The History Of Tenchiverse Forums

I’ll note here ahead of time three things:

1. You’re welcome to correct me if I’m wrong. This is simply the best recollection my memory and what records I have access to, could provide.

2. As you will come to find in this narrative, some serious stuff went down that was purposely kept from being public knowledge, in some cases, there may still be bad blood there. As such, some names will be omitted. For the people that were around during those times, I don’t doubt they can piece together who is who. There’s nothing I can do about that.

3. Far as I’m concerned, I’m going to tell it like it was. Meaning, if I say things were bad, then they were to me. I have no intention of this being a theatrical production, making someone out to be better or worse than they were. I’ve no desire to start up old wars. If you’ve got an issue with what I have to say, you’re welcome to take it up with me directly by PM or e-mail. Ain’t like I’ve been hiding anywhere over the last 12 years.

Ok so grab some chips and a drink, this will take a while to read….

To start from the top, like many of those reading this, I was first exposed to Tenchi from Toonami. For those not familiar with it, Toonami was a big deal in the USA as it was really the most widely televised block of anime on TV anywhere at that point in time. Many series were broadcast, but Tenchi was one of the shows that started around July of 2000. Really I had been exposed to anime previously, but wasn’t conscious of what it really was… it’d just been really good cartoons, up until Gundam Wing came about and I got hooked (I’m a mecha fan).

So I’d been exposed to Tenchi in the early 2000’s but while it was good, didn’t really hook me too much. The Tenchi that aired back then was also heavily edited for USA TV, some of the notable changes being editing out of nudity and alcohol, language, etc.

Due to Toonami’s success, other networks eventually hopped on the anime bandwagon, one being TechTV. TTV was unsurprisingly, a tech and all things gadgety network, but they launched a program called AnimeUnleashed (12 – 2002) on the evening slot. It showed at least 1 episode of two different series back to back, and they tended to be themed toward older teenagers. By this time Cartoon Network had come up with Adult Swim as the “mature” late night block version of Toonami. So AU was sort of a middle ground, not Toonami, but not Adult Swim either.

Eventually Dual! Parallel Trouble Adventure was shown, and I loved it. It had a more tame relationship between the characters, had giant robots, good food, family, and a drop of sci fi going for it.

Now before we get ahead of ourselves, let me set the stage. We’re talking 2001-ish when Google didn’t really work well. Geocities and AOL Hometown, along with Yahoo ruled the “personal web page” space. Internet Explorer 3 and 4 were normal. Web rings were popular if you wanted to connect with fans of similar things. The animated GIF was “awesome” to everyone. We didn’t have message boards so much as bulletin boards… which I guess for the younger folk, you could say they were like a comments section on YouTube. One thing after another someone posted on a single topic and it stuck there, making a post chain. It wasn’t pretty. Forum avatars were often limited to 25×25, 50×50, and woah 80×80 if you were pushing it. Forum signatures were often like.. 50×250 max.

Ok exiting grandpa mode… but it wasn’t quick or simple to do anything in those days.

I’d been on the net for a good while by this time, using AOL dialup of course. Going through 1000 sites one by one in search results took me 8 – 12 hours of the morning… but I’d do it (don’t ask about the parents & phone bill). But I’d never joined a forum. TechTV I considered a safe place, it’d been around a long time… I lurked for a while. Finally decided to join the AnimeUnleashed (AU) section, specifically for Dual.

People were having fun, posting questions, ideas for more or what might happen in the next episode. All the usual fandom questions. We had a few people that were writing fanfiction, good stuff, just in the starting stages. Since two series were played on AU, Dual got paired up at one point with Crest of the Stars, which was a space focused anime. We had people that jumped back and forth between the Dual and CotS sections. A couple memorable events we had were running post on the fly – ongoing fanfiction. We had THE INSANE thread which was so many crossovers, it couldn’t be caterorgized. We had Dual with NGE, and Betterman, and Robotech, and Trigun, and Star Wars, and Gundams, and whatever else… and oddly enough.. it was whacked out, funny, and it worked. We had giant anime battles for some reason going on inside a Super Star Destroyer (that had crashed into Peacemillion) with Vash running around shooting guns with rubber bullets. Akamatsu Industries from Betterman helping supply Dual robots and EVA units. The writers also participated as their own characters or avatars in the story, often Jedi or characters from Xenosaga, other anime they liked. That’s what they derived their powers from and determined what they were writing into the story. So really we were sorta doing a RPG fanfiction without all the stats.

