any comparison between early 00s online youth culture and late 10s online youth culture is fundamentally incompatible as soon as you move beyond the similarities of “lol teens being cringey” or whatever because we are in a completely different media landscape these days. making heavily-edited cosplay tiktoks is nothing like curating a deviantart gallery full of anime blingees because the former is always, implicitly or explicitly, an attempt to cash in on internet fame while the latter was simply rooted in the deep twisted psyche of someone feasting on the dark side’s cookies