Splitting your time between open vs closed canons

[g_uava]

For fandoms of open canons -
Pros: Activity whenever there's a new installment; more inspiration/ideas from the latest developments; potentially having more eyes on your fanworks and more fanworks by others to enjoy.
Cons: Anxiety over your speculations and fics being 'jossed'; anxiety over sharing controversial opinions/fanworks; pressure to formulate opinions on the latest developments on a weekly basis to stay active.

For fandoms of closed canons -
Pros: Being able to see the big picture of what canon is all about; less pressure to churn out reactions/fanworks to stay active; convenience of binge-watching.
Cons: Less activity; fewer engaged fans as people start drifting away to new canons.

How do you divide your time?

Comments

[thenewbuzwuzz]

I pour all of my time into a single fandom with a (mostly) closed canon. It's great. :D

[hlagol]

I find I tend more and more towards closed canons as time goes on, for the "pro" reasons you listed.

[tozka]

Both are fun! I usually end up with one new fandom and one closed fandom to obsess over every few months or so, and both are great. The excitement of the open canon is excellent, though usually there isn't a lot of fics at first. This is where the closed canon comes in! Usually for that one, there's a ton of fanfic built up, and I can read it while waiting for new fics to show up in the open canon.

[cadenzamuse]

I love having at least one open canon because they get bigger and more excited and because I like to see the changes in characterizations as we learn more (i.e. the jossing is a feature rather than a bug for me.)

I largely prefer to write in closed canons, though, which is probably why I do most of my writing for Yuletide.

[alatefeline]

I seem to end up in the latter just by virtue of almost always picking up a new canon (and/or a new fannish interest that prompts me to check out the canon) years after the initial peak of the excitement. It's glorious when I start archive-binging and there is SO MUCH there, but sad when I've gone through and found all my favorite authors and there is barely anything new.

I wish there was a counterpoint to the Yuletide fan event push to add works to smaller fandoms, that encouraged people to write in currently-less-active but previously-popular fandoms.

There's also the large fandoms with smaller fandoms within them, where a particular movie or season or book series is a closed canon but the larger canon-verse is still growing. MCU-but-only-until-CATWS is one; 11th-doctor-and-companions is one; and so on. I appreciate that fan writing allows writers to choose their jumping-off point for the best character portrayal (and ignore or selectively add subsequent or contradictory elements).

[melannen]

My ideal is the kind of canon that isn't closed, but that only gets a new installment every couple of years - so, book series and movie series. you get the excitement and fresh blood! I also get time to actually write something before the new installment comes out! (This is why I pretty much dropped MCU as a writing fandom when they started releasing multiple movies a year.)

I tend not to be active in fast-moving open canons like TV shows, if only because I can't keep up with canon very well. (Although in these days of an entire season dumping at once and then a long wait for another one, it might work better for me? I don't even seem to have the time to watch one whole netflix season before the next one shows up, though.)

[deird1]

I don't tend to think of closed canons as having less activity. Rather, the activity is skewed more towards the end I like.

There's less squeeing and speculation - but I don't care about that. There's more meta and analysis of season arcs - which is what I'm after.

[the_ragnarok]

I tend to go closed - I find keeping up with an open canon exhausting. This is especially the case with franchises that have huge extended universes, like marvel or star wars. i just end up being intimidated that i'll write something that's contradicted directly in canon and everyone will laugh at me.

...i mean, i also practice, "lol fuck it i'll write whatever the hell i want". but i still find it easier to do in smaller fandoms.

[used_songs]

I like open canons because there's always new material to be inspired by, and it doesn't really bother me when things are jossed.

[chelseagirl]

Closed for writing; open for discussion and getting excited about what might happen next.

[yourlibrarian]

I've never really thought of it as any kind of intentional split. I've gotten into both open and closed canons, though really to me the key issue is how fannish I still am once the canon is closed. There are things I'm still fond of that I've never gone back to, and things I'm still involved in that have been done for years.

I think the real change for me has been largely withdrawing from the fandoms themselves or never getting into it even though I loved the canon. A big part of it is time -- there's so much content out there and also so many groups one could be involved with that even if one did nothing else it would be very hard to keep up with.

[deborah_judge]

I enjoy talking with people about open canons but I do my best writing in closed canons.

[megpie71]

I'm mostly in a fandom with a technically closed-canon at this point (there is going to be the remake coming out at some point, but at present it is vapourware). However, this technically-closed canon is one where there's a certain amount of controversy about what actually is canon (due to the creation of a couple of prequels with a bunch of new characters, at least one of whom is technically still alive during the original game canon but who doesn't show up in it, for obvious reasons[1]), and where a certain set of events is definitely up for multiple re-interpretations and re-tellings over the years (the original game flashback version, the fan-created OVA which got adopted as canon by the game-makers, the prequel telling of the events through the eyes of a completely different character again, etc). Oh, and there's the sequels, some of which people pay attention to, and others of which they choose to ignore because it makes the whole mess entirely too convoluted.

