Automoderated users, Autopatrolled users, Bureaucrats, Comment administrators, Confirmed users, Forum administrators, Interface administrators, Moderators, Rollbackers, Administrators
116,623
edits
Lost Forever: Difference between revisions
→Real Life: added text
Looney Toons (talk | contribs) (→Real Life: added text) |
|||
| (19 intermediate revisions by 8 users not shown) | |||
Line 1:
{{trope}}{{featured article}}
{{quote|''...[[Averted Trope|we're not]] [[Killed Off for Real|killing off any of the companions]] because [[Player Preferred Pattern|everybody did]]. [[My God, What Have I Done?|And then everybody cried]]... People test as they're playing the system and they go... '[[Tempting Fate|I wonder if they're going to let me do this.]] [[Oh Crap|Oh no]]! My healer is gone forever'!''
|[[Word of God|Daniel Erickson]] [http://darthhater.com/2011/09/24/egxp-interview-with-daniel-erickson/page/2 on] why ''[[Star Wars: The Old Republic]]'' is going to [[Averted Trope|Avert]] this.}}
Also frequently referred to as being "missable," the dreaded '''Lost Forever''' is a game play component (such as an item, weapon, [[Sidequest]], [[Secret Character|character]], or plot event) that can become permanently inaccessible after a certain point in the game, therefore being "lost forever" if you miss them during the period in which they are available. A close relative and often an example of [[Guide Dang It]]. The bane of gamers everywhere, especially those shooting for [[100% Completion]], as it often forces them to start the entire game anew if they're not willing to accept a less-than-perfect run.
Lost Forevers frequently appear in areas that can only be accessed once, or are rendered unavailable after a certain plot event occurs. [[Doomed Hometown|The early town that is destroyed]], the mountainous area that caves in once you leave it, the village that you're banished from, the [[Load-Bearing Boss]]'s [[Collapsing Lair|hideout that goes boom]] after you beat it, the one-shot place that you're never given the option to return to, and so forth.
Line 10 ⟶ 11:
Forgiving developers will sometimes provide an alternative means to reach what would otherwise be Lost Forever. However, reaching it with this second-chance method is usually much more time-consuming or difficult than if you had just gotten it the first time around. If a player knows such an item is coming, a common tactic is to [[Save Scumming|save immediately beforehand, and restore repeatedly from that save]] [[Trial and Error Gameplay|until they manage to get it]]. This is often true when getting the Lost Forever is [[Luck-Based Mission|based on luck]], such as when a [[Boss Battle|boss]] [[Randomly Drops]] a unique piece of equipment.
This is infamously present in [[Massively Multiplayer Online Role Playing Game|MMORPG]]'s or any other game with online connectivity, due to one-time events, irreplaceable quest reward items (such as consumables that become [[Too Awesome to Use]]) distributed from an online source. While you can simply restart an offline game for another shot at the content, online Lost Forevers really can be lost ''forever''. (When it comes to patch updates, however, players who still have the old items are usually allowed to keep them, and the items are often displayed as a badge of honor.)
Due to their tendency to induce great frustration, smart developers tend to avoid implementing these, and allow players to collect items or do [[sidequest]]s [[Take Your Time|at their leisure]], whenever and in any order they want. Sometimes, this can result in silly situations where the player is presented with the option of returning to a location where there would be no logical reason to return to, such as, say, the site of a nuclear explosion. But, really, it's the lesser of the two evils.
