Welcome to the Destiel Fic Archive Project
Destiel, as a ship, is thirteen years old, and those years have seen vast changes in the nature of fandom and the way people share their works. They've also seen a constant stream of people entering and leaving the fandom, bringing their creativity with them, contributing their knowledge and skill to one of the richest ship fandoms on the entire internet. There are currently 94,000 works tagged Destiel on Archive of Our Own, and the ship was years old before AO3 was founded, so it's safe to say that in the past thirteen years more than 100,000 works have been created featuring our beloved Dean and Castiel. And while we still have many, many fics, countless works from the past have been deleted, or effectively "lost" by other means. This is tragic (well, aside from the ones that have been made into original fic and published, that's awesome) and work attrition continues to this day, with the most recent, public, high-profile deletion being apokteino’s decision to eliminate their account on New Year’s Eve of 2020.
The Fic Archive Project seeks to find, preserve, and archive as wide a range of Destiel works as possible, with an emphasis on:
Older, harder-to-find stories that have never been posted on AO3, and
Works that have been deleted from AO3, LJ, FF.net, or any other platform.
I (hi, I’m @unforth and this is my pet project) founded this project in 2018 as a spin off from the Destiel Favs Survey I administer yearly. I downloaded all works that received a vote, and tracked down any that had been deleted. That collection forms the core of the Archive, but over the years it has grown well beyond that. I now have a repository of nearly 15,000 Destiel works, and it grows all the time. Up to now, I’ve kept this project largely private; the only place it’s been available to the fandom is on the Profound Bond Discord server. However, in light of apokteino’s deletion, I’ve realized most people don’t know this is something I do, and don’t know that if they’re looking for a deleted fic, they can contact me. As such, I decided it was time to make a side-blog dedicated to the Archive, to help publicize it, grow it, and disseminate its contents.
I've created a spreadsheet to help navigate this collection, which you can access here: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1SWRvyj4DIAGGfo04_ba8LaDsJmlIfSxb2fn9TtqnlYM/edit?usp=sharing
Please be aware this is a living document so while I've done my best to keep it neat and organized and suitable for public viewing, I can't promise everything will always be in ship-shape when you view it. The first sheet of the linked workbook, "About This Workbook," contains extensive information about how the Archive is organized, decisions I've made on what and how to collect works, my personal to-do list, and numerous ways that anyone accessing the collection can help. If you’re interested in helping, or if you have copies of any of the works on my “lost fic” spreadsheet, please get in touch with me!
Feel free to drop this Tumblr an ask if you’re looking for something, or DM me for things that are available.
If you want a file, you must be willing to contact me off anon, as I will not be putting any files up for general distribution. The entire collection is backed up on g-drive but I do intend to open access to it - currently myself and cryptomoon (who has been beyond helpful throughout this and offered me server space) are the only two people who can access the actual archive. I send files by Discord message and/or e-mail.
Please note
if you are the author or know the author of a work that I’m currently distributing, and you know they’d rather things NOT be distributed, or have any other information that would help me better moderate this collection, please let me know.
if a work is marked as “Not for Distribution” I will not distribute it under any circumstances so do not ask.
Thanks for reading, welcome to the archive project, and I look forward to helping people find the fics they’re looking for!
