✿ Origin of internet memes Episode Bonus page ✿

This episode started as an idea from Karru to make an episode about early internet memes, since it's a pretty broadly appealing subject.
It immediatly reminded me of an old video by the french YouTuber LinksTheSun, where his friends go back in time decades by decades to learn about what were the most popular songs at the time. When I say LOVEWEB is inspired by the french YouTube scene of the 2010s, it's not by a little lol.

Oh hey, look that, the original outline of the episode. I tend to automatically delete that sort of stuff as I'm making the episode but I try to avoid doing that since you know... It's great for bonus pages!

Yes the outline does have misspellings and a random concept and random line in there. I always write down ideas as soon as I get them even if it's not in the right place.

Before going to 2001, Manon was first planned to time travel to 2006. This would have been a checkpoint to talk about memes from that era like demotivational posters, image macros... in 2006, it would also have been explained that memes used to last a lot longer before being considered being dated and lame. Also that this was before formats like advice animals and rage comics hit the scene and really made memes "mainstream".
This era also would have been the one dedicated to looking like an old Flash cartoon. Then 2001 would have looked like ASCII art. The 2006 era was removed to make sure the episode didn't blow out of proportions. When making this episode, I reaally didn't want it to as long as the Wikipedia and TF2 episode to make. It did end up taking a while anyway lol. I've accepted now that making a good LOVEWEB episode takes time.

For the BBS era stuff, I remember watching a 5 hours long multi part documentary about it. It was AWESOME. It gave me a solid basic understanding of the BBS era. It's funny to hear some of the stuff going on in there, it's as if the users never really changed decades later. Instead of "trolling", the term for that used to be "flaming".
If you got time to waste I totally recommend watching it.

As usual, I would go ahead and write up a whole "first draft" as a script before showing it to Elliot and Karru for feedback. This time I specifically tasked VeraSimila too (Cybermare's VA), to help with trimming the fat since she's a professional writer.
Below is a chunk of that first draft but instead of going immediatly to 2001, it's 2006!

As you can see, a lot of this was recycled into being the script for the 2001 section, including talking about All your base are belong to us. Also! Cybermare was planned at first to be a 3rd generation pony from My Little Pony, you'll see a doodle of it later.
I was a bit unsure of whether to turn Cybermare into a G3 pony or have an anthro design but Elliot was a big fan of the anthro Cybermare, and I thought it would be a more interesting challenge to draw anthro so I went with that.

Following that is an early version of the ending of the BBS section, which is AWKWARD.

Piecing every beat of an episode together in a way that's natural is a real challenge, and I was having a hard time thinking of a transition to get the characters from the BBS era back into the present. It was a real lightbulb moment to have Manon point out the connection between emoticons and the fact they use them all the time (though they use the Japanese variant know as Kaomojies).

Also you can see the section with having the voice cameos reading the emoticon conversation is missing! As you know the goal here was to trim the episode down as much as possible. But I thought showing the conversation itself was too interesting to not show aaand it would be fun to get some cool peeps to voice it!! Everyone involved was super hyped to help, you can find who voiced what in the Pastebin link in the episode's description of course.

Concept doodles for the episode. You can see a different take for anthro Cybermare on the right. Also on the left is a first take on the Wayback machine and next to it what I ended up drawing for the episode. Despite the crappy flash linework in the episode, anthro Cybermare was HARD to draw. It's only fairly recently I started drawing with semi-realistic proportions so yeah she was challenging to sketch out.

Manon's design was figured out pretty quickly, they're a mix of their first design and old 2channel flash animations. Now there wasn't that much flash content related to 2channel in 2001, at least that I could find. Those designs were started for the 2006 era, which would have been the "flash era". I would agree that in the collective consciousness, flash cartoons weren't a thing back then, but there was still SOME flash animations back then so I allowed myself some leeway.

Cybermare's anthro look was inspired by Eric W. Schwartz's furry artwork, which I looove how it looks, and it predates 2001! I did a lot of research on the furry scene at the time and I came across a lot of artists who's style I didn't find appealing. But when I came across Eric's stuff, I knew immediatly I was going for that. The brushwork and the way to make both Manon and Cybermare move was inspired by Zarla's animation of "Move Your Dead Bones". It's sooo incredibly charming.

Unfinished test for a release promo. I was struggling with making this look good and I didn't have any better ideas than just going with an edit of the thumbnail if this wasn't gonna work.

The first idea for a thumbnail, having the Wayback machine front and center with having old memes filling the stripes in the background. Having Manon cosplay as CATS from Zero Wing was too cool to pass up though.

Here's some different takes on the Background color for the thumbnail.

Ok so, if you came in late to the episode, you might not remember seeing that thumbnail on YouTube. Since this was my worst performing video is YEARS, I went into the Patreon Discord server to gather suggestions for a different titles and ideas to try to get it to perform well. For the first couple weeks, the title was changed to "What WAS the First Internet Meme?" and this was the thumbnail:

You have no idea how annoying it is to spend hundreds of hours on an animation only for the thumbnail and title be the ultimate decider of whether or not EVEN MY SUBSCRIBERS see the video. It SUCKS.

Oki let's see the episode itself.

It was not planned from the start to have Manon tweet this and then react to people's memes by he way. This was just the perfect way to start the episode with Manon being alienated by modern "Memes", and also sprinkle in more of that "LOVEWEB is real" magic. Which is it of course.

Cybermare is watching this video from Lute! They actually noticed their lil easter egg cameo in the episode and really liked it lol. Cybermare sure does love listening to boys rambling about stuff.

The person who posted this video has an Elnina profile picture which is a character from Deltarune chapter 3... Which doesn't makes sense since the episode is implying Manon is reacting to replies they got immediatly after posting the tweet in 2024! And Deltarune chapter 3 came out in 2025!! LOVEWEB is over the day someone decides to make a cinemasins video about it.

Manon pulling out Wikipedia is totally calling back to the previous episode that was all about Wikipedia lol.

The beeps and button presses sounds are an actually recording of me pressing buttons on a Digimon Vpet device lol. Makes sense since the Wayback machine's look was inspired by Digivices!

I specifically remember wanting to avoid mentioning the name of SA's users being "Goons" since that would require explanating it. But then Vera brought up the joke potential of the word "Goons" since the word means something different nowadays.

I almost forgot to point this out that Cybermare's phone also changed to be time accurate! To be precise it's a J-SH04, which is apparently the phone that popularized having a camera with mobile phones in Japan. They were YEARS AHEAD in terms of mobile phone technology in Japan.

And here, Cybermare's phone changed again! It's the "Apple QuickTake 100", which is completely unrecognizable in the ANSII art style.

Woa... The iconic Manon pose that is featured in like... No other episode outside the pilot...
I brought it back after seeing loveweburner's Etsy store featuring it! Go buy stuff from them now!!

Alrighty that's all for this bonus page. It helps to not write these years after the episode came out lol. Thanks for readiing.