Anyway, I wanted in on that action, so I picked a name that was based on things I liked at the time. JediGundamZinv. Around that first Christmas AU was on, the writers did a big parody of the wedding from Betterman, of course with all sorts of other characters partying and fooling around, doing karaoke, making (really touching) speeches, whatever. It was great fun to read.

But as things were, posting at the TTV boards was a little restrictive. I’d known about DualFans, a fansite for Dual of course, for a while but hadn’t decided to join there. But several of the “important” posters moved over to DualFans, and things got lighter or a bit slow. So I joined as well. At this time the site admin’s handle was Kazuki, just a guy in the Phillippeans using prepaid cards to get some dial-up so he could make little updates to his fansite. Dual had shown overseas before due to another network prior to AU picking it up. But he had a very basic fan site, and originally a bulletin board. Kazuki upgraded it to a very early phpBB forum not long before I joined. So a lot of the fans shifted to DualFans, we grew to quite a few regular posters. Things were good.

Well, you know what they say about all good things right? TechTV was going to be sold off (2004) since Paul Allen was simply tired of watching his tech network. There were also rumors that Comcast’s G4 sort of started a cable network hostile take over of sorts to lower the value of TTV. In reality it was way ahead of it’s time, but Allen sold TTV to MTV. The regular show hosts were told if they were not willing to relocate to southern California, they were fired immediately. Several of the big names of the network like Leo Laporte, who’d been with the network and did many shows, stood up for the other hosts, and was canned or basically was forced to leave of their own accord. As a result TechTV became G4TV and eventually just G4. During that transition, the show quality tanked. The forums were at almost riot level. People did not want this… TechTV was awesome, it was needed, there was nothing else like it anywhere. AnimeUnleashed got stuck on a death cycle of repeats before being cut. Several of the other primary shows were cut or completely mutated into nothing that had to do with tech. Everyone hated it. So before the final axe swing came down… people had mostly said their goodbyes and were bleeding from TTV’s boards (which we told were to be closed for no good reason) like someone who got dropped down an elevator shaft. The Crest of the Stars fans (notably some fans of Dual in there too) fled to the Abh Nation fansite. The Dual folk fled to DualFans. G4 pulled the plug and we lost all our old posts and the Insane thread… which had gone on it’s 3rd or 4th version, usually 350+ thread pages long before we got the thread locked and made a new one.

So DualFans was still booming though (03 ~ 04), several of the members that were mature, usually the fanfic authors, or people that had “stuff” like the US DVDs became moderators since the site had grown. The phpBB got upgraded to a green theme, Kazuki was trying to update his site some, but didn’t have the time, both in life or due to the prepaid Internet cards he had to use. You can see a old archived snapshot of the site here: http://web.archive.org/web/20050207033247/http://dualfans.host.sk/forum/index.php

Our fanfic section was booming, one of the greatest things to come out of it was COhugh’s Spaghetti or Curry fic, which when finished got virtually unanimous approval that it should be the sequel or was worthy of being called the continuation of Dual. How often so you see fans agree on something unanimously?

Some of the “big names” then were COhugh, Shadowdance, Andyscout, Xtor49, Xearo, Neo7, animegodfather, Tyr_13, Jacob Keyes, Jet981, JediInuyasha, cap, mr. winkie, DivineEternal. What seems amazing to me today is that we all got along so well. I can count the times any of the moderators did something “mod-y” on one hand, and it usually was something to the affect of “hey get back on topic.” Dual was unique in that if you liked it, you probably had a bunch of other things you liked that fit with everyone else too. It was like a perfect filter. Granted it was mostly a guys hangout, but we had a total of 3 female members, and even there, they were either put on a pedestal or treated like just another guy in the gang. None of the gender hate or abusive comments you find everywhere on forums these days.

