Any fanwork in a fandom under a Fanwork Ban usually becomes this. As most sites are pulled for fear of invoking legal wrath, some fanworks are made available through shady underground communities.
- The Star Trek fanfic "A Fragment out of Time" by Diane Marchant
— the first Kirk / Spock fic ever written, and the story that spawned Slash Fic as a genre — exists today only in its original zine, Grup 3, which is extremely rare. Except in the form of page◊ images◊, the story was never posted online.note The only way to read it is to hunt down the zine in used bins at conventions or keep checking to see if an online zine merchant has a copy for sale (might be expensive). The University of Iowa Library, however, hosts a special collection of early fanzines, including Grup 3 and the zine that contained Marchant's defense of K/S — Grup 4. You may also find text transcripts on Tumblr or other blogging sites.- This is actually true of many of the early fic written in zines, as many authors never made the switch to the Internet. There are websites where text transcripts of these early stories are archived, and a surprising number of fanzines have been digitized and added to the Internet Archive.note
- This is actually true of many of the early fic written in zines, as many authors never made the switch to the Internet. There are websites where text transcripts of these early stories are archived, and a surprising number of fanzines have been digitized and added to the Internet Archive
- Computer Boy, an Australian parody of The Matrix. No DVD release and only available as a low-resolution Quicktime download, due to (apparent) legal issues with a scene filmed inside a McDonald's store.
- Luckily, another mirror has been added to the Internet Archive.
- Luckily, another mirror has been added to the Internet Archive
- It has been known for fanfic authors who turn pro to pull their fanfic from the internet, either because they regret ever writing it, because their publishers don't approve, or because they're strip-mining their fic for ideas for original works and don't want people to make comparisons.
- It's not just ones from authors that turn pro. Any fanfic can just disappear from the internet due to some reason from the fanfic author. Sure, most of those aren't worth reading, but there are some good ones that disappear too.
- Snow Angels is only notable because it has a works page, but the author has long since pulled it from FanFiction.Net. A Dramatic Reading of the first few chapters does exist on YouTube, but the videos have been made private (so only the dramatic reader's friends can see them) after somebody the dramatic reader knows in real life mistook him for the actual creator. Since Snow Angels is So Bad, It's Good...
- When an Internet domain goes under, works by inattentive authors using that domain will disappear. The end of Geocities killed quite a few fanfics on unmaintained sites which had been popular enough to stay up by reader visits alone. Ones on Tripod and FortuneCity have also disappeared.
- Anything that was on Soupfiction and is not in the Wayback Archive.
- FanFiction.Net allowed Real-Person Fic until about 2001, and then removed it all. Some of it is still missing.
- In general, stories uploaded to the site have a nasty habit of disappearing without warning after a while. This is because FFN likes to periodically purge inactive/long completed fics for the sake of saving space on the site.
- Any of Racewing's fanfics appear almost completely lost. And That's Terrible.
- Some of them and others on Racewing's site can be found here
- Some of them and others on Racewing's site can be found here
- Super Smash Bros. Brawl mod Project M was taken down in December 2015, leaving behind one last blog post. However, players of the game have been circulating mirrors of it so that it can still thrive.
- Another Metroid 2 Remake, developed over a decade, was out for little more than a day before Nintendo sent DMCA takedowns towards all sites hosting the game, and later forced the developer to stop updating the game altogether. Despite (or rather because of) this, fans who downloaded the game before then have set up mirrors all over the internet.
- Kelly Green seems to consider her earliest, adulated Haunted Mansion comics terrible and deleted them for DeviantArt. Emma Mosier also deleted some of her early Phantom Manor doodles after being harassed by shippers who shamed her for her "Phantom/Melanie" AU. Fortunately, through a combination of fans having made personal copies on their hard drives and the ever-useful Internet Archive, most of those comics have been relocated and copies can be seen on the wiki.
- There used to be Touhou Project fan comic by pixiv user Wimifu, the which has a child Ran being raised by Yukari but, for some reason, the artist took their pixiv page down (or hid it, as the Wayback Machine says it's still around), thus the only way to view a good much of the comic and the artist's other artwork is through imageboard sites.
- Kill la Kill fanartist "Herokick" hid her Tumblr page and left her AU comic uncompleted, thus the only way to view much of said comic (along with other fanart) was on her twitter page (which you'd have to already be following, as it was made private) but, apparently, the Twitter account has been deactivated, so the only way see the comic (and her fanart) are imageboard sites, the Wayback Machine, or to search for it online. According to some background on Reddit, she deleted much of her Kill la Kill fanart (and fanart on an alt account) because of harassment and that she was afraid that her ships would hurt her reputation as an artist.
