I'm so sad i'm a zoomer and never got to experience it, the fanart was so soulful, the AMVs so bad but endearing, the fanfics so cringey.
It really was the peak of the fandom, it wasn't mainstream enough like today so it had some nice niches where you could find cool creative people.
Was it really as great as I think it was or am I looking at it though rose colored lenses?

>>58046674 (OP)
>Was it really as great as I think it was
no, so many people got groomed through pokemon skype groupchats

>I'm so sad i'm a zoomer
I was confused because I'm a zoomer and got into pokemon in the mid 2000's but then I realize you're probably some 2007 fetus.

It was fun. My school celebrated the release of DP with bookmarks and we traded cards at school. Pokemon trailers were actually hype and I fought/traded with people both online and irl.

>>58046683
That was literally every fandom. Most teenagers into pokemon were not erping as Lucario on the internet.

>>58046746
If you're old enough to drink in the US you're not a real zoomer

>>58046674 (OP)
Being from a third world country, I missed the crappy MSPaint DevianArt accounts, but back then I remember trading stickers, cards, and even pogs.
Remember pogs? No, you wouldn't, you are a zoomer. It was the closest to prison gambling back then: you and some kid threw the pogs against a wall. The one who remained the closest to the wall was the one walking with the pogs.
Good times.

>>58046775
That's not how it works buddy

If Sinnoh is older than you then you're too young to post here.

>>58046778
You still didn't explain what a pog is. Isn't that the twitch emote?

>>58046778
in my school what we'd do is pool our Tazos (pogs but europoor edition) together in a pile and turn them face down, then we'd take turns throwing a single one at the pile, whichever ones we got to turn face up, we'd keep

>>58046754
Sonic, MLP and Pokemon were the 3 communities most infamous for it though

>>58046795
You are right.
Pogs are small collectionable plastic disks. They used to come everywhere. In a bag of candy, or inside snack bags like potato chips or cheese sticks. Those were cool.

>>58046796
I remember doing something like that, but the trick trying to flip the pogs. We all put them face down, and then slap them on top. If the slap made them flip, it was yours.

Did any other zoomers not know what Johto and Hoenn were? I first got LeafGreen when I was like 8 in 2006 which was well into Gen 3, and before that I remember watching some of the anime and Burger King toys my aunt gave me who worked there. When I first played Emerald, it blew my mind out exotic and different everything felt from Kanto and what I was used to.

>>58046831
I remember watching the anime so I knew about Kanto and Johto, but my first game was Sapphire.
After that, I dropped the anime (mid Advance), and stuck with the games.

>>58046831
I was born during gen 4 and only knew about Kanto, Kalos & Alola

>>58046831
I got into pokemon from FRLG too in 2005 and knew what Hoenn and Johto was but had no interest in playing the games because I thought playing an older gen was stupid.

>>58046831
I knew what kanto and johto was when watching the anime. Emerald was my first game though around the late 2000's.

>>58046831
Oldest of zoomers here (born the first week of '97), everything being so different in Gen III actually put me off from playing the mainline games for some time, although I did liked the new designs.
But I do remember a bunch of people being unfamiliar with Johto, and it continued being the least popular region in fan polls until HG/SS came out.

>>58046802
That's because of a few shared factors:
>Huge fanbases
>Anthro or sapient furry characters up the wazoo
>Target demographic of the brands was children, at least at that point in time

Couple this with the literal zero digital literacy that our parents (well, my parents, at least), and you have a situation where tweens can easily find themselves having their trusting natures and naivety exploited during unsupervised computer time. Never happened to me, but some kid from my school was blackmailed into sending illicit pics of herself to what were essentially forum moderators for lying about her age and doing erotic erp in a chatroom.