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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no subject
Date: 2006-05-04 07:41 am (UTC)Dying? Not by a long shot. In a different stage of life, no longer the exuberant adolescent? Very likely.
I had a very different reaction to the latest two books than a lot of people, I guess - my interest in HP fandom hit its nadir after OotP, and I loved HBP enough that it gave me a bit of a resurgence, probably because it had a level of horror and mystery that haunts me still. (I skip all that teen romance stuff but I will read that chapter with Harry and Dumbledore and the potion over and over until it doesn't horrify me anymore, which may be a long time coming).
And yeah. I'm holding my breath too. If I love her ending, I hope to go back to minor characters and gap-fillings and AU smut, and if I hate it I hope to, y'know, rage against the dying of the light.
Of course, obviously I am open to being seduced away by other fandoms too...hoo boy, am I...but I don't consider myself to have left HP per se. (Isn't there usually some drama and at least one temporary journal deletion involved? Not my style.)
no subject
Date: 2006-05-05 12:46 am (UTC)What if we're seeing a side effect of fandom shifting from Yahoo Groups to LJ?
Think about it. In Yahoo Groups the faces always changed but the fandom kept churning on. Yet in LJ, your fandom needs are not met by the group (and the fic pouring through) but the individual LJs. Communities don't have the same mix of personal and fandom interaction.
Most of the shift occurred in 2002-2003. People are looking at their f-lists, people they've grown attached to and who serve as their main source of fic. There has now been about three years for their f-lists to display...
*drumroll please as I coin a new term*
Fandom drift.
You open your f-list and you start seeing... what? CSI? Who? House? WTF? Prince of Tennis? And why is everyone writing Stargate Atlantis, anyway?
The fandom's just fine. It's your friendslist that's experienced (stand back, here comes that term again)...
Fandom drift. I am inordinately proud of that, because I think HP is as big as a tectonic plate.
This may also have a side effect of centering the fandom on individuals and stars rather than the latest fic. What do you think?
Icarus