama. I didn’t always handle it well, and in fact, I may have helped start some of it. The first incident happened when one of the other members who had been made a moderator the same time as myself stepped down, and declared that she was going to leave the forum and wanted all her stories deleted. She was a very popular member with a very popular story, and we were all shocked. I’m embarrassed to admit that I fought with her about it, and never did follow her wishes to delete her story. Instead I created an invisible sub-forum, an archive that only moderators could see, and moved her story there. It still got it off the site, but it didn’t follow her wishes, and I regret that now. I could only think about how I wanted her to come back, and wanted her story to be waiting for her if she ever did, and how it was unfair of her to take the story away from everyone anyway; I was too young, and I suppose too self-centered, to see things from her perspective.
The most drama I faced at MFG, though, revolved around the “Elite Fics.” The Elite Fics were a sub-section of the FanFiction board where the site’s “best” stories were to be found, forever standing above the abandoned, often borderline-incomprehensible offerings that made up about 60% of the board’s content. When I became moderator the Elite Fics hadn’t been updated in quite some time, so they became my pet project, and I started a monthly poll where the story that received the most votes got added to the Elite Fics every month. I’ll admit I had fairly obvious ulterior motives — I wanted my story to be an Elite Fic, and it made it either the first or second month of polling — but I also just wanted to good writing to be appreciated.
This worked for maybe a year, after which I ran into two major problems: 1. the stories that were most popular with the voters were often not the most deserving stories, and 2. adding 12 new stories to the Elite Fics a year quickly overwhelmed and overcrowded a forum meant to be “Elite,” selective, an easy way to quickly find the board’s best stories. The monthly polls were too popular to stop, so my solution was to create a second category of Elite Fics, a separate sub-forum where the moderators were in charge of selecting the stories that would be featured.
There’s probably a universe out there where this worked, but in our universe? Backfired, big time. First of all, the other mods and I didn’t have any specific criteria for the stories we chose; secondly, we didn’t just occasionally select a new story to put in this new ultra-special category, we also started moving stories over to it from the other Elite Fics board; altogether, this sparked some cries of favoritism and kinda started a little schism between the mods and the general users. Winning the Elite Fics poll started to feel like a consolation prize and general engagement within the FanFiction forum (which, admittedly, had started to taper off after a while all on its own) dropped noticeably.
So yeah, around this time the appeal of being a moderator had worn off. All the general drama was wearing me down, for sure, but I was also running into a couple of existential crises. On the one hand, I was grappling with that age-old dilemma of whether it’s popularity or critical acclaim that makes a story great, and not finding easy answers, growing disillusioned with the whole endeavor; on the other hand, I also wasn’t happy with my own ego. Who was I to decide that my stories and the stories I thought were particularly well done were the ones that deserved to be highlighted? The authority I was given was meant to keep the FanFiction board safe and orderly, not to try to curate peoples’ reading experiences. I didn’t like who I was becoming on MFG. Around this same time the MFG forums shut down for a couple weeks as the website moved to a new host, and I took the opportunity to vanish. I never returned to the site and blocked everybody I knew from it on AIM, and while I was curious, I never even checked to see how people reacted to my leaving without saying goodbye. Maybe it wasn’t cool and I certainly wouldn’t handle it the same way now, but it was time to go, and I can appreciate that I learned what I could from the experience and left before things got too bad.
No traces of either Unrivaled nor MFG have survived on the internet. AIM no longer exists. The email account I signed up for these forums on no longer exists. This entire formative era of my life only exists in my head, and that sometimes leaves me feeling melancholy for sure, but I think it’s also for the best. I said and did a lot of dumb things on these websites that do not need to be preserved for posterity, that are better off discarded. But I also learned and grew so much during my time on these forums, and I’ll always be grateful I was able to come of age in the era of the message board, when I could make these messy mistakes in relative privacy and anonymity, not under my real name with my real picture slapped on it, with real life friends and families watching. I don’t envy this new generation of kids growing up online. I hope they can learn to laugh at themselves eventually too. Or, at least, afford therapy someday.
CHECK OUT
This past weekend I watched the documentary Class Action Park on HBO Max. I know by now you guys are probably tired of me bringing up New Jersey’s most infamous amusement park every other week, but I do so anyway because I think Class Action Park is the perfect counterpoint to the memoir about the park written by the owner’s son I discussed in-depth a few weeks ago.
I think the most invaluable thing Class Action Park does is spend significant time interviewing the family of a young man who died at Action Park. I don’t think Andy Mulvihill’s memoir necessarily glamorizes his father (at least not fully), and it is quite somber and frank about what it was like to witness the deaths in Action Park as an employee, but the voice of the victims and their families themselves are an essential missing piece to the puzzles that were Action Park and Glen Mulvihill, and having now seen them first-hand, I don’t think any exploration of the park is complete without these tragic, heartbreaking, sobering experiences.
Class Action Park also features quite a bit of Chris Gethard telling harrowing, incredulous childhood stories of surviving Action Park, and that’s worth the price of admission alone.
ABOUT
“Do You Know What I Love the Most?” is a newsletter from Spencer Irwin about his relationship with the stories he loves. Spencer is an enthusiast and writer from Newark, Delaware, who likes punk rock, comic books, working out, breakfast, and most of all, stories. His previous work appeared on Retcon Punch, One Week One Band, and Crisis on Infinite Chords, and he can be found on Twitter at @ThatSpenceGuy. If you like this newsletter, please subscribe and share with your friends!
Logo by Lewis Franco, with respects to Saves the Day.
Not on the internet, at least. I was bullied relentlessly at school, but those aren’t newsletter stories.
This is when a member of a forum creates multiple accounts other than his main one and tries to pass them off as different members, often using them to troll or harass people or support their own arguments.