Line 24 ⟶ 25:
----
{{examples}}
==
* ''[[Y: The Last Man]]'': Done via [[Continuity Nod]]. During the ''One Small Step'' arc, [[Escape Artist]] main character Yorick is stuck in unpickable handcuffs designed by Mossad of Israel's Secret Service. A couple of arcs later, we see a flashback of a magic store owner offering him the only skeleton key that works on those cuffs. Yorick must have been kicking himself.▼
== Oral Tradition, Folklore, Myths and Legends ==
* ''[[The Bible]]'' teaches that most ''human beings'' are this. People are "lost" when they sin, in which case they must be "found" (saved) before they die. If they are not, they are [[Hell|permanently lost]], with no hope of ever being retrieved.▼
== Tabletop Games ==▼
=== Card Games ===▼
* ''[[Magic: The Gathering]]'': Not exactly Lost Forever, but if you didn't get the Power Nine when ''Beta'' came out, you'd better be a professional gamer, or you'll never see the point. Same with dual lands.▼
=== Choose Your Own Adventure-type books ===▼
* Absolutely endemic.{{context}}<!--If it's that common, you can give us at least one example, right? -->▼
* ''[[Fighting Fantasy]]'' could be particularly bad about this. In "Black Vein Prophecy" and "Creature of Havoc", you could miss useful items or powers ''on a dice roll''. ("Black Vein Prophecy" was particularly grim, since the dice roll in question was failing a [[Luck Stat]] roll.)▼
=== Tabletop RPG ===▼
* ''[[Dungeons & Dragons]]'' adventure WG6 ''Isle of the Ape''. Near the end of the module six jewels worth a total of 300,000 gold pieces float to the ground. If the party doesn't pick them up within one round (1 minute) they vanish forever.▼
== Video Games ==
=== [[Action Adventure]] ===
* The freeware game ''[[Cave Story]]'' contains numerous easily missable one-shots, many of which are required in order to reach the [[Bonus Level of Hell|secret hell level]], which leads to the game's [[Multiple Endings|best ending]]. The worst of these moments: if you don't {{spoiler|search the corners of a certain room before triggering a cutscene, or search it after the boss fight and before [[Fission Mailed|your air supply runs out]], the tow rope, Curly Brace and}} the ability to obtain the best ending are Lost Forever in one fell swoop.
Line 76 ⟶ 94:
* ''[[Hotel Dusk: Room 215]]'' features a sidequest in which you can earn a prize from a vending machine. There is only one very short point in the game in which you can exchange your cash for change; after that, it's lost forever. (There is also no warning, making it a [[Guide Dang It]].)
** There is a kind-of new game plus mode after completing the game with an extra puzzle and ending, but the scavenger hunt item you get out of the machine changes, making the original Lost Forever unless you start a clean game. In addition, the original scavenger hunt vending item can be given to two different characters, but the only way to give it to one of them is to randomly guess the vending machine number, because there is no opportunity to give it to her after legitimately completing the scavenger hunt.
* The text-based game of ''[[
* ''[[Return to Zork]]''. Most notoriously, if you cut instead of dig up the bonding plant at the very beginning of the game, killing it, you're [[Failure Is the Only Option|screwed]]. Even worse, it's very late in the game when you find this out. Additionally, there are many ways of killing it by accident if you do dig it up.
** Likewise, the earlier text game ''Spellbreaker'' had a plant that you needed to dig up rather than cut to solve a puzzle. And just to make sure as many people as possible found that out too late, the game placed a [[Red Herring]] pair of shears near the plant.
Line 86 ⟶ 104:
* ''[[Luigi's Mansion]]'' features both golden mice and blue ghosts. Blue ghosts appear in the blink of an eye in certain dark rooms and vanish just as quickly; if you don't catch them in one go, they'll vanish forever. Golden mice are similar, but instead of just vanishing, they move really quickly, and can be vacuumed up in one hit. Both types will disappear if you turn all the lights in the room on (by defeating all the other ghosts) first. Both of them drop the same thing: Lots and ''lots'' of money, and, in the case of the blue ghosts, gems.
** It also has a plant in the Bone Yard that can be watered after every chapter. Miss it once, and the plant dies, meaning you lose the chance to get one of the giant diamonds worth a lot of money, and a huge amount of assorted coins and bank notes.
* ''[[Myst]]'' and ''[[Riven]]'' are very hard to make [[Unwinnable]]. But ''Myst 3: Exile
=== [[Card Battle Game]] ===
* ''[[Yu-Gi-Oh!|Nightmare Troubadour]]'' for the DS features an accidental example due to a glitch in some versions of the game: after beating Marik, the chance to duel Pegasus is lost forever, along with the chance to trade with him for the one-of-a-kind Imperial Order card. At one point there was a giveaway that would put the card on your game, and the game had online trades, but
* In ''[[Digimon World|Digimon: Digital Card Battle]]'' for the PSX, you get to choose a partner Digimon at the very start of the game, and you get two more later in the story. What nobody told you is that you have to choose them from a pool of 6, and that the decisions are permanent; the three partners you didn't choose are lost forever unless you cheat. That means that if you chose V-mon, Patamon and Tailmon/Gatomon (depending on the localization) and you were later aiming to get Wormmon, well, sucks to be you. At least the programmers had the courtesy of letting the player use "Borrowed decks" from people to get a chance of getting the card data of the partner Digimon you didn't choose, and their respective Armor Evolution data. [[Guide Dang It|Not that it's explicitly stated by anybody on the game, though]]...
