Slashcast Metachat with Gina and Penny -- Fandom Burnout: Pre-book Tension or The End?

Interviews by Fans
Title:	Slashcast Metachat with Gina and Penny -- Fandom Burnout: Pre-book Tension or The End?
Interviewer:	charlottechaos
Interviewee:	Gina and Penny
Date(s):	May 19, 2007
Medium:	online transcript, podcast
Fandom(s):	Mpreg
External Links:	online transcript here, Archived version
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Slashcast Metachat with Gina and Penny -- Fandom Burnout: Pre-book Tension or The End? is a 2007 interview at Slashcast. The interviewee is charlottechaos.

The topic is the upcoming final Harry Potter book and fandom.

For more in this series, see Slashcast Interview Series.

Some Topics Discussed

• roleplaying
• Smutmas
• fic exchanges and the culture of expectation around them
• fandom burnout

Excerpts

Penny: I started off roleplaying too; I was on another roleplaying forum called Delphi, and I ran a couple of Harry Potter RPs and, uh, after the first movie I thought Snape was hot, and I started writing some Snape/original female character like everybody got their start with, and from there it just progressed into slash. There was also a girl that Gina and I know mutually named Ange, and she was in a RP group called Nocturnal Runes, and that's kind of how I got my start.

Penny: Well, you know, when you've been writing sex for four years, and it just starts to get boring after a while, and it really doesn't matter what characters you're writing, or what fandom you're writing for, it just starts to get kind of boring after a while? So I've actually been kind of writing more-- even though there's some R/NC-17 bits in what I've been writing lately, there's actually more dialogue and more plot, and my stories are actually getting longer. I don't think it was any one incident-- and I did mention this in a chat I was in with a bunch of people earlier today-- you write so many stories about two different characters and you start running out of things to write about. And I think with the book coming to a close, I'm starting to-- I'm running out of ideas for what to do. It's almost like it's been done already. Any time I come up with an idea, somebody's already done it before.

Gina: I've been trying to figure out what it is, and it wasn't a specific incident for me, either. After five years of eating and breathing and living this stuff, it's sort of you know, what else is there to say? There's no more meta to be written, there's no more-- I haven't been reading fic 'cause, you know, I feel like I've-- like Penny said, everything's been done. Like Penny said, if you've read a fic, you've read every fic, you know? If you're into a certain pairing, you're going to get the same ideas over and over again. That kind of total immersion, I think, after a while, you can't help but burn out.

Gina: No, I do that every year, so it can't just be Smutmas. I mean, Smutmas was a big hassle this year, there's no doubt about it. Maybe that was the event that sort of capped it for me. I mean, I think I was on my way down before Smutmas started, and then just the fact that it was such a hassle this year, that sort of killed it-- no, not killed it for me, 'cause I'm still on the fringes. I still love the people that I know from fandom and I still want to keep up with them, and I'm still looking at fanart once in a while because that's like a real... once and done kind of a thing, you know, you don't spend a lot of time on it. So I'm still around enough that I'm sort of keeping my fingers in things, 'cause I don't want to back off totally and then if the book does really charge me up again, and then I dive back in, I don't want to have missed everything that happened, you know?

Gina: I haven't done it lately. I've been listening to other audio books instead. I don't think it's changed how I appreciate the canon; I love the stories. I'm not crazy about the writing, but I love the story, the plot that she puts together. And I'm really looking forward to the seventh book. The fact that I'm not interested in fandom that much anymore does not mean that I'm not interested in reading the book. I really want to see how things shake out. You know, once in a while I watch the movies-- the first and the second movies are my favorites, which I think I'm the only person in fandom who can say that. Everybody loves PoA, I hated PoA, so I don't watch that one, but I watch the others.

Penny: I'm thinking it's probably going to be a little bit of both. [The last book is] going to bring me closure, but at the same time, like Gina said, it's really going to make me sad. This is an end of an era for me. It's like a really good book that I've been reading and you get to the last chapter and it's time to end. I'm hoping it's going to be a little bit of both, though. I do have a few stories I want squeeze out, but hopefully we won't have any characters like Snape come to an untimely end, because I think that's really going to have a huge impact on fandom if that happens.