But we had probably 30-40 regulars on the forum, maybe double that in people that came or went. At our all time peak, I think we had over 340 members (in 2005). Anyway (back to 03 here) I thought the board was nice and the site had some stuff, but we were pretty lacking in media and things. First thing being like our avatars on the forum.. We had like 2 of each major character… so about 10 to choose from. That wasn’t cool. So I did my thing, scoured the web for Dual pics and other fansites, snagging everything I could find. Figured out how to use Photoshop 5, which we had laying around the house and never installed for some reason… and made 500 avatars. Loaded them up to AOL hometown, and sent a copy to Kazuki, who was understandably overwhelmed (the forum couldn’t even hold that many avatars lol). But from then on I volunteered as his right arm, trying to collect everything I could to bring it to DualFans.

In those “travels” I found that Dual was actually a fairly popular thing in Japan. There’d been Mitsuki Sanada fan clubs, a real club with a button badge, with chapters in different major cities in Japan. There were Japanese fan sites. There were things like Dual soundtracks. Back then I hadn’t discovered machine translation (which was in it’s infancy anyway) so I didn’t dive in too much. I focused more on english sites and constantly ran into Tenchi Muyo related information… how Tenchi and Dual were somehow related. Even the fans that owned the DVDs would say things about how Tenchi and Dual were similar. So in my quest for more and more Dual, I decided to go lurk among the Tenchi-ites.

Back then, the Tenchi fandom was.. mostly either real young fans, or older fans who’d probably seen it off a VHS copy tape somewhere. Many were also outside the USA, a fair portion were from Europe. But the fan sites weren’t great in number, or I just didn’t really look for them. In any case, I ended up at AIC International’s own forum. AIC being the company in Japan that produces Tenchi, Dual, and a few dozen other series. They had a USA or english site, and forum, and it was broken down into sub categories by series, this being the AIC YaBBS.

Now the Tenchi section here, had quite a few of the personalities that would direct the course of the fandom in the years to come. At AIC is where I first met AstroNerdBoy (ANB), and many other fans that you could say were well known. When I got into the picture, I pretty much lurked and listened. AIC had a Dual section, but it was pretty much dead. The action was in the two or three Tenchi sections they had. At that time, this was a little bit before GXP was released in Japan. People were hanging on every little tidbit of info to come out of Japan… either by the handful that knew Japanese, or through owners of doujinshi, news articles. Did I forget to mention animenewsnetwork.com had just started gaining notoriety around this time? But generally it was good info. GXP came out episode at a time, supposedly there would be big ties with Dual, I was excited, but most of the Tenchi folk were far less than enthused due to the OVA 3 info coming out then. Generally we had to wait till someone imported a copy of the tape/DVD, or wrote up an account of it to get any idea if what was going on. We couldn’t have a guy just upload something to YouTube like it is now.

So anyway GXP Ep. 17 parallel came and went. Everyone then was calling what we know today as Idol, was ZINV (ie Dual’s mecha). There were similarities to Dual, as we heard third hand. I tried to relay things back to DualFans, which was starting to wind down. Our members were wondering when there was going to be a sequel… no one understood that Dual was already a couple years old by the time we got it, and how the whole anime publishing thing worked back then… we just wanted more… yesterday. So between Kazuki trying to update and add stuff to the site, and fanfic author’s not putting out much, we sort of entered a cooling off period. TechTV was long dead in our eyes (late 04 ~ 05). Somewhere in here I managed to get enough money together to buy the Dual US DVD’s box set. Finally I had something to reference and could know what the other leaders on the forum knew!

So I got to posting at AIC a little. AIC also had a cool little hidden section for members where they stashed wallpapers they created for fans to download. I’d talked to the admin / manager of the forum (ie one guy running it) about why didn’t their Dual product page have anything on it besides a place holder image? He said they planned to put various things there in about 2-3 months.

