I never got to experience the pre-'net days. But I grew up in mid-to-late 90s and early 2000s fandom and I miss it all the time.
The drama and downsides were there, of course. I remember waiting days for the video equivalent of a shitty animated gif with midi music to download. My family was really poor, so I only got to buy something like a gaming magazine once a year or so, and I held onto those things and read and reread them until they fell apart. I coveted demo disks like they were the holy grail. Everything was really hard to get, so I appreciated it a lot more. Now I can pop on over to youtube and watch ten million fanvids and then go to AO3 and have my pick of thousands of well-written fics all featuring my favorite characters. Back then I had to wait days for a midi version of a song to download and I had my pick of the ten fics on the fandom's web archive.
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The drama and downsides were there, of course. I remember waiting days for the video equivalent of a shitty animated gif with midi music to download. My family was really poor, so I only got to buy something like a gaming magazine once a year or so, and I held onto those things and read and reread them until they fell apart. I coveted demo disks like they were the holy grail. Everything was really hard to get, so I appreciated it a lot more. Now I can pop on over to youtube and watch ten million fanvids and then go to AO3 and have my pick of thousands of well-written fics all featuring my favorite characters. Back then I had to wait days for a midi version of a song to download and I had my pick of the ten fics on the fandom's web archive.