Basically, Final Fantasy VII has a canon which reminds me strongly of computer industry standards: the fun thing about FFVII canon is there's so many to choose from.

To be honest, I'm more comfortable in fandoms with closed canons - minimal surprises, less to worry about, and none of the worry about "am I going to enjoy this, or am I going to wind up spending money on something I'm going to dislike?". I am ALL about the spoilers, thank you.

[1] Or at least, reasons which should be obvious if people would just think about the fact Crisis Core was created something like ten years after the original game got popular, rather than bitching because Genesis isn't showing up in the Nibelheim flashback scenes. But I digress...

[taichara]

I don't?

I mean, I don't care about "open" vs "closed". Neither is set in stone anyway. I just pick up what I pick up that happens to catch my attention, and that's how it rolls.

[sodium_amytal]

I write for whatever grabs my attention. Most all of my writing is AU anyway, so I use the canon as a guidebook rather than a rulebook. Open canon vs closed canon doesn't really come into play. On a few occasions, I've thought about "oh man what if the next season completely ruins this thing I'm establishing as canon here" when writing for an open canon, but, fuck it, everyone can see the story was posted before said new season, so ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

(Though the closed canons I end up obsessing over tend to have fandoms that are either ghost towns or pits of rabid dogs...)

[rush_keating]

I like fandoms that are semi-closed like Star Trek. There's still more Star Trek canon being added (due to Discovery) but the other shows are still closed. Best of both worlds IMO.

[arenee1999]

I am in both open and closed fandoms and enjoy both equally. I'm also irritated by both equally.

To me the whole point of fanfic is to explore avenues that aren't, weren't and/or won't be explored in canon. If I wanted canon I wouldn't be reading fanfic. Though, there is one completely canon compliant fic in Highlander fandom that has me (and most fans) in awe. It was written while the fandom was open and was so well researched that canon never contradicted it.

[kalloway]

This is something I've never thought about/it's never mattered to me. If a story/plot/characters/something looks interesting to me, I'll check it out. I may end up fannish about it, I may not, and that's fine either way. But the state of the canon has never been a consideration. (and given my general interests, something may spring from a 'closed' canon a decade later and eh? sure why not)

I admit I'm slower to pick up manga series that run more than about twenty volumes, but even then it's mostly because I'll want to buy them ever after reading them through the library and that's a financial sink. Similar with book series with a mythical unreleased final volume, but that's less to do with fandom, but more a simple annoyance as a reader.

[doranwen]

I rarely end up getting into open canons - nearly all the stuff I discover, I watch it years after it came out, go looking, find whatever fic there is (sometimes very little, sometimes a ton) - and fandoms which range from super active to extremely dead or nonexistent.

Case in point - Rookie Blue from my icon. Finished airing like 3 years ago, decent amount of fic out there - and almost no one still active in the fandom, which is really frustrating because I can't hardly find anyone to talk about anything about it. (I ended up creating a community for it on DW just in case someone comes in from Tumblr and is still into it, but so far no one's posted anything or commented on anything I've posted, so it's like talking into the void, lol.)

The one open canon I was into that had real fandom around it was Smallville - and in that case the canon went away from me. I couldn't stand the direction they were taking S4 and quit watching before that season ended. To this day I've not seen past 4x17, and I like to pretend S4 onward never happened. So I have a rather tricky relationship with the fandom anyway.

The time I put into fandoms depends on two things - what I got into most recently (and therefore grabs my heart the strongest), and if I have any friends into the fandom that I can chat with, help keep me focused when I write fic for it, etc. Which means I can get pretty ADD with fandoms when I can't find anyone to be my fandom friend for them, lol.

[mekare]

I usually do a bit of both at the same time. Right now I am waiting for the second season of an open canon and while the fandom is still pretty small, it was a lot of fun to watch episodes and discuss them after they were aired.

I also have a lot of closed canon fandoms which I like for all the post-canon fanworks.

[mythicmistress]

I tend to prefer closed canons right now. That way, I can find out what I'm getting myself into. To me, there's nothing worse than getting invested in a new fandom only to run head-first into content I find problematic (no matter how difficult it is to research while avoiding excessive spoilers).

I am in some open canons right now, but I've been getting annoyed by some elements popping up recently.

[schneefink]

On the one hand I really like the excitement and activity of open canons. But some of my favorite tropes are time travel and fix-it fics that are hard to do when there's so much still unknown, and I dislike relying too much on speculation. So my preferred canons should be those that still release new content every once in a while (not too often or I'm too stressed to keep up) but the major backstory reveal/arc is already finished and/or each new installment is about new things instead of drastically changing what was already there.

In practice I fall for canons and then have to deal with whatever status they're in ;)