Date: 06/27/2025

Mood: distracted

Listening to: Pleaser - Vana

old fansite nostalgia, LJ avatars, memes, and fics

I'd like to take a moment to go back through fandom history and take a look at old Rammstein fansites. Many of which are no longer online, and likely only are faintly remembered by fans today. Does anyone remember this? Well, here's nostalgia anyway. We got fansites in every language. Join me on this archival visit through ancient Rammstein chaos on the web when photos were 300 pixels and things loaded in .swf. I also mundanely talk about my experiences with R+ fanfics online since 2006. (I am a woman.)

Official site's past layouts and activity

As obvious as it is to say, actually the official R+ site's online history is riveting in terms of site design and content. Unlike many bands, R+ were cutting edge on the Internet and started taking this seriously during 1999-00. I suggest going to the start in spring 1998 and then scrolling forward through time. Watch the site evolve per album. Such as Mutter. Take note of any release date eras and check the site's correlating time. They were very hands on and kept news updates. In the earliest forms, they were taking note of fansites on the primitive web. Even the R+ website is victim to the "under construction". I love it.

The saddest thing to me is how Reise, Reise's site CSS and image background didn't get captured properly. The links work on the left if you hover though. What is most fascinating is some versions captured will legit play a clip from the JAL flight recorder hidden track that's about 10 seconds. I've always loved the plane and ship connection to Reise, Reise. The promotional images in business suits was also... a confusing choice. Because of the business suits, the recorder cover, Dalai Lama, and flight audio - mainly in recent years of false hindsight - people took it as indirect references to 9/11 when you remember Amerika's satire and state of politics in 2004.

On that same note, you can find suit photos on boats nautically too. I don't think it was meant to be correlated despite this coincidence. The suits with bats is more reminiscent of "Falling Down", which is a movie. This would make sense after Du hast's video was very obviously Reservoir Dogs. Men... like movies? lol. A lot of films in the early 00s liked to use fat suits too as did Keine Lust. It just looks like more movie references.

This page also notes Rammstein's first ever entry into worldwide iTunes. The way of the future of digital music: April 2005. The Rosenrot site design is so 2005 too. Please watch the Pussy flash intro I swear to god. The LIFAD era design is peak with the fonts.

If you go back to the site's special pages around 2000-02, you find things like community activity and giveaway prizes for various reasons. They had people send in questions to the band to answer. I cannot stop laughing at the questions asked. Half of the ones for Richard are about his at the time marriage. Oh women... they need to know apparently. They answered like none of the personal ones but did briefly answer the political and religious ones. Plus a small handful of semi-normal private ones.

Here's my highlights.

The succinct, "no" just takes me out every time to laughter. He has repeatedly said he likes Mexico's vibes. He vacationed there in 2022 for a while after their show. Paul likes all the stereotypical moid games. But those are good games lol. His answers indicate PC gaming with the mention of Team Fortress. Surprised he doesn't mention Quake with this list...

It's so fascinating to me the clothing designs are partially their own ideas. You're telling me, this man was the one who possible came up with his own crop top vest? God. If there's anything about his stage outfits that are consistent - man does not like having sleeves. His only exceptions was the coat or shirt used in the Ahoi tour (sometimes), and Stadium tour's gray sleeved shirt.

Okay, I totally know why they feel that way about Das Modell. But what did they do wrong with DRSG? I wonder what he means. Personally, I feel like those singles sort of overshadowed Sehnsucht itself. Like the title song and Buck dich feel like they could have been singles with videos but instead we got DRSG and a canceled Das Modell video waste of time since it didn't have the band anyway. Sometimes I wonder if six singles on Mutter was to make up for this lol.

This selected comment left on the official site!!! This is the year 2000s version of the "my skin is clear, my crops thriving, my vision 20/20, my children fed, humanity is saved" lmfaooooo. Internet humor is a circle. We are the same.

Old fansites: rammimages.com

rammimages.com (also a lot of obscure interviews!!)

