Fandom Burnout/Reawakening

[Gonzo14]

Does anyone else have this happen with things they're really into?

For example, I'm a huge Fan of LOST. I have random spreadsheets/word documents organizing the events/characters. I have fan theories etc, and I'll go to lostpedia and search for hidden things I missed, but after a while I'll get burnt out on it and I'll stop for a while...then months or even a few years later, I'll start watching it again and it'll all come back. Most recently this happened when I had my wife start watching Lost.

I've found that this happens with most of my fandoms; Lost, Power Rangers, The Office, Star Wars, and even the Muppets (although the Muppets will always be my top fandom)

Anyone else experience this?

 

[D'Snowth]

Yes, that happens to me quite often.

Really, just about the only fandoms that I find that seem to never burnout for me are Muppets (with the exception of maybe 2000, where I feel I may have finally felt like I was outgrowing them) and M*A*S*H (nearly ten freakin' years now).

As a kid, I was obsessed with COW AND CHICKEN, I would always tape new episodes (have all but the infamous "Buffalo Gals," episode, and "Major Wedgie / The Loneliest Cow"), and whenever it was time for them to be featured in the old CARTOON NETWORK STARRING comic books, I'd snag them (missed a few issue, though), then it seems like when ED, EDD N EDDY came a long and COURAGE THE COWARDLY DOG as well, C&C took the back burners. I'm still fond of C&C, but compared to EEE and Courage, it's just not my absolute favorite anymore.

That's just one example, though.

 

[fuzzygobo]

The same goes for me, but with bands. I might listen nonstop to a particular group for a week or two, then put them back on the shelf for another year.

Currently into a few artists who passed away this year- Johnny Winter, Joe Cocker, Jack Bruce- but the Beatles never seem to get old.

 

[Sgt Floyd]

Not sure about reawakening, but I definitely feel the burnout from dan vs. heck, just even reminding myself of the fact i was a well known member of the community makes me cringe. I want nothing to do with it anymore.

....is that burnout or me just hating the fandom? Meh

 

[Drtooth]

I have problems with fandoms in general, so I guess you can blame bad fandom for your own fan burnout. If there's three things that burn me out it's rotten fandoms for one, but also lack of new material or too much new material to really get caught up in. Granted, the last two kids are two polar opposites for burnout... if there's nothing new, where's the fun in that? Watching reruns over and over gets tired and you watch them less and less. If you're lucky and find a shirt at Hot Topic that's colored poorly. But if there's too much, it's exhausting. If there's a toy line and you're still collectin', unless you have like a crapload of money and you're uberfocused on that one thing you'll only get like 1 out of 20 of them, and then you just stop bothering. There's too much stimulation there and not enough in the former case.

 

[The Count]

Dunno if you could call it a "burnout", I'd say it was more of a hiatus of my fandom for the Muppets and Sesame in 1998 when I was in my undergrad university years. The last thing I remember tuning into was one of the Slimey to the Moon Season 28 episodes where Reporter Kermit was getting shoved off by some other guest star reporter covering Slimey's return.

As far as reawakening my love of all things Henson, I will always credit that to Palisades Toys and Ken Lily with the 2002 Muppets action figure line. That and all the friends I've found and made here on the forum throughout the years have helped rekindle my Muppet fandom.

 

[Slackbot]

There are fandoms I've drifted away from and come back to, like Muppets and MOTU. I've had three fandom periods for the Muppets: once when it was originally on, a second time on high school, when I was building puppets, and the third time is now.

It was similar with MOTU, except the second time was when I discovered he-man.org. I had fun there for a while, but I was on such a different wavelength from other fans--I don't give a toss about hypermuscly freaks and plastic figures; I liked the Trollans--that I got very little feedback for my efforts, so I lost interest for a while. But I still had stories to tell, so I came back after a while with a few more tales.

The only fandoms I've really burned out on are Darkwing Duck and ReBoot. The former because of some vicious, ill-behaved fans poisoning the water, and the latter because of Rainmaker's incredibly bad handling of the property, culminating in the failed revival. I could go on and on about their ineptness, and their downright abuse of the fandom in general and their biggest and most active supporters (such as moi) in particular, but you don't want to read a rant about it. I console myself with the fact that at least we'll always have the original four seasons, even if they haven't been able to do a non-distorted DVD transfer of the first two.

 

[Drtooth]

The only fandoms I've really burned out on are Darkwing Duck and ReBoot. The former because of some vicious, ill-behaved fans poisoning the water, and the latter because of Rainmaker's incredibly bad handling of the property, culminating in the failed revival. I could go on and on about their ineptness, and their downright abuse of the fandom in general and their biggest and most active supporters (such as moi) in particular, but you don't want to read a rant about it.

Eh... As a huge Darkwing Duck fan (it was my early 1990's), I don't want to know what the problem is, and yet I'm morbidly curious as to what. Worst thing I've seen are ingrates that refused to get the comics because Bushroot was stylized or something. Yeah. That's a thing, apparently.

