Hey everyone?

[seabroth.livejournal.com]

Hi, I'm completely new to the series/fandom, and I haven't finished watching it yet either... but can this comm be revived? I know people are still writing fic, and ds_slash seems to be fairly active, plus I bet there are fans on Tumblr that we can coerce into participating. It would just require some advertisement and maybe a flashier layout, but what do you think?

Comments

[desireearmfeldt]

I'm not sure how to figure out the answer to this question... In the two-years-and-a-bit I've been in the fandom, the impression I've gotten is that we're maintaining a small core of reasonably active writers, with a somewhat larger group of occasional writers, but we've run into trouble when we've tried to float more than a couple of challenges/events throughout the year -- right now, a lot of people are working on the Due South/Canadian 6 Degrees Big Bang (ds_c6d_bigbang), and there's Due South Seekrit Santa in December, and this year we've been experimenting with mini-fests for various actors' birthdays, all of which seems to have kept people pretty busy. And I think a lot of the currently-active folks are squashed enough by their Real Life commitments to be able to regularly participate in a challenge that occurs monthly or whatever it was ds-flashfic used to do.

On the other hand, I think there's some feeling that it'd be nice to have stuff going on and that some of the stuff that went on when the fandom was bigger and more active was pretty cool. It's a question of judging how much spare person-power is out there. I'm not convinced there's critical mass, but I could easily be wrong. Speaking for myself, the idea of reviving ds-flashfiction sounds tempting, but I know I don't personally have the capacity to participate regularly for the foreseeable future.

I think the fandom is also currently struggling to find ways to bridge the LJ/Tumblr divide, as there seem to be a lot of new folks coming into the fandom via Tumblr, which most of the older folks don't use, and my impression (as a non-Tumblr user) is that Tumblr is not the greatest platform for hosting centralized communities.

By the way, I suggest you subscribe to ds_noticeboard, if you haven't already; that's where the most action is in terms of event announcements and the like, that I know of. (Not that I'm a particularly good source of knowledge about what's out there. :) ) It might be worth polling people over there to see if there's interest in reviving ds-flashfiction (probably a lot of the relevant people are subscribed here, but maybe not the newer folks, since this comm has been inactive since before I came along...).

[seabroth.livejournal.com]

Thanks, I joined it!

I had a little success in another comm with enabling anonymous comments and every so often posting to the Tumblr tags to remind people the comm existed (and having the kink meme there). It seems like a lot of them want to just comment Anon and not make new entries, even if they actually are regularly commenting. And some other people who used both LJ and Tumblr but had ceased to check LJ, also joined.

Tumblr is really bad for having any kind of fandom exchange or community, in part because the messaging system is broken (it eats a lot of messages, and you can't save messages you've sent either). It's also practically impossible to find an entry you saw once because a.) the tags are always being flooded with reposts and b.) people change their usernames, reblog more stuff and delete posts so often that even when you find things in a Google search result, the search result is too old and it's not actually there anymore. I initially joined Tumblr because all the fandom stuff for a fandom I was in seemed to be there, but frankly even if there's less here on LJ it's a much better platform and community (people on Tumblr tend to not make fanstuff and only consume it instead)... Tumblr is also a lot worse with commenting, you can get a thousand "likes" and zero comments, and if you do get comments it tends to be bad ones, so it gets a bit depressing.

If we limited it to drabbles, or made it so the wordcount could be anything in general (even two-sentence stuff), it might generate a few more participants. And the challenges could be month-long (just because it's easier to remember), and we could reuse old challenges to avoid having to come up with new ones. But yeah... it's probably a long-shot.

[desireearmfeldt]

Interesting perspective on Tumblr and Tumblr/LJ interaction. We have a couple of LJ-to-Tumblr ambassadors in the fandom at the moment, which is helpful -- a lot of people also use Archive of Our Own to store fanworks and host challenges, and there have been a bunch of Tumblr folks who have joined up over there. (AO3 is not useful for communities, but is very useful as a centralized posting/reading place, and there's some sense of community/communication via comments, at least. Weirdly, I managed to enter online fandom via AO3, because people were proactive about reaching out to me in comments and pointing me at relevant LJ comms.)

