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Abandoned visioncloths*
Apr. 19th, 2020 01:59 pmDay Seventeen of the fandom meme prompts me to write about:
Q: A fandom you’ve abandoned and why.
I don't tend to leave fandoms — as should be very obvious to anyone who's been reading my various posts for this meme, once I love something, I love it forever.
But my feelings about Isobelle Carmody's Obernewtyn series have decidedly cooled since she wrote the concluding book several years ago.
This is a series for which — along with a lot of Australian women of my generation — I felt a great deal of affection. It's almost as old as I am; the first book was published in the 1980s, and I grew up with the series. For years most fans assumed it would never be finished. And then, a couple of years ago, Carmody finally published its conclusion.
To say this book was met with disappointment would be an understatement. I don't think I know a single fan who was happy with how the series ended, and the forum Obernewtyn.net, the first fannish community I ever joined, was ablaze with critical discussions of the book's ending. I had begun to cool on the series a bit earlier than that, basically at the point that I realised a) because it had dragged on so long the political situation to which it had been written in response was no longer relevant (it is extremely influenced by its Cold War context, with the nuclear arms race playing a major role, and had to scramble to adjust to a post-9/11 'war on terror' context) and b) because Carmody began writing the series as a teenager she was no longer able to distance herself from the story and felt paralysed about finishing it because it would, metaphorically, be closing that childhood chapter of her life.
I'm still good friends with the people I met through the fandom — we just don't talk about the books all that much any more — and I did dip my toes into Obernewtyn fanfic waters in an exchange a few years back. Inevitably, that fic was a canon divergent fix it fic that overwrote and ignored the last book's ending.
( The other days )
*The title of this post refers to another incomplete (and unlikely ever to be completed) Isobelle Carmody series, The Legendsong, rather than Obernewtyn. Are you sensing a pattern?
Q: A fandom you’ve abandoned and why.
I don't tend to leave fandoms — as should be very obvious to anyone who's been reading my various posts for this meme, once I love something, I love it forever.
But my feelings about Isobelle Carmody's Obernewtyn series have decidedly cooled since she wrote the concluding book several years ago.
This is a series for which — along with a lot of Australian women of my generation — I felt a great deal of affection. It's almost as old as I am; the first book was published in the 1980s, and I grew up with the series. For years most fans assumed it would never be finished. And then, a couple of years ago, Carmody finally published its conclusion.
To say this book was met with disappointment would be an understatement. I don't think I know a single fan who was happy with how the series ended, and the forum Obernewtyn.net, the first fannish community I ever joined, was ablaze with critical discussions of the book's ending. I had begun to cool on the series a bit earlier than that, basically at the point that I realised a) because it had dragged on so long the political situation to which it had been written in response was no longer relevant (it is extremely influenced by its Cold War context, with the nuclear arms race playing a major role, and had to scramble to adjust to a post-9/11 'war on terror' context) and b) because Carmody began writing the series as a teenager she was no longer able to distance herself from the story and felt paralysed about finishing it because it would, metaphorically, be closing that childhood chapter of her life.
I'm still good friends with the people I met through the fandom — we just don't talk about the books all that much any more — and I did dip my toes into Obernewtyn fanfic waters in an exchange a few years back. Inevitably, that fic was a canon divergent fix it fic that overwrote and ignored the last book's ending.
( The other days )
*The title of this post refers to another incomplete (and unlikely ever to be completed) Isobelle Carmody series, The Legendsong, rather than Obernewtyn. Are you sensing a pattern?