Scoured from Existence · 10:44pm May 18th, 2018
I have several perennially ongoing PM chains with some users on the site. I critique Tzardok's Fate series-based Magic cards. I bounce story ideas around with Speckle. I offer advice on one of Ultra-the-HedgeToaster's in-development projects. And, until recently, I discussed things with princeps. I'd link to his user page, but at his request, it no longer exists.
Yes, this is going along similar lines as Estee's latest blog. That gave me the nudge I needed to eulogize.
princeps wrote Chronicles of Darkness/Equestria Girls crossovers that are darker than my usual fare, but after some initial discussion that showed how ignorant and short-sighted my initial take on his work really was, I came to respect both that work and the author himself. Our PM discussion began with a question about whether he could do multiple entries for Imposing Sovereigns and later ranged from ways to make his work more accessible to personal details I won't divulge to other settings he'd dreamed up. We even discussed a possible story I'd write in his universe. Three guesses who it'd star, and the first two don't count.
Then I got a PM saying so long and thanks for all the friendship. And now, with his account well and truly gone, even that isn't there anymore. There's a hole in my inbox, and cheesy as it may sound, it feels like there's one in my heart. He said I was one of the ones keeping him here for as long as he was. I can't help but wonder what more I could've done to prolong his stay. I definitely could've been more prompt in responding. (Tzardok can certainly tell you I'm not perfect there.)
princeps wanted his work here to be forgotten, but once I got over myself, I defended the value of his work even from his critiques. I'm going to follow that theme. He entrusted the Google Docs folder containing his notes on the setting to me and told me to do with it as I pleased, up to and including plagiarizing the ever-loving crap out of it. Of course, he said it in that PM chain, so I can't prove it anymore. Still, if anyone's interested in seeing where he was going with his work, let me know, be it by comment or another personal message.
Who knows? We might go from there and see what happens.
I'd like to see it, might be interesting
time to go author hunting, we need more people in the revive dead fic group, I hate seeing cancelled fics, even if I don’t actually like them or never actually read them.
Always a shame when someone wants to not just leave, but to be completely wiped from the site. I had a friend who up and poofed a few years ago, blanked their page, deleted their stories and forum posts. It was pretty tragic since they were the one who motivated me to do some of my absurdfic works.
Like I said on Estee's blog, don't beat yourself up over this. I never understood the guy, but it sounds like a lot of what he said to you, I also heard. His problems were bigger than any one person, in other words. :/
I don't know anything about the guy, or his situation, and I know emotions are running very high for a lot of people about this.
But...
I really hope that people's rush to help, to care, to be friends, they don't forget to respect. He had and has wishes which he's stated pretty clearly. They are not sacred beyond all things, they are not perfect, and they may or may not be wise, but they should be treated with respect. I recently forgot to treat a friend with respect in my rush to try and help him, and ended up hurting him quite a lot at a time when all he really needed was a little respect.
Just, I don't know, something I feel should be said by somebody about all this.
Alas, "where he was going with his work" would mean more if I could still see where he had been with it. With all of his stories and comments gone too (I checked a few), the amount of effort I put in to
stalk peoplegather context isn't enough.(Post-writing note: Apparently this comment is about me a lot.)
I remember a while back, little unknown me made a blog post that mentioned that I was considering unpublishing (and maybe deleting) a few of the stories that I was uncomfortable with people seeing in my list anymore. To my surprise, multiple people objected. I figured if people wanted to enjoy them for what they were, who was I to stop them with my... what, vanity? In compromise, I unpublished only the ones that contributed the least to anything by a wide margin, and left the rest untouched. Nothing was deleted, just in case.
I happened across Estee's blog post last night by pure chance, so I wasn't surprised to see this. I know what it's like to think that way – I like to keep things clean in general, but I have thought about scrubbing an account or two for a clean restart or just to leave it all behind. When it comes to connections with other people, though, I wouldn't without good reason. Even with good reason, I would only delete everything if the intent is to make a statement or insult – and not the "I'm throwing a hissy-fit" kind – which I have actually done once before. That's because I know that my work could be used for others' enjoyment (similar to here), and I did not want that because of how the situation surrounding my work had been handled by the offending party/people who would benefit from its continued existence.