I'm SO mad and seething unable to cope that none of the jpegs were properly archived. This site had 7,000+ images and at least 4,000 are lost in my opinion. I'm so livid about this tbh. How am I supposed to live like this? I remember when this page used to function. I used to visit this site in 2007-08 and saved many of the Paul photos. This is a part of why I have the most obscure photos never seen in my own gallery.

This site was a main inspiration when I wanted to make mine. I originally wanted to use Coppermine. Which is what this site used. Minx is amazingly funny and she likes Flake. I was inspired by her to do what I did. "from the obscenely large collection of pictures and images of Rammstein that Minx had for her own perverse pleasure." Sooooooo relatable, queen. It's so crazy to me her own work was 7,400 images at the very end. Because I have managed to amass 12,000 alone so far for Paul after all these years. The Internet and passage of time sure is something.

It's like Minx wrote this for me.

By the way, Minx's fandom essay about her understanding of "middle aged women are a R+ peculiar phenomena" is very true and still is true to this day. Don't get me wrong, this band has the slew of young adults and some teens. As rock music does. But I am telling you the demographic of 30-40 something women is way higher than it has any right to be. I remember this since the onset of my fandom experience too. Even today, if you think the main audience of women are skewed young to the teens or 20s, you'd be wrong. They're annoying, so you notice them more often. They're not that prevalent to that degree.

If you actually dig into the majority of IG running fan accounts, you'll slowly realize the core female demographic is 30-55 (it goes up because these women stay in the fandom). There's a lot of women with kids bringing their 5-9 year olds to the show. Don't believe me? Go to my own gallery (photos sidebar link). Go to 2018-2026 and 2015-17 images categories. Go look at the selfies with fans. Majority of the women are 30+ by ratio. I believe everything Minx wrote is absolutely 100% accurate about why and how this happened. Rammstein are a very weird band for 50 reasons. Minimum. You will never replicate whatever this is. The fans are equally as peculiar. Including me. I am also a weirdo here.

Thank you for everything you ever did and wrote, Minx. You were everything to a young Bree as a teenager 🫡 I'll never forget your legacy and work to bring photos and translations to an organized collection.

Old fansites: rammsteinfan.de

rammsteinfan.de (DE) ⟶ A classic site that was around for a very long legacy. This is the earliest version of it. But later versions are good too. The last news update captured was July 2004 before the site vanishes. This site was actively maintained, very thorough, and lovingly crafted. You can see peak early 00s design principles here. I am extremely fucking upset about the fate of this fansite. It was seriously such an asset, well maintained, and ambitious.

I loved back reading the news feed for the bite sized history of R+ in 2001-2004. I got stuck doing this for hours lol.

The news feed in 2003 has Paul talking to someone about Reise, Reise coming up soon. He revealed Ohne dich to be included. The song Mein Teil was discussed as currently dubbed "Nein" which is a repeated lyric so that checks out. The song was also work shopped to be titled Slaughterer and The Butcher. That's horrible. It's like making a slasher film and calling it The Slasher. Have some creativity. I don't know why Mein Teil wasn't the only contender for the title. It's the chorus. The Nein working title is also the callback showing their brains were ON the chorus. Unless the lyrics were radically different in December, I don't know why they'd consider any other title.

It also has him questioning Paul about bootleg audios and demos. He recalled nothing about anything called Biest but said the description of the song sounded like a rough demo from forever ago. Which we more or less know to be true. Everything about Jeder Lacht was discarded as horrible but a single lyric was kept and reused for Adios. He said nothing about the demo songs titles on the bootlegs meant anything to him. They were never called those things by the band and probably was the bootlegger trying to come up with things for the tracks himself. I 100% believe this because I have been convinced for 500 years that "Sonne" from 1995's set is the working title of Feuerrader. That song takes strong cues from Ministry's Burning Inside and the music video.

Unfortunately, R+'s management being aware and involved in fansites was not always a good thing. This caused issues several times and I think it was wrong then. In the RR/R era, they started getting really pushy about sites and started taking shots at tape traders / bootleggers. Two victims of this I remember were the above websites. Both of them had management conflicts that most of the fandom condemned. They received really strong backlash about this online. Even random news sites and music portals chimed in. Total Streisand effect lol. I understand caring about bootlegs to a degree. I sort of grasp things like scans of booklets to official CDs or books being asked to be taken down. Why does Herzeleid.com ran by Jeremy get to stay up and be privileged? He offered downloads and bootlegs in ways the former never did. But the other site was yelled at?

