The Early Internet, Explained by One Weird Celine Dion Fan Site
Yury Toroptsov remembers the moment he fell in love with Celine Dion.
In 1997, he had a layover in South Korea. Flipping through the channels on his hotel-room TV, halfway through getting dressed to go out, he caught a glimpse of the 1996 music video for “It’s All Coming Back to Me Now”—six minutes long, starring Dion in a floor-length, long-sleeved, white-lace nightgown, following her through a night of terror in which she is haunted by the ghost of her lover, who has died by crashing his motorcycle into a tree.
Toroptsov was taken in by the spectacle, and the voice—the sheer magnitude of Celine, the Quebecois, bilingual international superstar, whose 1997 power ballad about Leonardo DiCaprio dying is one of the most beloved and most reviled in modern history. Toroptsov didn’t see the whole video at first, so he sat on the bed and waited for the Asian MTV equivalent to repeat it. Sure enough, they played it over and over during the next few hours. “I was hooked,” he told me. “By the time I was ready to leave the hotel room, I knew where I was going! To the largest music store in Seoul to buy Celine’s CD. It was un coup de foudre, as they say in French. A strike of thunder which announces sudden affection.”
Toroptsov’s fandom strengthened over the next several years, spent in New York City and Paris. In 1998, he sat on the
