I'm feeling quite sad because the website where I first started reading fanfiction has officially closed today. This was the beginning of something that has become an essential part of my life as a fangirl, and it's quite depressing to see it go. Worse than that might be that, because Potterfics (the website) was for Spanish speakers, it's not likely that I will find many people in the Internet who even know of it.
I don't normally make my own posts here, but Potterfics was a huge part of my life when I first started getting into fandoms, and a part of me thought it would always be there whenever I wanted to revisit a story I read maybe years ago (and I'm talking years, people) which I remembered fondly.
I honestly think that, for those of us Spanish speakers, Potterfics may have been the source of many favourite works. Some works were products of their time, it's true, but they were excellent reading material when I read them at the time, and they made me laugh, and cry, and squeal into my pillow so my mom wouldn't realise it was the middle of the night and I was still on the phone or the computer.
Maybe I'm being a tad dramatic, but for me it feels like an end of an era. Like that little kid I was, the one who loved reading books and didn't know she could share thoughts and headcanons about the different characters with people on the Internet, is being left behind. It honestly feels like some part of me is gone forever.
That doesn't mean, of course, that I don't appreciate Fanfiction.net or Ao3, because God knows their tagging system is way better and you are more likely to find betaed and proofread stories there. The quality is better, but there was a feeling of coming back home whenever I recalled a scene from a fic I had read more than ten years ago and I went back to check it out one more time.
I'll always remember some of the stories I read on that site fondly, even if the details get hazy. And I know I'll never find them again anywhere else, because (as I said) the site was never as known or popular as Ao3 or Fanfiction.net.
I hope at least someone out there feels a little sad about this, so that I don't feel so alone in my melancholic pain.
A thank you to Potterfics, to the people in charge of running it, and to all the lovely authors who took the time to gift people like me works that probably were our introduction to this crazy fandom life.