SOUPCATCHER'S BLOG
The Birth of fireflyfans
Monday, April 25, 2005 7:57 AM
Sometime in early 2002, M31 retired and Haken was born.M31 was the screen name of the creator of andromedatvfans.com* – an online community for fans of the sci-fi TV show Andromeda. The end result of many hours of programming was impressive: a community of over 600 registered users, close to 200 threads, more than ten feature articles, episode guides, encyclopedia entries, and other assorted content. What was even more impressive was that, when he began the project, M31 could not even watch the show – Andromeda was not aired in his home state of Hawaii.
M31’s passion for Andromeda waned and in early 2002 he decided to close down the site. Or, rather, he decided to take all his hard work and modify it to support a different science-fiction television show. This time, instead of investing a significant amount of time and resources towards a show he couldn’t watch, he chose a show no one else could watch either. A show that hadn’t even started filming. A series being developed by Joss Whedon called Firefly.
The first Firefly related content was posted on 28 February 2002 and consisted of seven threads that recapped news releases from the previous three months. This content was: an empty thread [7,187]**; an announcement from zap2it.com that Gina Torres, Ron Glass, and Summer Glau were joining the cast [7,188]; a reprint of a 19 December 2001 article by Mark Armstrong titled, “Whedon Bites Off Another New Series” [7,189]; short descriptions of each of the main characters (excerpt: “River- Borderline psychic. She can read most minds and has a tendency to speak not only what is on her own mind, but others' as well.”) [7,190]; background information on the actors and additional character information from Trek Today [7,191]; a duplicate of the content in thread 188 with a different title [7.192]; and Marti Noxon’s description of the show that concludes with the classic line, “We're focusing on their struggles, not a guy with a gorgon on his templok or something.” [7,193].
During the month of March news was posted as it happened. On the 6th the announcement that Rebecca Gayheart would play the role of Inara was relayed [7,195] along with a picture of the actress [7,196]. Six days later Rebecca Gayheart was gone [7,200] and, after a little more than a week, Morena Baccarin became the last of the nine cast members to join [7,201]. The only other Firefly thread was related to the ongoing development of the site – a test of emoticons [2,204]. This month also saw the beginning of the phase out of the M31 persona and the creation of two new accounts: NewsAdmin and Haken. The site creator would use the NewsAdmin account to post information updates and the Haken (an abbreviation of the Street Fighter battle cry Ha Do Ken)*** account to discuss Firefly with other fans.
Details continued to emerge throughout the next month. On April 1st, Cinescape reported that the special effects shop, Radium, would do most of the FX for Firefly [7,205]. The next day, Joss announced that Chris Buchanan would take over as President of Mutant Enemy Productions [7.206]. On the 6th, USA Today observed that the Firefly pilot, at a cost of 10 million dollars, would be the most expensive of the year [7,207]. Two and a half weeks later, FilmForce reported that a studio was searching for a writer and director to work on the movie adaptation of Iron Man, roles that Joss Whedon had previously held [7,208]. And on the 24th the first potential fandom conflict, in a reprint of a Firefly: Ultimate Resource article titled, “Firefly Contributing To The End Of Buffy?”, was presented [7,209].
Fireflyfans.net was shaping up as a nice online resource. But one thing was missing, people. At this point it was a community of one. Most of the user accounts for the old andromedatvfans site were deleted in March, along with a majority of the content [7,199]. (A few threads - [2,151], [2,182], [4,197], and [X,XXX] – are still available). Of the sixteen accounts created before 29 April 2002 that survive, nine users did not post in a thread,
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