I suppose I'm saying (for future consideration only, at this point) that I think one should either thank their friends and leave the content for them to enjoy, or use the deletion of everything as a sort of "screw you" statement where appropriate.
I'm going to agree with what 4863689 said, though; he did leave on his terms and trying to change that forcibly isn't going to do anything good for anyone, including him.
And now, as maddening as it is (for me) to have this unresolvable mystery laid before me, I'm just going to have to acknowledge that it's not worth trying to change that and shrug it off. Honestly – and this is for you, FoME – if I didn't let myself keep going and enjoy my life as best I can regardless of which of my friends (mostly in real life, in my case) have left me behind for both good and bad reasons, I would have been emotionally crippled a long time ago.
It hasn't helped much when it comes to making new friends, though. After the second or third time I think I got a little jaded anyway.
4863689
I did spend a few minutes pondering whether it would be better to just delete this blog without posting it and let things lie as they are. I probably should've spent more time doing so. I won't lie, this is more for me than for him, as a way to help me sort out my reaction to the whole situation. In the end, the gist of his final message was "thank you, here's my notes," so I figured I'd rather regret saying something than regret saying nothing.
4863727
Yeah, honestly, I think it's better to say what you want about the whole thing. I too have been part of a group that was on the receiving end of something like this (hi
4863680!) and it leaves a hole that there's no way to fill. In that case I was able to maintain some infrequent communication with the person for a while afterward, but was eventually cut off there too. And all that's left is the hole.
I don't really know what to take away from that kind of experience. Someone was there, and they mattered, and then they just up and decided not to participate in your life at all.
Without wanting to cast bitterness at people, I guess maybe it's a sign of having over-invested in them. It's something that you may or may not be able to see coming in advance. And maybe it's a "mistake" you'd ultimately be willing to make again for the sake of the good times.
It's... I don't know what my point is anymore. It just sucks, and I'm sorry, and I've been there.
4863727
Yeah, I'm not trying to say this blog shouldn't exist. I fully understand the need to have discussions and work through issues.
But I've seen (some here and some elsewhere) bits of sentiment that seem to imply that deleting one's stories is wrong and trying to remove one's footprint from the net is futile and/or wrong, and I wouldn't want that to turn into some kind of... I don't know. Well-meant friendship mob trying to undo this person's decisions, you know? Unless one is taking money for them, a writer's stories are theirs and nobody else's, and one has the right to destroy one's possessions. Other people liking them doesn't remove that right or make it wrong.
Maybe I'm projecting some myself. I've gotten massive grief over taking down a few of my stories just temporarily, and it bothered me that other people felt so entitled to my work. Princeps' stories and net existence in general are still his, whatever else other people may think about them.
Well, dang. I can't say I know the right thing to do here. It'd probably be okay to write that story of yours in his 'verse you'd considered writing, but people not having context for it might make that more difficult.
This sounds like it hit you kinda hard. If you need to talk through some stuff, there are a number of people (me included) who'd be willing to lend an ear.
I didn't know about this guy. Never heard about him. But by your description of his work I would have liked to sample it.
To lost friends and lost opportunities.
4863857
You see, I think the problem here comes from how good stories touch us. They can make us think, or question our way of thinking. Good stories can challenge our morals and values. They can hold up a mirror to us, make us reflect on our lives and can even make us grow as persons.
As some stories progress, so do we. Now, this doesn't apply to an everyday 3k comedic oneshot, or a quick-written shipfic inspired by the newest episode. However, some works just are like that. They are relatable on a very deep level, and no matter if that story is something like twenty-two minutes of Flutter Brutter or a four hundred thousand words long adventure/opera novel like The Count of Monte Cristo, just imagine this material suddenly disappeared or became inaccessible.
Though by law the material belongs to the author or publisher, from the moment it is shared with the world emotionally tied copies of it exist in every reader. It becomes a part of them, and while an author has every right to discontinue publishing and spreading his work, entirely taking it away from those who have already read it does carry a sense of wrongness with it.