Well 2-3 months came, and the admin suddenly announced that the forum would be closing in about a month (3/04). Of course that sort of threw everyone into a tizzy. We had people planning to make backups of the AIC YaBBS, people making goodbye threads, etc. AIC never really gave a reason. It basically wasn’t profitable to keep it going. It’s my personal feeling that they closed it because they feared for information that was coming out of the Tenchi section, would somehow impact their sales. I could see that – as GXP wasn’t being received really well., OVA 3 was pissing people off left and right. We knew it, they knew it… so they did damage control. The whole “Tenchi chooses who” thing was such a big deal back then too… you’d think someone’s entire being was dependent on their favorite girl getting Tenchi. With the news on OVA 3 and Tenchi getting a random fiancé in the picture… people were outright disgusted. They hadn’t seen it either, no dub had been made. GXP was leaving people with a sour taste and it wasn’t out of the gate entirely either. The “Tenchi chooses everyone” ending to the OVA didn’t sit well with many either. Some preferred to wait till they could see it for themselves, some were ok with the idea, some jumped ship then and there. So the AIC forum closing down… somewhat came at a crossroads for many fans anyway.

The AIC board people split 3 ways. A small contingent went to BobN64’s Seidou.org aka The Sanctuary forum, which if I recall he created as a direct result of AIC closing. A few more people went to Tenchiboard, and the largest group went to AyekaFanClub, which had a web page and a ezboard based forum.

AFC had been around since 1999, and was started I think by Lesell Charis (eventually passed to Beagle-san). Tenchiboard I think was younger than AFC, but they went more toward the direction of having character and series info built right into the sidebar of the forum/site. Far back as I can remember, AFC’s site had a little thing on cat of the month, which was stuck on Beagle-san’s(?) cat, we had the AFC gong, to ring when you stopped by. But everything was done up in pink, white, and purple for Ayeka. Tenchiboard had a darker green and black theme going for it. The Sanctuary has always been dead gray. You can see an old archive of the AFC site here: http://web.archive.org/web/20050207101917/http://ayekafanclub.org/ny/aeka/Frames.html

But some of the notable names at AFC were Watotsu, MaryRN51, Jeff Morris, GenSao, True Sheol, Harls, Fudo, Literary Eagle, AFC Possum, AstroNerdBoy, rolf, Jeffery Harris, Admiral Tigerclaw, Beagle-san, antvasima, Y Anthony Who, Kiyoka Makabi, punistation, Kthardin, conawn, shadow writer, BlaqueTalon, TKIA Lan, Mohawk52, K’thardin, S.Naoe, oni_shin. To name a few anyway….

The best I can describe the original AFC was that it was open to new people coming in, but very heavily opinionated. If you said something stupid or incorrect, be prepared to get hit from no less than 3 replies showing you just where you’re wrong. While there would be great debates, heated debates, little quote wars, most of the players so to speak were the older Tenchi fans, so while things got heated… eventually they’d break from chewing on each other, get offline for a while, then come back and hit it again – or let the topic drop. It was a little more mature is what I’m trying to get at. Since they were older, they also had that one thing most of us did not – money. Meaning they had little collections of their own, or had unique knowledge of Japanese sites, etc. They were powerful resources, and at the same time carried some weight around.

But as you can imagine, drop a DualFan into a Tenchi crowd, who starts preaching or trying to ties things together to show how Dual and Tenchi mixed… and it wasn’t taken all that well. Again, recall that GXP wasn’t too hot except with specific people. GXP tied to Dual. So the preferred method of dealing with someone such as myself was to counter argument most everything brought up. No Dual had nothing to do with Tenchi OVA! Kajishima says they are only connected at the corners! Nothing more! Kiyone Makabi in ep. 14 of Dual is just a cel artist joke. The light hawk wings of Jinbu mean nothing. The fact Kazuki Yotsuga is the emperor’s father and shown in GXP, and just happens to have the same name as in Dual, means nothing. The Washu bioroids have no connection to D. No no no no no no… you’re full of it, leave it alone, there’s all this Japanese stuff that disproves anything you have to say. Getting the picture yet?