- Fan-videos of any kind (AMVs, Abridged Series, "crack" videos, etc) when the user account is either A), taken down, B), terminated by the site, and or C), the videos are muted/blocked from viewing (more often than not in the case of YouTube). Fortunately, if fans are diligent enough, there are usually mirrors.
- The well-known Ed, Edd, 'n' Eddy fan-artist Yami-Shin deleted almost all of the Edd/Eddy fanart off of her Deviantart page. Thanks to her popularity, however, most if not all of it still exists online.
- Many Ask a Pony blogs close and as a result their artwork dies with them. Even highly popular ones like Ask Pinkamina Diane Pie and Ask Princess Molestia have had this. It's up to fans to keep the askings circulating.
- Rise Of The Clockwork Stallions, a fully developed platform game by Darkera Studios, was removed from their site once they started to advertise their first original game. Thankfully, the original download link still exists, but it requires some Wayback Machine action in order to properly access. As the files are intact, some fans have gone so far as to store it on their personal cloud drives, allowing others to easily access the game if asked for.
- Paradise was a lengthy Origins Episode fanfic for Celestia and Luna detailing how they went from unassuming Earth pony foals to godlike alicorn princesses. In 2014 it was removed offline so that the writer could rewrite it. That has yet to occur due to personal reasons, but fans have archived the original story.
- Some while back, there was a Walfas artist by the name of "Cirno is a Genius" who vanished from YouTube, Twitter, and Tumblr, taking all of their videos with them. Unfortunately, besides two vids, there doesn't seem to be any trace/mirrors of their videos anywhere.
- Unstable Equilibrium is a Korra/Asami fanfic where Asami is an equalist. The writer deleted it, meaning the only way to read it is through reposts.
- The Steven Universe fic No One Said Life Was Gonna Be Fair was deleted by its writer. Others have reuploaded it.
- When Machinima closed its YouTube channel, all of the videos were lost. However, some videos and series have been uploaded by fans who managed to have them saved, including Arby 'n The Chief, as well as Pre-Game Lobby. Unfortunately, there were a lot of early machinima made that were uploaded to Machinima.com that are still lost to this day.
- Kaijunited: Japanese Monsters & Us, Fabien Mauro's fan documentary about the Godzilla fandom in Japan, the US and France was originally screened at a fan convention in 2012 and became available online for a few years before being removed, presumably for legal reasons. However, other Godzilla-related French video reports and interviews that were likewise deleted have been re-uploaded to the TokuScope YouTube channel.
- Zeldanime was a Legend of Zelda fan webcomic that was made to remake the animated series from 1989. Originally hosted on its own website, it would later move to DeviantArt after the domain expired, but later down the line, OniChild, one of the artists who worked on the comic, would delete all of his deviations, including the comic's pages, from the website save for one image to protest AI artwork on the platform. While a number of the webcomic's later pages are still available on the official Tumblr account, reading the rest of the comic requires use of the WayBack Machine, but even then, some pages of the comic on the former official site do not appear to have been archived before its closure.
- Luigi Sucks At Super Smash Bros. (Melee and then Brawl), a Nintendo-themed parody of Arby 'n the Chief, was a YouTube series that revolved around the Smash-playing misadventures of toy figures of Luigi and Wario, and later a plush of Pikachu. It ran from 2008 to 2010, and there were also extra videos titled Luigi Sucks At (X), which involved the toys getting into other shenanigans. The author, Ryan Flint (AKA DekuScrubby), eventually made all the videos private and terminated his whole channel circa 2012. None of the original videos can be found anywhere anymore, though one episode has been miraculously salvaged. A few fan-made videos of the series are still up too.
- As Simple and as Complicated as All That, a beloved and extremely long Star Wars Legends fanfic that paired Mara Jade and Luke Skywalker before they were made an Official Couple, vanished off of the Internet when the website fanfix.com went down. Since the fics on the site were zipped files that had to be downloaded, the Internet Archive could not archive it. Author Licia Nishino's website only had a few chapters of an attempted rewrite that has long since been abandoned. Luckily, one fan who had loved the original story actually had it physically printed out and put in a notebook as a teenager, the contents of which were digitized and turned into a PDF file.
- Infamous SMPLive and Danganronpa Crossover fanfiction SMPRonpa was believed to be lost forever for several years due to CallMeCarson (and only Carson) singling it out as inappropriate and uncomfortable on a stream, leading to the author deleting it. Fans circulated snippets of the work until it was finally found in full in 2024.
- As of 2020, both games in the Mario in Animatronic Horror have been deleted from Gamejolt, the website which they were originally hosted, and GalacticStar Studios has no intention of bringing them back due to both games being Screwed by the Lawyers.
