Donna Troy: The Woman and The Hero

Is one of many now long dead Internet 1.0 Fansites that was a pretty important part of my early history as an Internet dwelling Nerd.  But in-spite of how Nostalgic I am for it I sometimes misremember the name by dropping the definite articles as "Donna Troy: Woman and Hero".

The Website is Archived via the Waybackmachine, but in a way that concerns me.  My first instinct going there is to want to find what the website looked like when I first found it in 2003 or 2004.  However while it says there are Captures from those years they don't properly load.  So the closest I can get is a Capture from June 2005 when the latest Update was the March 2005 Update when it covered the Return of Donna Troy special being announced, I remember when I saw that update happen, 2005 was a very pivotal year in my DC Fandom.

The most recent Capture before that which actually loads is an August 2002 Capture when the latest Update to the site had been in October 2001.  The revelation that even Waybackmachine Captures aren't guaranteed to last forever has me worried about a lot of our preservation of a lot of Internet History.

Now those of you who know Donna's history may have noticed that I just outed myself as a Donna Troy fan who is strangely most Nostalgic for when she was dead.  That's because this is when I became a fan, see I got into Donna reading this site before I'd yet read a single Comic Donna actually appeared it.  

It's interesting really to become a fan of a Western Comic Book character while they're Canonically dead, especially during this Post-Crisis yet pre Infinite Crisis era, the same phenomena applied to my Stephanie Brown Fandom.  It's hard to be as mad at the story that killed her as most of her fans are when that was already part of her Lore when I got into it.  And hard to be that upset at not getting any new stories (for awhile) when all her stories are new to me.  I'm first learning this character's history as a story with an already defined beginning middle and end, or in Donna's case several beginnings and a middle and an end.

Donna Troy is one of a few DC characters for whom how her origin keeps being messed with by Crisis related shenanigans is a commonly made fun of Meme.  But as things stood during this period I really saw her history as indeed uniquely complicated but not incoherent.  Like each new Retcon was adding to what we already had in a way that fleshed her out rather then replacing or discarding anything.  But maybe it only felt that way to me because this Fansite did a good job of presenting her History as one cohesive Story.

However in time DC grew obsessed with starting absolutely everything over from scratch every few years.

This site's last update was in 2009.  Now we finally have her in Live Action and while on paper The Titans show doesn't give her a history very similar to this Era of the Comics, Conor Leslie's performance is great and somehow managed to feel like exactly the character I became a Fan of in part via this Website.