Post by chroma on Jul 8, 2023 10:08:47 GMT
Background
If you have been around Pokemon Mystery Dungeon (PMD) fan content, you have likely heard of PMD Victory Fire. It is a well acclaimed webcomic that builds and expands on the first two official games, PMD Rescue Team, and Explorers. It is regarded as one of the best fan works that came out of the community. It was made by Sulfurbunny on Deviantart, an account that was originally shared by two people, Maggs and Night, they also both participated in the makings of the comic. Night unfortunately left from both the account and the comic's production in late 2014 due to inconveniences she had. She isn't active on internet anymore.
Maggs continued the comic by herself successfully up until 4th of January 2019, and in the day after, it was announced that the comic is now in hiatus due to "health and personal issues" of Maggs, but also adding she hoped to resume it within the next three months. However, that was the last time of her being seen on the account. The clear details of this vanishing was never revealed. Right now Silval58 looks over the account, who was given the access to before Maggs' leave, she is just as much informed on the topic as the rest of the community. For a more detailed history I suggest checking the 10th anniversary post:
Perhaps for appreciating the clever work, or perhaps as a motivator, I would recommend people to read the comic. It is in Deviantart and MS Paint Fan Adventures.
What Are We Looking For?
There are two precursors to this comic made by Maggs, one is Victory Fire "Beta", and the other is Riddle of Lightning (RoL), a separate work although with beats glaringly similar to Victory Fire's, you could even call it "VF Alpha". Though for the sake of not confusing anyone let's just call it by its own name. Also for the sake of clarity, Riddle of Lightning came before VF Beta.
RoL has been up on a personal site of Maggs, www.tangwistel.com, however the site had later went down, along with it we had lost the comic besides a few of its pages. Those pages are either recovered from the web archive of the site, or in Maggs's other Deviantart accounts which I will talk about in the next section.
We have even less knowledge about VF Beta, the only clue we have is that they were posted on a small Pokémon forum. This was mentioned in an interview when Night was still present, here is the link for the interview:
What We Know
About Maggs:
Maggs has been using several usernames through the years, Sulfurbunny/Maggs/Maggyo were the latest she was using. Here is a list of these nicknames and things associated with them
Metara/Tara:
This is the nick she posted RoL under, she put the "Tara" shorthand as a signature, also adding the year 2008. She had a Deviantart account under this nickname:https://www.deviantart.com/metara
Additionally, another site she posted content on:
side7.com/u/Metara/gallery
Eloze:
This nick is older than Metara, however she had posted some of RoL's pages under this name in the Deviantart account where you can't find in the actual Metara account.
Deviantart:
www.deviantart.com/eloze
Livejournal:
eloze.livejournal.com/
Northcastle:
eloze.northcastle.co.uk/
www.northcastle.co.uk/eloze/
Fanart Central (Page down with existing archives):
www.fanart-central.net/user-eloze.php
Tangwistel/Tang:
Although rarer she had used this alias to refer herself at times as well.
www.tangwistel.com
SSJ3VEGETTA6645:
This is also an obscure burner alias that comes up in the likes of fanfiction.net and gamefaqs sites. I am not sure if it would be helpful but putting it out there for the sake of a potential lead:
www.fanfiction.net/u/256686/SSJ3VEGETTA6645
gamefaqs.gamespot.com/community/SSJ3VEGETTA6645
About Night:
Night is the co-author of Victory Fire but I don't not know if she had participated in the precursors. There is a chance pages being shared under her monikers though. There is little knowledge I know of her myself.
TheBlackFox:
Her older username before she was in Sulfurbunny account. She also had a personal site like Maggs, with various domains:
www.thedreamrealm.com
tdr.thedreamrealm.com
Where To Look Next?
Backlink Hosters:
We suspect, or more accurately hope, that Maggs or Night had posted bits of their work in lesser known places. However I have seen a trend of Maggs using Tangwistel links to embed images on her posts instead of uploading them physically, and when the link is down, the embed goes down with it and ultimately no content survives. Still, using tools who find backlinks to the site, we can at least find out which places she has visited and, to be honest, there is quite an amount. She has accounts in all sorts of different places, it is difficult to search them all, hence why I'm issuing this search thread in the first place.
