Fandom - Relationship With Industry

Relationship With Industry

The film and television entertainment industry refers to the totality of fans devoted to a particular area of interest, whether organized or not, as the "fanbase".

Media fans, have, on occasion, organized on behalf of canceled television series, with notable success in cases such as Star Trek in 1968, Cagney & Lacey in 1983, Xena: Warrior Princess, in 1995, Roswell in 2000 and 2001 (it was canceled with finality at the end of the 2002 season), Farscape in 2002, Firefly in 2002, and Jericho in 2007. (In the case of Firefly the result was the movie Serenity, not another season.) Such outcry, even when unsuccessful, suggests a growing self-consciousness on the part of entertainment consumers, who appear increasingly likely to attempt to assert their power as a bloc. Fan activism in support of the 2007 Writers Guild of America strike through Fans4Writers appears to be an extension of this trend.

Gaming fans have also recently made a big impact on content developers. In March 2012, when the most recent installment of Bioware's Mass Effect series was released, the fandom was so displeased with the game's available endings that they demanded there be some kind of change. Buckling under the pressure of this heated demand, BioWare released a DLC (downloadable content) packet on June 26, 2012 in hopes of reconciling the game's endings and soothing the fandom's aggression. This simple change to the game's ending was a huge step for fandoms because the entertainment industry has never before taken such large steps to comply with a fanbase's desires.

In science fiction, a large number of the practitioners and other professionals in the field, not only writers but editors and publishers, traditionally have themselves come from and participate in science fiction fandom, from Ray Bradbury to Harlan Ellison to Patrick Neilsen Hayden to Toni Weisskopf; and the "fan" vs. "pro" dualism does not exist in the way it does in the media entertainment industry.

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