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

[kore]

Oh man the big team-up movies are so terrible and I'm so disappointed the shows are apparently going to follow the same kind of thing where they're perennially advertising The Next Thing (finales of FATWS and Loki, especially Loki, LOOKING AT YOU). They're basically commercials for the next installment, it's commercials all the way down.

And yeah, there were movies I really enjoyed -- Captain Marvel is a good example -- where I didn't feel that need to interact with the source, though, and read ALL the fic. But I think sometimes that's not even a marker of quality -- the idea that fans seek out flawed canons because there's something to fix. I don't know how much I buy that, but I've definitely seen it happen.

[osprey_archer]

I'm going to be annoyed forever that the end credits scene in Black Widow was an ad for the next installment. God, just let us have the WHOLE MOVIE without reminding us how you killed her in Endgame, is that too much to ask, Marvel?

I don't know that fans are always drawn to something because it's flawed, but maybe it's more common to feel that it's somehow incomplete? Or not even incomplete but the fans just want MORE; either more of the same or more where the characters finally get to fully express their love that the canon never fully acknowledges.

[kore]

I was so NOT HAPPY to see Val again, and to interrupt that great scene with Yelena at the grave? WTF?? And I don't give a SHIT about Clint Barton in the MCU at this point. The (male) screenwriter was like, "I love to do scenes like that, interrupt the big mourning scene with Val blowing her nose and dumping all over it." And I was just like, yeah, that sounds like a Hollywood male screenwriter, all right.

Incomplete, that's a better word for it! Like with TWS, the ending of that is such a beautiful setup for a bunch of stories -- Nat going off to find herself (INSERT SOLO MOVIE HERE), Steve and Sam going to find Bucky, whatever Bucky's up to now that he's woken up, the fall of SHIELD, &c &c. All those Up All Night To Get Bucky fics. ....and then it turns out canon wasn't really interested in any of that stuff. //cries

[osprey_archer]

I bet no one blew their nose and dumped all over the big mourning extravaganza for Tony in Endgame. I'M JUST SAYING.

I'm gonna die mad about the fact that we didn't get a solo Natasha movie back in 2015 or so. That was the obvious and correct place in the sequence for it to go.