Luli on the 'Net

a recap of my history on the Internet (and fandom)

i'm a child of the internet, for better or for worse. the first time i used a computer i was probably 3, and the first thing i did was play disney movies my parents illegally downloaded for me on Ares. one day my cousin, who is 10 years older than me, introduced me to barbie.com and club penguin. when my mom saw her she knew i was doomed. i bet i have been in front of a screen for... more than half of my life, seriously. i'm not proud of it, but i don't see myself stopping any time soon... i was always very obsessive, and i've been in fandom before i even knew what it was. technically my first fandom experience was frozen... at 5 on youtube, i was watching parodies, covers of let it go and edits before i had even seen the film.

besides that, i spent all the afternoon and evening on the family PC playing flash games. mostly the ones on the barbie websites, the monster high website, the official disney websites, and a site that was targeted at girls, but i cannot remember if it was girlgogames.com or not, but it did had pretty much the same games. i also loved club penguin a lot. my chat was always disabled so i never interacted with other players, i basically played it like it was single player and not an MMO. although i loved the concept of mmo's i didn't play many, the other one i played was one from my country called Mundo Gaturro (which is still up by the way), it's based on a national cartoon character from a comic strip called Gaturro (he's basically a knock off Garfield... the creator has multiple accusations of plagiarism and is also a right winger. the game was very fun tho i promise), in this game i did do a lot of role-playing, and i had a lot of friends, and i also saw a lot of the weird shit some kids (or not kids) did in there, unlike in club penguin. with it there also was this Twitter-like thing called Picapon that was connected to your account and you could talk to your friends there and make Tweet-like posts, AND when it close some players made a similar thing called Gaturoom, and i used it a lot too lol. i still am much more attached to club penguin, i believe i was there the day it shut down too. i started playing in 2013 when disney really started to take off with the "immersive advertising" or whatever they were doing, but i really didn't mind it because i never played pre-disney club penguin and was a very big disney kid. my favorite part of the game was still it's own storyline, i have lost count of how many times i played the secret missions. i still play the game today, mostly NCP because it's the version of the game i recognize the most. my username is lucianazul because that's what it was when i was a kid :)

i watched a lot of youtube, too. one day, probably 2014-2015, i was watching some halloween videos... i don't remember why, but they were like, animations? with music in the background? idk youtube algorithm you know the deal. but one of them had thriller by michael jackson in the background, and apparently my parents had never played michael jackson with me there before, so my mom heard the song and decided to show me the music video of thriller, and i kid you not, i watched that video every single day for like a year, i knew the choreography back then, i could act out the whole 13 minute music video. i watched a bunch of his music videos and might have watched full concerts on youtube (i also watched Living with Michael Jackson (2003) which was dubbed to spanish on youtube with no clue of all the scandal it caused lol). also, unfortunately, no one bothered to show me what an album was so until i became a teenager i never even listened to a full album of his. today i absolutely have, i'm still a big fan of his music.

i also watched other music videos. i was obsessed with katy perry's in particular too, they were amazing. i go back to her old music every now and then. another person whose music videos i watched in those years was miss Miley Cyrus. and my parents found out. because i had a little folder on the family computer where i put shortcuts to websites and videos i liked, and my 7 year old gay ass put the Wrecking Ball music video in there. my dad apparently checked it, which i didn't know he did, he and my mom scolded me and put age restriction on (my? their? our? i don't know whose i was using then) youtube account so i couldn't watch those kinds of videos anymore. i was very sad not because of Wrecking Ball specifically, but because i couldn't watch California Girls either :(

as i started to grow up, i started finding actual youtubers on youtube. if you're not latinamerican, you probably have no idea who these are, but if you are, i watched Los Polinesios, Caelike, Mariale, Sandra Cires, Ami Rodriguez, Amara Qué Linda, Sofía Castro, that crowd. sometimes AuronPlay too. then in like 2018 when argentinian youtubers were becoming much more popular, i started watching them a lot too, Mica Suárez, Angie Velasco, El Demente, PedritoVM, (Bajo Ningún Término también pero ya cuando se había ido todo a la mierda) and Sofía Maure (si los conoces sí ya se me muero de vergüenza yo también). a few of these i had fan accounts for on instagram because this was the era where i started using my mom's phone a lot. i made collage edits on picsart and video edits... one of two or them were pretty good.

