This is why I'm sad I discovered fandom so late. Only a little over a year ago...so I really have to make it special. And by fandom I basically mean The Sugarquill. ;) Without it, I wouldn't love the books so much, or have met the hundreds of wonderful people who I now count as some of my closest friends...and it's already almost over. Well, in a sense at least. The legacy will live on in archives and true fans.
I'd agree with that - so often you hear people referring to the Three Year Summer and the Golden Age and wish you were there.
I do love this new fandom happiness after HBP though. SDB writing crazy IMs and Arabella climbing out of that smelly drainpipe and everyone being all OMB TEH CANON!
Four films and one book to go. This is going to be a party that lasts for years.
It's still kind of hard for me to wrap my head around this fact. It's hard for me to even imagine what it will be like to read Book 7- half of me will want to rush through it to the end, and half of me will want to make it stretch out forever...
Well. I suppose we might as well enjoy the Platinum age while we can :)
I think OotP was kind of like being at the top of a mountain - it had been a long, long haul but we were finally there. What happened? JKR left us in a position where we were still on the top of the mountain, and the next book could lead us anywhere. North, south, east, west, above, below, left, right, up, down, clockwise, counterclockwise - none of us could really figure. HBP was like a thrilling and high speed descent into a vast and fascinating canyon of backstory and the present day. The nice thing about being in the canyon is that we know we're going to have to pass through certain things - Bill and Fleur's wedding, a trip to Godric's Hollow, probably a trip to 12 Grimmuald Place, the Hunt for the Horcruxes - before the story is finished. I think the fact that we're again in literary territory which can be mapped and navigated has inspired some of the renewed interest.
Then again, I may just be suffering from too much time looking at contour line plots of my data.....
Re: Is there any such thing as "too much time with contour plots"?arabellasqAugust 3 2005, 20:57:56 UTC
:) Nothing will ever be like that for me, either. I remember how shocked Zsenya and I were when we saw that we had 100 whole registered members. 100!
It does feel different now - great, but different. But still, Dr. C., even if you can't be as into the fandom as you once were... won't it be odd, when it's really over?
Anticipating the end, remembering the beginningdr_cAugust 3 2005, 21:41:03 UTC
Oh yes, certainly. I remember when I first discovered HP (shortly after the PoA release), thinking, "wow... this is like living in the 1950's and discovering LotR or Narnia when they were still being written." (The analogy is inexact, of course, but you get the idea.) It will be different not to have that anticipation anymore.
As for the early Quill-- I suspect that part of what happened was that you and Zsenya tapped into a unique moment in fandom history, and made the best of it. It was like there was sort of a R/H, H/G community waiting to happen after GoF, and you were the ones who brought it into reality and gave us all a standard that we could rally around.
You're right; although I'm always wanking this fandom... there's so much lovelyness. Yeah, people wank, and yeah, people are moronic... but in the end, it's okay.
And I think in some ways, fandom has improved - I really do. Fanfic authors are more open to their readers, more websites bother to tell you if your fic wasn't accepted (in the early years, I often just never got any reply when I tried submitting to some sites), and fandomers are less fickle.
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I do love this new fandom happiness after HBP though. SDB writing crazy IMs and Arabella climbing out of that smelly drainpipe and everyone being all OMB TEH CANON!
Four films and one book to go. This is going to be a party that lasts for years.
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It's still kind of hard for me to wrap my head around this fact. It's hard for me to even imagine what it will be like to read Book 7- half of me will want to rush through it to the end, and half of me will want to make it stretch out forever...
Well. I suppose we might as well enjoy the Platinum age while we can :)
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Then again, I may just be suffering from too much time looking at contour line plots of my data.....
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I don't think the fandom will ever match the first year (especially the first few months) of SQ for me, though.
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It does feel different now - great, but different. But still, Dr. C., even if you can't be as into the fandom as you once were... won't it be odd, when it's really over?
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As for the early Quill-- I suspect that part of what happened was that you and Zsenya tapped into a unique moment in fandom history, and made the best of it. It was like there was sort of a R/H, H/G community waiting to happen after GoF, and you were the ones who brought it into reality and gave us all a standard that we could rally around.
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And I think in some ways, fandom has improved - I really do. Fanfic authors are more open to their readers, more websites bother to tell you if your fic wasn't accepted (in the early years, I often just never got any reply when I tried submitting to some sites), and fandomers are less fickle.
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