I didn't know such tools existed before, so here I'm putting an example app to getting backlinks:
app.neilpatel.com/en/seo_analyzer/backlinks?domain=https://www.tangwistel.com
The Dream Realm (Best Lead For RoL):
Before anyone says it, yes, me and several other people had turned www.tangwistel.com's archives inside out in Wayback Machine. There are some pages found intact, there are some others where we see the thumbnail in the gallery, although really low resolution. I don't suspect to find anything new there but, check it out yourself if you would like. Here is the archived page of gallery showing the pages of RoL:
web.archive.org/web/20081122082822/http://www.tangwistel.com/comics.shtml
web.archive.org/web/20100618232912/http://tdr.thedreamrealm.com:80/forum/memberlist.php
About Maggs:
Maggs has been using several usernames through the years, Sulfurbunny/Maggs/Maggyo were the latest she was using. Here is a list of these nicknames and things associated with them
Metara/Tara:
This is the nick she posted RoL under, she put the "Tara" shorthand as a signature, also adding the year 2008. She had a Deviantart account under this nickname:https://www.deviantart.com/metara
Additionally, another site she posted content on:
side7.com/u/Metara/gallery
Eloze:
This nick is older than Metara, however she had posted some of RoL's pages under this name in the Deviantart account where you can't find in the actual Metara account.
Deviantart:
www.deviantart.com/eloze
Livejournal:
eloze.livejournal.com/
Northcastle:
eloze.northcastle.co.uk/
www.northcastle.co.uk/eloze/
Fanart Central (Page down with existing archives):
www.fanart-central.net/user-eloze.php
Tangwistel/Tang:
Although rarer she had used this alias to refer herself at times as well.
www.tangwistel.com
SSJ3VEGETTA6645:
This is also an obscure burner alias that comes up in the likes of fanfiction.net and gamefaqs sites. I am not sure if it would be helpful but putting it out there for the sake of a potential lead:
www.fanfiction.net/u/256686/SSJ3VEGETTA6645
gamefaqs.gamespot.com/community/SSJ3VEGETTA6645
About Night:
Night is the co-author of Victory Fire but I don't not know if she had participated in the precursors. There is a chance pages being shared under her monikers though. There is little knowledge I know of her myself.
TheBlackFox:
Her older username before she was in Sulfurbunny account. She also had a personal site like Maggs, with various domains:
www.thedreamrealm.com
tdr.thedreamrealm.com
Where To Look Next?
Backlink Hosters:
We suspect, or more accurately hope, that Maggs or Night had posted bits of their work in lesser known places. However I have seen a trend of Maggs using Tangwistel links to embed images on her posts instead of uploading them physically, and when the link is down, the embed goes down with it and ultimately no content survives. Still, using tools who find backlinks to the site, we can at least find out which places she has visited and, to be honest, there is quite an amount. She has accounts in all sorts of different places, it is difficult to search them all, hence why I'm issuing this search thread in the first place.
I didn't know such tools existed before, so here I'm putting an example app to getting backlinks:
app.neilpatel.com/en/seo_analyzer/backlinks?domain=https://www.tangwistel.com
The Dream Realm (Best Lead For RoL):
Before anyone says it, yes, me and several other people had turned www.tangwistel.com's archives inside out in Wayback Machine. There are some pages found intact, there are some others where we see the thumbnail in the gallery, although really low resolution. I don't suspect to find anything new there but, check it out yourself if you would like. Here is the archived page of gallery showing the pages of RoL:
web.archive.org/web/20081122082822/http://www.tangwistel.com/comics.shtml
The REAL importance of tangwistel in the current stage comes from its sister site, Night's site, The Dream Realm, because they are sharing some of the content of each other in the same paths of their personal domains
i.e.:
www.thedreamrealm.com/gallery/albums/taracomix/pokem21.thumb.gif
www.tangwistel.com/gallery/albums/taracomix/pokem21.thumb.gif
The bold part is path here. They are leading to the same image, the difference is that The Dream Realm site is still up while I can only see the latter from the archived page. What this means is that the comic may have survived under The Dream Realm, however we don't know how the page links are supposed to be. For example we do have "http://www.tangwistel.com/gallery/taracomix/pokem01?full=1" link which is supposed to lead to the actual full page, but when we put the same path in The Dream Realm site, it gives an error. What it seems to be missing is the file extensions, but we had also tried the likes of jpg, png, gif, it didn't work. Still it could be up with a different name.