By the way, for < 300-word fics, there's already ds_snippets, which is still active.

There's also the newish Due South/Canadian 6 Degrees Prompt Meme on Archive of Our Own, which has not gotten rolling as much as I'd like, but I live in hope -- that's just prompts, no specific deadlines.

[seabroth.livejournal.com]

I'll join both of them! I didn't even know AO3 had these kinds of things (now I feel a bit pathetic, haha). I might not write anything for a while though, it's embarrassing to say but I'm currently on the last ep of the first season and I've just been going around spoiling myself by reading fic.

I can't really remember how I found online fandom. I know I was on FF.net before I was on LJ, but I was reading fanfic starting from when I was around 10-11 years old... Well, I certainly remember when AO3 popped up and I can't believe they're still in beta. It took me a while but I like AO3 more now since it's a lot easier to edit/post fics there. But I am a bit sad sometimes since I deleted all my old fic, I should have saved the very first one I ever wrote at least.

[skieswideopen]

More activity would be wonderful, but I know I don't have the time to participate regularly here.

If can't get this off the ground and you're interested in writing flash fic, there's also fan_flashworks, which is multi-fandom and currently active. Of course, that won't help much if your main goal is generating more Due South flash fic to read.

[seabroth.livejournal.com]

Haha, I think there's plenty out there to read so far! Except in the case of all my crack pairings... Well, lately I've been in fandoms that only have like 30 fics or less so I was really shocked when I saw there were thousands here.

I've never joined a multi-fandom comm before, it seems a bit weird, but in this day and age it might be necessary ;_;

[desireearmfeldt]

It's a 20-year-old fandom and was quite big in its heyday! :)

[seabroth.livejournal.com]

Speaking of that, I thought I saw something that said some episodes were censored when it showed on American tv, is that true...? (Sorry that I'm sort of spamming the post but I don't have anyone to talk to about this series!)

[desireearmfeldt]

Sorry, can't help you there -- I don't know much about the meta/history of the show.

Sadly, something thing DS LJ fandom doesn't seem to have at the moment is a good place for randomly chatting about the show. I have the impression there's some of that going on on Tumblr -- and more on people's personal LJs -- but I don't know how to find it.

You might want to check out the entries in ds_noticeboard the week of April 23 2014: for the 20th anniversary of the airing of the Pilot episode of Due South, we had an online "party," and there are a couple of getting-to-know-you posts where a lot of folks introduced themselves. That might point you at some of the individuals who are currently active. Likewise, if you look in AO3 at the Due-South-tagged fic section, that'll give you some currently active names.

[bghost.livejournal.com]

Hey hey! I posted my first dS fic on Feb 16th 2012, and for me this is not just a brand spanking new fandom, it is THE shiniest fandom. So, feel free to chat away, tell me of your crack pairdoms, and who knows, I might write you one.

[seabroth.livejournal.com]

Okay! Well my main gripe right now is, what the hell went wrong with the third and fourth seasons? (I'm halfway through the fourth now). actually, why did the series start getting bad in the last three eps of the second season? (i'm just going to assume budget cuts made them switch out half their staff or something)

Some choice bits:
- Fraser’s boss said lieutenant instead of leftenant once

- multiple times, episode-centric actors reappeared in later episodes as supposedly completely different characters, and sometimes in the immediately-following ep, except of course you recognized them from the other eps so it was really confusing

- similarly extremely-obviously-reused buildings (ex. the mental-ward hospital building now suddenly turned into the place where they were doing the gambling with lady shoes - even doing the exact same "gonna jump off the same ledge at the same place" bit)

- people constantly kept forgetting stuff like ”she is a criminal at this point, she was even handcuffed and taken to interrogation, they wouldn’t just let her do that” or ”they should be soaking wet right now as they fell into water two seconds ago” or "hello, OBVIOUSLY CHASE AFTER THAT GUY don't chase after the other guy" or for no reason that was explained at all, the car they were normally driving got changed with another one etc. and other common-sense items.

