Mid-2000′s Phantom of the Opera Fandom Things

Meta
Title:	Mid-2000′s Phantom of the Opera Fandom Things:
Creator:	pastelwest
Date(s):	2016
Medium:	online
Fandom:	Phantom of the Opera
Topic:	Phantom of the Opera fandom history
External Links:	reblog by notpitifulchildren, original post is deleted
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Mid-2000′s Phantom of the Opera Fandom Things: was the 2016 post by pastelwest on the history Phantom of the Opera fandom. It listed the features and trends typical for this fandom during the mid-2000s. The post was fairly popular in the tumblr phandom and got reblogged by many fans, some of whom added their own recollections of the fandom during the discussed period.

It has 1,171 notes (as of 2020).

Post

• Musical Fans and Movie Fans screaming at each other constantly.
• “Leroux Purists” sitting in a shadowy corner drinking salty coffee and comparing French translation notes and being generally annoyed at literally everyone else.
• You gained fandom cred based on how many versions you had seen/listened to/watched/owned.
• PHANTOM REVIEWS.
• The Phantom of the Opera boards were still active and it was a matter of pride that they had gotten the phantomoftheopera.com domain before even Andrew Lloyd Webber himself had thought to purchase it.
• The masked smiley emoticons on said Phantom Boards.
• Roommates and Girls Next Door when they were just beginning.
• BEING ABLE TO CALL OURSELVES THE “PHANDOM” WITHOUT THE DAN AND PHIL CREW GETTING CONFUSED AND ANGRY AT US.
• The Leroux Erik Plush Project™
• Those fanfics where it was literally just “let’s dump every single version of Erik in a room and see what happens.”
• THAT WEIRD PERIOD OF TIME WHERE THERE WERE NAZI AU’S EVERYWHERE????? WHY. WHY DID THIS HAPPEN.
• Gerard Butler’s face photoshopped onto stock romance novel cover photos.
• E/C actually being the dominant pairing (as opposed to R/C).
• E/C and R/C actually being like. A legitimate ship war.
• A certain group of E/C shippers (known as the Unravellers) getting so Into This that they proceeded to do hundreds upon hundreds of pages of film analysis trying to uncover the 2004 movie’s Hidden Plot, which PROVED!!! that Erik and Christine were absolutely together 5ever in love and also there was something about Demons?
• The Unravellers proceeded to then get so much shit and so much harassment from the rest of the fandom that it became genuinely not funny and as hilarious as the whole situation was initially, both sides took themselves Way Too Seriously and things quickly crossed the threshold into Extremely Fucked Up.
• Raoul being completely synonymous and interchangeable with the word “Fop.”
• SO. MUCH. BADLY. TRACED. ART. OF. THE. SAME. DAMN. SCREENSHOTS.

Comments

• Leroux purists complaining about prettied-up ALW!Erik and then proceeding to draw Eriks that essentially looked like handsome gaunt middle-aged white men with long dark hair, just with no nose and yellow eyes for that canon™ authenticity

• Crossover fics with Les Mis, especially ones where Erik and Èponine hooked up.

• Sequels where Erik and Meg Giry hooked up (such a prevalent trope that I actually guessed this was where LND was going when the casting notices included a late-20s Meg, and then, I mean…)
• Phantom of Manhattan being considered the Worst Thing Ever before we knew what was going to succeed it. It was the prototype for Love Never Dies, except everyone was at least still in character even if the plot put them in bad circumstances- Raoul was a tender, devoted, kind husband and his inability to father a child came from being shot while still in the Navy, I think? Point is, a major blood vessel involved in PIV sex was destroyed by the bullet he took for someone else. Meg Giry was Christine’s best friend and personal attendant after she hurt her leg and wasn’t able to go back to dancing. Erik’s last name was Muhlheim. It was pretty bad, but we had no idea what was coming later.

• The general assumption that Erik’s last name is Destler, from the 1989 movie.

• BUT THE DUCKS WARRING IN/LET THE AUDIENCE IN/CAUSE MY MUSIC’S AFIRE!

• Phanwank on LJ, which eventually spawned an RP called the Sueniverse. The Sueniverse still exists, but isn’t really a POTO board at all anymore, though the character rankings by post number are still almost all Phanwank memes (‘masterful virgin’, ‘in the duggins’, ‘one with teh whales’, etc).

• Roule’s Ingenious Plane

• Sporking (doing mean-spirited running commentaries) on badfics (or, rather, ‘badphics’.)

• Paint Never Dries/Leroux Needs a Drink

• Requiem Mask!!

• Leroux and Kay being interchangeably the Highest Authority™ of canon

• A Lamentable Mess

• The misconception that the Opera was some kind of boarding school and all the ballerinas/staff lived there and slept in dormitories.

• Searching for Phantom references literally everywhere (I think Erik appeared once in some Universal Studios attraction?)

• Dario Argento jokes

I was there for the Hidden Plot. On that exact forum it unraveled. It was a fucking mess. Like legit, a fucking train wreck

(And I was an E/C shipper. I still thought it was an absolute fucking mess. Erik as King of the Opera House? Erik was actually possessed by a legit Phantom? It was batshit.

…..though I did kinda like the theory of Raoul and Erik being related. I thought that would have been a really cool twist)

ROULES IGENIOUS PLANE God what a fucking time how about that group of phans who continuously tries to prove that Erik actually existed.

does anyone else remember the Fifth Cellar fanfiction site?

Another one- People with copies of Kay!Phantom lording it over people who didn’t have copies.

…I must have missed the Nazi AU’s. Where was that happening? I remember a WWII AU where Erik was a war vet with like… a missing arm or something. But no Nazi AU’s. Who was the Nazi? It was Raoul, wasn’t it?

I always find it fascinating whenever a fandom rolls over into a New Fandom Era™ and looks back at the last one in confusion and distress.

In twenty years: “Remember when everyone was, like, OBSESSED with how hot the Daroga was? And all the religious Phantom versions? Weird times!)