Vintage Friends:
Basically Maggs and Night's internet friends from their older accounts like Eloze and TheBlackFox who might still have some information although it is a small chance. The Dream Realm site had a forum with a member list, here is the archived page to this list, if they are still around, we could ask them:i.e.:
www.thedreamrealm.com/gallery/albums/taracomix/pokem21.thumb.gif
www.tangwistel.com/gallery/albums/taracomix/pokem21.thumb.gif
The bold part is path here. They are leading to the same image, the difference is that The Dream Realm site is still up while I can only see the latter from the archived page. What this means is that the comic may have survived under The Dream Realm, however we don't know how the page links are supposed to be. For example we do have "http://www.tangwistel.com/gallery/taracomix/pokem01?full=1" link which is supposed to lead to the actual full page, but when we put the same path in The Dream Realm site, it gives an error. What it seems to be missing is the file extensions, but we had also tried the likes of jpg, png, gif, it didn't work. Still it could be up with a different name.
Vintage Friends:
web.archive.org/web/20100618232912/http://tdr.thedreamrealm.com:80/forum/memberlist.php
Other Pokemon Related Sites (Best Lead For Victory Fire Beta):
This section I have the least knowledge of because I got interested in Pokémon long after "small Pokemon forums" era had passed, I am a latecomer. I have no idea what they could be. What I have been informed though is that Maggs had an account in www.pokefarm.com's old site. The current site is different, here is the archive of the old one: web.archive.org/web/20100208021029/http://www.pokefarm.com/.
Probably similar to Pokefarm, I suspect that Maggs had registered to several other forums under her different nicknames, this is quite a big search though.
Comments Section And Journal Posts:
Victory Fire was hosted in Deviantart and the late Smackjeeves, luckily someone had archived Smackjeeves page before it went down. I have been informed that Riddle of Lightning was mentioned in the comments of Victory Fire somewhere, quite a reading but at least they are right under our hands.
Additionally, the journal posts and comments under those posts in Sulfurbunny account could have some leads.
Smackjeeves archive: drive.google.com/drive/folders/1TD3xSGHngd6w69Xk2LLNom4vJZ4Lul8R
Deviantart: www.deviantart.com/sulfurbunny
This section I have the least knowledge of because I got interested in Pokémon long after "small Pokemon forums" era had passed, I am a latecomer. I have no idea what they could be. What I have been informed though is that Maggs had an account in www.pokefarm.com's old site. The current site is different, here is the archive of the old one: web.archive.org/web/20100208021029/http://www.pokefarm.com/.
Probably similar to Pokefarm, I suspect that Maggs had registered to several other forums under her different nicknames, this is quite a big search though.
Comments Section And Journal Posts:
Victory Fire was hosted in Deviantart and the late Smackjeeves, luckily someone had archived Smackjeeves page before it went down. I have been informed that Riddle of Lightning was mentioned in the comments of Victory Fire somewhere, quite a reading but at least they are right under our hands.
Additionally, the journal posts and comments under those posts in Sulfurbunny account could have some leads.
Smackjeeves archive: drive.google.com/drive/folders/1TD3xSGHngd6w69Xk2LLNom4vJZ4Lul8R
Deviantart: www.deviantart.com/sulfurbunny
PS: Sorry if the thread is a bit messy, it is my first time here and my forum habits are long lost. If I missed any detail, which I might have because there is a lot, I will edit them in at the bottom of the this post. I will also put up the RoL pages we have so far but I need to compile them, I just want to get this thread out there before losing my juice.