Line 120 ⟶ 137:
*** Brought up again in two mutation modes, Last Gnome on Earth and Healing Gnome. Both modes require you to carry the gnome from start to finish (on any map, not just Dark Carnival this time) and you can't advance to the next level without the gnome in your hands. If the gnome gets tossed over a fence or left behind a [[Point of No Return]], the game is then [[Unwinnable]]
** This might be a shout out to ''[[System Shock 2]]''. In the training mission (before you pick your class etc.) you can find a basketball. If you pick it up, it will stay with in your inventory to the actual game (in between of which there is a three year training period, mind you :)). If you keep it with you all the way up to the recreational sector of the ship (very far into the game), you can throw it into a hoop. You then recieve a secret prize.
* There are five audio diaries in ''[[BioShock (series)|BioShock ]]'' in two areas that you cannot backtrack to.
** ''Bioshock 2'' has you collecting research information on enemies in exchange for unique character abilities. The early [[Mook]] enemies [[Sorting Algorithm of Evil|stop spawning once you're strong enough]], so if you haven't maxed out their Research Track, say goodbye to their bonus and the [[One Hundred Percent Completion]] achievement for Research.
** Given the finite amount of ADAM one can receive in any given playthrough, certain Plasmids, Gene Tonics and Upgrades can be Lost Forever if you did not purchase them before your ADAM ran out. Likewise, there are only a limited number of Power to the People Vending Machines in the game, which is less than how many times you can upgrade each weapon in total (each Power to the People will be permanently deactivated when you use them). On top of that, if you Kill Sander Cohen, one of these limited machines will also be Lost Forever, further limiting your upgrades.
** Considering you can't backtrack between levels at all in ''[[BioShock (series)]] 2'', any audio diaries you haven't collected when you advance to the next level become this.
* In ''[[Quake]]'', it's a given that you can't backtrack to previous levels. However, maps E4M4 and E4M5 have a message saying you forgot something important if you didn't pickup a certain weapon on that level. This would imply that it would be lost forever, but the following levels contains the weapons you skipped past. To trigger those message, you're likely going out of your way to skip them.
* ''[[Team Fortress 2]]'' gave users the ability to permanently delete unlocked weapons. For a brief period, players were panicking over the prospects of not being able to re-unlock these weapons, because they were tied to achievements whose records were stored on Valve's servers—in other words, those achievements could not be manually cleared. Then Valve introduced their new [[Randomly Drops]] system of attaining unlockables, and not only could players breathe easily, but suddenly being able to delete duplicate items became VERY important.
** A give-away for unique medals for the Soldier class was held on a first-come first-serve basis. If you missed the giveaway there is no other way to get a medal for your Soldier.
Line 134 ⟶ 151:
* ''[[Doom]] II'' has a level (''[[MAP 27]]: Monster Condo'') with an area which sneakily seals itself off 30 seconds after the level starts, and is thereafter totally inaccessible (it can be opened only from the inside). It's not too far away from the start point, but unless you know about this sector beforehand there's absolutely no way you'd find it in a normal play through the level. What's worse is that it's a marked Secret Area, so it affects the score on the intermission screen; if you get to the area too slow, you're not getting 100% secrets.
* In ''[[Descent]] II'', some secrets are only accessible by one-shot timed doors or become blocked off by [[Mobile Maze]] barriers. If the door closes, fugeddaboudit.
* In ''[[Call of Cthulhu (tabletop game)|Call of Cthulhu]]: [[Dark Corners of the Earth]]'', the refinery contains a sniper rifle, but it's hidden behind a door in an office you pass through. If you do not close the door behind yourself and take the rifle when you first enter the room, it will be Lost Forever, as you cannot return to the office once you leave it. What's worse, getting this rifle is necessary for a [[100% Completion]]... which is the only way to see the proper ending and make sense of the plot.
* In ''[[Red Faction]]: Guerrilla'', the most useful vehicles are the Walker mechs. Because they're so perfect for destroying things, you will almost never see them outside of the specific missions where you use one. There are a few places where you can find a Walker, unless you destroyed the building that was there. In the unlikely event that you either just happened not to destroy the building where one of the Walkers might spawn, or you knew beforehand not to destroy that building, you could very well see a Walker there. Most of these buildings are EDF property which you are encouraged to demolish, and if the building is gone, you can't get a Walker from there anymore.