Q: A topic we cannot avoid and which was also was present in the media is the dispute with some fansites. Firstly the site rammsteinfan.de was closed down after a threat with a law-suit of your management and lately you had problems with the English site rammimages.com What’s your opinion?

Paul: The band was not involved in the measures taken against rammsteinfan.de management backed us up. For good or bad I don’t know. About rammimages.com I didn’t know anything until a journalists told me yesterday; the band is not involved here, either. It’s the task of our management to protect us, and maybe they sometimes act a bit harsh. But they just want the best…at least for us. Mostly we don’t know anything, to be honest. If I get to know something I try to explore what’s behind it all. But in my experience most of the times both sides are right in a way. With rammsteinfan.de it seemed as if the bad Rammsteiners were closing down a website, but if such things happen the other party is not totally innocent either. ⟫ Source

This is the same shot in the foot artificial scarcity thing I have complained about before. Management wants bootleg DVDs to stop being such a lucrative massive thing. Yet they struggle to release DVD content of their own to satiate the demand. They want fans to buy images and books, but never reprint books or release hoards of images they have kept gated from us. Many R+ photobooks cost $200-400 (depends on condition) due to rarity of never being reprinted...

The only "good" thing social media ever did was force Rammstein management to lose their control. You can't force Instagram or Facebook to moderate the way you want. They lost control over the photos and discussion on fansites directly. They were forced to embrace that all they can do is issue copyright strikes on YouTube and cry.

Old fansites: a quick list

RSTBCD ⟶ This fansite is what the modern historians would call "shitposting." They called themselves The Spacey Bitch Goddesses. Please understand we will never have this amazing era of fandom back. I love it!! Rammstein is a band that has excessive ~fan lore~, yall don't even know the half of it. 90% of this band is made up information and almost mythical. They really are a band with like legit lore in the most true definition of "lore" you could mean. This was the time when people thought Paul was born in Russia and his name was Henry. I can explain how all that happened logically but it's still funny.

The oldest and truest Paul Geocities fansite ever that went cold in 2004. ⟶ Bless this site design. The cringe is beautiful and everything is how I remember it when I saw it in like 2007. I cannot believe we lost this in favor of >Instagram. I'm so upset the guestbook wasn't archived. Sadly, half the info page is wrong. His origin is German and Polish lmao. But yeah he is 'mixed' by technicality. I'm surprised they don't mention his older sister. But I guess nothing was translated correctly in this time. The name Paul comes from a maternal uncle. As for the eye color discrepancy? It's blue in a legal matter. But his eyes bear a melanin ring that tinges the blue to look brown due to lighting conditions. No tattoos? Boy, wait until we hit the in-his-40s character arc! You don't even know what's coming.

Myxin.de ⟶ Later briefly became "rammstein-world.de" but NOT to be confused with rammsteinworld.com that became a French site. This site has a rare archive of Flake's thing about his arrest. Which is a text that often has gone forgotten. People don't remember this, but R+ used to run micro-blogs on the official website. They also did real-time chats. They were cutting edge on the Internet for the time. Paul, Schneider, and Flake all blogged during the hype release into Mutter. Some photos online that are like 200-400 pixels sometimes originate from the R+ blogging adventures on the official site.

If I remember right, Olli would write some of the 90s ones and that's why he's barely in the pics. Flake is a natural rambling pretentious blogger and he would write paragraphs blathering. You think I'm verbose? Flake is the king of it. This made his book writing in the future foreshadowed. I do not understand why this man never legitimately had a blog and dedicated site to his writing during like 2008-14 or something for the LIFAD and MiG era. (During that time, Paul would blog photos from his camera instead.) I guess his radio show scratched that same itch eventually. Anyway, if I remember right somewhere during this era it was Paul who said he saw Myxin.de and visited it. They did know about their fansites to some degree and sometimes gave them special privileges. Even in the LIFAD/MiG era, their management would be hands on to send teaser images or things to them to release on special dates.

