Did Enterprise fandom dissipate exceptionally thoroughly?

[FederationHistorian]

To be entirely fair, most people still weren't particularly excited about the finale regardless of which side of the ship war they were on, but the A/T'P fans who largely weren't Trip fans weren't especially broken up that he died. I only remember one person being obnoxious in their gloating, though

I just find it interesting that in the finale, Mayweather, Hoshi, Reed, and Phlox weren’t broken up about Trip dying. And in reality, A/T’P shippers weren’t broken up about Trip dying either.

 

[Sumire]

And in reality, A/T’P shippers weren’t broken up about Trip dying either.

It has already been established that I get emotional about everything but I find that so difficult to understand. I’m as devoted to my preferred ships as almost anyone (I can think of two characters in all my fandoms that I read more than one pairing for, so call me 99% OTP for life ) but I also love friends and found family. I get very invested in everyone on shows and I am practical enough to mourn the end of a steady paycheck for actors.

I am still upset about the death of TNG’s Tasha Yar. I wish Kes had been kept on Voyager. I watched DS9 less than either of those (surprise, anything called dark or gritty isn’t my jam) but the behind the scenes unfairness leading to Jadzia’s death still rankles. I didn’t ship any of them but death is sad! Especially death of a close friend, which is what Trip was for Archer and T’Pol. Even if you didn’t ship Trip, being so callous about his death seems really strange to me. But, perhaps other people have better emotional boundaries when it comes to fiction. I bet they don’t even run out of the room when someone on screen gets embarrassed. Nerves of steel!

 

[Reanok]

Anna you can get in contact with Shanna Gilkeson about The Delphic expanse she has an e-mail address on her twitter page she's a college professor .

 

[Lord Hierarch]

I just found a site called The Delphic Expanse. If only I found its forums a few yea-

Anna you can get in contact with Shanna Gilkeson about The Delphic expanse she has an e-mail address on her twitter page she's a college professor .

Thankfully, the fanfic archives are still up.

Also those image threads .

 

[Reanok]

I'm glad the stories from the Delphic expanse are still there that's good news

 

[bookworm8571]

As I noted in my introduction, I have recently started poking around Enterprise fandom and it feels… strange.

Whenever my interest in a particular past Star Trek series has ignited, I could easily find active fans on a number of platforms; Discord, Tumblr, AO3 and the like. (I know, I’m old, I’m not up on all the hottest current platforms but I’m also not trawling LiveJournal and MySpace.) I have had much more difficulty finding active Enterprise fans. They’re out there but I feel like a good 75% of what I find has been mothballed. The date of the mothballing changes, sometimes it’s 2007, sometimes 2011, sometimes 2016, but it’s like a ghost town now either way.

My thought is that there are two main causes for this:

1) Unhappy fans — this seems to be divided very distinctly between fans who were unhappy with the show and left long before the end and fans who were unhappy with the ending (both the infamous final episode and the show being cancelled before it could complete its intended run)

2) Bad timing — Enterprise ended just as YouTube was starting, Facebook was becoming available to the general population, LiveJournal was being sold and Tumblr was starting. By the time the major platforms found their user-base, nostalgia was in full swing for DS9, TNG and Voyager. People took the time to create a new fandom community for these shows on these new platforms. Enterprise was still grappling with the bitterness left in its wake and wasn’t really old enough to evoke nostalgia, so there wasn’t as big a push to create new fandom communities on these new platforms.

Does this ring true to anyone? Am I just an inept internet archeologist? Am I way too old and looking in all the wrong places? Or is there a marked lack of active Enterprise fans?

Enterprise is actually my favorite of the Star Trek series but I didn’t really get into it until a few years ago. My heart wasn’t in it after 9/11 and I didn’t get good reception for the channel it was on. I started watching reruns and bought the DVDs and just fell in love with it and the characters. I still watch it now and then. I’ve also read the tie-in books. The only episode I refuse to watch is the finale. Trip didn’t die.

 

[Disposable_Ensign]

I dunno...perhaps making something like how Spock descibed the era in "Balance of Terror?"

SPOCK: As you may recall from your histories, this conflict was fought, by our standards today, with primitive atomic weapons and in primitive space vessels which allowed no quarter, no captives. Nor was there even ship-to-ship visual communication. Therefore, no human, Romulan, or ally has ever seen the other.

All you are doing is taking Spock's lines out of context from what the writer originally intended, just to justify a show made 35+ years after the fact, by two guys who didn't give a crap about Spock's lines, or TOS in general, and which showed a technology level far in advance of what Spock described. And please don't insult my intelligence by implying that if ENT ended up showing the Romulan War, that it would be anything like how Spock described it.

And Spock didn't get any war casualties wrong. His counts were retconned later by another future production. That is not evidence that he was 'wrong.' That's like saying that everyone gets Kirk's middle initial wrong (even Kirk himself) because it was established to be 'R' in WNMHGB.

When nitpicking things in quotes, like this or dates, some perspective is useful; consider: if you went out and asked some guy on the street for details of a war from several hundred years ago, the information would be generally correct, but still a little iffy. You can't take general quotes made for effect for granted. And we see visual communication between species that have interacted before, but the Romulans had not been widely encountered yet, so perhaps their visual communication was not compatible. Atomic weapons could theoretically refer to something stronger than your every-day nuke, too. I'm sure that a Romulan war that happened would not be exactly as described, and I would love to see an ENT season five showing it.