Question: Would the archive of the Area 51 forum be included? Cult used to host the archive at www.sonic-cult.org/community/, although it was seemingly taken down some time after 2010. If possible, I'd like to see that archived too, whether it's hosted/uploaded as part of the Cult archive, or separately.
I'd love to write it off like this, but I can't say it was all for shock value or irony. In particular, the anti-trans stuff on CulT was no joke, and that was normalised in the community (yes, even here) for years. For a long time your gender identity was only respected if we liked you - so Wetflame got given a metric fuckton of abuse while Ayla was treated with respect (here, not on CulT). Regardless of whether or not Wetflame was an asshole (true) or Ayla was cool as hell (also true), that shit isn't on and I regret that I was party to it. That's just one thing, though - there was plenty more genuine nastiness underneath it all. I quite liked X-CulT, did some pages for it including Virtua Fighter and WWF Smackdown 2. I feel like TCRF is the closest thing to the original spirit of X-CulT.
I am late to the party. Moving threw me out of the loop for a bit. RIP to CulT, though your time was over a decade ago, it was still fun having you around to look back and reflect on everything, right or wrong. Heavens know I was prone to some pretty cringy stuff my own self. What's funny is that TCRF also gelled with the old Zelda's Secret Ocarina / Zelda Coalition Community. I'm used to seeing a lot of names pop up in the forums and Wiki that I recognize from both places.
It's like telling someone to stay away from a Cemetery because the people buried in it had a certain viewpoint.