Today, we salute a veteran of the hopeless cause of FF8 fandom: Sheila Knight, whose Rinoa Heartilly fansite Rebelling Princess has been running for TWENTY-FIVE YEARS.
Several people have compared our humble website here to old the Web 1.0 Geocities-style of the World Wide Web, but it’s not really. It’s more like a Web 2.0 blog, or a novelty Tumblr. But Rebelling Princess is the real deal stalwart of Web 1.0. This is a tribute-style site in the style that doesn’t really exist anymore, with individual pages about topics like the Forest Owls, or what kind of dog Angelo is, or a list of every piece of Rinoa-related merchandise, or a page of 48 Rinoa avatars for you to use on message boards. There’s a ton of original research here. This is display of serious long-term dedication to all things Rinoa.
Even more remarkably, the credits page says this website was designed by the late Monty Oum, creator of RWBY.
The homepage says this is version 7.0 of Rebelling Princess, which makes me think it that, yes, it is not abandoned and has in fact been under continual development since 1999. There’s plenty of old content, like a page full of video files that links to an .mpg hosted on something called animetheme.com. But the author also links to their Instagram, so the last update was at least somewhat recent!
But my favorite parts are the little pieces of leftovers from the old way the web worked. There’s a page for the Heartilly Family affiliate ring, and something called Project R.I.N.O.A., a group that shares “adoptable gifs” of Rinoa and once apparently boasted thousands of members. People have been nuts about FF8 long before this website appeared, and they will continue to be weird about Final Fantasy VIII until the heat death of the universe.
Thank you, Sheila for keeping the lights on. We’ll always be there in your corner.
We have adopted this gif: 