#i've made it a habit to throw any longfic into the wayback machine- that i read

[metalbvcky]

Aw no Anon, don’t think that :( the Stucky fandom is very alive and well. I don’t know what it’s like on Twitter (since I don’t go there bc of bad experiences from a couple years ago) but the Stucky fandom on Tumblr specifically is much smaller than it was in say, 2014, but you know what? I think it’s kinda nice, it’s cozier. I’m in the Destiel fandom and ever since the finale, we’ve doubled (tripled??) in size. Drama (varying levels of chaosary) is happening almost daily over there. I look back from 2016-2019 and I really, really, miss when it was smaller. Peace is a bliss. 

Look at me for example, I joined just this year! I’ve been apart of the Supernatural fandom for 6 years and so many people have come and gone. People might stay for a long while, years even, while others might dip their toes into a new fandom then leave in just a few short months. 

If the Star Trek & Harry Potter fandoms are anything to go by, then I don’t think you’ll have to worry about Stucky (or any sub-section of the Marvel fandom for that matter) dying anytime soon. We’re the biggest ship in the fandom, and I don’t think anything could stop us. There are over 50k words on AO3, and more are being created everyday. That’s a lot of fics!! Enough to last a lifetime, or more.

Look at it this way: Fandoms have different eras. You’ve got fandom before it spiked in popularity. Then you’ve got fandom during the spike of popularly. After that, the dust begins to settle and fandom is about between the two. New material comes out, whatever it may be, and people start to create again. It goes up, it goes down. Interests vary from person to person, and they come and go. 

TL;DR: There will always be someone creating and we should support them, because down the road, their next work might be your next favorite fic. <3 

have you noticed an increase in popular fics being deleted recently? do you think the stucky fandom is dying?

We are noticing more deletions, yes, but I don’t think you need to worry about the fandom dying. 

People move on. Sometimes that means they take their stories with them, for a variety of reasons. Maybe they’ve joined a new fandom and like a clean break. Maybe they’ve grown so much as a writer that they can’t stand their old writing anymore. Maybe they feel so burned by the canon that they want to cut all ties. Maybe they don’t want to take any risk that one day their kids may read something they wrote. Maybe they’re going pro and their publisher demanded they take down any of their fannish writing, whether they remixed something or not. The best case scenario for the fandom at that point is that the author orphans their work, but losing control of your writing that way is definitely not for everyone, and we shouldn’t begrudge anyone that choice. They’ve given us a gift, and we’ve had it to treasure for a while, and we’ll continue to treasure its memory. 

But people are also just now getting into writing for this fandom for the first time. A Bang is posting right now. Many more Bangs and other events are on the docket for the coming year, not just for Stucky but for other MCU content as well. There are so many stories out there already that I honestly think you could spend the rest of your life reading them and not run out of new-to-you fics. That is not a hallmark of a dying fandom. Steve may be out of the MCU, but there is still a lot of content coming for people to play around with. After all, we do what we want, right? We create our own worlds.

So please, don’t fret. The fandom may be changing, but it’s certainly not going anywhere.