This is of course just my opinion, but I wouldn't be comfortable with never getting another chance at reading some of my favorite works, either.
Now I'm hella mad because I've been nagging a friend who's a fan of WoD to read through their stuff and they hadn't gotten around to it.
The Awakenings were pretty amazing character studies.
4863990
This. A thousand times this.
Something that touches you, touches you. It's not a question of whether it can, should, or shouldn't go away. And entitlement is kind of an orthogonal concern; once the work enters your heart, you already have a copy. It's just then a matter of desiring to reconcile the feeling in the heart with the details that tend to grow fuzzy in the head over time. Plus, then, there is the human desire to share what we love and find inspiration from with others.
I guess the tl;dr is that no man is an island.
I remember princeps.
He was really good at his work; I enjoyed reading it and was willing to ask him writing questions.....but I was too chicken to do it
I'm too chicken to do a lot of things, including posting actual stories, and it sucks that he's now gone before I even had a chance to tell him how awesome I thought his work was and how it inspired me to look in new directions for my writing 
I say continue on in his footsteps, FOME.
I had written a comment.
It was a long comment. Took more than an hour to write.
Then I realized most of it was me going off on a rant how much I hate it when people decide for everybody else that their works are no longer of relevance to them, how someone just making years of their work go up in a poof of smoke is something that is, from my perspective, - unironically, unexaggeratedly - simply insane, how I've had to put up with that kind of behavior on deviantArt far too often ever since the higher ups decided to implement an easy-to-use "self-destruct button", how the only way to contain the madness I can think of is to do an emotional appeal through the medium of comic, with the only comic-idea I have being too complicated and timeconsuming for me to actually pull off...
.....and that that isn't what you need to hear right now.
I'm sorry to hear you've lost contact with your friend, and that they decided their departure from the site had to be so "final".
And I cringe at the notion that fimfiction decided to also remove your conversations with him.
)
( Yet somehow, I am not surprised. ...Excuse me, while I take a batch download tool to backup all my messages.
I don't even know if I've ever read anything from "princeps", the name only vaguely rings a bell.
But one thing you and anyone who'd still like to read their stories might want to look into is the Fimfarchive, which has a downloadable 5 GB backup of all fimfiction stories as recent as March 2018, and........ huh. I know there was also a site somewhere that specifically keeps backups of deleted fimfiction stories, though I don't remember where to find it... maybe it was fimfetch.net?
Though that one only seems to have one story from princeps, from April this year. ...And I only was able to still find it because I had clicked on it yesterday, since as of today, the search for author=princeps shows 0 results. Story was still cached, thankfully. Downloaded it for good measure in case it too vanishes. (So... that was probably not the site specifically keeping backups of deleted fimfiction-stories.)
So yeah, if you or anybody can scrape his works together from the archive - I believe it is searchable by author, though I've never looked into it - I'd say, put his works back up on Google Docs for anyone to read. (Fimfiction would probably throw a fit if someone uploaded "another author's works".)
Even if he wanted his works to be forgotten, that still isn't right. That isn't fair to his fans, both past and future ones.
4864950
Another "I love you" can't hurt, right?
No, it can't. I love you. 
You know, I thought I'm the only one who thinks like that..... Because wherever you go and bring this up, you immediately get an armada of people on your tail who are whiteknighting artists who do that kind of thing, with the usual arguments of how you have to succumb to their whims because it's "their art", but no one else who criticizes artists for doing that.
Deviantart is awful and I despise Derpibooru's DNP list for the same reason..... It renders the idea of an archive that preserves pony art useless.
Right now, I have started something that serves to inspire authors to rather let their stories getting archived, instead of letting them get deleted together with their account:
https://www.fimfiction.net/user/331452/Fluttercheers+Orphanage
https://www.fimfiction.net/blog/819965/recent-site-changes-account-deletion-the-future-of-fimfiction-groups-and-fluttercheers-home-for-abandoned-pony-fiction
I am advocating this and will appeal to authors if they wanna delete their account. If you could help me spreading the word of this and do the same if you see someone who thinks about deleting their account or appears like they might wanna do that, it would help tremendously!