Fear of the future
Mar. 2nd, 2003 10:37 amSo, I've been thinking a lot about the ending of Buffy, and how I feel about it, and what it means to me as a fan, and as a fan writer and vidder, and it's giving me the blues in a big way. I totally understand SMG's feelings about leaving while they're doing good work; it always bothered me that the press focused so much on her movie career, when she'd said repeatedly that she didn't want the show to go out like Ally McBeal, which started at the same time they did, or drag out like the X-Files, and while I share those sentiments, I guess I'm just not ready to go there yet. Possibly because we at least got some serious romance with Angel for three years, not to mention one lovely episode of his own show; we Spuffy fans will probably never get anything like that now with the show ending. It will have been the harshness of last year, and then only the tiniest of crumbs this year. Which would be okay in some respects, but there's this underlying feeling of "could have been more" that I keep hearing scratching at the back of my brain.
Some of this is the depresso feeling that I won't really have anything fannish to focus on and that my connections here on LJ and on lists will be lost. The ending of a show doesn't necessarily mean the ending of a fandom; I'm involved still in writing and vidding for a show that's been dead for a few years now, and I'm the kind of person who never really leaves a fandom, even if I run out of story ideas or whatnot. But I think a lot of what a currently airing show does is to provide new ideas and new places to take things like fanfic and certainly to take vids; without that impetus, people often drift away to the next big thing, or, for folks where this is the only show they've ever been fannish about, they leave entirely after a time. People definitely stick around in smaller groups, but I can't help wondering if all my connections will be severed -- the main reason I started this page wasn't for personal reasons but to review episodes, write essays, do little movie reviews, but all of the shows I wanted to review will now be gone.
I was startled when people friended me here -- I'd never expected it, because of not cutting away spoilers and I knew I was stepping outside the traditional bounds of the LJ expectations, and also, I'm about as nobody as you can get, and yet people friended me anyway of their own accord (I'm not worthy!) or they friended me back when I friended them (so misguided!). And so suddenly I felt like I was in the Buffy community, and it had been a long time since I'd felt like part of a fan community. I had pretty much gafiated completely -- I still wrote sometimes, and vidded a lot, but I was on only one small list, participated in nothing, and just wanted to stay the hell away from fandom. It was really after the musical last year that I went, "you know, I like what's happening with Buffy and Spike, and I think I want to participate again." And then Crumbling Walls came along, I joined some lists, but mostly, I started doing these goofy reviews and kept posting stories, and suddenly I was a fan again, and having so much fun that I felt like a newbie all over. And the show ending makes me feel like that is going to go away -- no more analyzing or dissecting to do, no more new directions for the show that I can mine for fanfic, and possibly no more reason to keep this LJ.
Certainly all the shows except Angel are gone that I wanted to write about and that connected me to most of the friends I have here; Firefly was the one I hoped for as a replacement for Buffy (and suddenly, I hate UPN even more for turning down Firefly now they've lost Buffy and no continuation with Faith; don't they look stupid for not taking something they could have at least tried to make into a franchise). And I don't know how long Angel has to go, and I've never felt as qualified to talk much about it because it's always been a secondary interest for me. Buffy I could talk about for days, Angel I am often baffled by (hating two major characters makes loving a show harder). This year was one of the most fannishly happy I'd had in a long time, only now everything's gone except Without a Trace, and that's not the kind of show you can really analyze and dissect because it's plot-driven rather than character-driven.
I still love Alias and Gilmore Girls, and there's 24 and The Shield (for a short time), but none of them drive me to write and vid as Buffy has. Otherwise, there's the little forced death march of shows I loved this year and thought could be serious fannish interests -- MDs, Firefly, Birds of Prey, Robbery Homicide Division; Veritas is already gone, Miracles probably soon. I'm a fan, it's who I am, and I'll always be one, so I feel cast adrift when I don't have a fannish obsession. Maybe it's time for me to look at boy bands. ;-) Buffy hit a cord with me from the beginning; from the movie, actually, and it's never stopped being my main focus -- for a brief halcyon time, it was on the same night as La Femme Nikita, and it was the best tv time ever for me. I need that jolt of having a show to look forward to, of being excited to see something and analyzing it to death in between weeks; I also fear that the sense of community I have here and on lists will dissipate a lot and that adds to my sadness.
