Hmmm. Hadn't considered your notion of the effect of closed canon before. ::nodnod::
I came to fandom in general during the golden age of Star Trek Original Series (I was a fan of the show when it first aired in the '60s. My advancing age and increasing decrepitude, let me show you it), and I've been witness to the decades of good writing and awful writing and everything in between that The Original Series (TOS) has generated.
At first glance, the very fact that there were so many years during which we saw the full spectrum of writing in TOS, stellar to pure crap, would seem to disprove your theory--but TOS is unique in a number of ways. It had a short original run of three seasons, but those three seasons generated 79 episodes, providing such a large and rich canon that writers had seemingly endless opportunities to expand, debate, reimagine, and spackle plot holes (of which there were many). This kept everyone busy for years, and just as things might have died down and the split between good and awful fic might have happened (and perhaps some would say that it did happen, but that it was swallowed up in future events--but I digress), we got the first movie, which was not very good in the opinion of most fans, but even so, another wave of writing came along to expand/debate/reimagine/spackle the movie, as well as to rework prior canon in the light of it. And this happened over and over, every time another one of the 5 movies that followed was released.
TOS fandom has also ridden the wave of changing technologies, as it came into being pre-Internet (pre-computer, even. Wow.) and thus the fiction originally was entirely paper-fanzine based. It was reinvigorated with the advent of newsgroups and listservs and then once again during the golden age of the Yahoo Group. Every time the technology changed, it seemed there was a new crop of writers who embraced that technology, perhaps even were inspired by it and by the new ways in which it enabled them to create and share their work.
TOS canon has been closed for some time now, but it took a fairly long time post-closing for the split to become evident. Now, actually, there isn't much new fic of any kind around. I think the fandom has existed so long, and there's such a HUGE body of work already created, that there just isn't all that much ground left to explore. What I have seen of the more recent fic definitely falls into your "really truly awful" vs. "really excellent" split--with the majority being on the awful side. TOS doesn't seem to have survived the LJ transition very well. I do see some former TOS writers on LJ but they're either writing in other fandoms, or they've stopped writing fic altogether.
Joining you in the baseless sociological nattering . . . although I see we haven't talked at all about gen vs. het vs. slash and whether splitting occurs differently in these different categories. But that's a discussion for another time! :)
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branchandroot
no subject
Date: 2008-08-11 05:32 am (UTC)I came to fandom in general during the golden age of Star Trek Original Series (I was a fan of the show when it first aired in the '60s. My advancing age and increasing decrepitude, let me show you it), and I've been witness to the decades of good writing and awful writing and everything in between that The Original Series (TOS) has generated.
At first glance, the very fact that there were so many years during which we saw the full spectrum of writing in TOS, stellar to pure crap, would seem to disprove your theory--but TOS is unique in a number of ways. It had a short original run of three seasons, but those three seasons generated 79 episodes, providing such a large and rich canon that writers had seemingly endless opportunities to expand, debate, reimagine, and spackle plot holes (of which there were many). This kept everyone busy for years, and just as things might have died down and the split between good and awful fic might have happened (and perhaps some would say that it did happen, but that it was swallowed up in future events--but I digress), we got the first movie, which was not very good in the opinion of most fans, but even so, another wave of writing came along to expand/debate/reimagine/spackle the movie, as well as to rework prior canon in the light of it. And this happened over and over, every time another one of the 5 movies that followed was released.
TOS fandom has also ridden the wave of changing technologies, as it came into being pre-Internet (pre-computer, even. Wow.) and thus the fiction originally was entirely paper-fanzine based. It was reinvigorated with the advent of newsgroups and listservs and then once again during the golden age of the Yahoo Group. Every time the technology changed, it seemed there was a new crop of writers who embraced that technology, perhaps even were inspired by it and by the new ways in which it enabled them to create and share their work.
TOS canon has been closed for some time now, but it took a fairly long time post-closing for the split to become evident. Now, actually, there isn't much new fic of any kind around. I think the fandom has existed so long, and there's such a HUGE body of work already created, that there just isn't all that much ground left to explore. What I have seen of the more recent fic definitely falls into your "really truly awful" vs. "really excellent" split--with the majority being on the awful side. TOS doesn't seem to have survived the LJ transition very well. I do see some former TOS writers on LJ but they're either writing in other fandoms, or they've stopped writing fic altogether.
Joining you in the baseless sociological nattering . . . although I see we haven't talked at all about gen vs. het vs. slash and whether splitting occurs differently in these different categories. But that's a discussion for another time! :)