youtubers led me to kpop (the worst one). i don't quite remember how i got to it, but a lot of it was fueled by some of these youtubers i watched making videos reacting to kpop, 'cause that was a thing they did a lot back then, this is like 2018. i first became obsessed with BLACKPINK, then BTS (which in the moment i didn't know was a... complicated combo). this went on until 2021, because the fandom sucked all the joy from me in quarentine. these groups made me get twitter in 2019, and that fried my brain. i spent every day of quarantine (which in my case was 8 months straight of not leaving my house at all) glued to my screen on twitter, and it made my anxiety a thousand times worse than it was naturally going to get. there were happy times, like when BTS released Dynamite, that was a fun day, but that's about it. i don't have many happy memories from that fandom experiencex in that particular time it was very toxic ESPECIALLY the spanish speaking part of the fandom was terrible, i may sound a bit ridiculous but i promise people were mean as fuck and it was also full of terfs for some reason. even though i still love the band's music (not BLACKPINK's, i dropped that fandom a while before because i started to really dislike them and their music, sorry if there's a blink out there). what i do give it is that it was my first REAL fandom experience, it got me into fanfiction, RPF, fandom lingo, etc., and while i was in it i started to discover my own sexuality too, and the fandom was quite welcoming in that aspect. so i do thank it for that.

now, between Youtubers and Kpop, was Stranger Things, but i didn't mention it because it is it's whole different thing. i didn't get into it because of the internet itself, i got into it because this new schoolmate of mine and her older sister liked it, and i really wanted to be liked by them because i found them so cool and wanted something to talk to them about, so i watched the show they were such fans of at the time. i ended up becoming genuinely obsessed with it, i watched videos of the cast on youtube all the time, i lurked in the instagram fandom which was enourmous at the time, i basically interacted with anything ST related that was in spanish that i could find. at this time i started to also watch a few USAmerican youtubers whose videos had subtitles in spanish, like Joana Ceddia. i was always good in english at school and always listened to music in english, and rewatching ST in the OG audio helped me learn a lot, and so it wasn't that weird to me to start watching content in english. one day i put on a video and forgot to activate the subtitles and... didn't notice until the video was almost over, and i had understood everything Joana was saying. i knew english! that's when the possibilities became endless... lol.

now, 2019, Stranger Things 3 comes out, and it's a huge success, everyone's talking about it, big deal. now, after watching, i started to wonder if someone shipped Will and Mike, because i had noticed a vibe... that's when i found out about Byler. people did, in fact, ship them, and specially started to do so after S3. i found translations of a few analysis of the show, originally posted on Tumblr in english, on Wattpad. they convinced me. i didn't do much about it at the time, but they were on my mind when thinking of the show. for someone that was so online it took me way too long to make a Tumblr account, for a long time i thought Tumblr was just a word that meant cool, not a social media platform. i had an aesthetic kpop blog in 2020 that got a very big amount on followers, actually, but i stopped using it fast. when Stranger Things 4 was announced, i knew the fandom was big on there, specially everything Byler came from there, so i deleted that Kpop blog and made a new account for Stranger Things. i have been using that account until today i have a grown very fond of it, it's so full of things i love now. Tumblr is pretty much the only social media platform i actually use and don't hate it while i use it. i know it has fame of being a hellhole but its actually the most positive one out there and its easy to curate your experience there instead of just having an algorithm that feeds you rage bait all day.

ST4 came out in 2 parts so the month in the middle of it was wild, and so fun. this was pretty much my first full, good fandom experience, pretty much pure fun for me. the fandom has got a lot of flaws, but i have learned to curate my experience now, i learned how to actually have fun. Stranger Things is my favorite piece of media ever, really, and has accompanied me in lots of ways these years. it played a big role in making me learn a different language that i'll probably make a career out of, reading basically essays about it got me into film analysis, and i have a lot of good memories of it. i'll always cherish it i think, regardless of how it ends.

so, while using tumblr i got really into editing my custom theme. is a pretty forgotten part of the site, most people don't have one and if they do it's just a premade one. there's a few people that are still into them and make them themselves, and a lot of those people had a neocities website, too. that's pretty much how i discovered it :)

i wrote all of this unplanned, i didn't expect to write this much lol. these are not all of my fandom experiences or all of the shit i have done on the internet, but it's a lot of it. if you read all of this... wow thank you lmao i hope i didn't bore you out of your skull ajskawdj <3