Before & After & Inbetween

Today, King Amusement Creative announced on YouTube a TV anime of Tokyo Babylon done by GoHands production to come in 2021. The trailer is embedded below in case you are the single TB fan who lived under an extraterrestrial rock during the previous week. The animation in the trailer looks beautiful and the character design appears to be close to what we saw in Clamp in Wonderland.



However, I admit having very mixed feelings.

On the one hand - I'm all over the moon, too, because who wouldn't LOVE getting a TB anime?!?

On the other hand, there are two things that keep me from being all exuberant now.

Firstly, CiWo's character design (and the one in the trailer linked above) doesn't click well with me. It's beautiful, clear-lined, fluent, and works well for the twins, but Seishiro... looks strange for me. I guess mostly because of the different glasses, but sheesh - that's your shallow writer for you; and you can be sure it won't keep me from watching!
The second thing is more serious, though. I've only been an active participant - creating fan works, participating in discussions, etc. - in four small fandoms (Galaxy Rangers, Emperor's Edge, Viewfinder, and TBX - if you are curious), and two of them died when new material was released after a long hiatus.
In one case, it was just the release of the source material as a DVD set, in the other, the book series was continued after what was a bitter-sweet but fitting conclusion and the fandoms just evaporated. People consumed the new material... and discussions died down, interactions dwindled, exchanges stopped... the mailing list of the DVD fandom trickled down to being mostly the "you have to renew your subscription"-mail once a year, and the book forum became a ghost town, not over night, but within weeks of the new volume.
The fandoms didn't survive the new material. At all. Viewfinder never had a real hiatus, just an awfully slow release cycle to begin with, and I wasn't that active in it to begin with, so it can't serve as a counterexample.
I can help but fear that something similar may happen to TBX - and that would be so devastating.

I'm still working on the finishing touches to Family Matters. I won't say I'm done before New Year, because whenever I say something like that, something else will jump up and chew all my plans. I want this fic to be all shiny and finished and available online in all its glory.

Albeit I'm afraid very few people will notice, since almost all the forums and groups dedicated to TBX are either deadly silent (or have disappeared altogether). I also noticed, that most of my fannish interests have either gone the same way of TBX or come without a blog-presence.

( Lot's of talk of fandoms and losses )

Given all that, I'm not sure that I will continue writing Business As Usual after I finished the editing of Family Matters. At least, the Dekagram will have a working end then. If Seishiro (and the notorious Tree-san) compel me to continue, I'll most likely complete it on my own before seeking help for editing, instead of publishing it chapter by chapter. There's just not much point doing the chapter-dance without a fandom for feedback.

Livejournal's longlasting TBX fan community x1999 has just been deleted. The community was very quiet these last months, but I still feel like a vital part of TBX fan life just died.

x1999 was one of the first three communities I joined when getting into the fandom. I'm sad to see it gone.

Today I spotted a post of the _missing_verb community on my friends page, advertising dubious internet meds. Yes, the last post in that community dedicated to Sakurazuka Seishiro has been in 2007, but it's still sad when old communities get spammed. It feels like ugly graffiti & broken windows in a once decent neighborhood.