Why I'm Glad I Revisited Quizilla

Are you having flashbacks yet?

Hello, it's May 27, and today I'm going to talk about a very important period of my life: middle school.

Ah, middle school. Those years when you begin to break out of infancy, throw all things childish away, and become an adult, at least to yourself. No, not an adult. Adults are stupid. You become a teenager. Which is arguably even worse.

I always considered myself unique when I was young in the sense that I was never a kid who wanted to grow up too quickly. When I was a kid I was acutely aware of the fact that being a kid was way more fun than being an adult, and I wanted to stay "a kid" for the rest of my life. So strong was this desire that I even cried on my tenth birthday because my age was now in the two digit numbers, and I could never go back to single digits. But of course there are benefits to growing up, and one of them was: increased computer privileges.

I was introduced to the internet through my elementary school after-school care. If you wanted to, you could go to the computer labs and just sit there and play on the internet for an hour or so. We were only allowed to go to five websites: cartoonnetwork.com, barbie.com, clubpenguin.com, nickelodeon.com, and neopets.com. It didn't matter that we were restricted from everything else; those sites were plenty for a fourth grader just wanting to play games. In middle school though, things stepped up a notch. And so my addiction began, the summer before seventh grade. How well I remember it.

I was attending a summer camp at my middle school. It was basically glorified day care for middle school aged kids, but I didn't mind because I had a friend there so it was like having a playdate every single day of the week. Again, we were allowed to go to the computer labs and use the internet, but now we were allowed to go to other sites. The two that I frequented most? Youtube and Quizilla.

Sasori, aka the love of my Naruto obsessed life. Strangely,
I never wrote a fanfic about him. I still may or may
not have an anime crush on him.

I was a massive otaku in middle school. I adored all things Japanese, whether it was manga, anime, the Japanese language, or Japanese cuisine. I loved it all. Mostly though, I was a huge manga/anime fan. And that summer, the summer it started, my major addiction was Naruto (I still have a nostalgic soft spot for the manga in my heart). I was head over heels for that show. I got my friend into the show as well and that was it. My entire summer was Naruto obsessed. I spent so much time watching Naruto AMVs, flash animations, drawing Naruto OCs, reading fanfiction, and writing fanfiction. I did all this on Youtube and Quizilla. My fixation died off several months later, and I moved onto newer sites like fanfiction.net for my fangirling needs. I began to fangirl over other series and make OCs for other stories. In short, I left my middle school otaku life behind me and became, you know, a regular human being. Relatively speaking.

So why did I tell you all this? Just today, I heard a little fairy whispering in my ear, "You should see if your old Quizilla account is still there." I don't know where it came from, but I'm the queen of nostalgia, so I thought I'd do it, just for fun. I found my old username from an email and logged in, and hey, there it was. All my stories that I'd written in 2007, still on the site.

Don't forget the generic anime girls that everybody used as faceclaims.
 I distinctly remember this one. I think I even used it once.

Not without trepidation, I began reading. And horror, disgust, disbelief, and hilarity flashed through my brain in .0001 seconds. It was terrible. It was so awful I couldn't believe that I had written it. Surely even thirteen year old me was a better writer than this. But nope. It was me. Once the horror passed, I found myself reading with a smile on my face. Yeah, my stories were complete garbage, but reading them put a smile on my face, and I reread all my old stories eagerly.

Now we finally get to the title of this post. Why am I glad I revisited Quizilla and subjected myself to reading my past literary indescretions? Because reading them was fun and it reminded me of how much fun I had writing them when I was thirteen, as silly as they were. One of the biggest problems I have today with writing stories is worrying how they're going to turn out and trying to get everything right the first time. Thirteen year old me didn't worry about any of that at all. She just had fun putting together a story she wanted to tell. In a way, I was more free as a writer at thirteen than I am now at nineteen, and re-reading my old stories reminded me of the sheer happiness that churning out a new fanfiction chapter gave me. The summer of my Naruto obsession was also the summer I began to really practice drawing, so I can credit Naruto with both my love of drawing and writing. Reading my fanfiction brought back all those good memories of being a complete and utter fangirl with my friend about a show that we loved. And while most people would probably cringe at those memories, let me repeat that I am the queen of nostalgia, and it just puts a silly smile on my face to remember those times. So that's why I'm glad I revisited Quizilla.

Really though, my stories were awful. Like, vomit-worthy levels of terrible writing. And this was before I started learning to speak Japanese properly, so there's too many instances of horribly misused Japanese words. But again, everybody has to start learning to write somewhere, and I'm glad that the worst examples of my writing are buried deep in the darkest recesses of the internet where nobody will ever find them. Hopefully.