Yeah the official site had a voting context for popular fansites and the band surely saw some of them. Myxin.de was on the list among many others.

People have this misconception that R+ don't understand the Internet or they're too ~old~ to understand technology. Which is sort of untrue. Yeah R+ never jumped into Twitter or IG during 2009-2017 era when it was probably overdue. But they weren't so stupid about using the Internet. The only one I think was illiterate was Till in the early 00s. They used to do chats with fans. They did read stuff in their Fanarea section for members. Flake was blogging there and lurking. They have been spotted being proficient with using a desktop computer for music making purposes. They were known to visit ancient fansites from time to time and their own management kept recognition of them in the RR/R and LIFAD/MiG era. They ran those galleries and micro-blogs from 1998-2000 and in 2001 when doing that was a novelty from an official band source. Where do you think those photos came from, everyone?? Paul spent time with us on the official website photoblog as if it was his own IG account, technically.

I have one story from Paul, proving he is not Internet illiterate, that I can't find source of what he means via official website archives. Which means he has got to be talking about the fanclub membership Fanarea that never was archived. He said that in 2001 after 9/11, the band posted critical American sentiment articles, and some American fans got very upset. Yet there is no trace of the official news feed posting such articles anywhere in September-December. Nothing shows in 2002 either yet I can find lots of stuff perfectly archived. The only way to get feedback from such angry fans had to be direct emails or that Fanarea forum's direct posting. Otherwise his anecdote is lost to time. I wanted to read the American whining.

rammstein-austria.com ⟶ I appreciate this website design era so much. I spent a LOT of time on this site with a dictionary. This site was peak quality to me back then. The news archive is a trip. Just looking at the index, I see the 2007 allusions to the MiG box set and later with the Raritaten compilation... what a delay?

rfan.de (DE) ⟶ I remember visiting this one's forums sometimes too. Like damn the layout takes me back...

Ram-web UK ⟶ Please, just..... you need to see the graphic design of the home page. Click.

A very popular R+ Geocities site. I even remember seeing this linked around even in 2006+ and still working at the time despite not being updated anymore.

A popular forum. I remember reading this one myself. I think at the end of the lifespan, it was like ~500 members.

Affenknecht forum is still around and functioning, I didn't even know this lol. Wow. Go to the main site, scroll to the bottom, and go look at the most popular post... lol. I used to spend time on this site too around MiG era.

rammsteinpress ⟶ This site died and the Wayback copy of it horrible to navigate due to some type of Wordpress CSS failure. No idea how/why that happened. It functions, but you need to fuss with it a lot.

Herzeleid.com ⟶ The webmaster of this site got into so much fandom drama debates about him. Jobarr aka Jeremy. I don't know why he was so controversial! The band's management became aware of him at some point for his English audience pull. The band apparently have visited this site back in the day too. I am pretty sure the genius.com English translations are all stolen from him for the old albums. He mysteriously vanished mid-LIFAD, but his site's hosting and name was paid for another decade to expire in 2020. Why did he vanish if he recently dumped so much money to renew? To manage to have hosting and domain name status for another 10 years is huge money to waste upfront...

Old fansite listings

This post is riveting. She knows stuff about the band and their names. That's so amazing to see in Japan of all places in 2001. Her commentary is cute when she realizes Paul does the boat in Heirate mich. I'm out.

PS - During my travels to find obscure images, I sometimes end up in weird places. Like random working forums nobody uses anymore most the time. Many times I find the funniest comments and mid 2000s culture. This forum comment made me laugh way too hard for my own good. Girl is totally fed up in 2011!! I agree with her. And I like him.

Old web LJ avatars

Whenever I am doing my duty to collect Paul photos for the gallery, I often stumble into old aesthetic LJ style avatars. 99% of the time the image host is broken due to being defunct. (Curse you Photobucket!!) 1% of the time, I find things that scratch the itch in my brain the right way. I started saving them lol.

Fandom Memes

No, not cringe memes. Opinion memes and surveys. That's what I mean. We had those too. One for LJ/blogs and some types for those who know how to work Photoshop. Save or new tab for the full size. I recovered these templates myself but I didn't make them of course.

