No but you have raised my curiosity about it

OH BOY. gundamwatch was basically like having a friend who used to be really chill and great to hang out with, only for them to discover tumblr social justice and slowly morph into a batshit insane, overly-sensitive shitlord. 

it was a gundam forum that was around from about 2001-05 or so. it was actually my first venture into the gundam fandom waaaay back in early ‘02. it was pretty good from what i remember in the early days, but then their was a changing of the guards with who ran the place, and gradually the rules got stricter and stricter and it became a much less enjoyable place to hang around.

they had this rule that “if it’s gundam, it’s all good”. i assume it was put in place to keep universe elitism to a minimum, but it gradually become “you aren’t allowed to say anything remotely bad about any gundam series ever”. and if you did, one of the mods would send you the most pretentious, condescending piece of tl;dr explaining how what you did was SO WRONG and against the rules and what not (and then your post would be edited or deleted). no lie, that happened to me for calling char an asshole. not a terrible character or anything, just saying that he was an asshole (because HE IS). that was what made me say fuck it, though i did return to lurk every now and then.

nevermind that i seem to recall people calling ghinius and the like all sorts of names and not having their posts edited and whatnot.

when they banned people (which happened often in the end, due to how damn restrictive they got) they made sure to make a thread about it in the announcements forum complete with pretentious tl;dr about why they were banned. they fucking gloated in it, i swear.

it eventually closed down for good, and during its last days the only people left posting were the mods and a few loyal asskissers. everyone else had either been banned or left on their own accord. it was completely pathetic, and honestly really sad to see since it used to be a great forum in the beginning, one that at certain points in my life was pretty much my entire social and support network.

I know mechatalk loooves to go on about how they aren’t gundamwatch and how much better they are, etc, but honestly it has a lot of the same damn problems and even the same people as gundamwatch. it even has the same “no favorites threads” rule. unlike gundamwatch they do allow people to criticize shit, though if you express an unpopular opinion you’ll be dogpiled by condescending elitist assholes (as opposed to having your post edited by a mod).

Oh, Gundamwatch… (Brace yourselves, folks, this is going to be long.)

I was a mod there pretty early on…just as the Gundam Project forums were closing down, but before Gundamwatch itself went to hell. At that time, it was a pretty fun place, and I’d made some good friends—and bitter enemies—while there. Once I was elevated to mod status on “rival” forum Gundam.com (that place was a whole other ball of drama in and of itself, let me tell you) in early ‘02, they gave me a special status that wasn’t mod, but still allowed me to consult on behind-the-scenes decisions and such. Basically, they didn’t want me to deal with the stress of modding two forums at the same time (and believe me, the Gundam fandom circa 2001-02 was stressful as fuck), but they also valued my input.

Then…stuff happened. The biggest of those was the change in ownership, and how rules started to change and things were not how they were when I was helping run things.The second owner often gloated behind the scenes about being a “benevolent dictator” and revelled in his draconian policies.

There was also another incident in early ‘02 between me and another prominent member there (I think he was a mod at the time, but I can’t remember) that occurred when we met in person. It’s not something I like to talk about, because it left me in a very, very bad place for a long time. (Those who were there for a lot of it know what happened, and I would prefer to leave it at that.) But that particular incident drove a huge wedge between the staff (to say nothing of other members who knew about it by virtue of hanging out in our daily AIM chats), and it was around then that things got even stricter. Many of the male members of the staff also started getting particularly unpleasant towards us female staff (as I wasn’t the only one), and it bled out into the rest of the forums too, because they really seemed to go after female members like AR or Kishiria and less so the actual (male) troublemakers, even though what they were doing wasn’t remotely worthy of admonishment. I didn’t like the direction this was going, but I dared not speak my mind on this, because doing so in that environment was akin to sentencing yourself to death.

Somewhere in this was some big Gundam.com drama where they booted me out as mod and I decided to just leave that place altogether (I’ll definitely need to tell that story sometime), and Gundamwatch eventually bumped me back up to part-time mod. This did not last long, because sometime in ‘03, I eventually got tired of remaining silent on the things that bothered me about the way things were being run and spoke my mind. I wasn’t banned, but between that and the aforementioned incident in ‘02, I was deemed “too emotional” to be a mod (yeah, I know…WTF?) and stripped of mod status and any other special status I’d had before any of this. (What made it more upsetting for me was that my now-fiancé, who I’d met in the fandom in ‘02 as well, was kept on as mod after being added sometime before that even though our relationship was no secret.) While I didn’t outright say it there, I just gave them a figurative “fuck you” and left the place—and pretty much all of Gundam fandom until early 2012—behind. (I think my fiancé followed me out of there not long after.)

A couple years later, I befriended someone on another forum in a completely unrelated fandom…and by sheer coincidence, it turned out she was a mod at Gundamwatch for a time after I was gone. When I told her about what it was like for me, she said it had only gotten worse after that—the male staff became even more sexist towards females, and they were even stricter about silencing dissent. There may have even been some Dominonist trappings about them too (seriously…go look up that term on Wikipedia and be afraid…be very afraid). So perhaps it was a good thing I got out when I did.

When I heard that it finally vanished for good, I took a smug sense of satisfaction in seeing it finally gone, because the shambling zombie of the original forums I so enjoyed needed to be put out of its misery. They tried resurrecting it a few times after that, but it never lasted long, and it finally died out. The closest thing that remains now is MechaTalk at MAHQ, but it’s not nearly as bad as the worst of Gundamwatch (though it has its moments that make me wonder why the hell I ever signed up there in the first place).

And that, my friends, is the sordid history of Gundamwatch from someone who saw a lot of it from behind the scenes and who dealt with a whole lot of horrible shit as a result of it. Be glad that many of you were not around for this.