I'll be presenting on incorporating fandom into teaching media literacy in a week or two at a local conference, and then I'll be in LA for another teaching conference in May. But the really important one is in October in which I'll be presenting on the 50+ years of our community.
What I am seeing so far is a split developing between the old fans [chiefly first cousins] who are organized around the TV series and the new fans organized around the movie. On Fanfiction.net, the tv series has 3.2K stories [we are still very respectable] but only 299 stories for the film version.
However, on AO3, there are 4620 for the tv series and 2443 for the movie.
The platforms being utilized are also different. Series fans are here on LJ and on FB with the Yahoogroups kind of ghost towns. The film fans are over on Tumblr as far as I can see. There are also separate websites although Bob short has a website that has both, but only for info.
So a couple of questions are occurring in my mind:
1) Anyone here a fan of the film or both film and series?
Not so incidentally, I'm looking for younger film fans to connect with. Anyone have a way into that community?
2) Is anyone writing fanfic for both?
3) And now, more intriguingly, is there a way to unite the two? The canon for the series did not fill in the background for Solo and Kuryakin while the canon for the film is pre-UNCLE. Is it possible to thread them together narratively?
I have some complicated thoughts on series/film and how it's worked [or not worked] with other franchises but I'd like to hear your thoughts first ---especially if you came here because of the film.