I wasn't excited about the prospect of Faith taking over, but I was willing to at least see how it went; mostly because I just wasn't ready to let the show go. I wonder how precarious Angel is right now, and whether it really will come back next year -- I haven't seen anything definite yet. But at the same time, I dreaded the concept of Buffy continuing like that, or Angel just floundering around moving from night to night. I was an XF fan through to the whole bitter, bitter end, and it was the most painful lingering death ever. The show ended back in 6th season, but stayed through two more years, and that was just wrong, wrong, wrong. There were a few good episodes when Doggett came along, but for the most part it was like watching a slow amputation; you just had to turn away and cover your ears from the screaming. The idea of that happening to Buffy is too horrid to think, so I guess I'm relieved in some ways that it can't happen now. (And a tangential aside: I was glad to see SMG finally discuss publicly with a reputable journalistic source about her dissatisfaction with last season. Fans have been gossiping about it so long, and I'm glad it's out in the open; it always bugged me that Marti and Joss insisted it's how all young adults come into adulthood, but I was like, no, it's not. I didn't act that despicably -- my friends didn't. It's about time that she's had the chance to discuss how much that disappointed her.) Only, I'm not ready to let it die, either, so the conflict is that it stay on life support until I'm ready to say pull the plug... which may be never, because I'm feeling like such a big baby. I want a good shooooowwwww. Gimme a good shooowwww....
And that's the stupid thing -- It's a show for crying out loud! And yet I have all this emotional investment in it, in this community I've joined here, and I see that going away at a time when my work is so depressing I can hardly bear to get up in the morning, when my future looks really dark... so I focus all my energy and affection on a show. I don't know how successful all the rest of the show's cast and crew will be -- I have to agree with![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
herself_nyc that SMG will never have the big movie career that so few actresses have but that most dream of, she'll never really have an opportunity like this show again. I like her much more than most fans, but she's not the kind of powerhouse who can open movies past a teen audience, and that can't last long as she gets older. And I wonder about the others most of all -- especially JM, and what's in store for him. People talk about a Spike spinoff, but that would just be... weird, to me, because much as I worship JM, he's starting to show his age, as DB is on Angel, and these guys are supposed to be immortal vampires who are looking entirely too mortal. You'd have to change the characters so much to accommodate that, and then... where's the fun? If anyone could pull it off, Joss could, but I don't know how excited I am at that prospect, and I wonder, too, if Joss is now tainted by all of this.
Bleh. I know I have a couple more months to have fun in, so I should stop this. I'm in what I used to call a Sunday mood -- my friend, when I was in high school, would waste her entire Sunday moping and being miserable because she had to go to school the next day, so she only enjoyed half her weekend. I chided her that it was asinine to do that, but I'm in a May mood now -- anticipating the end before it happens, anticipating the end of this community and my reason for even being here or on lists, when it hasn't happened yet. How dumb is that? Well, pretty dumb. I feel like I should be doodling on a Pee-Chee "Buffy 4 ever" or something.
Some of this is the depresso feeling that I won't really have anything fannish to focus on and that my connections here on LJ and on lists will be lost. The ending of a show doesn't necessarily mean the ending of a fandom; I'm involved still in writing and vidding for a show that's been dead for a few years now, and I'm the kind of person who never really leaves a fandom, even if I run out of story ideas or whatnot. But I think a lot of what a currently airing show does is to provide new ideas and new places to take things like fanfic and certainly to take vids; without that impetus, people often drift away to the next big thing, or, for folks where this is the only show they've ever been fannish about, they leave entirely after a time. People definitely stick around in smaller groups, but I can't help wondering if all my connections will be severed -- the main reason I started this page wasn't for personal reasons but to review episodes, write essays, do little movie reviews, but all of the shows I wanted to review will now be gone.
I was startled when people friended me here -- I'd never expected it, because of not cutting away spoilers and I knew I was stepping outside the traditional bounds of the LJ expectations, and also, I'm about as nobody as you can get, and yet people friended me anyway of their own accord (I'm not worthy!) or they friended me back when I friended them (so misguided!). And so suddenly I felt like I was in the Buffy community, and it had been a long time since I'd felt like part of a fan community. I had pretty much gafiated completely -- I still wrote sometimes, and vidded a lot, but I was on only one small list, participated in nothing, and just wanted to stay the hell away from fandom. It was really after the musical last year that I went, "you know, I like what's happening with Buffy and Spike, and I think I want to participate again." And then Crumbling Walls came along, I joined some lists, but mostly, I started doing these goofy reviews and kept posting stories, and suddenly I was a fan again, and having so much fun that I felt like a newbie all over. And the show ending makes me feel like that is going to go away -- no more analyzing or dissecting to do, no more new directions for the show that I can mine for fanfic, and possibly no more reason to keep this LJ.
