So my half-ass analysis of early Utena fandom did some numbers, got me some followers, and means this is a good time to take you all on a tour of the Utena fandom as I remember it, when I joined it around 1998/9ish! Caution: cw/slurs/unedited internet content from the late 90s...

The first website any Utena fan at the time discovered: http://duellists.tj  (oddball domains were hot in the 90s/00s, and were a way to get around .com domains being taken), which was The Utena Encyclopedia when I arrived, but originally been "The Arena of Revolutionists"

The Utena Encyclopedia was a thorough and truly astounding website for the time, and focused especially on translations. When the site came down, I trawled for the series scripts and hosted them here: http://ohtori.nu/scripts/ , out of worry the wayback machine wouldn't be kept up.

I needn't have worried there, http://duellists.tj  is one of the more browsable pages on it! https://web.archive.org/web/20000303002101/http://duellists.tj/
This website came down around 2003, and was static after 1999. The archive does seem to preserve, to some extent, the http://duellists.tj  mailing list...

...which was the first community I found! You know how at work sometimes your idiot coworkers mass-mail the staff something and your inbox floods with people who meant to send the e-mail to one person? Well mailing lists were that but on purpose, an early form of social media.

The primary methods of fan communication I discovered and used were the http://duellists.tj  mailing list, the SKUAD (Shoujo Kakumei Utena Analysis and Discussion) mailing list, and AFU, or http://alt.fan .utena, a usenet group, archived here: https://alt.fan.utena.narkive.com/ 

Each had its own 'flavor', but tbh SKUAD was my favorite, and is naturally the one not backed up anywhere, afaik. If you poke around on the http://duellists.tj  mailing list or AFU, you'll notice strings in the signatures of many. This was UtenaCode. Think of it like flair.

It was, I recall, ripped off from the Sailor Moon fandom, which feels appropriate. I archived the faq for it here: http://ohtori.nu/UtenaCode.html  Notice it scores how long you've been a fan by *the year*...cute. :) I'd fill my Twitter limit trying to make over 20 stars now. LOL.

Where else did one go on the internet back then? One of the big websites of the era was Blood Soaked and Honor Bound. Don't let the name fool you, it was primarily a humor website. It went up in 1999 and was updated through 2003. It's somehow still up: https://www.angelfire.com/darkside/bshb/ 

The humor is....dated, at times, but very in step with what anime fan humor looked like at the time. Do kids these days even 'pants' entire scripts? No? Thank god. I vaguely recall having some kind of fandom drama with the admins of this site, but I don't remember it now? lol

Another popular thing to do in fandoms at the time was MST3King content. In ours this was done by Chris Rain, who dunked on bad fanfics from the earlier era. Satellite of Revolution is no longer live at its original URL, but I host it (w permission): http://satellite.ohtori.nu/ 

It is here you'll find The Observatory Of Forbidden Pleasures Series, Story One: Touga's Lesson, which is absolutely non-stop content warnings both for the original fic and for the MST3K, wherein you'll find pretty typical but extremely problematic attitudes about Akio and Touga.

Another popular site compiled fanfics. The Utena Fanfiction Repository had some cross-over with LiveJournal (which I honestly was never on, but did have a significant Utena presence in the early 00s)--this is also down now, but hosted with permission: http://ufr.ohtori.nu/ 

How did people find shit in the late 90s?? Glad you asked. Webrings. Websites used to string themselves together along a series of links managed by a central location. The Wayback Machine's page for the largest Utena webring is still sort of up: https://web.archive.org/web/20110419122708/http://www.webring.org/cgi-bin/webring?ring=skutena;index;id=1

There was also URL: Utena Revolutionary Links, which is amazingly STILL UP. This is a good capture of what the Utena fandom website culture looked like right before I started Empty Movement! http://utena.iwarp.com/ 

However, the real ~Memories~ for me were in character shrines, which doubled as art installations during a period where website design was very much ~the thing we all did.~ While I'm sure lots of fans had character shrines on LiveJournal and such, Utena fans loved this shit.

I suppose it would be like how evergreen Utena is as cosplay content. The aesthetic inspired, and so a lot of weeb web design nerds embraced Utena shrines and fanpages. This was, in fact, the original motivator for me to build the gallery, I wanted to encourage more web design.

It worked. A LOT of sites from here on will use my scans, tho not all. Among these was http://utena.net . Active all through the early 00s, this was a collection of shrines, primarily, with a front page that was frequently changed. Empty Movement followed this formula.

This copy of it is fairly stable with lots of links and workable subshrines: https://web.archive.org/web/20030205131429/http://utena.net/
PS. Oh god I forgot about Sympathy for the Devil i'm dead why did I start this
PPS. The Utena shrine is backed up on http://ohtori.nu : http://utena.ohtori.nu/ 

Bara no Unmei focused entirely on the movie, and basically meant I could ignore it, thanks thank you yes
Notable for one of the better aged layouts, most design-heavy sites from the era assumed a specific resolution and designed around it.
https://web.archive.org/web/20030624151931/http://www.ming-ling.net/utena/main.html

Renaissance Rose, an Anthy shrine, is amazingly STILL UP, though the main domain is goneish. It is PEAK FUCK YOU web design from the era, involving animated gifs, pop up framed design, scripted scrollbars that probably don't work in any browser now, etc: http://himemiya.net/anthy/index.html

Misc Aesthetics (that are broken on modern browsers lol) Post:
Ophelia: https://web.archive.org/web/20030407001033/http://utena.tadashii.net/utena/
Bloody Roses: https://web.archive.org/web/20030405154451/http://www.geocities.com/bloodyroses2000/
Beyond Pink:
https://web.archive.org/web/20021205172632/http://www.bunnybeth.net:80/beyondpink/
Blonde Bombshell:
https://web.archive.org/web/20021201171046/http://www.elusive-heaven.net/nanami/

I'm forgetting like SO MUCH STUFF. Like the time I gave my website to the admin of http://himemiya.nu  because I couldn't handle it, was congratulated by a stranger for my self-preserving decision, only to take the site back and then marry the stranger a few years later.

Oh hey I'm out of Tweets, lmao, I'm missing so much whatever I'm clicking send, thank you for coming on this weird unorganized, definitely very unthorough rambling journey through 20 years ago on the net

btw to show my WHOLE ass, I used to really hate Touga i dunno i was dumb