Lethe

I'm nowhere near as articulate as Lethe herself, however, given that she puts so much care into her own sites and writing, it only felt right to bring the same care to a fanlisting dedicated to her.

A fanlisting is simply an online listing of fans of a subject, such as a TV show, actor, or musician, that is created by an individual and open for fans from around the world to join. There are no costs, and the only requirements to join a fanlisting are your name and country. The Fanlistings Network

I don't know Lethe personally beyond very warm and welcoming emails and lovely forum exchanges, but I think her sites speak for the depth of the person who created them. I found Oubliette tangentially while deep in a Neocities rabbit hole, looking for something to reignite a spark after more than a decade away from web design, a bad case of creator's block, and a stretch of depression that had drained the color out of most things. Plenty of sites along the way helped bring that spark back (I credit them properly over at my collective, Dreamesque). Oubliette kept it burning.

Lethe's sites are emotive and elegant, coded with a precision so exact it reads less like decoration and more like devotion. Every pixel earns its place, and every CSS class feels less like a coat of paint and more like its own instrument in an orchestra. I have a particular sense for design and her work gave me something close to aesthetic peace. The meticulous care she takes crediting her resources shows thoughtfulness and it also gives others a way in, a stepping stone to learn from her process the way she's learned from others (I've learned so much myself, just from following the trail of sites she's credited).

And then there's her writing. So much of it! From the records she keeps on her own creative process to her handcrafted shrines themselves, each one grown out of a love intense enough that it bleeds through the letters on the screen. I have a background in medicine, but my sister Mina, a scholar of Shakespeare, raised me as a zealot for literature and analysis. So watching Lethe pour that same depth into something as personal and niche as a shrine made me admire her immensely and quietly aspire to build something with that same level of passion some day.

Though I'm commenting as an admirer from afar, even I could see the mark Lethe herself has left on the fandom community and other corners of the web — from her engagement in Amassment (now retired), the website marathons she's hosted, and the warmth and genuine excitement in how she talks about her friends and brings people together. You can tell she genuinely wants to build something communal — a place where people thrive, learn from each other, and can share their passions completely unfiltered and without fear of judgment.

Tl;dr: am I hardcore fangirling over another hardcore fangirl? Yes. But so should you? Also yes!

Site

Why Anamnesis?

Though I am aware that forgetting is a natural as well as necessary part of life, oblivion remains my greatest fear, less so being forgotten than, perhaps even without realizing it, losing my memories: that something may disappear without trace, leaving no proof of having ever existed. I wish for my love and my thoughts to mean something; I wish for my present feelings to stand the test of time, for my future self to be able to look back and see the person it once was. Calling oblivion by its name, as I do by this, means working against it — it means not allowing memories to die. Lethe - Oubliette.Nu (Domain)

Keeping this in mind, I knew a fanlisting in her honor needed a name that gestured toward memory, toward the act of remembering itself. Anamnesis is the Greek word for recollection, sharing its root with the name of the Greek goddess of memory, Mnemosyne, whom Lethe names as her chosen Patron (a web-clique where each member picks a mythological figure, a patron saint or patron god, to stand as their own personal guardian). I'm not sure if she intentionally chose Mnemosyne with her own name in mind, though I like to think she did, given how clever she is about connecting details like that. Once I'd made the connection between Lethe and Mnemosyne myself, though, I couldn't unsee it as anything but fitting.

Expanding further, Lethe's network is named The Wither and Bloom Network, and she's written about how taking up the care of indoor plants reshaped her own philosophy of change and transformation. Plants wither, and they bloom; it's a cycle. The title Anamnesis gestures at something adjacent to that, a third state, neither withering nor blooming, but preserved: remembered, like a pressed flower. A pressed flower is a bloom that never got the chance to wither. It has still changed, still been altered by time and pressure, but it's been kept — delicately, deliberately — by someone who cared enough to hold onto both the flower and whatever it was tangled up with in memory, even as everything around it kept moving on.

Lethe has thematically built her work around the concept of memory, and the fear that something might vanish "without trace."

This is that trace.

Layout Details

Usagi Tsukino alias Sailor Moon was my one and only childhood hero. I am sure she has, along with Sailor Moon as a whole, influenced me and my life in more ways than I can count, and continues to do so without my being aware of it. Lethe - Oubliette.Nu (Mistress)

Lethe often cites Sailor Moon as a major source of inspiration for her, and as a Moonie myself, I was more than excited to build her a Sailor Moon–themed layout for this fanlisting. As I do with most of my designs these days, I try to approach each layout as a chance to try something different, whether that's in the design, the composition, or the code itself. Normally I do a lot of my own rendering and texture work, and my layouts tend to lean on a strong, space-inspired background. For Anamnesis, the challenge was the opposite: keep the banner itself simple, and let the flourishes and the fanlisting's own text do the work of bringing everything together.

You might have noticed an upside-down triangle (▽) used throughout the fanlisting. That's intentional — it's the alchemical symbol for water, which I chose specifically because Lethe's name comes from water, the underworld river she's named for. It felt like an esoteric way to tie in Sailor Moon, too, since the Inner Senshis' powers are each built around an element, while still tipping a hat to Lethe herself.

Credits