Fandom Meme, 23 & 24

[osprey_archer]

23. Your rarest fandoms.

God, so many book fandoms. After all, many books never have what you might call a “fandom” at all. I think the smallest one I’ve actually written fic for is Zilpha Keatley Snyder’s The Changeling, for which I wrote the only fic on AO3.


24. A fandom you’ve abandoned and why.

There are really two reasons why this happens: either the canon is closed and I run out of ideas to write so I just drift away (Sutcliff fandom, Frances Hodgson Burnett’s The Lost Prince), or the canon is open and the new developments strike me as disappointing/enraging (Torchwood, Downton Abbey, the MCU) so I quit, sometimes in a huff.

Is this because the later installments are in fact disappointing, or because I’ve gotten so attached to my own interpretations that the later canon can’t help but annoy me? Of course I tend to feel that it’s the former, but it’s happened with so many fandoms now that I’m beginning to wonder if maybe this is just the curse of getting super-involved with an open canon.

OTOH it’s very common for me to get annoyed at a TV show and stop watching, so maybe it’s more of a general TV show thing. (I realize the MCU is not mainly a TV show, but like a TV show it is an ongoing property, and ongoing properties are liable to go off the rails at any time.)

Comments

[potofsoup]

haha, sounds about right! TWS is quite laser-targeted, and even with TWS, I had quite a few quibbles back in April 2014. But then I joined fandom and it moved from "pretty decent movie with some unresolved emotional beats" to "excellent source material with prime unresolved emotional beats." XD;;;

I feel like most of the standalones are decent popcorn movies, though my eternal frustration is that they always pull their punches re: thematic messaging, and of course, everything has to be resolved by 30 minutes of punching. Whereas the team-up movies basically have 20 minutes to develop the thinnest of plots, because they have to spend 1 hour checking in with everyone, 1 hour to get the team together, and 1 hour to punch.

[osprey_archer]

No one in the MCU cares about themes. Their goal is to make decent popcorn movies that gesture at themes but never actually explore them, leaving the part of the audience that cares about that sort of thing screaming "But you got SO CLOSE to truly exploring this ethical question and having deep thematic resonance, why did you STOP?"

Possibly it's a nefarious plot to make us all keep coming back in the forlorn hope that THIS TIME the MCU will actually let a theme play out instead of killing it dead just in time for punching.

[potofsoup]

this makes me want to do a MCU movie rating system based purely on their theme followthrough --

[x]% follow-through on the theme of [blah] but: (check all that apply) [] decided to solve the problem through punching [] allowed the good guys to win without fully confronting the ramifications of their actions re: [theme] [] shifted the narrative to be about individual success and failure instead of systemic issues

Black Panther -- 75% follow-through on their theme of the harms of colonialism and the responsibility of bystanders, but: [x] decided to solve the problem through punching (boring Panther/Panther fight) [x] allowed the good guys to win without fully confronting the ramifications of their actions re: Wakanda's responsibility for Killmonger and the African Diaspora [] shifted the narrative to be about individual success and failure instead of systemic issues