https://varishangout.com/index.php?threads/studying-the-origin-of-hentai-in-the-west-usenet.2668/

Thought this was interesting. The author goes through some old usenet posts, trying to find out how erotic manga and anime came to be categorized as hentai' by westerners, and the evolution of the use of the term, as well as how terms like lolicon' were understood at the time--observably different from how it is now, including and more avidly referring to a demographic interested in high school age girls with lolita' and bishoujo' being considered interchangeable.

When I was watching SDF Macross recently, there was a scene where they had decided to translate lolicon into ``likes high school girls'', which I thought was an odd word choice, perhaps a bit censored?- but upon reading this it suddenly made sense considering the time it was made. I wonder if anyone else has picked up on this from shows around that decade.

Also look at that flamewar that's linked in the middle, lol. As an aside, if you want some time-burning amusement I can highly recommend combing through anime-centered newsgroups from the era, a lot of it feels indistinguishable from modern shitposting save for the specific series they discuss. Mind you, this was all Usenet in the 90s--long before 4chan.

>As an aside, if you want some time-burning amusement I can highly recommend combing through anime-centered newsgroups from the era, a lot of it feels indistinguishable from modern shitposting save for the specific series they discuss. Mind you, this was all Usenet in the 90s--long before 4chan.

I have an affinity for web banter and discussion in its most basic form, which is why textboards appeal to me so much. I love the way 2channel was, and the way 4chan was in formula, but find the image component of imageboards to be so extraneous that a board like [this one] is my ideal. It's sad that textboards like 4-ch never got a serious foothold in the west, so that style of pure-text banter is basically a distant memory in the form of Usenet.