Of all the ways my brain chooses to manifest anxiety, throwing out 'hey do you realise how much of X fandom's history has been lost? like could you make a fic rec list at all do you know for sure you could find even ten solid fics in accessible form now' is one of the most Depressing.

like I thought it was hard for Torchwood (and it was, mostly due to the jump off LJ and so many people deleting accounts or those accounts getting lost in one of LJ's periodic inactivity sweeps) but the idea of trying to make one for Velvet Goldmine almost physically pains me due to just how little I know I can find.

(the fact the AO3 tag is fucking swamped in Star Wars etc crossovers is a whole seperate issue)

like there have been at least three fics from LJ days that I squealed when I found again on AO3 because I feared they'd been lost forever.

(I should note none of my own LJ-era fic should be counted in mourned losses bc I was 14-17 when those were written and also are actually still in existance somewhere no one: is being shown as in B has been sworn to secrecy about where they are)

anyway this is Addi's occasional 'all of my fandom's are niche and sometimes this is great and sometimes it breaks my heart' moment.

(I actually think a proportional amount of Torchwood fic was lost as it was peaking riiight around the time people started jumping the LJ ship en masse and a lot got lost due to a few account deletions but Torchwood is also big enough that there's still a lot of reccalbe fic from that era and we've gotten more canon in the last 5 years)

....and it's actually horribly On Theme that one of my absoulte favorite Torchwood fics to this day is In Perpetuity bc uhhhh it's all about the act of preservation done through various media and mmm.

(He'd had to regress, technologically. Eventually, encoded data always fails. Silicon degrades. Optical media oxidizes. Magnetics demagnetize. Crystals crack., I am not sure if the author meant to be commenting on fandom history too but BOY)