Moot in Raspberry Heaven

4 Moot in Raspberry Heaven Raspberry Heaven Hold me tightly in the fun dreams of Heaven Raspberry Heaven, I'm coming back to you When paradise's flowers have beautifully bloomed You and me Together we'll be —"Raspberry Heaven," Azumanga Daioh Around 2000, Richard “Lowtax” Kyanka, who hated anime, added an anime forum to Something Awful (SA), naming it Anime Death Tentacle Rape Warehouse (ADTRW). By 2003, ADTRW existed a few planes down from more popular forums like the chaotic bin where the most obnoxious users met to insult each other, Fuck You and Die (FYAD). ADTRW attracted a slightly younger audience who lived in the shadow of older, cooler boys. As one SA user who later migrated to the chans wrote, SA “was also home to [a] wide collection of other losers, the third or fourth saddest of which was the ADTRW crew.”¹ One of these users was a fifteen-year-old kid who lived with his mother in Westchester, New York, named Christopher Poole. And at the time, he was deeply unhappy. “I was overweight bordering on obese,” he wrote on his blog years later, “drank two liters of cola every day, spent a good 6–12 hours per day playing video games in a bedroom with blacked-out windows, and rarely went outdoors or socialized.”² On his favorite message board, SA Poole chose a name of bleak negation, “moot.” Most also hung out in one of the many satellite chat rooms orbiting SA, an Internet Relay Chat (IRC) channel named Raspberry Heaven. Poole had chosen was named after the sickly sweet ending-credits song to the anime series Azumanga Daioh, a comedy about teenage girls enduring the trials of puberty. However, the inhabitants of the channel were all teenage boys who directed their social life not outward toward the goings-on in the halls of their high schools, as Azumanga Daioh depicted, but rather inward and toward each other on the IRC channel, mediated by the fantasy of anime. “We quickly chased out the few women,” a user named “Shii,” who later became an influential early 4chan moderator, told me. “It became an all-male free-for-all for almost a decade.” Another user, who went by the handle “Souldark” and also became an early moderator of 4chan, recalled that Raspberry Heaven was a realm defined by its constant mockery, adolescent ribbing that never ended.

This image shows a scanned book page titled “Moot in Raspberry Heaven,” featuring the lyrics to “Raspberry Heaven” from Azumanga Daioh and a history of the online communities that preceded 4chan. It explains how Christopher Poole, known as moot, emerged from Something Awful’s anime forum and Raspberry Heaven IRC channel, turning an obscure anime subculture into an influential part of internet history. EN: This image shows a scanned book page titled “Moot in Raspberry Heaven,” featuring the lyrics to “Raspberry Heaven” from Azumanga Daioh and a history of the online communities that preceded 4chan. It explains how Christopher Poole, known as moot, emerged from Something Awful’s anime forum and Raspberry Heaven IRC channel, turning an obscure anime subculture into an influential part of internet history.

• @gentoomemes / 6608 2023-10-02