Certainly all the shows except Angel are gone that I wanted to write about and that connected me to most of the friends I have here; Firefly was the one I hoped for as a replacement for Buffy (and suddenly, I hate UPN even more for turning down Firefly now they've lost Buffy and no continuation with Faith; don't they look stupid for not taking something they could have at least tried to make into a franchise). And I don't know how long Angel has to go, and I've never felt as qualified to talk much about it because it's always been a secondary interest for me. Buffy I could talk about for days, Angel I am often baffled by (hating two major characters makes loving a show harder). This year was one of the most fannishly happy I'd had in a long time, only now everything's gone except Without a Trace, and that's not the kind of show you can really analyze and dissect because it's plot-driven rather than character-driven.
I still love Alias and Gilmore Girls, and there's 24 and The Shield (for a short time), but none of them drive me to write and vid as Buffy has. Otherwise, there's the little forced death march of shows I loved this year and thought could be serious fannish interests -- MDs, Firefly, Birds of Prey, Robbery Homicide Division; Veritas is already gone, Miracles probably soon. I'm a fan, it's who I am, and I'll always be one, so I feel cast adrift when I don't have a fannish obsession. Maybe it's time for me to look at boy bands. ;-) Buffy hit a cord with me from the beginning; from the movie, actually, and it's never stopped being my main focus -- for a brief halcyon time, it was on the same night as La Femme Nikita, and it was the best tv time ever for me. I need that jolt of having a show to look forward to, of being excited to see something and analyzing it to death in between weeks; I also fear that the sense of community I have here and on lists will dissipate a lot and that adds to my sadness.
I wasn't excited about the prospect of Faith taking over, but I was willing to at least see how it went; mostly because I just wasn't ready to let the show go. I wonder how precarious Angel is right now, and whether it really will come back next year -- I haven't seen anything definite yet. But at the same time, I dreaded the concept of Buffy continuing like that, or Angel just floundering around moving from night to night. I was an XF fan through to the whole bitter, bitter end, and it was the most painful lingering death ever. The show ended back in 6th season, but stayed through two more years, and that was just wrong, wrong, wrong. There were a few good episodes when Doggett came along, but for the most part it was like watching a slow amputation; you just had to turn away and cover your ears from the screaming. The idea of that happening to Buffy is too horrid to think, so I guess I'm relieved in some ways that it can't happen now. (And a tangential aside: I was glad to see SMG finally discuss publicly with a reputable journalistic source about her dissatisfaction with last season. Fans have been gossiping about it so long, and I'm glad it's out in the open; it always bugged me that Marti and Joss insisted it's how all young adults come into adulthood, but I was like, no, it's not. I didn't act that despicably -- my friends didn't. It's about time that she's had the chance to discuss how much that disappointed her.) Only, I'm not ready to let it die, either, so the conflict is that it stay on life support until I'm ready to say pull the plug... which may be never, because I'm feeling like such a big baby. I want a good shooooowwwww. Gimme a good shooowwww....
And that's the stupid thing -- It's a show for crying out loud! And yet I have all this emotional investment in it, in this community I've joined here, and I see that going away at a time when my work is so depressing I can hardly bear to get up in the morning, when my future looks really dark... so I focus all my energy and affection on a show. I don't know how successful all the rest of the show's cast and crew will be -- I have to agree with
herself_nyc that SMG will never have the big movie career that so few actresses have but that most dream of, she'll never really have an opportunity like this show again. I like her much more than most fans, but she's not the kind of powerhouse who can open movies past a teen audience, and that can't last long as she gets older. And I wonder about the others most of all -- especially JM, and what's in store for him. People talk about a Spike spinoff, but that would just be... weird, to me, because much as I worship JM, he's starting to show his age, as DB is on Angel, and these guys are supposed to be immortal vampires who are looking entirely too mortal. You'd have to change the characters so much to accommodate that, and then... where's the fun? If anyone could pull it off, Joss could, but I don't know how excited I am at that prospect, and I wonder, too, if Joss is now tainted by all of this.Bleh. I know I have a couple more months to have fun in, so I should stop this. I'm in what I used to call a Sunday mood -- my friend, when I was in high school, would waste her entire Sunday moping and being miserable because she had to go to school the next day, so she only enjoyed half her weekend. I chided her that it was asinine to do that, but I'm in a May mood now -- anticipating the end before it happens, anticipating the end of this community and my reason for even being here or on lists, when it hasn't happened yet. How dumb is that? Well, pretty dumb. I feel like I should be doodling on a Pee-Chee "Buffy 4 ever" or something.
