internet half-life of shows.

[burntcopper]

show gets cancelled. how fast do the fans abandon it? a year? a few months?

Dr Who and Trek - NEVER. We were here first, and we'll outlast you all. Also we get nice new shiny packaging every few years.
Due South - still trucking along happily as a small-ish fandom.
Buffy - went on for a couple of years afterwards, but most people that I know that were in it left.

SGA, I have no idea, but I do remember the people abandoning it in droves come middle/end of S5.

Maybe the measure should be when the majority of fans abandon it, because a fandom will keep going in small amounts for years.

Any bets on Robin Hood? Sarah Connor?

Comments

[minim_calibre]

Buffy seems to have a lot of activity, but an entirely new set of fans. (I recognize few of the names on the news letter, but there's still plenty being written.)

Sarah Connor seems like it will continue being a niche fandom, every so often producing something mind-blowing, and more often producing grumbling that there's not enough of X, Y, or Z out there.

[xenaclone.livejournal.com]

Adding, 'Firefly'. Loyal fandom, cast and there are still new trinkets and other shiny things to buy.

[luckykaa.livejournal.com]

True. Dallas still has its fansites and fanfics even though it hasn't been around since 1991. It's likely that the remaining fans will be fans for the rest of their lives, but it's unlikely that we'll see any new fans. Dallas fandom will last until the late 21st century. I expect Due South and many others will be similar.

Some fandoms still generate new fans. The most prominent example is Sherlock Holmes, whose fans seem to have invented fandom even though there hasn't been a canonical work for 80 years, but there's a strong fan community. Trek was in the same boat. Viewing figures went up after it was cancelled. These both seem to have developed a certain critical mass of fans. The community can keep going purely on the strength of the community.

[alysscarlet.livejournal.com]

Robin of Sherwood still picks up the odd fan or two, a couple of decades after the show was cancelled.

[taraljc.livejournal.com]

I second this. I still get feedback now and then on the tiny handful of RoS stories I have online (99% of my stuff was in 'zines from 20 years ago)--some of which were written before the person emailing me was out of diapers.

[fahrenheit-f430.livejournal.com]

I reckon Robin Hood'll fuse with Nottingham & All Previous Robin Hoods as is always the way with Robin Hood.

[sbp.livejournal.com]

Technically Buffy itself is still going as a Season 8 comic. Although it's past 24 episodes now.

What about BSGng fandom? Also Farscape had enough fandom-whinge to get a series 5 miniseries made.

Prisoner fandom?

[taraljc.livejournal.com]

I started in fandoms with closed canon (i.e. shows that were off the air, and in some cases, had been off the air for years). I think it all depends on the fan. Some fans are monogamous, and their first fandom is their only fandom--sometimes for decades. I have friends who still write RoS, for example, and that series was cancelled in 1986.

But even for fannish butterflies like me, it's not that I abandon the fandoms so much as I tend to shift focus as I acquire new shinies, and either find msyelf telling the same stories over and over after a while, or I get stalled on WIPs and set them aside until I have distacne and then re-watch source to approach it fresh.

But I often keep writing the odd bit of fiction--usually for ficathons--a few years after I moevd on. Tho in the case of soemthing like "Firefly", I could have happily written stroeis for years, had "Serenity" not killed any desire I ever had to write in that universe again.

Whereas despite being a fan of Wonder Woman, Doctor Who and Jem in my childhood, I never staretd writing until the 2000s. Tho with DW, I wandered around s3, adn tho I ams till fannish, the obsessive need to tell stories has faded as the show has moved in different directions...

[cidercupcakes.livejournal.com]

From what I've seen, actually, Buffy's still chugging along pretty steadily, though obviously on a much smaller scale -- I stumbled across someone running a friending meme the other day, and it had several pages of comments. And lord knows the Browncoats are still going strong. I think that Joss continually recycles his actors and is still working pretty hard helps him a lot, as does the fact that Buffy has S8.