Thinky-thoughts, I has them...
slavelabour linked to an interesting essay on the death of the Western, which is well worth a read on its own*, but at the end it went on a little digression about fandom death and shrinkage, which is what I'm pondering on here.
It's fascinating to me how some fandoms continue to thrive long after the material that inspired it has passed away from the airwaves, and others just seem to subside. Star Trek certainly is thriving - even though, yes, in this case, there is new material like the reboot, people are still writing old-school Kirk/Spock. Due South is still live and kicking, The Magnificent Seven has quite a hardcore little fandom (and bless its socks, I do love it), but other fandoms have become very quiet.
There are always flare-ups, for Porn Battles or Yuletide, but there's not much in the way of an active fandom anymore. Just using the fandoms I used to be active in for examples: you don't see many X-Files fen about the place these days, for example. Star Trek Voyager is almost dead. Ditto with Buffy.
I have a vague incoherent theory that it's something to do with the relevance and timelessness of the themes of the show, or more appropriately the ability of the show to transcend its time and context - The X-Files is very much-rooted in the 90s and the approaching-the-millennium-paranoia, and it shows. Buffy is very late 90s/early 2000s and that Valley Girl trope. Whereas, to my mind at least, something like The Magnificent Seven, possibly by virtue of not being set in the modern day, doesn't date as easily. And Due South is full of the old cliché of the fish out of water, and that doesn't date. Nor do the old Canadian stereotypes, sadly.
I'm sure I could come up with other examples, but it's early and I'm tired. You guys fill in the blanks. Agree? Disagree? Somewhere in-between?
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* My initial thoughts are that a) westerns cannot die because that would make me immensely sad, as I love them too much, and b) westerns haven't died at all, they've just moved to another frontier, ie. the final frontier.
It's fascinating to me how some fandoms continue to thrive long after the material that inspired it has passed away from the airwaves, and others just seem to subside. Star Trek certainly is thriving - even though, yes, in this case, there is new material like the reboot, people are still writing old-school Kirk/Spock. Due South is still live and kicking, The Magnificent Seven has quite a hardcore little fandom (and bless its socks, I do love it), but other fandoms have become very quiet.
There are always flare-ups, for Porn Battles or Yuletide, but there's not much in the way of an active fandom anymore. Just using the fandoms I used to be active in for examples: you don't see many X-Files fen about the place these days, for example. Star Trek Voyager is almost dead. Ditto with Buffy.
I have a vague incoherent theory that it's something to do with the relevance and timelessness of the themes of the show, or more appropriately the ability of the show to transcend its time and context - The X-Files is very much-rooted in the 90s and the approaching-the-millennium-paranoia, and it shows. Buffy is very late 90s/early 2000s and that Valley Girl trope. Whereas, to my mind at least, something like The Magnificent Seven, possibly by virtue of not being set in the modern day, doesn't date as easily. And Due South is full of the old cliché of the fish out of water, and that doesn't date. Nor do the old Canadian stereotypes, sadly.
I'm sure I could come up with other examples, but it's early and I'm tired. You guys fill in the blanks. Agree? Disagree? Somewhere in-between?
___________________
* My initial thoughts are that a) westerns cannot die because that would make me immensely sad, as I love them too much, and b) westerns haven't died at all, they've just moved to another frontier, ie. the final frontier.