Curing Hiatus Fever

Meta
Title:	Curing Hiatus Fever
Creator:	Merlin Missy
Date(s):	June 20, 2008
Medium:
Fandom:	multifandom
Topic:
External Links:	Curing Hiatus Fever
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Curing Hiatus Fever is a 2008 essay by Merlin Missy.

Series

This essay is part of a series called Dr. Merlin's Soapbox.

Some Topics Discussed

• cliffhangers, and subsequent hiatuses, for shows leave fans on the edge of their seats
• one example is the all-consuming cliffhanger in Dallas aka "Who shot J.R.?"
• "The problem is that, for many of us, the people on the screen are just as real, vibrant and important to us as the other people in the so-called real world."
• "Hiatus fever makes us do the wacky. Otherwise normal, perky, intelligent fanthings will become frothing idiots around mid-August when the set-stalkers aren't posting yet but all the good meta has already been raked over fifteen times."
• some cures for "hiatus fever"
  • read lots of fanfic ("Take Sturgeon's Law to heart, and know you're eventually going to find that gem among the dross, even at Fanfiction.Net.")
  • write lots of fanfic
  • rewatch and study the show
  • call up a friend and vent, but don't vent online because it "can and often will follow you to the END of TIME. Trust me on this." -- this hint contains a link to The (Original) Mary Sue Litmus Test, an essay that Merlin Missy often said she regretted, but keeps bringing up and linking
  • go do something else that isn't fannish
• don't listen to people that say "it's just a tv show," as other people are strongly fannish about all sorts of things and don't get flak
• this essay contains embedded links to These Are the Keys, This Is the Kingdom and The Flip, the Flail and the Flounce: When Fandom Implodes

From the Essay

Every year, our shows draw to a close for the summer / winter / insert hiatus length here (choose one), and every year, we're stuck for months on end with nothing else to do but speculate and snip and argue and flame and wank and wibble.

Dr. Merlin was attempting to explain hiatus fever to her sadly mundane mother-in-law today. For fans and mundanes alike over a certain age, the question, "Who Shot J.R.?" holds a special resonance. For those of you too young to have any clue, there was an evening weekly soap opera called Dallas which was at its height of popularity in the '80s. One season ended on a cliffhanger where the lead character (a gentleman of rather unsavory disposition) was shot. And that summer, that was the big thing everyone talked about. It was on the news. It was on t-shirts, along with the slightly funnier "I Shot J.R." logo.

[...]

Dr. Merlin told her mother-in-law that hiatus time in fandom is like dealing with "Who Shot J.R.?" ALL THE TIME.

Ah, hiatus. There's a cliffhanger, a twisted moment both inevitable and yet out of the blue, a scream, a hopeless moment. There's an ending to the season arc, beautifully built up and still bittersweet in execution wherein we remember once again that having is not so sweet a thing as wanting, and getting everything we thought we wanted can mean losing what we found out we needed most. We speak the name of the showrunner in awe, and we curse it blue, and we expect next season is going to be even better and we're terrified that we just passed the peak and that it's all downhill from here. We speculate, in our meta and our fanfics, and we try to suss out the future from the clues we've been handed, or we break with canon entirely because it's too painful to think about what comes next. We guess, and we hope. Sometimes our theories come out correct, and sometimes we turn out to have been smoking the good crack (no, we are not in fact going to spend the next season with the cast lost in an alternate world without shrimp). Sometimes our fanfiction mirrors the season premiere so closely that our friends tease us about spying on the writing staff, and sometimes we step back six months later and go, "WTF?" Sometimes the new season tortures logic, character, dialogue and the laws of physics so badly that we go back to that jossed 'fic, declare it to be our personal fanon, and weep into our cartoon-patterned pillowcases while we drown our sorrows with Dark Chocolate M&Ms.

Fan Comments

[dotfic]: Hee. This is hilarious (or very very sad, I can't decide which).

[haven]: God, just reading this is helping me through hiatus. It's hilarious and rings true. Am I supposed to be embarrassed about that? V nice, v.