I'd love to write fanfic for the Near Dark fandom (Diamondback/Jesse, of course, wih a bit of Severen peppered in) but ngl fandom has changed so much since I was a teenager. Nowadays I see people say that they don't bother reading fanfic with less than 10k and things like that.
Any other fandom oldhead feel the same? Things have changed so much and not necessarily for the better. I feel like a stranger in fandom spaces nowadays. Probably why I enjoy/prefer old fandoms like Near Dark.
I'm not a fandom old, I've only been involved in any fandom for anything since i was an older teenager [2011-2015ish] People got weirdly shy and started claiming crippling social anxiety as why they didn't comment on things, and how you were an asshole if you felt like they should comment anyway. It was bullshit then, two wholly anonymous platforms with anonymous options in them???? One of my roommates had SEVERE social anxiety in college, cried trying to make phone calls, couldn't take the main paths to classes bc they were too crowded....and this person still could comment on fic. That was the start. Then it was just simply "you're an asshole to expect comments for doing something you wanted to do anyway."
As for Near Dark fandom? If you're someone who needs the validation of comments to post fic this isn't the place. I'd love to read what you have, everyone here would, but the movie is mostly unknown. If there's 100 people who enjoy a movie/show/book/etc, maybe 15 of them will be invested enough for fandom, 5 of them long term, and maybe 2 will actually read fanfic, and of those only half will comment.
My fic only has over 100 comments bc it has over 50 chapters and one extremely delightful human decided to comment on every chapter, and i make a point to reply to all comments.
There really isnt an old fandom for Near Dark. Its more active now than ive ever seen it. When i posted my first fic i think there were only 30 on all of AO3 and ZERO on ff.net.
Unless someone's been online longer than me and witnessed a fandom on LJ or myspace, this is the most there's ever been.
Ive written for smaller fandoms, but at that point it really is posting them and putting them out there for the future; a lot of those older Near Dark fics were tiny-fandom or Yuletide exhanges from well over a decade ago but how lucky we are to have an archive with that kind of power behind it so they're there to find as new fans find older media they want to interact with through fic.
I hope this doesn't come off as callous but juat realistic, this is a tiny, tiny fandom and given the finite material of canon, given the niche audience, the difficulty to find the movie--this isnt somewhere you'll get much reaction.
The bright side is with the physical copy coming next year there's probably going to be an uptick in activity: again, why its nice to leave things on the archive, so people can find them as they find the film. Plus, being such a small tag [if you take out xReader, crossovers, original fic people purposefully mistagged for traffic, unfinished challenges and kink memes that never got to the Near Dark entry--iirc, its still only around 45-50] if someone is interested enough to go looking for more, they'll see everything. Its not like posting to an endless tag of 100k or even 30k fics. Stories stay easy to find.
