#db - The original Dragon Ball chatroom

[NeverRamza]

A long time ago, at least as early as 1996 (per a reference I found on Wuken's Homepage), there was an IRC chatroom that became the primary meeting place of Dragon Ball fans and website owners. Compared to the size of the chatroom, it had a tremendous downstream impact on English Dragon Ball fandom over the years. Nearly every moderate to extremely popular website owner could be found in the chatroom (or later one of its spinoffs) at one point or another. Relationships were built which lead to new sites being developed which shaped the conversation and attitude of the fandom during this era. This even occasionally extended into some of the first fan-relations website owners had with FUNimation. Longtime fan Steven Simmons, using the internet handle Daimao, became the translator for the company. Back then, it was seen by some as a crazy Metal Gear Solid-style infiltration from the fandom into this wacky company that was going through a bizarre identity crisis. It became a turning point for the company becoming respectable and putting out quality products with integrity. And now, FUNimation is the #1 domestic anime company today.

#db and its ilk also had its controversies. MrE of Planet Namek eventually became a regular. Not everyone may remember but his site initially started off as a repository for stolen media (images, links, and music) taken from other websites, all ripped off and uploaded to one location. He was one of the first to be so broad and shameless in his website ethics at the time, but thanks to getting a website domain name back before we all realized it was the obvious thing to do, and also getting prominent Yahoo positioning his website shot up to being the most popular Dragon Ball website on the internet. And when he decided to pop into IRC, we definitely hazed the ever-living hell out of him for a very long time. There was a clear reflection in his output on the website. I remember him inside of a year changing from the naive kid, desperate for acceptance, to hating everyone and everything (especially his own website).

There are many small stories of website owners coming together, inspiring each other through competition, and miserable drama as well.

So thinking about this today, I came to the realization that this point of English Dragon Ball fandom is almost entirely undocumented. Does anyone know or remember who started #db? Who were the very first prominent members? The chatroom was hosted on an IRC server whose only other popular channel was #ranma. It seems like the admins of the server hung out in #ranma and never made appearances in #db. I don't remember anybody ever having any clue who these people were. Eventually, the #db regulars shifted over to a new generation of regulars and so we became even more disconnected from its roots.

If you were ever there, it would be interesting to hear how you found it and what your thoughts are now.

[Kunzait_83]

Whoa. Unexpected blast from the past here.

While I certainly remember the infamous #db IRC and have indeed heard tons and tons of stories about it over the years going way, waaaaay back to the very beginnings, it wasn't someplace that I made a habit of personally and regularly hanging out in; mainly since I didn't own or operate a DB fansite back then. Though incidentally (and I don't think I've ever talked about this on here before) I did at one time attempt to make my own site, circa '95/'96/'97 or thereabouts, but the attempt fizzled out as other real life obligations got in the way. Would've been called "Muscle Tower" and it would've focused on reviews, Daizenshuu tidbits, and fansub video clips primarily, and the idea for it was largely influenced by most of the Latino and Southeast Asian DB sites that were around at the time (most of which I found to be some of the overall best sites around for in-depth discussion about pre-Z DB apart from the more Toriyama-focused places).

But yeah, since I wasn't a site owner or operator back then, I tended to stay away from that particular IRC server (though I think I poked my head in a couple times on a few occasions just to eavesdrop out of morbid curiosity) since it had a reputation for being exceedingly "exclusive" and such. I know that Wuken, Ed Gorgen, Steve Simmons, Dr. Briefs (guy behind the Capsule Corp. Homepage which created the original Dragon Ball FAQ) and folks like that were some of the earliest (or earlier) members of it, and I think that guys like Henri LaPierre and Curtis Hoffman also used to drop in and out of it occasionally from time to time.

LaPierre was one of the few guys on it I attempted to talk to a couple times, since he was one of the generally more approachable and down to earth guys from those parts: we mainly talked about DBZ Legends on Saturn, which was brand new at the time, along with good places to acquire Boo saga and GT fansubs. Other people (not everyone by any means, guys like Hoffman and Simmons were always very nice and welcoming) but a fairly good deal of some of the louder voices on there seemed to attempt to put on some kind of "intimidating" air, as if they were some sort of "important celebrity" who's time was valuable or something.

To be fair, that wasn't so much the case earlier on, but seemed to become more of a thing that grew increasingly worse and more toxic once the mid-90s gave way into the late 90s and early-most 2000s, right when the in-house FUNi dub first started and you got into the whole Planet Namek/Season 3-era of websites (VegettoEX knows exactly what I'm talking about here). Even normally super cool dudes like Chris Psaros started acting increasingly weird and offputting around that point.

