As of when
I write this (March 2022), Fanfiction.net is still more or less alive; not
floating but not quite drowning for the moment. How long it will stay like that
is another matter. While many pundits have been predicting the imminent death
of the site for years, it has somehow managed to keep going despite all of
that. Likewise, while many have been expecting Archive of our Own to overtake
it in terms of growth and content any day
now, that hasn’t happened either.
Of course,
the death of Fanfiction.net would be a terrible thing, despite how much we joke
about it. The simple fact is that the site represents a tremendous repository
of fanlore going back to the late nineties. Many of the fics on it exist there
and there alone. Some may have been posted on other sites that have since been
lost to the death of Web 1.0; most simply have never been posted anywhere else
at all. And on the day that Fanfiction.net does die (and many do see it as a when, not an if), they will indeed be lost forever. Of course, that also doesn’t
prevent authors from removing their fics from fanfiction.net; when such
happens, that fic becomes lost.
We’ve seen
a lot of that in our time. The original Elmer Studios run was in the era of
personal websites, small archives and the like, with fanfiction.net creeping in
there at the end. Conversely, the modern run started in the age of
fanfiction.net and Ao3, while watching the personal website and the small
archive die around us, as well as a number of other sources that we have turned
to in past. Many of the fanfics we have riffed now simply exist nowhere else at
all, at least not in their ‘raw’ format.
So I
thought I’d do a tour of some ‘lost’ fics.
