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.
The
original Delta Invasion was lost to
history even before the death of Geocities; it had been pulled off the site and
replaced with Gates of Oblivion. For
the longest time, the original MSTings were the last versions of the fic known
to exist.
When we
began our rebuild series, we started by “reverse engineering” the raw versions
out of our old MSTings. However, we eventually were able to use archive.org to
uncover the original versions and used them in the later episodes. (Which means
that we’ll also have the original versions available to us for when Evangelion is inevitably next rebooted).
As such, for the moment, Delta Invasion is
not entirely ‘lost’ as long as the archived version survives; likewise with Gates of Oblivion.
Conversely, both AYNGEL Project and The Apocalyptic Battle were found on their original Angelifre pages which, as of March 2022 still existed. Yes, I am as surprised by that as you are.
The Legion of the Mysterious Black X-1 VTFighter and The Resurrection
Both of
these fics were hosted on the original version of Robotech.com back when it was
a far more extensive site then the shell that it is today. However, at some
point the site’s servers were attacked which caused an unrecoverable loss of
data. Furthermore, due to the nature of the website’s architecture, use of
archive.org or other methods to recover them have proven to be futile. As such,
they are well and truly lost.
Which is a
pity, because they’re awesome.
This is a
case where a fic is mostly but not
entirely lost. The version we used was but a fragment of a larger fic, taken
from a message board (that as of this writing) is miraculously still up and
active. However, that is still only a fragment.
The
original version was posted on another forum that was shut down by its owner
before we started the rebuild. It was also posted on another archive, but then
removed by the author, again before we started the rebuild. Unfortunately, we
had nothing to work with to make retrieving either version possible. So this is
a case where the fic in full is effectively lost, but a fragment of it
survives.
This may
actually be the most recently lost fic on the site as well as the most lost,
which is quite a feat in its own way. The original version, used in the MSTing,
was posted on Yahoo Groups, and, as near as I can tell, never posted anywhere
else. That means it would have remained up until the site’s shutdown in
December of 2020. However, post shutdown, it’s basically been entirely
inaccessible through archive.org and other methods.
This one
has to take some sort of achievement for being lost in multiple ways.
It was
hosted on the author’s personal website, which went down at some point in the
last decade, and all efforts to recover it have so far failed. Archives of it
were hosted on an ftp site that also has gone down in the last few years (and
in the process took with it two decades worth of Bubblegum Crisis fanfiction).
Finally, while it was originally posted on usenet, we were only able to
retrieve four chapters from there; chapter three had to be ‘reverse engineered’
from our previous MSTing.
Chronicles of the Mad Dog Squadron
Mad Dog
Squadron has the dubious claim to fame of being partially lost while we were
working on it.
Two
versions of the fic existed. The first version that we discovered was posted on
fanfiction.net, and consisted of only the first four chapters; it was this
version that we had originally intended to use. That version is still exists as
of the time of this writing.
However, we
then discovered the full version of the fic on a dedicated Rifts Fanfiction
Archive (yes, there really was one); not just did it have all twelve chapters,
but it also had some additional material such as a full cast list. We chose to
use that version, which lead to our many, many schedule reshuffles regarding
that fic and reassigning it to Voice Two. However, that archive went down (and
has been unrecoverable) at some time during the riffing process.
My Way is in a unique situation (for us, at least)
where it’s a fic that was originally hosted on fanfiction.net but has since
been removed. And that was because the author got himself banned from the site.
Not that it stopped him from coming back under a different name and posting
what amounted to the same fic anyway. As such, our MSTed versions represent the
only versions that still exist anywhere on the internet.
Trinity was the first (and to date only) published
novel we have ever covered, for very generous definitions of “novel” and
“published”. At some point after we were given the manuscript by an anonymous
donor, the version available on Amazon was replaced with a revised version, thus
making the version we covered effectively “lost”. Since then, it has been
pulled completely and is no longer available or, for that matter, extent
anywhere.
It goes
without saying that the two planned sequels never emerged.
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