December Daily: switching fandoms

princessofgeeks asks, "How did you go about changing fandoms? Was it, historically, something you did or something that just happened? Did friends lure you? Did you find new shows to watch?"

I think that the last fandom that attracted me because of something in the canon was "Star Trek: The Next Generation" when it was new.

It's much more typical for me to get drawn in by fan activity -- great stories that make me fall in love with a character or a pairing, great meta that fixes things that bother me in the source material.

When I lose interest in a fandom, often it's just that between me and the other fans I feel like we've explored all the most interesting nooks and crannies. I remember cesperanza once saying something like: We write a funny snippet and we write a sexy one-shot and we keep writing bigger, deeper things until we EXPRESS OUR SOULS! and then we wander off into a new fandom where it's all lube and balloons.

Sometimes it's that the canon gets crappy, or that the crappiness that was always there gets harder and harder to ignore. With SGA, it got to the point where I had difficulty making myself watch episodes.

Sometimes it's the fandom that goes sour. That was what happened with BBC Sherlock. I mean, the canon was going sour at the same time, but if that had been the only issue, I could have happily paddled around in pre-Reichenbach canon for at least a few more stories, pretending that Series 3 was no realer than the epilogue of Harry Potter; what drove me out was that the first time I encountered The Goddamned Discourse on Tumblr was in the context of people I admired putting a lot of energy into trying to reason with people whose entire argument was basically "anyone who loves BBC Sherlock is clearly a racist misogynist, and if you support them, you're one of them," and that was Res out.



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