bramblepatch:
patrexes:
hiccup-queen:
phantomrose96:
agriff11:
phantomrose96:
theofficialvincenzo:
phantomrose96:
I would pay top dollar for a comprehensive, source-supported explanation of how Superwholock vanished.
Like……..that was the core of tumblr in 2013. Its tainted life-blood. Its fetid royal palace. Destiel this and Johnlock that. Tardis-in-the-impala-at-221B URLS. Bendydoot Cucumberpatch and long analytical debates of which doctor is best doctor
What caused the end? What destroyed it? What series of events sunk this fortress? I’m so. So curious. This was so much of what tumblr was. So unavoidable. It’s cultural history. I want. to know.
So I’m not completely sure but I think you can pinpoint the disappearance to the month following Dashcon. Like, the entire year prior, things were going fucking insane; The DW 50th anniversary, Sherlock returned after a hiatus, Dean became a demon or something I don’t remember. Point is, the fans were worse than ever.
And then Dashcon happened: All those people got together for a nightmarish event in the ball pit (for anyone who doesn’t know what Dashcon was, look it up and read any of the news articles about it. I promise, you will not be disappointed).
Now, I wasn’t too active on tumblr at that point because of school reasons, but I remember finding out that the new season of Supernatural had aired on TV, and I saw NOTHING about it on tumblr. Not a single post on my dash. It was a miracle, but I was so confused. How had the whole fandom just vanished like that? I still don’t know for sure, but it was very shortly after the Dashcon incident.
Then Doctor Who returned. New doctor and a new companion. Same scenario. Nobody said anything online. I was still big into DW so that was kind of a bummer but it was still astounding.
I went back online more readily and started realizing that fandoms, as I had known them, were essentially dead after that summer. It was like everybody simultaneously realized how toxic those communities were after they all got together in person and proved themselves to be a disgusting bunch.
It was the fastest and most unsettling jump in internet culture I’d ever seen. Overnight it became an embarrassment to admit that you were in a popular fandom. All because of fucking
“Superwholock died as a result of Dashcon” is the most fascinating theory I’ve heard in a while amazing
(And you know, seasonal rot and kids getting older and all that but s t i l l)
My personal theory is it was because of hiatuses and competition!
- Hiatuses: Sherlock especially, but the long Doctor Who mid-season
breaks didn’t help. People wandered off. Some of them to very similar
shows, like Elementary, which fought initial fan scepticism to
become THE Sherlock alternative.
- Fans became more critical. All
three shows frequently come under fire for their treatment of women,
LGBTQIA people, etc., and without new content fans had no option but to
rewatch and reexamine the same episodes over and over again. Their flaws
became more obvious on repeat viewings, and the comparison to new arrivals like Elementary didn’t help. I imagine there were other
competitors too, but one would need to do more research to see how
relevant they are here - cartoons like Steven Universe and Gravity
Falls, maybe? WtNV? OUAT and OITNB? All of them are much more obviously
diverse, so Superwholock starts looking bland in comparison. There’s also the quality-comparison argument (Doctor Who is not as good at plotting as a lot of other things), but I reckon that goes without saying.
- Fandom backlash! You either die a hero or live long enough to become a villain. After events like the Mishapocalypse and the infamous FANDOMS GRAB YOUR WEAPONS post Superwholock became shorthand for the most obnoxious parts of Tumblr and fandom, so more people starting distancing themselves from it (see also: how Bronies killed the MLP fandom). And, yeah, it all came to a head with the Dashcon Clusterfuck 2k14.
- Fandom Backlash II: Your Fave is Problematic. Every popular figure from Joss Whedon to Taylor Swift is eventually the subject of text posts and screencaps dragging their name through the mud. Steven Moffat, Benedict Cumberbatch, Martin Freeman, and Jensen Ackles (I believe? It might have been Jared Padalecki. I don’t really follow Supernatural) have all had plenty of this.
IN CONCLUSION: there wasn’t enough new stuff being made. People found their own new stuff, which in many cases they found more appealling. People became less forgiving of the old stuff, its creators, and its fans. Eventually enough time passed that they gave up on the old stuff completely, so when it came back they weren’t interested.
(granted this mostly comes under the seasonal rot and kids getting older points but I didn’t notice that until I’d typed this out, and it seems a waste to delete it now :P )
It’s like I’m reading the end-result of an assigned essay topic I handed out last night. I’ve forgotten so many things from the 2013 era you get an A+
Also, 2 of the 3 series changed drastically.
