Welcome to Gaia! ::

Sorry I haven't been here for a couple of days, folks - I've got a pile of RL issues to deal with at the moment, and I've been doing a bit of intensive work for SHQ on the side.

Here's a little question I posed at SHQ a few years ago, and which inexplicably wound up spreading across three threads over two weeks. I'm not expecting it to do anything like that here, but I was wondering what you guys would think.

I'm not saying that this is necessarily a view I agree with - just a case of me playing devil's advocate.

It dawned on me at one point that, in some respects, the Internet - with its online fandoms and complete freedom of information exchange all over the planet - could not only be the best thing to happen to come fandoms, but also one of the worst.

Let's take Sonic fandom as an example. I live in the UK, where Sonic as a franchise peaked with the release of Sonic 2 for the Mega Drive/Genesis, and gradually tailed off until around 1995, when only StC was left to remind people that Sonic had ever had UK merchandising at all.

Both Sonic Adventure titles were released with virtually no publicity whatsoever - unless you had cable TV, you didn't even see ads for the Dreamcast as a console.

It was only when I discovered online fandom - when I got Internet access from my first university in 1998 - that I really had my faith in Sonic restored. There were other fans out there, and even without new games, there were other continuities than the struggling StC.

My memories of SatAM were a little vague (by that point, it was three years since the final episode's single showing on UK terrestrial TV), but a comic based loosely around those characters didn't seem quite so painful.

And hey - any comic that makes Tails "The Chosen One" and ultimate hero gets my vote. wink

So I began to run with assorted packs in the online fandom. After catching up with what I'd missed via some handy summary sites, I ordered myself a subscription that I've kept up ever since.

I download those anything in terms of Sonic media that the UK doesn't get - which, with the exception of Sonic X (where we got episodes 27-39 first blaugh ), is just about everything.

And since I got my fingers burned by buying a Saturn, and I've been having to get along on a student budget rather than be able to spend gross amounts of money on new hardware every eighteen months, I confess that emulators and ROMs are a lifeline.

I'm able to play titles on my PC that I otherwise wouldn't be able to find anywhere (the 8-bit back catalogue, SegaSonic Arcade or Sonic Championship), but keeping me up to date with other things that I couldn't otherwise afford, like the Sonic Advance series.

And here is where the possible bone of contention in. I'm going to try not to focus too heavily on the downright illegal stuff (like software piracy or full issue comic scans - although Fleetway've been fairly apathetic about the latter since their licence expired), since that's always been seen as a double-edged sword in the circles I move in.

If games and consoles were priced a little more cheaply rather than for high profits, or somebody actually saw and acted on the demand for - for example - an official DVD release of SatAM, or a R2 release or hybrid or subbed release of Sonic X, people might not see the need to have to seek these things from illegal sources in the first place.

One of the reasons that SHQ removed its SatAM downloads was to create demand for further DVD releases after the initial one - but repeated downloads at least show the relevant companies that there is a product out there that someone is not marketing. Certainly, if I could find a DVD release of SatAM or a quality hybrid release of Sonic X, I'd buy it.

But even disregarding the illegal media, fans are able to share lots of information over the Internet that they'd otherwise have to go straight to official sources for - for example, if they wanted to find out what happened in back issues of comics and they couldn't ask any handy friends, they'd just have to buy back issues.

Although fans have to initially get their information from official sources, it now takes a very small number of people with sources to pass things along the grapevine.

And that has to bring down revenue, with which the official sources churn out their material in the first place. Ultimately, could it bring down quality?

Is there too much of a good thing? Do you think that Internet fandom draws attention away from the very official sources it's trying to pay homage to?