Originally Posted by
Leftovers
Cringe warning goes here. I felt like expressing some sincerity and practiced breaking through the wall of apathy to write it.
A long time ago, for uncertain reasons, it became important to me that I should try to learn about and commit to memory as much as I could about the history and social dynamics of this forum, notable discussions and events, the unique characteristics of posters and the subgroups they formed, and so on. I don't remember how it started, but I certainly had a lot of free time and a deep investment in this place, so it most probably seemed worthwhile to preserve this information in memory in case it was ever lost and had to be remembered. This is a laughable sentiment now, but it had only been a few years then that BL1 was reduced to atoms, and it was for his ability to ｐｅｒｆｅｃｔｌｙ recollect events from it that Cruor was my idol.
Anyway, at the time it felt doable to just read every single post of a very busy forum to stay on top of things and keep the historical record and social charts updated. Forum cliques, subforum divisions, thread isolates, cults of personality, Elders, the main IRC channels and semi-private offshoots, Skype, Kitchen Space, DSM, SB and TFF double-dippers, Skypechats, MAL immigrants, and so on. A staggering waste of time and mental capacity that ensured my university experience was a featureless void between blurry-eyed reading of the 6 hours of drivel in the overnight IRC log on the 7 am bus and rushing home to an internet connection to save the newest food sockpuppet's posts before they got wiped. I'm only mildly exaggerating, and it probably wasn't too much of a conscious effort, but it's still painful all laid out like that.
This is all leading to my point that between reading old posts about obsolete topics, scouring the Internet Archive for remnants of BL1, diving into defunct pbwikis old enough to vote, listening to old-timers talk about the good old days, and catching /myself/ talking in the same way about a completely different time, a sense of actual perspective settled in with regards to the scope of the BL diaspora, one less mythologised and more appreciative of how many people have come and gone through the site, adding something of themselves to it and creating friendships that last even after they leave it. If at some point I had a conception of BL as a city with old posters now living in the outskirts but still retaining their citizenship, so to speak, I had to see my contemporaries phase out of BL to gain proper perspective on the transience of poster circles and the pointlessness of defining the forum's identity through their presence. It's hard not to think like that when it feels like yesterday that I was reading people waxing nostalgic in their retirement homes about the forum having changed completely when I was new, now that I have my own retirement home mostly divorced from the forum's current affairs.
It's easy to see how just a couple of years of posting can become an eternal source of reminiscence with how much I miss the two-odd years of the Golden Age of GD, or have a proper sense of the communities formed in the early years of BL1 that never even made it to BL2 now that BL2 is over a decade old. Equally easy was to cast out a thread of theoretical continuity over such a long time by mapping out the partial history that the information I could find allowed me to formulate, compared to sticking around for the same amount of time to find out that there are two BLs, the one you share with your friends along the way, and the one that predates and survives your activity in it.
At any rate. Time seems to pass more uneventfully now and the forum is slower and quieter in the times of Discord, but the renewal of the community is the only certainty. It seems pretty silly to overly value any one clique or generation of posters when the time spent shitposting about japanese cartoons at any point in this website's existence is any given person's idealised and unparalleled golden age. While I still value the sense of heritage and ｃｌｏｕｔ within the fandom that BL's moonruners and loreposters command, as a glorified janitor and amateur historian of the forum I consider the way new group identities form as new people find their way here to be the truest testament to its continuity.
All in all, growing up within and along with a website leads to weird quasisocial attachments. Here's one to all BLers past and present, whatever chat they already have or one day will retire in. And keep having fun talking and learning new things about Type-Moon on BL, it makes the senile old folk happy.
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