A crappy fandom can hurt fan reaction, as well as crappy inconsiderate companies that own said things of ...which,...fandom... Uh... The crappy companies that own the franchise the fans were in. Yeah. That's what I'm trying to say.

If there's one thing in every fandom I hate it's the "I'm not drinkin' the Kool-Aid" jerks that poopoo everything done to accomodate the fandom. There's one idiot in particular that supposedly doesn't so much dislike the Mega Man comics as much as outright thinks that they're incredibly horrible to the point they're a pox on humanity. Now, we're talking about a dying video game franchise that's been all but completely abandoned because of pandering to "hardcore gamers" (read people with X-Boxes that think they're hardcore but refuse to get out of their little FPS/hyper violent Fighting Game bubble). Archie has done great by keeping the characters alive, as did Nintendo for including him in the latest Smash Bros. You should be thankful to get anything, say the least of a well done comic series. And considering our American fiction for the character ranges from Captain N, to the Ruby Spears cartoon series, to a toothless, insipid dub of a meh kiddy anime, this is the best we've got ever. But because it's actually good, some jerk always comes out of the woodwork to pan it because it sounds like some great, profound truth (when it isn't) and a bunch of dittoheads cling on to sound smart. Now, mark my words, the fanbase for the most part loves the comic, but I'm glad I'm not in a toxic fanbase like that.

 

[minor muppetz]

Many of my fandoms tend to have "burn-out" periods, or at least a "period spike" where I'm a lot more interested/thinking about it more than usual. Some fandoms that I tend to have periods of really wanting to concentrate on (watcch, listen, play, think about, talk about, look up online) include Looney Tunes, Weird Al Yankovic, Darkwing Duck, Mario, Peanuts, Bob Newhart (with most of the focus being on his show Newhart), old school Nickdelodeon and Nick at Nite, Ernest P. Worrell, Garfield, Calvin and Hobbes, Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, SCTV, Saturday Night Live (usually the first five seasons, but more frequently in the past few years loads of other seasons as well), The Nostalgia Critic, and others.

And there'll be things I was a big fan of in the past that I hardly cared about for many years that would suddenly get a big spike of attention from me, sometimes temporary, sometimes lasting again. Just a few months ago, right at the end of Halloween, I was suddenly back into Goosebumps, though after a few months that interest has drowned from my head a bit,though I'm still thinking about it a little. Maybe it will continue to have "burnouts" and "spikes", or maybe I'll care less for a long time. For years I hadn;t watched The Wonder Years, or cared as much about it as I did when it was on Nick at Nite, but after getting a Netflix account I've watched every episode, watched many of the same episodes many times, have gotten a big "fandom spike" over The Wonder Years.

Sometimes, having a sudden bigger interest might come from me suddenly reading about it online (wikipedia and TV Tropes are big contributors there). Or maybe I've been reminded of it via The Nostalgia Critic, The Angry Video Game Nerd, The Rowdy Reviewer, and other online video critics (and the irony is that they were badmouthing those works, or at least related works). And sometimes it might be because there's something new, or maybe a new means of watching old stuff.

My Muppet and Sesame Street fandom is the most present. Sometimes I might go through periods of caring less than usual, but even then, I still go on all the major Muppet fan sites every day, though there might be periods where I'm posting less here and editing less at Muppet Wiki (but so far since sending articles to The Muppet Mindset I have not gone a whole month without doing so). Sometimes I'll be thinking a lot more about a certain Muppet production, product, or character a lot more than others. Other things from The Jim Henson Company are more likely to get more "fandom burnout" from me from time to time. Often I'll care a lot about Dinosaurs, but at times I might be really into Labyrinth, The Storyteller, Sam and Friends, Land of Gorch, Jim Henson's experimental films, and others.

Of course, with Muppets and Sesame Street, the burnout is more over which one I care more about. The Muppets might get more attention from me if there's a new movie or special or video release or something, and Sesame Street might get more from me if there's a video release I'm really excited about, or if certain rare clips are made available. There's only been a few periods in my life where I truly experienced Muppet "burnout", mainly because there were a lot more things that I was suddenly more into.

 

[Slackbot]

Eh... As a huge Darkwing Duck fan (it was my early 1990's), I don't want to know what the problem is, and yet I'm morbidly curious as to what.

It was stupid stuff by a clique of childish fans who at first pestered me to death with sugary praise and "write/draw this for me!" requests, and when I told them to back off they started a harassment campaign against me. Hate fanfics, nastiness on their websites, E-mail and IRC "whisper campaigns" (including such slander as me being a pedophile who lured young girls in with my fanfics), harassing me on the Disney Afternoon mailing list I ran and then screaming about my abuse of power when I banned their E-mails addresses, and other such foolishness. This was back in the late '90s, when Web fandom was a disorganized mishmash of Geocities and other freebie sites and a few message boards. When one of my trusted friends sided with them and began feeding them info on me to add fuel to the fire, that was the last straw, and I gafiated. No announcements, no drama, I just deleted my bookmarks and walked away from the fandom. Kept my website, though; I wasn't about to let them take anything away from my own creative works.