Frogs vs. Roses
Year: 2001 (Small update in 2008)
Date of Archival: Coming soon...
Run by: Amanda
Originally hosted at: www.angelfire.com/anime3/amanda
Status: Incomplete
Archive Link: Coming soon...
It's the strangest sites that really catch our attention. This was one of many Team Rocket fan-sites run by a young person on the internet who wanted to spread the love of those Pokemon antagonists, but for some reason it was one I loved to check constantly. Maybe it was the fanfiction, or the charming in-character banter, or as usual the sheer enthusiasm pouring from every word. Whatever it is, this is the one Team Rocket website I remember above all others.
I actually found this website through a friend, as both of us were regulars on a different Team Rocket site. Like I say, there were a lot of them. I wish I could remember the name or URL of the other one; I think it was something as simple as Nyaasu no Party, but of course nowadays all that'll get you is links to the actual Meowth's Party. Anyway, as fans of TR, this place had pics during a time it was tough to get pics, info like their Japanese names, and of course fun fanfiction and roleplay galore.
Being a site made by an enthusiastic kid, you're going to find a lot of old school thoughts about things that were somewhat hot-button issues in the fandom at the time - shipping wars, of course, but also the use of English vs. Japanese names, James's sexuality (the concept of queer-coding was a long way away from most kids' minds at the time, and 'gay' was still seen as something insulting), and the concept of a crack fic. It can be hard to remember just how much of a sensation Pokemon was, and when you combine that with groups of young, enthusiastic, passionate fans who had access to HTML tutorials and free web hosting, well, that's when you got this wonderful little slice of 2001.
Part of the reason I remember this site so vividly is incredibly silly. When I was in 7th grade, I had to turn in an assignment where I wrote a story about a road trip. For some reason, I just didn't want to do the assignment at all, and I ended up plagiarizing the Road Trip story from this very website, but I ctrl-F'd and replaced every instance of Meowth with "Jon". The teacher gave me a decent grade and I got to perform it in front of the class with a few others. My dirty secret, my secret shame, my original Pokemon guy "Jon".
This site is currently under construction, and while all the main info will be there once archived, there will be several dead images just because of massive Angelfire purges over the years. One delay in the archival process is that a lot of the links are pointing towards the live site and a lot of the images are hotlinked, so once I've crawled through the website and fixed the links to point internally and backed up the images, this one will be archived albeit somewhat incomplete. Either way, I hope people find this one as charming as I did and still do. It's gaudy, it's garish, it's juvenile, but it's fun, and it puts a smile on my face. As Amanda said herself in her final update in 2008, I hope that everyone still has a little kid in them and can remember the fun times, and that the younger generation can appreciate it too.