- A post on fan site Fringenuity focusing on the life of a show after it ends contained a quote from actor Joshua Jackson. In it, he placed the work of content creators as a sort of prequel to the later life it lives in its fandom community. “I think there will probably be a lot of fan fiction. Maybe there will be even some sort of filmed addendum to the show or televised or podcasts or however it manifests itself, but I feel like the afterlife of Fringe is the test case for how modern cult shows are going to live on after they go off the air.”
- The New York Times wrote about how fandom visibility doesn’t just change the afterlife of a project, but perceptions about its current importance. “The sudden roar around ‘Fast & Furious 6’ reflects not only the unusual and overlooked strengths of the series, but also the value in Hollywood of cultivating an online fan base. Universal was able to light its Internet brush fire because it has spent years working to make fans feel a sense of ownership in the series.”
- The long-term effect of some fandoms could be seen in The Sydney Morning Herald‘s piece on a dance which “interprets the fan fiction spawned by the 2004 film Alien vs Predator.” Writing about choreographer Larissa McGowan, the article states “What she does have is a killer instinct for what mash-up culture can bring to the world of contemporary dance. McGowan’s 15-minute work Fanatic is an homage to two of sci-fi’s enduring big-screen series and to the legions of rabid fans who obsess over Hollywood’s war of the franchises, which began with Alien vs Predator in 2004. It was one of the hits of last year’s Spring Dance festival at the Sydney Opera House.”
- The Chicago Reader discussed modern aspects of fandom in a look at the Beatles White Album. “What’s really interesting is how spontaneously emergent it is. If you wrap a Beatles record in a plain white sleeve, a certain percentage of listeners will naturally use it as the platform for their own visual interpretations. Humans raised in the modern media-rich environment seem to almost instinctively want to interact with the cultural artifacts that they love by creating more artifacts in various media. The extent of that drive is only recently becoming clear, as the Internet has begun connecting creatively minded devotees of specific cultural properties into the massive, noncanonical content-generating hive mind known collectively as ‘fandom.'” The article links to Fanlore when it concludes “The Japanese, who remain the gold standard for obsessive fandom, have a name for this: niji sousaku, literally, ‘secondary creation.'”
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