My guess as to why that was has generally always been that it was probably a combination of factors like DB first becoming genuinely for-real mainstream-mainstream in the U.S. at this point, and a lot of these guys, along with some of them still being in their teenage years or early 20s and hormones/testosterone being what it is, suddenly found themselves these arbiters of authoritative knowledge about something that was no longer this one niche thing among other niche things (anime/manga) but now something that was obviously quickly becoming a genuine mainstream pop culture phenomenon, and were thus kind of thrust into this much bigger spotlight than what they'd originally bargained for at the beginning: one that had suddenly almost overnight given them these legions of "fans" (most of whom were brand new kids to the series and to anime in general, often elementary school age: the first ever Toonami babies in other words) hanging onto their every word and inflating egos left and right.

As for who originally started the room, I honestly couldn't tell you, as its one of those places that seemed like it was just "always" around. If I had to take an educated guess, I'd imagine it was originally started by some of the earliest fansubbers or people who attempted English translations of DB material going back to at least the late 80s/early 90s. But ultimately, I wasn't present for when it was first "established" cause I wasn't a site admin back then, so I really couldn't say with any certainty who the original creator of it was. Ultimately my personal experience with the place was very limited (since I generally felt I had little business being on there, outside of moments where my curiosity got the better of me and I'd snoop around for a bit), and most of what I remember/know about the place was from the grapevine of various online rumors and stories over the years (many of which I've taken with a pinch or two of salt, the game of telephone being what it is and whatnot).

I only vaguely recall hearing that it was the place that originally connected Simmons to FUNimation, but that generally doesn't surprise me. Like you said, that place was the original genesis of actual direct contact and communication between FUNimation and prominent DBZ webmasters online at the time, and that much was fairly common knowledge among those closely following all this stuff at the time.

My only real point of contention with anything you've said here is that I would HIGHLY disagree that FUNimation had become a "respectable" licensing company (outside of a few key titles of their own and their license rescuing a number of notable Geneon/Pioneer titles at least) and certainly I would also disagree vehemently that their acquiring the kind of power and pull that they have in the U.S. anime industry has been in any which way a good or positive thing in the long run. If anything I would argue that its been partly FUNimation's impact and effect on anime licensing in the U.S. (among other factors to be fair) that has helped contribute to the fostering and metastasizing of some of the most virulently toxic components of modern anime fandom. But that's a whole separate can of worms unto itself.

That ties in I guess to my generally very negative feelings towards that whole "transitional" era of online DB (and by extension, wider anime) fandom that was around that time (1999/2000 and onward) the point where the influence of things like Cartoon Network and Toonami seemed to begin poisoning the waters and the general tone and tenor of fan conversation noticeably and starkly drifted from looking to these things from a place of artistic appreciation, respect for the individual artists and auteurs, and pushing for broader creative respectability and standards for animation in general (all of which is where everything generally was solidly focused around throughout anime fandom in the U.S. from the late 80s through late 90s), and more towards a more business executive's lens for charting sales numbers and TV ratings and such and becoming obsessed with these infantile dick waving contests of who's pet series is "doing bigger numbers" as if that in any way matters to anything or that these were sports teams or something (and that also incidentally struck me as eerily reminiscent of the then-nascent Power Levels obsessing).

In many ways, I've been arguing for years now that things had NEVER ever really recovered from that era, and most of the worst, most toxic aspects of fandom today you can more or less trace their roots back to that particular period.

So yeah, I suppose I overall have mixed feelings (at best) about #db. Like so many other things in online DB fandom, it originally started out as an interesting place filled with interesting people that fostered some genuinely worthwhile discussion: but the general thrust of DB into the mainstream spotlight (specifically through an outlet like Cartoon Network/Toonami, which I maintain is one of the worst ways that DB and moreover broader anime as a whole could've possibly gotten its mainstream exposure) ended up being a corrosive factor that helped turn the place and the people in it into something kinda ugly.

That ugliness ended up permeating the entire fanbase (both from the top down and from the bottom up), and while certain individual aspects have gotten somewhat better over time (and certainly a lot of the folks from back then who were acting like total asshats had mellowed and matured considerably long since then), I would say that overall we as a general fanbase have never fully shaken off that general toxicity that came about from back then, and like it or not its now become what seems to be more or less a permanent part of the fan culture that's been here to stay.

[VegettoEX]

Yeah, outside of us and Steve (maaaaaaybe Greg and Ryan?), I'm not sure if anyone here would have ever been a part of it...?

The names I definitely remember were Junta, Wuken, Daimao, Carddass, and TheDuck. Like Kunzait's saying, whatever named Ed Gorgen and Dr. Briefs and other folks had were also hanging out in there.

I'm fairly certain they created an official web page for the channel at some point, because I remember #ssppp basically taking the idea wholesale and making a chat-specific page listing all the members, as well. Maybe we can dig around on archive.org on some of the older sites and see if and when anyone linked that page? That would probably give a little more info on things.

But yeah, I remember learning about it probably on alt.fan.dragonball and popping in and feeling incredibly out of my league and bewildered and intimidated by all the established, old people. Us "newbies" definitely formed our own dramatic clique and began supplementing conversations with AIM and such.