Well I’m stubborn, I saw how it fit even if they didn’t. They might know Tenchi, but I knew Dual. Dual was simply one layer in a infinite layer cake, along with Kajishima’s other series. I stuck around, posting when I could, picking up info, relaying what I found to DualFans. It may be of interest to note to fans that once upon a time, Kajishima did have a english website where fans could send in question by e-mail, already or preferably translated, and they might get a reply back. As it was, this is how we got the TM! 101 Secrets book. But for whatever reason, it was closed… I think we guessed it was spam or abuse at the time. AIC had a little note that all fan-mail was to go through their site from then on. *hint hint wink wink*

I sort of slunk back to DualFans for a while at this point. Didn’t frequent the Tenchi forums much. We had a couple of nice things happen, some of our members were finding loved ones, going on first dates, etc. But pretty much I’d say this was the start of where things went downhill.

DualFans had it’s first crash, something to do with the host screwing up a update. Took us down for a week or so. People took it in stride. About a week later it did it again, didn’t seem to be anymore problems. To be safe Kazuki backed things up. We’d upgraded the site and forums again, new theme, fresh coat of paint. Things had slowed down to mostly a core group of members and a handful of regular pop ins. We still had some fanfiction ongoing, but it was like book or series 4 of what started more than a year prior. It was good, but getting old. I’d managed to pick up the Dual US BESM Fan Guide by then and a bootleg OST (hey I was young and didn’t know the difference till I got it, still reported em to the FBI). So we were adding content in. Things were kinda stagnant though.

I think it was in spring when we got hacked. Over the whole web it seemed there was a major organized effort of overseas script kiddies going through and exploiting holes in what was poor phpBB security at the time. They hit a lot of forums everywhere. I can recall that I was starting to look at AnimeExpo and their forums even got taken out for a few days. So this was probably early 2005. Abh Nation that I’d finally reconnected with, got hit too, but they had people with IP security training and web development skills. They warded off the hacker attempts and kept on truckin. AFC I think was mostly ok. Tenchiboard got wiped or taken down for a couple weeks until someone in management noticed it was broken.

By this time too it’s worth noting that a lot of fansites started to fade away. The web rings were more like asteroid belts than connected sites. You hit or missed. In many cases I think the anime boom of the early 2000’s was winding down. Many people had websites up from the late 90’s and they simply expired, the hosting ran out, links didn’t work, no one remembered to update them. Unbelievable amounts of information was lost as lights winked out slowly but surely, not just for Dual, but Tenchi and other sites for what we’d now consider “classic anime.” Commercialism and mainstream anime took hold or at least came to the forefront in this period. Animenation’s store came into being, ANN was booming, this was also around the time that Toonami was going downhill in terms of their content. We hadn’t gotten to the Naruto’s and Bleach’s yet. Fullmetal Alchemist was about 3-6 months off from being on TV. The convention scene was growing painfully, but it was growing. I saw painfully because many big or “original” cons were suffering for funding and new content. We were in a transition period where con’s weren’t really together with any publishers, or sponsors back then. Trying to get guests or panelists was more about who you knew, or if someone cool just wanted to show up. It was much more informal and fan made than what we have now. Some cons died, some new ones rose in their places. Amazon.com was becoming a well known name.

I’m not sure if Geocities was taken down around this time or not, I think it was later around 2009. But that was like… getting knifed in the gut. Geocities had been a bastion for what old sites were still around. It closed fairly abruptly and took what felt like 1/3rd the Internet with it. Oddly I found out later that the Japanese branch never went offline, as of this writing it’s still running. Maybe what I’m thinking of is AOL Hometown…. which was like a offshoot of Netscape and AOL, which gave you something like 5 MB free storage online (woo hooo!). When they closed quite a few personal or mini anime pages disappeared. More so it was collections of GIFs, icons, little zip files and collections of stuff. Game sprites and things were pretty common. One guy from DualFans, MastaX.. had.. oh maybe 1000 animated GIFs on there. I stored all my avatars and banners on there. So while I had backups… all that went poof off the net. Many young startup web hosts were dying off too. So you could say that a good portion of the net had a lot of broken links, broken images, and so forth.

If I was making chapter titles, here’s where I’d put “downfall.”

