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Awwww .... show...
SGA will end its run with season 5.
My thoughts on this:
I'm sad. Of course I am. I've fanned harder and heavier on SGA than on any show since I was a teenager. (And they couldn't have waited until next week to announce this, after the inevitable "Shrine"-high, could they? *g*) The show has been a disturbingly integral part of my life for over two years, and it feels like a bit of a punch in the gut that we won't get to have new adventures of Team SGA anymore. It's also sad because it really felt like they were hitting their stride during seasons 4 and 5, and I really would have liked to see what they did after that.
But ... here's why I'm not too depressed about it. 5 years is a good, solid run for a series. Most of the shows I've fanned on have made it a lot less than that. (My last active fanning on an open-canon show was "Invisible Man", and that only made it for two seasons!) With the shows I've watched that did go for more than five seasons, it seemed like most of them tanked in later seasons, in some cases to the point where my enjoyment of earlier seasons is tainted by the massive pile of suck that the show later became. (I'm not saying *every* show does this. But an awful lot of them do.) Back at the start of season 3, I remember saying that I hoped the show would run for five seasons and go out on a high note. Now that we're here, er, I'm kinda eating my words a little bit XD ... but, honestly, I am glad it's going out on a high note with strong episodes and a thriving fandom, not limping to a conclusion with most of the fandom having moved on to shinier pastures.
And I'm heartened by looking around me at other closed-canon fandoms. As far as I can tell, based on my f'list, SG1 fandom is still going just as strong as it was at the close of season 10. Sentinel and Due South were cancelled a decade ago, but both of them still seem to have active fandoms and new fans coming in as they discover the shows. Most of the shows I've fanned on other than SGA are shows that had either been cancelled when I started watching them, or had a planned limited run (like most anime does, or like Life on Mars) so it's not like this is new for me.
There's a mellowness to closed-canon fanning that's kind of nice. As wonderful as it is to get new canon every week, it's an emotional roller coaster ride as canon changes, stories get jossed, ships run aground and fans freak out over new developments. Once the show's over, we can still write our happily-ever-afters, explore the Pegasus galaxy, and make up detailed life histories for every character -- without any worries of being contradicted by canon or having our favorite characters die.
I'm sad about losing the show, I really really am, but I'm also kind of happy and even excited about being active in a closed-canon fandom again. It's not really worse, it's just ... different. (And I'm already contemplating "keep the show alive!" projects of various sorts. I am the woman who ran the Trigun Virtual Third Season, after all. [Edit: which, wow, is still online. Is that a trip down memory lane or what. I haven't thought about it in ages!])
My thoughts on this:
I'm sad. Of course I am. I've fanned harder and heavier on SGA than on any show since I was a teenager. (And they couldn't have waited until next week to announce this, after the inevitable "Shrine"-high, could they? *g*) The show has been a disturbingly integral part of my life for over two years, and it feels like a bit of a punch in the gut that we won't get to have new adventures of Team SGA anymore. It's also sad because it really felt like they were hitting their stride during seasons 4 and 5, and I really would have liked to see what they did after that.
But ... here's why I'm not too depressed about it. 5 years is a good, solid run for a series. Most of the shows I've fanned on have made it a lot less than that. (My last active fanning on an open-canon show was "Invisible Man", and that only made it for two seasons!) With the shows I've watched that did go for more than five seasons, it seemed like most of them tanked in later seasons, in some cases to the point where my enjoyment of earlier seasons is tainted by the massive pile of suck that the show later became. (I'm not saying *every* show does this. But an awful lot of them do.) Back at the start of season 3, I remember saying that I hoped the show would run for five seasons and go out on a high note. Now that we're here, er, I'm kinda eating my words a little bit XD ... but, honestly, I am glad it's going out on a high note with strong episodes and a thriving fandom, not limping to a conclusion with most of the fandom having moved on to shinier pastures.
And I'm heartened by looking around me at other closed-canon fandoms. As far as I can tell, based on my f'list, SG1 fandom is still going just as strong as it was at the close of season 10. Sentinel and Due South were cancelled a decade ago, but both of them still seem to have active fandoms and new fans coming in as they discover the shows. Most of the shows I've fanned on other than SGA are shows that had either been cancelled when I started watching them, or had a planned limited run (like most anime does, or like Life on Mars) so it's not like this is new for me.
There's a mellowness to closed-canon fanning that's kind of nice. As wonderful as it is to get new canon every week, it's an emotional roller coaster ride as canon changes, stories get jossed, ships run aground and fans freak out over new developments. Once the show's over, we can still write our happily-ever-afters, explore the Pegasus galaxy, and make up detailed life histories for every character -- without any worries of being contradicted by canon or having our favorite characters die.
I'm sad about losing the show, I really really am, but I'm also kind of happy and even excited about being active in a closed-canon fandom again. It's not really worse, it's just ... different. (And I'm already contemplating "keep the show alive!" projects of various sorts. I am the woman who ran the Trigun Virtual Third Season, after all. [Edit: which, wow, is still online. Is that a trip down memory lane or what. I haven't thought about it in ages!])
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And, yeah, for all my (mostly tongue-in-cheek) histrionics, I get what you're saying about losing canon details. It's actually a big problem with going back to finish stories that I started years ago in other fandoms. There are some I would really like to finish, but that fannish intensity of detail that you collect when you're actually in a fandom are gone. I don't know the characters so intimately anymore.
The combination is perfect for me; there's not much else that provides it so...I wonder if one of the reasons I never got into SPN fandom wasn't even the way it was giving me what I wanted (too much, even) but because there's really so little to the 'verse; the mythology is not so developed. Considering SV was very meta-inspiring, so that as much as I hated the show, it involved me (and there was that whole extended comic verse to explore, too)...I need that, I think. --but I need the character relations, too; Doctor Who has an enormous universe, but no permanency of chars/relationships, and that impedes me...
Yeah ... it's interesting, there does seem to be some kind of "perfect fannish equation" - it's certainly very individual, depending on what a person fans on, but I think SGA hits both of ours pretty hard.
That's really interesting about both SPN and Who. The impermanence of Who is definitely something that stops me from fanning really hard on it - that, and the mythic nature of the Doctor, which is simply not what I look for from a main character. Some people want mythic; I want someone who's flawed and imperfect, living a short human life.
And I hadn't really thought about SPN, but you're right, and maybe that's one reason why I'm not so interested in exploring the 'verse. Considering that it draws upon urban legends but does very little with them that's new, pretty much everything one can write in the 'verse is essentially original fic, unless you're exploring the characters, and they've been so thoroughly plumbed in canon that there isn't a whole lot that can be done with them. (Though, if you haven't read it, you might want to check out
Another thing that just struck me about SPN is how little the guest stars excite my interest to explore them as characters. That's interesting, really, because in most of the shows I fan on, there are characters, worlds, settings which have only been in one or two episodes that make me want to explore them in fic. SPN doesn't really do that. I guess this is pretty standard for horror, but the guest stars are generally fairly flat, and the main thing about the monsters each week that's interesting is "how do you kill them?"