* ''[[Killing Floor]]'' has added a few promotional playermodels, only obtainable by preordering another game (such as the protagonist of ''The Ball'') or unlocking a specific number of achievements during an event (10 of 13 summer achievements to unlock a [[Steampunk]] version of [[Ensemble Darkhorse|Mr. Foster]]); when the game is released or the event ends, you can no longer get the models.
* In ''[[Strangers Wrath|Oddworld: Stranger's Wrath]]'', we have the Binoculars, which are ''only'' available at the General Store in Gizzard's Gulch (right at the ''start of the game''), and said General Store gets destroyed in the battle with Boilz Booty. Didn't buy the Binoculars? Well then, you won't be able to use the game's [[Sniper Rifle]] equivalent, the [[One-Hit Kill|Sniper Wasps]], as they can only be accessed/used through the Binoculars. [[Guide Dang It|This is mentioned nowhere.]]
=== General ===
Line 151 ⟶ 167:
=== [[Massively Multiplayer Online Role Playing Game|MMORPGs]] ===
* Many [[Free to Play]] [[Massively Multiplayer Online Role Playing Game|MMORPG]]s give exclusive items to participants in each of the game's beta stages [[Perpetual Beta|(pre-release beta stages, that is, usually Closed, Open and/or Invitation Only stages)]] to honor their participation and as a partial compensation for the necessity of wiping their hard-built characters before opening day. Those joining after the official release naturally can't ever obtain them unless the service provider distributes them for new channel or expansion betas.
* A ''[[Final Fantasy XI]]'' example: There are actually quite a few items you can only get once, and worse, they can't be sold or traded to other players, so you can save space on your character-that-can-do-anything. Most of these aren't exactly that good, but then you have examples like the Bibiki Seashell, a very decent tanking item... that once could be ''accidentally thrown'', before a patch fixed it.
** ''[[Final Fantasy XI]]'''s [[Game Master]]s will generally restore ''one'' item you accidentally lose. Needless to say, this ability is [[Too Awesome to Use]] for most people.
Line 175 ⟶ 191:
** Another fun thing from the tutorial was a special item that the little girl Gwen gave you. It didn't do anything. Even if you finished the game, there was no use for it, as Gwen was never found, and it was taking up space in your inventory. After some 3 real-life years, the 3rd expansion came out, and Gwen was there. Anyone who had saved the item could now use it for a bonus quest/item. For everyone else: Make a new character.
** Then there're the lost riches of the duping scandal. In 2007, a bunch of players figured out how to manipulate a new mechanic in order to dupe items. Naturally, they started producing mass quantities of Armbraces of Truth (a high-end item that could be traded in to collector NPCs for rare items, which were commonly used as high-denomination currency. [[Arena Net]] shut them down, but not before they were able to buy pretty much everything they wanted. The community is still trying to figure out how many ultrarare, limited-edition minipets were lost when the dupers' accounts were deleted. (The wave of bot-related account bannings in 2010 probably didn't help either, judging by the wails of some of the banned).
*** Most [[Massively Multiplayer Online Role Playing Game|MMORPG]] service providers will conduct massive wipe-a-thons and server rollbacks when they confirm that a wave of duping has occurred. Items that were unique or virtually impossible to get before the dupes will naturally fall under this trope afterwards. Occasionally any in-game items that were used to trigger the duping will be removed outright rather than being fixed.
* [[Massively Multiplayer Online Role Playing Game|MMORPG]] ''[[Mabinogi (video game)|Mabinogi]]'' has many of these associated with limited-time events. Not really important, since the vast majority of these items are purely cosmetic, none of them are [[Game Breaker]]s or even particularly high-powered, and most of them [[Breakable Weapons|don't last very long anyway]].
** Some of the main story quests have the option to skip them. Doing so loses a few good items or titles forever, or eliminates the ability to convert from [[An Adventurer Is You|Paladin to Dark Knight]]. It also makes some of the later story quests more difficult; though they're still available.
** Special titles are available to players who "break the seal" on newly-released zones and dungeons by matching a particular set of conditions. Since each seal can only be broken once per server, they are unique, and unavailable to other players once the seal is broken. If the player character is deleted (by the player, or by the [[Game Master]]s for rules violations), the seal remains broken, and the title is lost forever.
