I wanted to talk a little bit about linkrot.
I’m involved with a fanart archival project, homestucksongcomics. Calling it an archival project might be a little pretentious; we just reblog lyricstucks, tagging and indexing them as best we can to make it easy for people to find them. These days, we’re losing more and more posts. A lot of lyricstucks are long and artists courteously put them under read-mores, which became defunct when people deleted their blogs or changed fandoms and deleted the post. We’ve added youtube video adaptations of some of these lyricstucks below the read-mores, only for the videos to later get deleted or privated.
Earlier this year, I thought of a lyricstuck that I loved and went to rewatch it, only to discover that it had suffered this fate. I remember the illustrations from it, the ideas, the way it matched characters to the song’s concepts. I’d spoken to the artist once and told them how much I loved it; they were surprised I’d even seen it as it hadn’t gotten a lot of notes. No one can see it now. I searched youtube for any existing adaptations and came up empty-handed. I even tried the internet archive. All that’s left of it now is the very first panel before the read more. I cried about it.
With all of these fan artists, we are internet strangers, but there was a time when we loved the same thing. We poured our time and energy and creativity and fragile pieces of our hearts into our art and cosplays and fanworks. I started doing digital art at all because I was inspired by other people’s lyricstucks and wanted to make my own. These days, I’m not particularly involved in fandom and am lucky if I post fan art once a year, but I’m carrying the memories of our community, our passion and absurdity, the skills and songs I learned because of them, with me, and I think of it with great fondness.
Yesterday, someone reblogged a lyricstuck from homestucksongcomics and I got a notification about it. This particular lyricstuck was from a deactivated blog, but wasn’t under a read more so we had the whole thing preserved. They tagged it: #my art #archive #god i missed this. It was the original artist, reblogging their old art onto their new blog. I don’t know when it was originally posted, but we had reblogged it in 2014. It had been almost ten years.
I guess this all is to say, I missed this too. We’ve all grown and changed in that time, and a lot of us have packed up and moved on and it will never be what it once was, but let’s not erase what we shared. My first lyricstuck did not get many notes and its art is borderline embarrassing; you will recall it was essentially my first digital art project. I can’t imagine anyone would miss it if it went anywhere, but it will be staying up.