I’m putting off studying for exams and googled “pirates of dark water fanfic” out of curiosity, and found this page…
“…Let’s face it, the Strider series is not the most popular Capcom series, by any stretch of the imagination. Actual news to report on is rare. This causes many sites to stagnate, and they end up looking like a Pirates of Dark Water page. If you’ve seen one of those, you’ll know what I’m talking about. It’s not pretty. Major updates consist of the webmaster notifying the community that merchandise is being sold on eBay, format changes, and the odd picture now and then. Sites like this play musical chairs and vanish.”
That’s a pretty unfair thing to say. I’ve never heard of Strider because I’m not a gamer, but this is a show that came out over 10 years ago, before animation as a serious medium really caught on, and it was canceled without any resolution, which turned a lot of people away, and it’s not something a lot of people think about or have access to. Yeah, I know we all wish that there’s more Dark Water content online, but what can we do? Not enough people remember the show well enough to be able to put a major amount of effort into creating online content, and those that do usually don’t have the time or ability to.
And if the “major updates” thing is a reference to my site–what else do you want me to do? I mean that, too–I want feedback for what I can do to make this site better for the people visiting it. I know I could be more diligent in getting episode summaries and such up, but just the fact that I already have this much content is a miracle (especially since the vast majority of it has gone up in the last 2-3 years, when this site’s been around since 1996), and it’s completely thanks to other people and their efforts that it’s come this far. This site is a culmination of not just my efforts at writing and compiling the content, but of pretty much all the major Dark Water fans online that have the ability to capture and compile content themselves. I’ve made this site as interactive as I know how to do, but it takes other people to drive the updates, too. Especially with this site.
I also try and do what I can to search for PoDW fanart and fanfiction that people have stored away in different art and writing communities, so that this really is your one-stop resource for pretty much everything online about the show. I’ve created a community at LiveJournal, and I think after exams, I’ll figure out how to start communities at DeviantArt and Orkut, too. Another problem is maintaining those, though, because I sort of feel obligated to keep on posting since I don’t know how to get people motivated enough to post on their own–I don’t think there’s really a way around that though, so…
(Well…that woke me up sufficiently. I’m off to the library–yes, at 10 PM on a Saturday, but that’s what happens when your work keeps you busy all through Dead Week so you have no choice but to start studying for exams the weekend before–to study like hell. These next 4 days are going to be awful…but I’ll have 1 1/2 weeks off after that to relax.)