From here on I’m going to be not mentioning particular names. Trust me it’s harder on me writing this “not” to mention them…

2005 wasn’t a good year. First off we had the above happening, second DualFans was getting slower and slower. Still had a decent core contingent but getting a hold of Kazuki was really hard. He’d vanish for months at a time. We’d had some prominent members sort of vanish, Kazuki elected me as global moderator and gave me the title Dual Guardian. Ganted nothing much by today’s standards, but I was honored.

I’ll get back to DualFans in a minute, but over at AFC they were having a multi part problem. One I think GXP got dubbed first by Funimation. A guy either from, or was working with Funi that went by the name Tomato, was working frequently back and forth with ANB about the translation. It came out and sort of rammed home that original feeling from the AIC days. Very very few people cared for the humor that GXP had. The mass wedding (sorry spoilers!) at the end made everyone realize what had been said about OVA 3 was probably true. The Idol being in GXP, along with 3 dozen other hints to Dual, made a lot of the anti-Dual people get much quieter. Overall, it was a big turn off.. again. As a side note ANB by this time had acquired the TM:R FAQ from DeathQuaker, so he was fairly figure head-ish in the community. But reason two, was a contingent of members became… oh what to call it… rowdy, causing trouble for lack of energy outlets, generally being serious pains in the ass? This caused problems with the moderating staff at AFC, though they did a amazing job not showing it on the surface. A lot was handled back door style, over PMs and emails.

The other issue, was we were getting new members that were feeding that same fire. Late teens to mid twenties folk that just did not know how to filter their word port. If they weren’t drunk when posting, it wasn’t a good time. (No offense to those who enjoy their beer). So fights were frequent, they started over nothing, or someone barbing another purposely to get a ruse. Some were organized attacks under the surface against the leadership, being reported to the mod staff as personal attacks, so the mods would take action or reprimand someone. If you can imagine Ryoko and Ayeka going at it non stop, complaining, yelling, etc that’s a fairly accurate mental image here. Once in a while we had a decent topic, some series news… some thought provoking discussion, but in came the jolly band of trouble makers… and it got a lot of threads locked… a lot split. Week long temp bans were fairly common cause people wouldn’t quit picking on others. It was a barely moderated zoo.

So we started losing more and more of the “old guard” members. I remember Watotsu fed up and leaving in some level of disgust. True Sheol, before he left had been talking to me on Dual ideas, said that he’d agreed all along about the multiverse theory. The mature fans were fed up with the direction the OVA was going, having a multi partner harem ending or this fiance come out of no where didn’t sit right, GXP had burned the bridge, and the board devolving into a place you felt wasn’t worth your time… culminated in them saying “I’m done.” So they left, and so did a lot of the information, translation abilities, and level headed parts of the board.

Now I’ll also stick in here that the AFC admin/mod crew then was sorta mixed. You had several people that were all taking care of things, but it shifted like everything else as some members just weren’t around as much any more. Like Beagle-san had kids, but in 05 I think Katrina hit New Orleans and that’s where he lived. They’d evacuated, but their house was more a sewer than a home when they got back. He’d already been sort of back and forth before that. Possium was reachable once in a great while. Bottom line is that the last crew standing was Jeff and Mary Morris (RedRN51), ANB, and Beagle’d pop in if they needed something big decided on.

Now let me step off her and talk about Jeff and Mary a bit. My first meeting was with Red as she was a regular poster from back since AIC. She had a big thing for GXP, and was one of the most vocal opponents I had against Dual fitting into the Tenchi-verse. She certaily got top 3 anyway. She ran her own ezboard and site oni-hime.com which was called Seto’s Fan. It didn’t see a ton of traffic, but it had it’s on little contingent of oldies that’d post there. Jeff was well known for his fiction that he wrote. You probably couldn’t find any original AIC person that hadn’t read it. I didn’t talk with Jeff much unfortunately, I probably would have learned some things. Mary and I went round and round until the point I started doing auctions.