Old web fanfic pre-AO3

Okay okay if you wondered "where were yall's fanfics tho 👁👁", we put it all on fanfiction.net. Livejournal locked communities (eg "the6" that has several hundreds of fics lost in there forever. look at the stats!). The LJ comm used to be bigger but that site has been purging many usernames and accounts. We also congregated here in general. Scattered forums ran by women too. I don't know to what degree, but I know there was a selection of fic and community on Deviantart that was like ~200-400 people as well. I never read fic on DA so I don't know precisely but I have seen it linked around before. A closed access Yahoo Group with 400 members (aka the "R+ slash mailing list"). This group is what led to the first slash fic site ever maintained by DasTier (an author). This site morphed URLs another two times. To here. The last known URL was here. There was also some German ones. Her site tries to link other slash from this era. She mentions defunct FF.net rivals which makes me feel old. By this era in time around Mutter and RR/R, there was also Russian fic sites and communities spawning. You'd be shocked at the depth of Russian fanfics even to this day. It rivals our own AO3 tag and they're a single language. Early 00s Russian fics can be found here too, for example.

To be real though, fic for this band were never huge or anything. It's simply too niche and still is. We only cracked 2k fics on AO3 in a 15 years of the site existing. Our fandom doesn't attract fujos naturally. Apparently it's casual enough to not warrant avid fic writing. That said, as you noticed from my words - Rammstein is an older band suffering fanfics being scattered everywhere and not corralled on AO3 from the start. So a lot of stuff simply was lost to time or is trapped in Livejournal or Yahoo Groups in closed communities nobody moderates. I don't think AO3 has ever been made aware they should scrape and salvage these R+ fics because I might be the only one who remembers this site. The archive mentions "eviltwin" as an author - she was also active on LJ with us in the6 as a mod for some years.

Which brings me to... if you check that archive site you'll see the writer "autiotalo". Does she ring any bells for any R+ fic aficionados? No? She should. The second AO3 existed, she jumped right on it and was among the first populating the Rammstein tag herself. She's been at it for years. I can feel her passion for the band through her fic. Bless. She only in the past year orphaned her fics, but they're still in the R+ tag. Her magnum opus to me is The Other Side of Midnight. I've read it countless times (my eyes glaze over the sexual content because I don't care) and it's one of five (5) R+ fics I enjoy. Best characterization of Paul I've seen always comes from autiotalo outside of this master-fucking-piece. This fic was reposted on AO3 by the author, actually. Guess who? It's still autiotalo but under her previous pseudonym being Oreitheia. Am I the only one who made the ancient connection between her two pseudonyms? Haha.

Other than her, the next best old writer of my "interests" was here on her homepage. Her site discusses every member's archetype and this has not changed in the year 2025 one bit from 2004. Everything about this page is still true in modern fic tropes. Though, we have grown a lot from it too; it still prevails. This page also reconfirms the fandom standard of "Reesh" and not Risch/Rich. As women, we whole-cloth decided what his name should be spelled. It seems to be originated from women, our forums, and fanfics. And now everyone does it. To the point even Richard himself made it canon with his "Lil Reesh" shirts. Lmao. For the RZK lasses, there's some stuff over there that seems forgotten.

You didn't know I could write dissertations about R+ fic, but I can. When I was younger, I wanted het fic. I show up online and everything is gay. I was confused as hell over it. There's always been strong discourse about allowing het fics into slash spaces and vice versa. I never have understood why we can't live in harmony or why each side is so hostile that even sharing a website with het fics is "a big deal".

I legitimately appear to be one of the few women who cannot wrap my mind around fujoshi culture. I get it... but also I do not get it. I think I'm too bisexual to understand. As a result, I quit reading most fics and decided it wasn't for me. There's too many confusing things for me of self-inserts, bodies, male characters, and other discomfort while reading. The problem appears to be my failure at being attracted to more than one male character that I mentally do everything to erase the not-Paul guy from it. On top of that, if anything was swapped from what I preferred - I would mentally change it as I was reading. At this point, I'm ruining the fic, right??? Yeah, so I stopped reading them.