spiderbraids

The web is an exercise in radical impermanence 😔
— Ramsey Nasser (@ra) July 21, 2019

As this article surmises, you can't trust the Internet to continue existing... most certainly at least not your favorite websites, and TV show fansites are certainly no exception :-\ And over the course of 15 years, Winx Club has seen many fansites come and go... In this three-post series, let's take a look at a couple now-defunct high-profile fansites Winxers like me used to visit...

The Winx Club LiveJournal (aka winx_club @ lj)
(June 22, 2004 - April 5, 2017)

Advert for the community from the founder's profile

The Facts
Founded by a doll collector known as eilonwe (later tanz_fanatika), the site boasted that "We were the first LJ community dedicated to Winx and we remain the best!" The community featured all sorts of fan discussion about Winx Club, and well-written episode summary/reviews written by the founder herself. It went members-only in December 2005 (along with many other fan communities run by the owner) after a serious bout of drama involving banned members.

The Personal Connection
It's the entire reason that this DreamWidth exists (I originally joined LJ to join the community, then transferred my blog over to DreamWidth) but the less said about my time as a member of this LJ community, the better :-\ The 4Kids era was a hard time for non-4Kids fans like myself, with fans being vilified for bashing the edited version (the profile page even explicitly stated "No 4Kids bashing" as a rule), and even after I adjusted my posts on the show's edits to be more objective, the moderators were still offended by things like posting fanfic reviews, and quoting members' posts without getting permission for a podcast... Is it any surprise I got banned rather quickly? :-\

The Demise
The Winx Club LiveJournal's decline is linked to that of LiveJournal itself: Even after LJ's sale to Russian concerns, the community continued to exist all the way through the Nick era, but the members-only nature of the community meant that its members had to log in to LJ to even see the posts, which with LJ's decline meant that the community hardly made an impact on the fandom in its latter days.

Just before the end, I discovered from the profile page that the owner forbade discussion of World of Winx over the whole "whitewashing" business, and she refused to support the spinoff because of that (considering that the spinoff had the best writing for the Winx in years, one imagines it would not have gone over so well in a more active community) The final nail in the coffin was when LJ's Russian owners decided to change their terms of service to align with Russian laws (which are, to put it mildly, somewhat less respectful of free speech than the US) and in protest, many members, including the founder, decided to uproot themselves from LJ to move over to DreamWidth (and I eventually followed in order to preserve the comments she made on my blog)