Ok sorry but side stepping again, got to talk about that. Since I’d been around, and my Dual hunts lead me to buying stuff from Japan, I got involved with overseas brokers and machine translation. This being back with AltaVista Babelfish was the only thing around. So I had a way of getting stuff from Japan, to me. At the time, at AFC people had been complaining about the lack of Tenchi goods in the USA, they wanted stuff. This went on for a bit, and I finally piped up… what if I import things and you buy them off me? I know how to get them, you want em, we can all benefit from getting some novels and doujinshi in here, then we can see for ourselves what’s happening with Tenchi. Well this was well received, I just about had a qeue of people looking to get something. I’d flatly stated if I spend the money, you guys agree to buy it off me, I’ll keep the price for my end low as I can.

Well I went to Yahoo Auctions, went through my broker, bought up Tenchi doujinshi in bulk, groups of 30 to 40 at a time. I had pretty much everything except the Nontans at that point. Spent bit over $1200 in that first round. But I got around 110 doujinshi all toll, and some extras like novels and other books that were in the groups. Ok so I come back to the board, been keeping everyone up to date on things coming in. After the import fees, shipping, broker, and a little something for my time, doujins were about $40 a pop. Very few people wanted to buy anything. You’re free to visualize a roughly 18 year old sitting at a desk with a “oh cra…” expression. I’d spent the money, got what everyone wanted and more… now no one would take it. Sure I had some sales, but nothing like people had claimed they’d do. Learned an important lesson about trust in business that way…

As it was, I had to lower the price and take a hit on most everything. Oddly enough though, I got more people doing special orders, wanting specific things. So while I was eating crow on the big batch of stuff, I was breaking even or a little better on the special orders that came as a result of everything else. So here why I brought all this up – Mary got a hold of me, was interested in finding some GXP stuff, wanted to sort of call a truce. No reason we couldn’t do business, even if we didn’t see eye to eye right? Sure I could deal with that. Surprisingly enough we actually got along pretty well after all that, she even made me a moderator eventually at her Seto’s Fan forum.

At this same time, remember that the crazies had their run of the board too. One newcomer had quite an ego, but he came baring information direct from Japan in the form of doujinshi scans and partial translations sometimes. So on some level he fit in, and on another level depending on who it was, people were twittipated over whatever he came up with. Two problems though, ego and he was posting scans of stuff I was trying to sell. I consulted the AFC admins… I understood he was well within limits to post whatever, and in his position I’d post things too. But, not when someone is right there, was on the board already, and it was well established I was trying to get rid off all the stuff. I was just asking the admins, what should I do here? Basically what I got was.. you need to just talk it out in private, we’re not going to do anything (I wasn’t asking them to). So I got on the PM horn, basically said, hey can you just be considerate of me here, I’m not in great shape, deals went wrong. I think what you’re doing is helpful on some level, could you just maybe wait till after my sales are done or give me a heads up on what you’re going to post scans of – maybe we can work together on this?

Which yes I was asking cause the constant barrage of a new scan of this or that, I’d had people cancel buying something from me. Had special orders that I got frankly told that the only reason they were going to finish sending me the money is they didn’t want to make it look (in public) like they held me out to dry. Cause the scans were out, why bother buying anything right? Scans somehow managed to get out about the time I got the stuff to me… so the hard part then was getting the deal to go through with payment.

So I got a response back. I was told there and publicly on the forum, in no uncertain terms, that he didn’t care if I was hurt or not by his actions, he was going to continue doing so, and if I didn’t like it, I could go fly a kite. (not actual words there, I’m being nice) Needless to say, we didn’t have much of a speaking relationship. I let ANB know, the AFC mods had a few run ins with the guy, usually coming to the point where he was telling them how to run the board. Like I said, ego. ANB made a offhanded quip about it at Seto’s Fan I think… I replied in agreement. I got PM’d in about 2 days with a high strung hot worded complaint / demand that I remove my comment. Something like it was damaging to his image or false information about him, and he deserved a honest and genuine apology.. blah blah blah. I ended up taking my comment down just to get him to leave me alone. In my reply I was clear that I wasn’t all too happy with him either thanks to him screwing me over time and time again with the scans. That didn’t matter to him. Anyway, he went after ANB too same deal. ANB edited it and back to the usual hell we went.

