Spirit Fanfiction

Spirit Fanfics e Histórias, better known as Spirit Fanfiction, is one of the most popular archives of fanfiction and original fiction in Brazil. Stories in Spanish and English are also accepted; however, their presence is anecdotic and doesn't get much attention.
The site is constantly involved in controversies, such as attempts to purge content Yaoi and LGBT, banning authors, staff harassing the site users, numerous reports of plagiarism, removing categories and website functionality without any discussion, arbitrary rule changes, etc. 
Spirit has already been the butt of jokes, because in an attempt to "homogenize" the site, it started to treat published content - both fanfiction and original fiction - by the term book, in order to in order to look more like the competitor Wattpad, in part because the Brazilian authors of the site name any and all work they produce that way, even those that are fanworks. See more in Controversies section.
==History==
Created in 2001, by the Brazilian Túlio Henrique, the site was initially called Amnsp and was a homepage about anime and games correlated with an IRC channel of which Túlio was a member. Since 2013, Túlio and his sister Lana Beatriz Thomé have managed the site together, working at maintenance and archiving of their contents.
Their popularity and membership grew exponentially in the following years, and in 2003 it was completely reworked/modified and renamed to AnimeSpirit – users affectionately called him only Spirit.
Since its birth, the site already had specific sections for creating fanfics and fanarts, as well as pages for users to post about their cosplays and debate national and international anime and games events/conventions. One of the most popular sections was Clans, where users created factions in which they came together based on certain affinities.
In principle, all published content, from texts to comments, was – as described on the about page – verified by the site's moderators. In part to avoid tensions between different clans, shippers and fans of a given fandom.
Named the "portal" by the team, the number of users of the site, which initially was 40 thousand in 2001, 250 thousand between January and April 2013, reached a total of 400 thousand users in July.
 This expansion also led to changes in the focus of its content, mainly in the fanfics section with works outside the anime/games genre, the site was renamed again, now to Spirit.
Between 2017 and 2022, the site had info updates, in order to explain its new guideline as a site for self-publishing as a kind of Publisher. Much in part to resemble Wattpad after its purchase by North Korean company Naver.
==Timeline==
*2001 Túlio Henrique founds the homepage Amnsp based on an IRC anime and game channel
*2003 becomes a popular social network and changes its name to AnimeSpirit
*2010 the site has basic restructurings adopting a more social focus and starts showing statistics from Google Analytics*
*2012 The first Android app was released in June 21
*2013 starts to focus more on fanfictions and is now called Spirit, categories are expanded
*2016 the website's interface and homepage are modified, along with its colors changing from a dark red to the familiar blue-green on February 29
==Controversies==
The site has changed its URL several times over the years, many of them without any prior notice to fans. Leaked login and password data were reported by fans. Bullying and stalking users made by other members including staff are also sources of complaints. 
Between 2017 and 2022 the site several changes were implemented, the site's timeline history, indicating who created it and when it was removed from the "About" section. Many users saw this as a way to erase the "Spirit"'s Japanese culture-focused social media past. It was also at this time that they started to call the works published there as books and an attempt to use the site as an national alternative to self-publishing, so that fanwriters become professionals. Recommendations for authors to start registering their works before this professional publication on the website platform was also the subject of confusion, because the change from fanfics site to Publisher of Books was done without much information. 
Along with that announcement came the paid version of the site, which generated a lot of criticism and its attempts to look like Wattpad in keeping members with ambassador status.
At that time, several authors declared to have had their works removed or denounced, most of them wrote slash, more specifically yaoi. As a result of this and other complaints by the authors on their profiles on the website itself or on others such as Facebook there was a large migration of a group of them to the Inkspired platform. Some of the reports are even shared in groups of authors, which increased adherence, leading to an exodus. This banning of works and users in addition to their escape was named by some as Witch Hunt.
==Notes==
==References==
Category:Portuguese-Speaking Fandom