Inspired by a Star Trek fanficrant post...
http://community.livejournal.com/fanficrants/8227664.html
This was the post. Hmmm.
Now, the OP does make one or two good points if you try to remove the sense of entitlement from them, but really...
The fascinating stuff happened in the comments, which were equally split between "Word!" and "Er, what the hell are you on?" and it's easy to see that there is already a pretty big schism in the fandom. The point that a lot of people were making about the movie-verse being an AU from TOS is what struck me.
It's something that I've been trying to figure out and think through for the last week. When we got new Doctor Who it was very definitely a continuation of what had gone before. It's useful to have some knowledge of the old episodes if you're going to write for New Who just so that you aren't getting canon stuff wrong given that everyone acknowledges that continuation element. That doesn't mean having to have watched every episode (I haven't and I consider myself an old school fan) but knowing how the internal rules of the universe work is a must and having a reference point for critical things is helpful. I know that there was the big divide between old fans and new with lots of people straddling the fence of both and plenty finding the old stuff through their love of the new. That's been a big part of the fun of new Doctor Who. At no stage, though, has it even been suggested that new Doctor Who is a separate universe from old Doctor Who.
With Star Trek, it's different. You know how I felt when I read that post? Like I was back in some of the Eastercon debates where long-time fans were mourning the death of fannishness due to all these awful new young people coming in. That was not something I liked but it does give me a picture of what Star Trek fandom is like.
Yes, it would be nice to think that people will be rediscovering the original series through the new movie, but having thought about it carefully I don't think that it's essential. No, not even for fanfic writers. The movie creates an AU and things are going to develop differently from now on. This Enterprise crew started out differently, will probably have different adventures due to the timeline changes and won't be following the same path as the original series.
To me that means movie-based fanfic is going to have a different interpretation of the characters than original series fic and that's the way it should be. If anything, I'd probably get quite annoyed if a fic supposedly based on the movie-verse used original series characterisation as a base because Shatner et al. aren't the same as Pine et al.
And as with Doctor Who, I don't think it's necessary to watch every episode of the original series before diving in to write new movie fanfic. Seriously, some episodes shouldn't be watched even if you want to write original series fic. The 20s gangster world sticks out in my mind. I do think that it's useful to know some of the facts about the Star Trek universe, its history and cultures. This is particularly true for anyone writing Spock. It might be helpful to know about major future events that fans are familiar with but equally some of those events may no longer be relevant. Actually, it might be interesting to see how some of the original series plots would play out in this AU.
I don't think this is entirely about old versus new fans, but more about some old fans not understanding how the AU-ness of the movie can impact interpretation. I am hoping that the poster in fanficrants isn't representative of most old school Trek fans, but I have a suspicion that there are going to be a fair few out there with the same attitude.
To me this means that, however carefully people mark their fics as TOS or XI-based, there are going to be a few people out there who will send nasty notes because they don't want to acknowledge the AU thing. That will make me sad because there are going to be some excellent fics out there that do a wonderful job of working out how the new universe will differ, extrapolating forward and building some amazing ideas and they will still get hit by people complaining that they got things wrong because it doesn't match up perfectly with the original series.
I'm thinking of a new tag-line for this stuff:
Star Trek XI: New universe, new rules. Deal with it.