Ok so back to Marry and Jeff Morris, they along with ANB were the last of the mod staff for AFC. Marry and Jeff were pretty laid back to begin with, unless you were debating them. But it was pretty clear they were stressed and getting more and more fed up with the board. The stupidity, bashing, fighting, barbs, baiting, was in full swing thanks to a core little group of crazies that enjoyed chaos. Mary and Jeff were actually pretty patient people, but they were having trouble in life with moving and work, among other things. They’d had enough too.

Ok back to DualFans *awwwwww* Yes yes I know, but we have to keep some semblance of continuity right?

Ok so DualFans wasn’t in the best of shape either. Kazuki was often unreachable. Other than the Tenchi stuff I found or had acquired from the mega purchase of doujins, nothing new was coming our way. We knew it, the writing was on the wall Our catch phrase We Want More Dual… we knew it wasn’t coming to save the day. So people slowly were trickling out and beginning to stay gone.

At the same time, I hit probably the lowest point in my life up to that time. My mother left late one night under the guise of an excuse, to run off with another man after 20 years of marriage. She proceeded to rape, pilliage, and destroy everything we’d built. If she couldn’t have it no one could. Tried to drain all our funds and worst of all, took my much younger sister to guarantee herself a hostage of sorts. This was being done under the guidance of the man she decided to run to, who promised her money, and sweet temptations, which of course were lies he’d told to several women before. He’d had a petty grudge festering in his heart for those 20 years, and took his opportunity when it presented itself. But from her, the verbal abuse, the emotional abuse, it continued with the vehemence reserved for a star going nova. Things that should not be said to any child, ever, were said with glee and destructive passion.

So my soul, and emotional state was completely obliterated. Home life destroyed. School life went along with my mother, since she was registered as my home schooling teacher. I overnighted papers to her, to be graded and sent to the school, she “lost” them. I had to accept failing grades. We were not allowed to speak with my sister without her “captors” lording over the phone and recording what we said, one word out of line and the phone was ripped away. Much more could be described here of the injustice of it all, but that is not the purpose of this narrative….

At this time, in remorse, my soul weeping, I told the members at DualFans that I didn’t know if I could keep helping out, supporting the site and being around. too much was uncertain. There was no centerpoint to that world anymore. Perhaps to you the reader, this may seem childish to be concerned over such a thing. But I’d invested years here. These people were of a sort, my family too. Some of these friends I’d offered back and forth advice on the choice to propose and get married. To their credit, the members of that dear forum encouraged me, and helped in some small way to keep my whits during those first few rough months. I owe them a debt of gratitude, for their listening and support.

But our trials unfortunately were not over…

Kazuki and me had gotten together and he planned to do a final big blast for Dual by upgrading the forum and website to have everything I’d collected over the years, along with his own collection people had given him over time. He called it the Tribute to Dual. We’d been inviting people back to the site, doing interviews with the fanfic authors to go into an interactive fanfic section. We had galleries and info coming out of our eyeballs. Well sorta. We knew the site was winding down, but at least we’d go out with a bang and remain as a testament for any fans that came after us. Sort of sad, but we were happy to see people returning that had gone away.

Well the forum host… Host.sk (hey look em up they’re still around *spits like a cowboy*) decided that they were going to upgrade the database software system wide. Betcha can’t guess where this is going right? They screwed it up, to the tune of their entire network was crippled. Whatever databases didn’t get wiped, locked their own owners out of them. So Kazuki was locked out. Probably 10,000 other host.sk sites all frozen. But what we didn’t realize was with the databases gone, the system was eating itself from the inside too. So the forum was the first thing to fail, you got a corrupted database message. Host.sk thought they figured it out, the sites came back online for like… 8 hours, and were broke again. It never worked after that.

So the whole site gradually broke on it’s own, piece by piece, over time. It’s actually still locked that way on the last date it was active. If you aren’t afraid of trojan virus alerts, go take a look at dualfans.host.sk. Kazuki couldn’t do anything, I couldn’t do anything. It was like watching the body of a friend in a hospital rot away. I only had contacts over AIM with a handful of people. This went on for over a month. Kazuki had been having similar problems to mine in his home, which where keeping him from the site understandably. So I finally said enough, we need a temp forum if nothing else before we lost everyone.