- both rayK and fraser were just crushing on people willy-nilly despite, you know, rayK being in love with his ex-wife and fraser being fraser. also wtf they even changed the dog's personality and otherwise made him more of a human than a dog

- rayK was supposed to be undercover, so deeply undercover he wasn’t supposed to even say aloud to fraser that he wasn’t rayV and people had to go whispering in closets about it, and he magically just left that (without rayV coming back), his parents knew where he was, random unrelated police sort of guys knew his real name, etc?? did i miss something??

- the camera angles and timing became horrible, i have no idea how much time is passing or how the criminal got to where he was standing etc. likewise figuring out the case, the case's difficulties, little quips and so on used to be the main focus and now it's... kinda.... relatively plotless with a lot of arguing (or should i say shouting and pushing matches). the dialogue is so horrible sometimes that you can tell it's the awful dialogue that's making the actors unable to act as well as they could... i don't blame them, i can't believe they went from such good lines to such bad ones. before, the plot was "formula", but it was still fresh and not entirely predictable, now it just went to entirely predictable and uninteresting.

- oh and let's see, all the stuff they replaced at the beginning of the third season all at once: the dog, rayV, the canadian consulate, etc etc there could have been other ways to do it that didn't make it so obvious.

- and now suddenly everyone has a bad family life (alcoholic dads) and all the crimes are about murders? oh and these murdered guys are all dying in like one hit whether from knives or guns or something else?

- also now suddenly fraser has to keep finding a whole bunch of people (women) who are on the same level as him in various ways? or him missing stuff that's pretty obvious and other characters have to help him out? i was pretty sure in the first two seasons that the whole point of fraser was kinda like a, y'know, unrealistic, unusual, fanservice mary-sue....

- now suddenly fraser swears on occasion, we get reinactments of all types of scenes (ex. when talking about a criminal they show reinactment scenes of their crime or whatever), pretty sure we heard someone's thoughts once, etc

- it became decidedly more racist, sexist, and stereotypical. before i was rather proud of how they were doing it - a black guy isn't always a criminal or isn't always poor, same for a woman, or a white guy, etc. but now it just got bad. "white male sailors who are superstitious about ghost ships" wow like i haven't seen that a billion times and can't guess your dialogue

man, it just feels like if i had been there i would have wanted to smack some sense into the scriptwriter at least

[phenyx-tp.livejournal.com]

As someone who has been a fan and watched this show since it originally aired in the U.S., I can answer some of your questions by explaining one important fact. Due South got cancelled after the second season.

The sets were torn down, David Marciano (Ray V) had gotten another gig, and everyone involved had pretty much moved on. But then a miracle. The fans were so passionate about the show, and it was so hugely popular overseas, that they were able to gain funding from new sources and got back on the air. This however, meant that they had to scramble. New sets, new actors etc. Paul Gross signed on not only as the star of the show, but as producer and one of the main writers.

With Paul Gross in charge and writing much of the show, much of his sense of humour found it's way into the stories. True, some of it doesn't make sense, but that's the funny part. There is one scene that embodies (for me anyway) the feeling Paul was trying to achieve with those last seasons. In the first ep. of the third season when the boys are driving the Riv into the Lake they call Michigan, they crash through a wooden crate and drive into the water. The wooden crate was filled with yellow rubber duckies that you can hear squeaking as the car crashes. Those duckies made me laugh 20 years ago and I still giggle when I watch that scene again today, even after hundreds of viewings.

I should also point out that the show was filmed in Canada where (at that time) the actor pool was pretty thin, so you saw a lot of the same actors guest starring multiple times. Even today, I can spot a show that is filming in Canada because the guest stars are people I've seen guest staring in other shows filmed in Canada.

I personally love the 3rd and 4th seasons. They appeal to my sense of humour, make me laugh and give me that warm fuzzy feeling. I wept when the final episode aired. I felt like I was leaving college and the friends I had so much fun with were all moving on. But the fandom keeps it alive! Love you guys!!

[seabroth.livejournal.com]

Haha yeah, by now I've both finished the show (really glad it got better by the end) and have watched a documentary on it and read a bunch of fan comments / interviews ; D

I'm glad the fandom is really big, I haven't been in such a big fandom since probably 2005, lol. And everyone is so nice too!!