Line 253 ⟶ 269:
=== [[Roguelike]] ===
* In [[
** ''[[TOME]]'' has a few dungeons with special named levels, which are different in that they aren't randomly generated, and thus the same in every game. They also have the same unique monsters and artifacts in every game. They ''also'' disappear if you leave (for example via the down staircase) and if you attempt to go back to it, you'll just get a randomly generated level instead. So, you only get one shot at grabbing those artifacts (whether found on the floor or dropped from a unique) before leaving the level, or they're Lost Forever. Make sure to have some free inventory space when you get there.
* In ''[[Ancient Domains of Mystery|ADOM]]'', the Pyramid (which holds two awesome artifacts) is a prime example of this trope. It closes as soon as you reach level 17. Besides, it is a rather difficult place, which means that you want all the skill you can. So...
Line 359 ⟶ 375:
** Another big one in ''Star Ocean: The Second Story'' is the Sharp Edge. It's a rather weak weapon for Claude that you can only get if you take second place in the fighting tournament, then speak to a specific NPC. Oh, wait, after the tournament was over, you left town BEFORE you spoke to that NPC? Guess what, the sword's Lost Forever. And did you know that Claude can customize it a few times and end up creating his [[Infinity+1 Sword]]? Guess you shouldn't have forgotten to get it!
** Another interesting variance from ''Star Ocean: The Second Story''. There is a particular hidden witch you may talk to in an early town, which promptly becomes uninhabitable a few minutes of game play later, and then much later in another town. If spoken to in both locations, she unlocks Indalacio Limiter Off, an alternate form of the last boss. It's a variance due to the fact that most players ''don't'' want this to happen, as [[That One Boss|he will destroy you]].
* ''[[
** And while it's pretty good at not having quests Lost Forever, it's not good at all with items. Specifically, one of the guild merchants sells a bunch of rare items. He's the only person in the game you can get these items from. You have to kill him for a quest. He also sells a bunch of rare spells, but you can get those again once you're done with the quest line.
*** There's another guild merchant with a unique spell that only ''he'' sells. And he's killed as part of a quest. If you didn't buy the spell from him before he dies, it really is Lost Forever - no other spell in the game has that type of effect!
Line 559 ⟶ 575:
* In ''[[The Godfather (video game)|The Godfather]]: The Game'' there are [[Thief Bag]]s with cash in every mission that will disappear after the mission is over. Fortunately, it's just cash, which you can easily earn elsewhere.
== [[Web Original]] ==▼
▲* ''[[Y: The Last Man]]'': Done via [[Continuity Nod]]. During the ''One Small Step'' arc, [[Escape Artist]] main character Yorick is stuck in unpickable handcuffs designed by Mossad of Israel's Secret Service. A couple of arcs later, we see a flashback of a magic store owner offering him the only skeleton key that works on those cuffs. Yorick must have been kicking himself.
▲* ''[[The Bible]]'' teaches that most ''human beings'' are this. People are "lost" when they sin, in which case they must be "found" (saved) before they die. If they are not, they are [[Hell|permanently lost]], with no hope of ever being retrieved.
▲== Tabletop Games ==
▲=== Card Games ===
▲* ''[[Magic: The Gathering]]'': Not exactly Lost Forever, but if you didn't get the Power Nine when ''Beta'' came out, you'd better be a professional gamer, or you'll never see the point. Same with dual lands.
▲=== Choose Your Own Adventure-type books ===
▲* Absolutely endemic.{{context}}<!--If it's that common, you can give us at least one example, right? -->
▲* ''[[Fighting Fantasy]]'' could be particularly bad about this. In "Black Vein Prophecy" and "Creature of Havoc", you could miss useful items or powers ''on a dice roll''. ("Black Vein Prophecy" was particularly grim, since the dice roll in question was failing a [[Luck Stat]] roll.)
▲=== Tabletop RPG ===
▲* ''[[Dungeons & Dragons]]'' adventure WG6 ''Isle of the Ape''. Near the end of the module six jewels worth a total of 300,000 gold pieces float to the ground. If the party doesn't pick them up within one round (1 minute) they vanish forever.
▲== Web Original ==
* Any website that doesn't allow the Internet Archive to search its old pages.
* At [[TV Tropes]] (and by extension here), due to
* All The Tropes has its own examples, thanks to the Orain hack and an earlier crash. For instance, the current version of the page for [[Lord Buckley]] is a reconstruction of one posted just before the hack.
