Topics that can be difficult to research for

I think lost fan works (art, fiction, songs, etc) AND their creators can be tricky to research. Because often unless a fanwork gets "legendary meme" status, once they're gone, they're GONE. Sure you can discuss the work, try to find the original creator or their circle, but if any creator gets removed from a site, or they delete the work, what else will there be to say? I was watching a Deviantart iceberg a while back and a LOT of the artists simply deleted large amounts of their work once they get famous or infamous. Do any of these works matter in the scheme of things? Probably not, but it is disheartening to get curious about an artist and go to sites which hosted tons of an artist's work, only to find at least 60% of it GONE for whatever reason, and likely for good.

I've been searching for a lost Pokemon fanfic for years with no luck. I originally found a TV Tropes blurb which led to a dead link, and now I can't even FIND the TV Tropes blurb anymore, and no one else seems to know what I'm talking about.

Well I've been trying to find art made by online artists that either wound up getting deleted by the creators themselves or the owners of the art sites that they were on. I've been trying to find pictures of Loona from Helluvaboss made by an artist called WolphoxArg who randomly deleted a lot of their art for no good reason (along with anybof their other art) and a picture of 3 muscular zangooses made by a former deviantart artist sz-ryuuki. This is just a few examples of art and artists that I've been desperately been trying to find. If I could find or get help finding anyone who has all of the art that I'm looking for, that would make my life a whole lot easier.

Obviously trying to find old art from random artists from random sites is very hard, but miracles have happen before. There was one video that I've been looking for for month that thankfully someone eventually saw the thread that I made and reuploaded the files to it. So I'm hoping that something like that will happen again with everything else I'm looking for, or someone will create archive sites that can recover and retrieve deleted art and videos. Might be a stretch, but I'm still confident that I can recover at least most of the stuff I'm looking for.

Most artists prefer that you do not save their content without permission . but it always try backup of most of the content that I like. There are several software that let you backup artist easily .


(also that sounds like a bunch of fetish content lol)

nonenglish searches. unless you know the language, looking for anything is gonna be hard. especially languages that don't translate to english well

I made another post talking about struggling to find an obscure song by just Googling it. It feels like the algorithm favors popular media. Companies pay to be the top result so obscure and smaller media gets buried.

I also noticed that there tends to be very limited info on lesser known computer games. I get that most people don’t care about some random edutainment game from the 90s, so maybe those aren’t treated as a priority. A lot of this stuff isn’t really lost but just unarchived.

I also noticed that lost or unidentified educational VHS tend to be hardest to find info on. It sort of sucks that the most you can hope for is it popping up on RedLetterMedia or a similar channel.

Anything created for Disney by external companies. I've heard quite a lot that creating work Disney (for example creating promo art) as an external company is often completely locked down in NDA hell, with people who worked on it not allowed to even tell people they worked on it long after its release.

Does this include stuff like Valiant or The Wild? Valiant was definitely advertised as a "Disney movie" in my neck of the woods (in its limited advertising), but after it flopped hard and was quietly shuffled to video, I noticed that Disney no longer acknowledges it in ANY capacity, nor the Wild. Once I learned years later that both movies were farmed out, it does make sense why they are not in the Disney canon.