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Introduction: starting at the end / Rebecca Williams -- Remembering R.E.M.: social media, memories and endings within music fandom / Lucy Bennett -- "I'll never break your heart": the perpetual fandom of the Backstreet Boys / Simone Driessen -- "My music was on shuffle, one of their songs came on and had to hit next...": navigating grief and disgust in Lostprophets fandom / Bethan Jones -- Breaking up with Breaking Bad: relational dissolution and the critically acclaimed AMC series - Melissa A. Click and Holly Willson Holladay -- Fan euthanasia: a thin line between love and hate / Paul Booth -- Endings in soap opera: speculation and reaction to Eastenders' 30th anniversary storyline - Stuart Bell and Ruth A Deller -- "Is this what you call a break up?": the cancellation of Merlin, perceived producer disloyalty and 'television-as-lover fandom' / Joseph Brennan -- Hannibal's refrigerator: Bryan Fuller's response to fan's (critical) rage - Evelyn Deshane -- The repurposed fantasy: Doujinshi and the Japanese media mix / Anya Benson -- When production is over: creating narrative closure in fan edits / Nicolle Lamerichs -- Creating canon through kickstarter: Star Trek continues / Nichola Dobson -- Replacing Maelstrom: theme park fandom, place, and the Disney brand - Rebecca Williams -- "The world's turned inside out, and we can never go home, anymore": Punchdrunk's site specific theater and fan interaction - Emily Garside -- Internet killed the video store: video stores, cultural memory, nostalgia and fandom / Kathleen Williams -- Afterword: fannish affect and its aftermath / Kristina Busse

Have you ever been a fan of a show that was canceled abruptly or that killed off a beloved character unexpectedly? Or perhaps it was rebooted after a long absence and now you're worried it won't be as good as the original? Anyone who has ever followed entertainment closely knows firsthand that such transitions can be jarring. Indeed, for truly loyal fans, the loss can feel very real-even throwing their own identity into question. Examining how fans respond to and cope with transitions, endings, or resurrections in everything from band breakups (R.E.M.) to show cancellations (Hannibal) to closing down popular amusement park rides, this collection brings together an eclectic mix of scholars to analyze the various ways fans respond to change. Essays explore practices such as fan discussion and creating alternative fan fictions, as well as cases where fans abandon their objects of interest completely and move on to new ones. Shedding light on how fans react, both individually and as a community, the contributors also trace the commonalities and differences present in fandoms across a range of media, and they pay close attention to the ways fandom operates across paratexts and transmedia forms including films, comics, and television. This fascinating approach promises to make an important contribution to the fields of fan, media, and cultural studies, and should appeal widely to students, scholars, and anyone else with a genuine interest in understanding why these transitions can have such a deep impact on fans' lives.--

Tumblr's modes of looping and repetition (especially via the circulation of GIFs) offer a potential source of comfort during moments of fannish rupture. By analyzing my own responses to the ending of a favorite television series, I argue that the repetition of Tumblr—the sense of infinity that is engendered by the fact that users may see the same thing reblogged and turning up on their dashboard over and over again—can be understood as offering the potential for working through moments of affective disruption. By assessing Tumblr's sense of endlessness and the reblogging of images and GIF and GIF sets across fan blogs after the finale of the television series Hannibal (2013–15), I consider how the use of a single specific platform can relate to the absence rather than the presence of fan-created objects. In an analysis of fan engagement and attachment, I draw on Freud's work on repeating and working through to study the relationship among repetition, trauma, and the wider media. The repetition engendered by the repeated viewing of GIFs and GIF sets on Tumblr offers comfort and catharsis for fans in periods of mourning. These areas of study inform an analysis of Tumblr as a specific platform for fan engagement and this platform's use as a mechanism for reassurance in the face of moments of rupture.

Abstract