* From ''[[That Guy With The Glasses]]'':
** A video by [[That Dude in the Suede]] that ranted against
** Every single video that [[Unperson|Daniel "That Aussie Guy" Rizzo]] made for the site.
** [[The Nostalgia Chick]]'s controversial review of the ''[[Dune]]'' movie.
Line 589 ⟶ 588:
* Fanfiction.net never lets any [[Fan Fiction]] remain on the site forever. Which is sad, since the Wayback Machine can't archive anything there...
* Public user photo site Fotopic went into administration in 2011, taking with it 8 years worth of images, websites, galleries... the lot. And with the Wayback Machine unable to save anything from it, it's all gone for good.
*
* The staff of [[tumblr]] tried to ''enforce'' this trope by banning volunteer teams who were frantically trying to rescue/archive content from "adult" pages that were going to be destroyed when it [[Think of the Advertisers!|purged itself of adult content to better appeal to advertisers]] in December 2018.
== [[Real Life]] ==
* The Honjo Masamune, probably the most famous sword made by the swordsmith Gorō Nyūdō Masamune, was by and large considered the single finest katana ever made and was a personal treasure of the Tokugawa Shogunate, as well as a Japanese National Treasure. In 1945, Prince Tokugawa Iemasa entrusted the Honjo Masamune and 14 other swords to a Police station in Mejiro, only for them to be given to a sergeant of the 7th Air Cavalry of the United States Military one month later. Since then, however, the whereabouts of the sword are completely unknown.
** 'The Greatest Generation' really got their hands on a lot of cool loot.
*
* [[wikipedia:Lost film|Many films]], especially from the silent cinema and early 'talkie' era, were not well archived, and as such they either vanished into the dustbin of history or had missing scenes.
** And the earliest methods of copying the films for distribution actually ''degrades'' the strips that's being copied from.
** Not to mention that early filmstock is dangerously flammable, and entire archives have subsequently been lost to fire.
* In one of the ballsiest moves in the history of modern music (from a band that made their ''entire career'' on being ballsy), anti-establishment electronica duo [[The KLF]] celebrated their departure from the music industry by deleting their entire back catalogue. If you want to hear their music now, good luck finding old copies of their records on eBay.
** To clarify, the term "deleted" means no longer in print by request of the artist. This happens a lot, but the artist usually only "deletes" an album/single or two, not their entire discography. It's pretty easy to find their discography on the internet, minus a few releases that may or may not exist. Whether or not the master tapes still exist is up for debate.
* Averted by [[Tom Lehrer]], who put his entire catalogue into the public domain at the end of 2022, after which he had all his tracks packaged up and posted on the net for anyone who wanted them.
* Any time a species goes extinct.
* In early July 2019, every single eBook ever sold by Microsoft, including those that were free to download -- along with any personal annotations anyone ever made to their copies -- abruptly ceased to be available when Microsoft got out of the eBook business and decided that maintaining a skeleton DRM system so that its customers could keep their books was ''more trouble and more expensive'' than issuing refunds for every book they ever sold, along with a US$25 credit for the loss of annotations.
** Microsoft did something similar to ''[[w:AltspaceVR|AltspaceVR]]'' in 2023. As one of the earlier virtual environments on several VR devices, it had a good following that grew to thousands of users and "worlds", but it was free to use and unprofitable for its owners except as a source of ideas. Microsoft bought it in 2017, when the original developer ran out of money to run it. They used some of its features in their other products, [[Executive Meddling|messed about]] for a few years and then pulled the plug.
* ''[[Relatively Absent]]'' by Mark "Togashi Gaijin" Shurtleff, was an incomplete, [[Doorstopper|epic-length]] ''[[Ranma ½]]/[[Sailor Moon]]'' [[Crossover Fic]] of remarkable quality that at 11 large chapters was clearly still in the process of setting up its plot when Shurtleff abandoned fan fiction entirely in 2009. He took down his story archives and managed to purge ''Relatively Absent'' (and his other fan writing) entirely from the Web -- even from the [[Wayback Machine]]. He then spent the next ten years or so firing off take-down notices to every site that tried to repost it. Archives of this and his other stories exist and [[Keep Circulating the Tapes|are traded fan-to-fan]], but unless you know someone who has it, you're out of luck.
{{reflist}}
[[Category:{{PAGENAME}}]]▼
[[Category:Fake Difficulty]]
[[Category:Video Game Items and Inventory]]
[[Category:Depressing Tropes]]
▲[[Category:{{PAGENAME}}]]
| |||