Doctor Who got a new showrunner (Moffat), whom many fans dislike for various reasons. I know that when Amelia Pond was introduced, I was very confused because it was such a different show. Some people stopped watching to protest Moffat; other people just stopped watching when the show stopped being about ordinary people doing extraordinary things and became puzzles for the doctor to solve. (See: the crack in Amelia’s wall; the doctor’s time-travelling-backwards wife; Clara saving the doctor repeatedly with no memory of it.) it also started relying more heavily on complicated, confusing plots that were hard to follow. (I still have no clue how River is Amy’s best friend, her daughter, and the doctor’s wife, or why she only traveled backwards, or why the name translation was important, or the regeneration thing [”Shut up, Mum, I’m concentrating on a dress size!”], or why they made Amelia have a mystical pregnancy, or what purpose that plot served except to flaunt how ‘clever’ Moffat is.) At the same time, Moffat-Who brought in new fans, who had seen Superwholock on Tumblr and been irritated by them, so they tried not to become them.
Meanwhile, Supernatural was going through showrunners like they were pre-owned toilet paper. They kept trying to raise the stakes and they kept falling short. Like, there are only so many times you can watch the same season about preventing-the-apocalypse before you start being able to call the play, you know? Nobody was surprised when Dean became a demon. A not-inconsiderable segment of fandom kept asking, “Where’s Sam? How does he feel/think about this?”, another not-inconsiderable segment was asking where Cas was and what HE felt/thought, and those people started leaving the fandom in droves. Demons and angels became so cliche as to be boring. Missed episodes, instead of being “NONONO WHAT HAPPENED?!”, became “Dean and Sam solved a case, the plot advanced just far enough that they can recap it in 10 seconds before the next episode, aaaand that gif just told me all I need to know about it.” The show got simultaneously boring and infuriating (like, they made Sam SHARE A HOUSE WITH THE ANGEL WHO RAPED AND TORTURED HIM FOR CENTURIES AND DIDN’T SPARE A SECOND TO SHOW HE HE FELT ABOUT IT, consent issues on the show are super fucking gross [Dean got into a former porn-star’s house and begged/’seduced’/[unconsciously?]threatened her into having sex with him, Sam was forced into being an “angel condom” without knowing about it, the fuckery goes on], Demon-Dean sang karaoke….) and that turned fans off like a blown fuse.
Sherlock was on hiatus for an astoundingly long time, and as mentioned by agriff11, people found new shows to watch and picked apart the problems in the existing episodes.
Also, I’d add that the users on this site have matured some, pushing the average age older, and so the sitewide shutdowns (Mishapocalypse, for example) just don’t happen anymore. Even memes - I can’t think of a meme this year that’s been literally everywhere and inescapable, like the “Hi I’m auditioning for X and I’ll be singing Y”, or “Surprise bitch”, or “gun”, or “Do you love the color of the sky?” The website also gotten gradually less user-friendly with popup ads, ads with sound that play automatically, messages being eaten, random deletions, frequent changes without telling us, etc. Some changes were good (putting reblog on the bottom of posts), some changes were bad (why tf did they put the edit and delete buttons under a clickdown menu?), and some were just there (the change from nested replies to listed replies, which is fantastic for long posts because now they aren’t just one letter/line).
TLDR: the shows changed and the website changed, thus changing the fandoms.
i agree with a lot of this, but moffat-era dr.who as The End Of Dr.Who Fandom doesn’t work for a number of reasons, not the least of which is that moffat-era was several years in by this point. dr.who was, however, going through the 50th anniversary, which gave us a mess of a plot including the return of gallifrey (in a form that didn’t match really any prior depictions), two new doctors (”the war doctor” and 12), a storyline with 8 which alienated half of the expanded universe fanbase, and what looked at the time to be yet another river song plot. couple that with a general fandom maturity level that knew enough to be critical of the media they were consuming but not quite enough to differentiate character POV from narrative POV and the rest of the stuff outlined here…
IMO, there’s also the factor that a lot of Whovians didn’t immediately jump ship when Moffat took over because it took him a while to burn through the goodwill the fandom already held for him. It seems odd now, but during Russell T. Davies’ time as showrunner, Moffat was a highly regarded DW writer! His RTD-era stories were well received - he wrote The Empty Child/The Doctor Dances, and Blink, and Silence in the Library/Forest of the Dead. When he’s got proper editorial oversight and is working on the scale of one or two episodes, he can write some really great creepy stuff. It took a while for it to sink in that his strengths don’t extend to long-term plot arcs or characterization, and I think a lot of people were willing to stick around to see Amy and Rory’s arc through but didn’t care to deal with the 50th Anniversary stuff or try to figure out what was going on with Clara.
You three get A+’s also.