What got you started making shrines?

[Crystal]

As all of us are either new to shrines or have been making them for years I thought I'd ask the question what got you started making shrines?

As for me I was pretty much a noob when I was introduced to the idea years ago but I thought they were the coolest thing when I stumbled upon them (Stacey-Ann's Grace and Emi's Double Negative were my biggest inspirations). After deciding I wanted to make one as well I turned my Lyndis fanlisting into a shrine as well (which is still online today but is severely neglected). Although, to be honest, I don't think I really got into shrining -- let alone completely understood the concept of them -- until I joined Amassment back when it opened years ago on LJ.

So yeah, how about you guys? :D

[Puppeteer]

Man...it happened so long ago now it's funny to think about lol. I was really obsessed with Kouga from InuYasha like, 10 years ago, and googling for him or the series yielded mostly shrines. Browsing around those sites got me really interested in the idea of doing an online dedication like that, so I tried my hand at it. I was only focused on the content aspect versus design though, since I didn't know a lick about HTML or anything then.

Shrine culture was flourishing at that time, too. Places you could apply for awards and get your name out, extensive networks of fandoms--it got me driven to work hard and was easy to get absorbed in. It was those types of activities that made it a hobby for me, instead of just a try-it-once-and-forget-it sort of thing.

[anon]

It was the year 2000 and my friend made a Digimon fan site... only it was more like her taking on a Digimon name and then posting image galleries of her favorite Digimon. I thought it was cool so I made my own Digimon site some time later.

[Mikari]

Before Fanfiction Net came around I went from site to site looking for good stories. I got into writing my own (which sucked back then, but hey it's all part of learning) and would send my fics to other sites. Eventually I wanted to join the fun and have my own place to put up fanfics. From a fanfiction site it grew to a fanfic site with a gallery and that turned into fanfics + graphics and it all kept growing and growing from there. I later got into Fanfiction Net, and other such sites and stopped making my own sites, instead keeping only a main page to link to all the sites I posted at. I later got back into it because I wanted a place to put my Reno pixels. Eventually I moved them to Deviant Art and did a big revamp on my collective. That's when I made Golden Phoenix as an experiment to see if I could make a shrine that was similar in style to the majority of shrines in Amassment, meaning info-centric. More such experiments followed to participate in events, though none of them would exist if not because Amassment made them fun. It was and still is, more so about Amassment then my own initiative when it comes to making those types of shrines. It's just really fun to share them here in a somewhat similar sense to how I share fanworks on archives (which I'm even more into these days).

[dragoneyes]

Usually I would say "it's all because of Saya" since she was the one that prompted me to actually make my first "official" shrine, but I've recently realized that the first site I've ever made was a shrine of sort itself.
It originally was created to talk about a handful of series (the plan was 3-4 series) I liked at the time and collect fanfictions and fanarts about them, so in a way it was kind of a collective shrine. You could say that it was just by looking at other people's websites and deciding to make my own that I got into shrines.

[Emma]

I actually can't really remember. I think I found places like rinoa.nu and co. and was inspired, although it was a while before I made my own shrines. I think I joined the forums at [s]spira.net[/s] yuuna.net? If I'm remembering that domain name right. I feel like Final Fantasy X factored in somehow.

[Aa-chan]

Waaaayyyy back in the late '90's-early '00's, I was really obsessed with Final Fantasy IV (I RPed Porom and Anna in a group on AOL, wrote fanfic, visited FFIV-based sites like sygnus.org daily). This lead me to see if there were any other FFIV sites on the 'net, and, when I didn't see very many, decided to make my own character shrine(s). I persuaded my dad to buy me a nuname, after being obsessed with magitek.nu (and Pange's now-missing Rydia site, Caller), and got into HTMLing and the like with mysidia.nu.

Soooo... Several different factors, yesh. =D All in all, awesome memories.

[Sarah]

I think it was when Anipike was really popular and I would see all these awesome shrines/fansites dedicated to various anime. I felt like I wanted to make one too. Especially a Digimon one, because I was very much into Digimon at the time. My good friend was learning HTML and made a couple websites herself, which piqued my interest even more. That's pretty much how it started for me. :)

[Todd]

I used to visit sites to Animorphs and Everworld back in the day, as I was obsessed with those series. I decided I wanted to try to make my own Everworld site, so I did. Some of the webmasters in the Everworld community had other sites (Stacey Anne was part of the Everworld community with me, and she had a Digimon site, a Pokemon site, and some others...), so I kind of followed along and decided to make multiple sites to my interests as well.

[dubiousdisc]

It was the year 2002 or something when I picked up this magazine which had a page about Pokémon fansites. I was not aware of the concept of a fansite, so I jumped in and looked it up, then all its links, and all their links, and at some point during that I got to chat a bit with some of the people involved in that and decided I wanted to make my own fansite.

Some time later, I stumbled upon a Pokémon fansite which also had one-page shrines to the owner's favorites. Then I discovered fanlistings and browsed them a bit and found out that some of them were also part shrines. The idea of having more than one site was very wild to me at that point, but it sounded so fun. My first thing was a single-page shrine to Blastoise within my larger fansite. Not much after that I wanted to get into fanlistings with shrines too, and so I opened the Sneasel one, and the rest is history.