Favorite fansites?!?!?

[toothpastepancake]

 I just made a fansite dedicated to a specific topic and I was wondering if anyone had any favorite fandom-specific personal websites, or complex shrines you've seen on the indie/small web?

Here are some cool ones I found while looking!

It's Not Stupid (Invader Zim) NOTE: There is a fast moving gif on this page
Channel 27 (Weird Al)
Dan & Phil games NOTE: way too many flashing gifs on this page, but still very cool

EDIT: I wrote this at 5AM and forgot the indie web movement is new. I’m looking for fansites of any age!

Comments

[rionaleonhart]

Congratulations on your site! I haven't seen Doom Patrol, but your site design is so nostalgic, and I love how strongly your passion comes across.

zarla has a lot of fandom-specific websites, some of which have been around for over twenty years; they're listed here. I discovered her Pokémon site when I was a kid, and it was very influential in my development as a fan!

I've also got a couple of fandom-specific websites of my own: Balamb Garden, devoted to Final Fantasy VIII, and Silent Hill, devoted to Silent Hill 2. I only started getting into website making last year, but it's surprisingly addictive!

EDIT: Oh, and larissa has a bunch of gorgeous shrines that you can find here, mainly for Final Fantasy and Pokémon!

[larissa]

A lot of the older-school fansites are listed at directories such as Amassment (general), Emotion (anime/manga and video games), and In The Fade (RPGs). These shrines/fansites largely predate Neocities and the more recent indie web movement, so a lot of them are not mobile friendly, but some date back to 2000 or even earlier.

As Riona mentioned, I run a bunch! I have what's called a collective, which is where I list all of my various sites. You can find a lot more collectives at Cloudplane.

Happy browsing!

[toothpastepancake]

Thank you so so much for the links! oh wow!! Can’t wait to dive into these.

[momijizukamori]

I think my favorite go-to is Empty Movement, which is a collective of Revolutionary Girl Utena fansites that's been going strong for 20+ years now (and one of the few people to still hold on to their .nu domain, which were very trendy in like, the mid-00s and then fell out of fashion).

Secondary shout-out to all the fansites <a href="https://www.gekidasa.net/>gekidasa</a> runs, some of which are of an age with Empty Movement and the first big boom of anime fansites in the early 00s.</p>

[pebbleinalake]

One fansite I visit frequently is the MLP identification guide Strawberry Reef. It hasn't been updated in several years, but for anything pre-2021, it is by far the most useful identification guide for MLP collectors.

Two of my favorite Furby shrines are this one and this one - I think they're really cute and love the nostalgic vibe of them.

And this one isn't fandom specific, but I just recently discovered this amazing fansite dedicated to the Frutiger Aero web aesthetic: Frutiger Aero Archive.

[aikoto]

Looking for fansites and shrines is one of my favorite things! I mostly surf ones related to SMT/P3 though, but here are some I enjoy

- Allegory of Whatever (Persona 2 Innocent Sin)
- Tsumi x Batsu (Persona 2 duology, from 1999!)
- Heart of glasss (P3, Chidori)
- Amala Network (Collective of SMT fansites)

- Tomorrow's Calling (Exploring the economy & sociology of Animal Crossing)
- Sunyshore (Collection of electric pokemon, each plush has it's own story! Non-archive version focus exclusively on Raichu though)
- The Mewtwo Museum (Simillar to the avobe site but with Mewtwo)
- Level 20 (Gyarados shrine, it was so fun to read about all the different Gyarados the author has raised)
- Dark Claws (Sneasel shrine, I love how the author wrote about Sneasel's biology if they were real animals)

I have more sites saved here, but it needs updating + most are general websites. Then I also have a bunch of Persona 3 and DeSu specific blogs and small sites, but again most of them are fanart sites rather than shrines/fanpage.
(Also while writting this I noticed the Mitsuru shrine I liked got taken down and isn't archived, sad...)

[matsushima]

I'm loving "Level 20." It's so wholesome!

[aikoto]

Yeah, personal shirnes like it are my favorites 🥹

[matsushima]

Yes, personal shrines are the best! Especially now that fan wikis exist, I'm much more interested in reading about someone's personal experiences/interpretations/headcanons/etc. than basic facts about the franchise.

[larissa]

Thank you, also! I had a lot of fun making that Gyarados site, and even though I haven't really been into Pokémon for a few years now I look back on it fondly.

[matsushima]

It inspired me to make my own Pokémon shrine! It's still very bare bones, definitely a WIP, but thank you for the inspiration! I've been in an indie web idea rut lately and that helped me get going again!

[larissa]

Oh, I'm so glad to hear this! Your site looks lovely so far, I wish you the best of luck with it. I'm really touched that I was able to inspire you. More sites for all, I say :D

[falkner]

Amala Network!! What a blast from the past...

[larissa]

Oh, Level 20 is one of my sites! I'm glad you enjoyed it. (I'll pass along the kind words to the owner of the Sneasel shrine, as well!)

[aikoto]

What an honor! Level 20 is one of the sites I come back to from time to time, it's very sweet and I love how detailed it is. I don't have a pokemon that I've trained that many times (though Lopunny comes close), but it inspired me to make a page about the teams I had thru the years as well :)

(Oh, I actually got reminded about the Sneasel fansite the other day, whie reading thru Cryptodex it seems there's some beta designs of Sneasel that were discovered not long ago!)

[larissa]

I'm so happy to hear you were inspired! It warms my heart a lot to know that people are still getting inspired by each other's sites. It was a big part of how I got started (20+ years ago lol) and it feels like the torch is still getting carried.

Lopunny is an excellent choice btw, 10/10.

[craftyhobbit]

You should try looking on Neocities, which is where most of the personal websites are now, and there is/was a site called Amassment that is a forum for fansites and shrines. It's not new though - fansites and the like have been around since the late '90s, but they declined when social media like Facebook and Twitter came about, and free hosts like geocities closed down.

[thepasteldyke]

It doesn't exist anymore, or I just can't find it again (though I'm pretty sure it's the first cus I have *looked*), but there was this fan webpage that was solely dedicated to the manga Takeru: Opera Susanoh Sword of the Devil and I loved it. I'm so glad my brother still had a lot of the images saved when the site went down, I had them too but my computer that had them just died.

[linky]

Ooh I like your site!! Here's a selection of sites I've had bookmarked:

Kamen Rider V3 Homepage, an old fansite all about KR V3!
Corpse Brigade is dedicated to all things Final Fantasy Tactics.
Bugsite is a fansite about the game Network Adventure Bugsite.
Anathema is a shrine (that also has a fanlisting) dedicated to the anime and manga series Black Jack.