#this character—mike—is like...proto-kirk

[lonesomedreamer]

WILLIAM SHATNER in Insight: “Locusts Have No King” (1965; aired 1967)

I think of myself as a principled man. What good are principles if you don’t act on them? How solid is a belief if it isn’t worth fighting for?

[captainofthedefiant]

this is fantastic analysis and i appreciate your thoughts!! agree with most of this, definitely re: it being proto-prestige television in a way, and the amount of research you'd have to do for a very small scope of what you could actually write about. and in the modern day, a really good sitcom might have half the amount of fanfiction a really good drama has, so it tracks as well that the show was just simply not as emotionally intense as the other examples, leading to less desire to write about it (fanfiction or otherwise). to use my own examples, starsky and hutch had less than half the amount of episodes and i think has double the amount of fic on ao3, both from modern era and the 70s, 80s, 90s. a lot of modern mash fic is "BJ goes to maine" while not a NEW concept in theory definitely picked up in speed after that one interview with Mike Farrell where he said BJ would have walked to Maine for Hawkeye (which, side note: i love this quote and its shippy implications but watching that clip i feel like that man was not considering the gay implications of what he said hahah). And i see a lot more of those fics post-2021 or whenever that clip is from.

another thought: ensemble shows i think tend to be much more spread out when it comes to shipping or superfans. i suppose hawkeye could have had his superfans since he was ostensibly the main character but there are so many characters on MASH, and GOOD characters, i can hardly pick a favorite, so perhaps there just was not enough consensus for zines to pick up (using TOS as an example, it was an ensemble show but come on, it was absolutely the kirk and spock show) (i have not seen much of TOS, and i do know there are people obsessed w every guy on that show so please forgive my ignorance <3)

i also love the idea of shows that have existed forever just... having a new perspective foisted upon them. the 2020 boom of MASH on tumblr and twitter definitely gave the show new eyes and new perspectives. i feel like now, we all sort of expect our shows to come with built in fandoms, and if they don't, we make them ourselves because it's easy to just start...posting. product of the internet, whereas it was a much smaller cohort of people dedicated enough to the mailing and creating of fanworks that might still exist to be excavated in 2025 for us to analyze now.

someone sent me an ask about this also bringing up that maybe there was a respect element to this too, that writing silly fanfic or even just joking around with the source material would have been disrespectful. not that i think any of us interacting with the canon on tumblr/etc are being disrespectful but time certainly softens what may have been too "real" for people, even superfans.

truly an interesting case study of modern vs "antique" fandom and i also love thinking about this in depth. a rambley reply for you as well!!

what was it about MASH that there doesn’t seem like there was much fandom at the time of it airing compared to Star Trek and starsky and hutch? Was it just the normie show that didn’t have its rabid fan base circulating hand typed zines until the livejournal era?