Hercules and Xena |
Whither now, online fandom? | Hercules and Xena essays |
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Hercules and Xena |
Whither now, online fandom? | Hercules and Xena essays |
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Whither now, online fandom?
Whither now, or wither now? That seems to be the question. I'm going to depart from the HERCULES/XENA-centric perspective for a while and talk about online fandom in general. I've been involved in online fandom for several years. I found my way to the Compuserve SF Lit Forum some years back when I was still stumbling around in what was then the largest online service in America. The SF Lit Forum split into two fora eventually, and they started two SFMedia fora (and you can see Hercules and Xena discussions in the SF Media Two Forum. In time I found my way to the Internet and off Compuserve, and I descended upon various SF news groups and mailing lists and created many Web sites, and yada, yada, yada. Just like so many others out there. Along the way I discovered there are two kinds of online fandom -- literary types and television types. Actually, you can discern the gaming and comics crowds, and the convention runners -- but most people I've dealt with seem to fall into either the literary or television crowds. I encounter a few in both areas, but there seems to be quite a bit of segregation in media interests. HERCULES and XENA, of course, have been the topics of numerous books, both novels and non-fiction, but their main fandom falls clearly in the Television category. Other fandom groups I've joined or observed in Television include fans of STARGATE SG-1, EARTH: FINAL CONFLICT, and CONAN THE BARBARIAN. Of these fandoms, the Conan crowd seems to be pretty small -- probably because many of the hard-core Robert E. Howard fans are more literary types, and most of the "Conan" fans seem to be Robert Jordan fans, or devotees of the comics and graphic novels. The Stargate folks are still a fairly young bunch, as fandoms go. STARGATE is a unique television series in that it is currently running on a major cable network Showtime and is being syndicated as a primetime (once-a-week) series across America. Many fans who haven't seen the series on Showtime are this season seeing it for the first time as if it it were a first-run syndicated series. EFC, like HERCULES and XENA, is being syndicated directly to television stations across the US (and, so far as I know, to foreign markets like all the other shows). And like HERCULES and XENA, EFC has undergone some major changes which have upset a lot of the fans. EARTH: FINAL CONFLICT is only in its second season, but this year the series has brought in a new producer, new writers, and killed off the star of the show. Discussions on the Internet consist mostly of, "If this keeps up much longer, I'm going to stop watching". And the ratings seem to indicate that fans are leaving the show in droves. STARGATE SG-1 fandom is still growing and I suspect it will continue to get stronger. But now this year I find that HERCULES and XENA are both losing some longtime Internet fans. H:TLJ, like EFC, has killed off a major character this season: Iolaus. At first a lot of people said, "What? Kill Iolaus? They've done it before!" But then word slipped out that Iolaus would REALLY die. Permanently. A thing relatively unheard of in the Herc/Xenaverse. They just don't permanently kill of Hercules' friends. But they've done it. And now many long-time Michael Hurst fans are threatening to stop watching the show. Many long-time Xena fans stopped watching because of "The Rift", the lengthy story-arc from XENA's third season in which Xena and Gabrielle drifted apart, became enemies, and then worked to heal an renew their relationship. Add to these burdens an unpoopular story arc about a demonic force named Dahak and the fans are starting to get fed up. I am not. Not yet, although I have to admit that EFC without Kevin Kilner is fast losing my interest. But this column is about HERCULES and XENA online fandom, which are still huge entities. Thousands of Web sites, dozens of news groups and mailing lists, and an indeterminate number of fans are "out there". The attrition rate is only barely noticeable, although the ratings have dropped considerably this season (as they have for many SF shows). Now, for a long time I've been predicting that Herc/Xena fandom will continue to grow. I think that's still true. The shows have not finished production and Kevin Sorbo and Lucy Lawless remain immensely popular among fans. Michael Hurst and Renee O'Connor are still with the shows, too. So new fans will join the legions of the faithful each year for several years to come, I am sure. But the character of online fandom is changing. It is, I think, inevitable that online fandom should evolve. People just cannot be the same, year after year. The discussion groups reflect the changes in online fandom, too. The original discussion topics have been replaced by newer topics (partly because the series progresses and introduces new stories and characters). Web sites have become more sophisticated in the ever-churning competition to develop faithful followings. We have large sites now which are maintained by teams of Webmasters, writers, researchers, graphics artists, and other folks. It's almost an industry with semi-professional devotees investing a lot of time, money, and effort in demonstrating their love for these shows. So, we've lost a few faces in the crowd, and online fandom marches on toward a future filled with (probably) decades of Uber Fan Fiction, Slash Fan Fiction, Soft Fan Fiction, Crossover Fan Fiction, and other types of Fan Fiction yet to be named. The Fanfic authors themselves are developing major followings and generating a lot of interest in their own work. I'll be looking more closely at fan fiction in a future column. It's an interesting phenomenon and I don't believe we're anywhere near the end of it. The shows may both fail because of too many radical decisions, but the fandoms will still be there long after the last first-run episodes are aired. And this brings me back to the Literary versus Television fandoms. It seems that the major difference between the two groups is that the Television fandoms are more active -- they are constantly being given new material to digest and analyze. Literary fandoms have to wait months or even years for new material, and when a primary author dies, the fandom may stagnate for lack of new interest factors. So, what will the Television fandoms become once the shows are no longer in production? The Fanfic authors will still be producing, probably, but they won't carry all of fandom with them. Will the Hardcore Nutballs eventually be the fanfic readers? Will Herc/Xena fandom evolve into a fast-paced Literary fandom? Fan fiction has been around for a long time now -- Trekkers kept Kirk, Spock, McCoy, and other characters alive for decades through fanzines. But as widespread and powerful as that early Trek fandom became, it lacked the catalytic presence of the Internet and the World Wide Web. Today we may be seeing the broadcast fans leaving the shows, but the online fans may very well take these creative worlds and turn them into a new source of fannish inspiration. We may one day see Web sites devoted not to HERCULES and XENA, but to Herc and Xena Superfans, whomever those folks may be. And I'm sure the phenomenon won't be unique to Herc/Xena fandom. But we'll just have to wait and see... |
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