The Myth of the Dying Fandom
May. 3rd, 2006 10:31 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
icarusThe Myth of a Dying Fandom
There've been quite a few posts in the Harry Potter fandom lately about how it's dying, or declarations isn't dying, or that it needs to be revitalized, etc., etc. I think a lot of people have set the dying fandom myth to rest, but to add my two cents...
I receive several reviews a week on Harry Potter stories I wrote upwards of three years ago. Beg Me For It is being translated into Russian for Fanrus, a site that features Huge numbers of Harry Potter Russian translations. I was recently sent several gorgeous pieces of fanart. Given the last full-length HP fic I wrote was The Metronome in January, and I haven't been stirring the cauldron posting stories everywhere, that sounds like a pretty lively fandom to me.
When a group of authors discussed fanfiction on Making Light, most of the fanfiction writers who turned up wrote Harry Potter.
Now I have noticed that the HP authors I've followed for years haven't been posting a lot of fic. There seems to be a multi-fandom fad going around. I'm no different. Right now I don't have any HP stories burbling on the stove. I did burn out after 130 HP stories, and I was counting on Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince to restart my engines.
Instead, I find I'm holding my breath.
The book was a cliffhanger and I'm not one of those people who like to fill in what I think the ending's going to be. I don't shake my Christmas presents either. I like to be surprised. I've always been canon-centric in Lord of the Rings and Harry Potter (we'll not mention what I do to canon in Stargate Atlantis). So instead of filling in the ready-made holes of canon, I find myself faced with a story that's... incomplete. I don't want to tie up the loose ends or finish anything off for JKR. I want to see what she does.
This is not a dying fandom. This is a fandom on the edge of a cliff, silently breathless, waiting for the fireworks to begin.
I predict an explosion of fanfiction after JKR's final book.
There've been quite a few posts in the Harry Potter fandom lately about how it's dying, or declarations isn't dying, or that it needs to be revitalized, etc., etc. I think a lot of people have set the dying fandom myth to rest, but to add my two cents...
I receive several reviews a week on Harry Potter stories I wrote upwards of three years ago. Beg Me For It is being translated into Russian for Fanrus, a site that features Huge numbers of Harry Potter Russian translations. I was recently sent several gorgeous pieces of fanart. Given the last full-length HP fic I wrote was The Metronome in January, and I haven't been stirring the cauldron posting stories everywhere, that sounds like a pretty lively fandom to me.
When a group of authors discussed fanfiction on Making Light, most of the fanfiction writers who turned up wrote Harry Potter.
Now I have noticed that the HP authors I've followed for years haven't been posting a lot of fic. There seems to be a multi-fandom fad going around. I'm no different. Right now I don't have any HP stories burbling on the stove. I did burn out after 130 HP stories, and I was counting on Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince to restart my engines.
Instead, I find I'm holding my breath.
The book was a cliffhanger and I'm not one of those people who like to fill in what I think the ending's going to be. I don't shake my Christmas presents either. I like to be surprised. I've always been canon-centric in Lord of the Rings and Harry Potter (we'll not mention what I do to canon in Stargate Atlantis). So instead of filling in the ready-made holes of canon, I find myself faced with a story that's... incomplete. I don't want to tie up the loose ends or finish anything off for JKR. I want to see what she does.
This is not a dying fandom. This is a fandom on the edge of a cliff, silently breathless, waiting for the fireworks to begin.
I predict an explosion of fanfiction after JKR's final book.
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Date: 2006-05-03 08:10 pm (UTC)i'd have to agree with you here. in all honesty, i don't believe that the HP fandom is "dying" so much as a number of people were thrown for a world-class loop by the events in HBP. it seems to me that quite a few of the younger authors (fanfiction.net, for example) have lost interest or are trying to insist that AU fics where sirius/dumbledore aren't dead, or where harry never got together with cho/ginny, or any number of canon facts just aren't true. now i'm not saying that AU fics are bad! far far from it... but there was a decided dip in the fluffy and micro fics after the last two books.
what's funniest to me -- i loved the last two books more than the first four. but then, they loaded me up with a ton of ammunition against dumbledore, whom i didn't much like or trust from the start *lol* this has caused a bit of a civil war at home, naturally. my mother worships dumbledore and hates snape with a passion. my daughter is tepid about them both, but was furious with the harry/ginny subplot. and my son, bless him, just wanted there to be more fight scenes.
so, is the HP fandom dying? i give it a resounding NO!