fandoms are fascinating things

A couple of people on my flist have linked to the Ms.Scribe Story which I've started reading. It is indeed engrossing. datawhorevoyeur have you come across this yet? It seems like something right up your alley.

One of the things that's interesting to me is that there seems to be an inevitability to the life cycles of online communities. It begins, everyone is excited, fresh, "young." It's the best community ever. We all love each other and will be BFF. We're the bestest of the best. Then come the disputes, the fractures, the cliques. Subcommunities form. Offences are taken. Charges of elitism are made. Power positions--real or more likely imagined--are identitied. Frauds, the obnoxious, and the just plain weird come onto the scene. Everyone laments the good old days, which may or may not have been as golden as memory makes them. And eventually people start moving on to new communities that are fresh and exciting, where everyone is the coolest person ever and we'll all be BFF. The cycle begins anew.

It's been interesting reading other friend's comments about the evolutions of various communities and thinking, "yup, been there. the next step will probably be X."

Looking back, as trying as times could be at the Bronze--particularly around posting board party time--we were a pretty healthy community. Passionate and fighty and touchy sometimes, but somehow there was also a lot of humor and wit to take us through many of the dark times. Or maybe I'm just looking back through the rose-tinted glasses of nostalgia.

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I'm up to season 5 of my Buffy odyssey. It's been fun watching all at once knowing how things all end up. I'm getting a fresh appreciation for the construction of things as a whole. Things that I've noticed this time around. (Some I may have noticed before and am seeing anew.)

There's some nice set up from very early on for Willow's later troubles with magic. It's interesting seeing as early as season 3 Giles trying to get Willow to go slowly with the magic and have respect for it. And in season 4 we see the looming tendency for Willow to use magic to try to make herself feel better or to take shortcuts to avoid difficulty. (Her unwillingness to accept the truth from others that it's just going to take time to get through the pain of Oz leaving.) In season 5 we start to see her eagerness to use magic for things that can be just as easily dealt with in ordinary ways. And of course in season 6 that tendency will bit everyone in the butt.

I just finished watching Fool for Love. I really like this episode. Spike has a line that I noticed again for the first time with this viewing. It's near the end when he's talking to Buffy about how Slayers are killed and he says something like, "in the end she's killed because she's ready to die." (That's not the exact line, but I've got the right meaning.) That struck me this time around and I did a mental flash forward to The Gift and I thought of Buffy being tired of the violence and the sacrifice and the killing and just being ready to surrender to death. That was nicely done.