#it's comedic and weird and the lineages don't make sense and is littered with tragedy and themes of family and loss

[onesaltyerik]

genuinely as an art historian, it pains me when any piece of media is deleted. it's literally a snapshot of historical storytelling that was created in an incredibly unique way through the collaborative efforts of so many creative people. it's never 'just fandom/fanart/fanfiction', the majority of the great artworks of history are literally just fan works of popular religious/historical/folkloric tales and people of the time, i kid you not! and we live in a section of time where much of our history is going to be stored digitally rather than in a physical hard copy, making it already difficult to ensure its preservation for future appreciation and study, so the fact that so much of the dsmp and many other online storytelling media is just...capable of being deleted just like that, it's genuinely heartbreaking.

on top of that, we live in an era where many, and i mean MANY, people now have access to storytelling tools outside of oral tradition and painted canvases. meaning that you don't HAVE to go to a fancy school or pay a ton of money to be able to make your mark on the creative world, you can just create and display your works for those who appreciate it. this is a part of history where we can see a collective generation's wealth of knowledge and creativity in one place rather than just a select few individual's works who's legacies are only still around due to people who appreciated their works and wanted to continue their stories. we now have thousands, if not millions of voices of creativity who have the tools now to speak their mind, that is HUGE in terms of historical relevance!

i really hope that more media will be recovered and preserved, the world needs to remember the stories of the folk. the world deserves to create and be given creation. (yes i'm waxing poetic, this is my main source of study, shush.)

but yeah pls archive and keep archiving the stories you love!

i do mean it when i say 10 years in the future, the dsmp itself might have some case of lost media bc of a mix of the amt of streams we can't recover, biased recaps, and the purges of dsmp-related accounts both on twt and tumblr. it is already hard for me to find streams unrelated to ctommy or cwilbur, and it doesn't help that a good percent of the analysis essay posts we've archived in dsmpanalysis have been completely deleted.

of course any person can experience any piece of media at any time but truly, the dsmp was something else when experienced live because it was a testament to the importance of perspective and individual choices on which story you wanted to follow. if it weren't for archiving projects and dedicated fans, the dsmp would have been perceived in such a one-sided way.

20% of the archived essays i've been sifting through have already heen deleted. a good portion of the fics i've bookmarked have been orphaned or deleted. besides the slight upset i feel about the story and the progress of the dsmp being deleted, i think i'm more upset about the complete decimation of fan content. it's like, i get why they deleted their stuff— the dsmp has its fair share of controversy— but what made the dsmp fun and worthwhile was the fan creativity.

and now a good percentage of that is gone. i don't hope to doompost about anything because i don't rlly think the fandom is going anywhere. but it is definitely a shock to me how much history of the dsmp has completely disappeared just in the span of 2 years.