This is what a dying fandom looks like???
Okay, I've been hearing pretty much since July how that now that the series is over and they haven't announced plans to restart the anime adaptations that Inuyasha is a dying fandom. "Oh, woe!" the cry has gone out. We'll have to be less picky in our awards communities now so we won't drive away the few remaining authors willing to put effort into a thing of the past. Everyone is moving on.
Bollocks!
I'm sure it'll happen eventually but if numbers are anything to go by then the fandom doesn't even have a stuffy nose yet so don't start planning what flowers to send to the funeral.
Back towards the end of September I discovered that I could subscribe to feeds from FF.Net and Media Miner so that I'd get a notice in Google Reader every time a new story was posted in the category I subscribed to. I get the title, author, rating, pairing, summary, posting date, and with FF.Net the completion status, if tagged. In one of the optional views I also can get a count of how many stories have posted since I subscribed.
Inuyasha has had nearly 5000 stories at FF.Net alone. From October 2nd to December 20th. That means that will be OVER 5000 stories for the quarter to chose from when IYFG nominations roll around. Pity things are dying so we don't have as many to chose from any more.
'
Now granted Harry Potter gets 700 or 800 a week and Naruto is up around 1000 a week BUT Inuyasha beats every OTHER category I subscribed to hands down even all the various Batman categories combined. It beats Narnia, Yu Yu Hakusho, Sailor Moon, Pirates of the Caribbean, and Lord of the Rings. Heck, YYH, PotC, and LotR get less in a month than IY gets in a week.
Now, I'll concede that traffic on the message boards I follow related to Inuyasha dropped right after the end of the series but so did the traffic on boards that had absolutely nothing to do with Inuyasha. it was slow at Urban Legends and Folk Lore even though the final months of the US Presidential election were generating a ton of wild rumors that needed to be tracked It was Summer. Traffic always drops in the summer because people take vacations and can go outside and do stuff instead of huddling around their computers. Now that it's not Summer I can't keep up with the between quarter traffic at IYFG. I've been at least a hundred messages behind every day this week.
People are still going to be crying about how the fandom is dying though even in the face of evidence to the contrary until at last, several years from now, they are right. After all, every two or three quarters at IYFG somebody whines about how it's the same authors winning everything and they should be banned for being so good it's not fair to have to compete against them and someone, usually Ren, posts stats showing how the percentage of repeat winners is actually very small and there are new authors who have never won before winning every quarter which gets ignored when the cycle starts again and some of the same people start bitching all over again.
I can see what fuels that mess, people want to get rid of the really good authors so they have a better chance. It's childish and shows a lack of faith in their (or their friends) work but it serves a selfish purpose. I don't really understand what people are getting out of the whole dying fandom myth though. You'd think we'd get enough angst from the fanfic to meet our RDA without generating more.
Bollocks!
I'm sure it'll happen eventually but if numbers are anything to go by then the fandom doesn't even have a stuffy nose yet so don't start planning what flowers to send to the funeral.
Back towards the end of September I discovered that I could subscribe to feeds from FF.Net and Media Miner so that I'd get a notice in Google Reader every time a new story was posted in the category I subscribed to. I get the title, author, rating, pairing, summary, posting date, and with FF.Net the completion status, if tagged. In one of the optional views I also can get a count of how many stories have posted since I subscribed.
Inuyasha has had nearly 5000 stories at FF.Net alone. From October 2nd to December 20th. That means that will be OVER 5000 stories for the quarter to chose from when IYFG nominations roll around. Pity things are dying so we don't have as many to chose from any more.
'
Now granted Harry Potter gets 700 or 800 a week and Naruto is up around 1000 a week BUT Inuyasha beats every OTHER category I subscribed to hands down even all the various Batman categories combined. It beats Narnia, Yu Yu Hakusho, Sailor Moon, Pirates of the Caribbean, and Lord of the Rings. Heck, YYH, PotC, and LotR get less in a month than IY gets in a week.
Now, I'll concede that traffic on the message boards I follow related to Inuyasha dropped right after the end of the series but so did the traffic on boards that had absolutely nothing to do with Inuyasha. it was slow at Urban Legends and Folk Lore even though the final months of the US Presidential election were generating a ton of wild rumors that needed to be tracked It was Summer. Traffic always drops in the summer because people take vacations and can go outside and do stuff instead of huddling around their computers. Now that it's not Summer I can't keep up with the between quarter traffic at IYFG. I've been at least a hundred messages behind every day this week.
People are still going to be crying about how the fandom is dying though even in the face of evidence to the contrary until at last, several years from now, they are right. After all, every two or three quarters at IYFG somebody whines about how it's the same authors winning everything and they should be banned for being so good it's not fair to have to compete against them and someone, usually Ren, posts stats showing how the percentage of repeat winners is actually very small and there are new authors who have never won before winning every quarter which gets ignored when the cycle starts again and some of the same people start bitching all over again.
I can see what fuels that mess, people want to get rid of the really good authors so they have a better chance. It's childish and shows a lack of faith in their (or their friends) work but it serves a selfish purpose. I don't really understand what people are getting out of the whole dying fandom myth though. You'd think we'd get enough angst from the fanfic to meet our RDA without generating more.