The Utena Gallery is closed.

When I started this gallery, Utena was a dying fandom and most of the Utena galleries on the web were closed. Now Utena fandom has burst back into full bloom, with a vibrant new crop of young fans.

And most of them hotlinked to this page.

At least, that's what it feels like when I look at my access logs. This page itself gets about 4000 hits a month. The pic of Utena moping because Anthy left her, on the other hand, got more than 230,000 hits in May alone. A pair of Juri pics together got almost 60,000 hits in the same month. I know which pictures racked up these hits because I was able to track down the people who hotlinked to them; alongside these stats are the hundreds of thousands of hits I get monthly from people who use images from my site as their chat-room avatars or Neopets graphics. For every person who clicks through to read this page, 80 or more see a hotlinked image from the page on someone else's site. One visitor. Eighty hotlinks.

To stem the flood, I tried coding the site so that anyone who hotlinked to it would get a picture of two men having sex, with a tasteful and descriptive line of text gently discouraging further hotlinking. I tried renaming heavily linked-to images. I put a warning against hotlinking on the gallery page. I even tracked people down and requested that they unlink to the images.

And the last, my friends, is why this site is down. Almost all the people I spoke to either ignored me, or told me that they were going to keep on doing it because they wanted to. And I thought: My god, I'm maintaining a page for lickshites.

It was exceedingly depressing. I hate being depressed. It depresses me. So I gave myself a little vacation from depression, and shut the gallery down. If you're one of the 1.25% of thoughtful, intelligent Utena fans who came here to see cute Anthy pics, I'm sorry. Try the gallery at Anime Cubed instead. And if you're one of the 98.75% majority who came here to find out why the picture in your friend's LiveJournal is down, I'm sorry, too. It wasn't your fault. On the other hand, you might want to drop a line to your friend and gently encourage them not to be a lickshite.