When did it die?

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Kungfunaomi
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Katie10 wrote:
Anyhow the game topic is really dead no one has posted in it for around two weeks.
That qualifies as dead!? In my book, dead is at least 52 weeks.
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PennyBassett
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Oh yeah. At least a year, maybe more...
"Let me get this straight. I bet all those non-friends of yours try to embarrass you about your love for that stuff, right? So, you almost feel like you have to hide your treasures away and can only take them out in secret on rainy days when your mom goes to the store to get more liver and nobody is around to berate your sensitive spirit. Is that what you’re saying?" -Jay Smouse
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Katie10
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Fine there very quiet.
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Bob
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PennyBassett wrote:I think there were originally a lot of fans who grew up listening to the best of Odyssey. Since Odyssey's quality has deteriorated and said original fans got older, there aren't as many new fans to fill the gap.
I'm not sure that reasoning entirely works.

As of 2000, when albums like Virtual Realities came out, many of the old fans of the time considered them to be the worst episodes ever (indeed, they're still considered to be among the worst episodes, 18 years later). Yet that obviously didn't have a big impact*, as fan communities continued to thrive and even get larger over the next 12 years.

Going off on a bit of a tangent... I find it a bit funny when Soda Shop and late ToO-era fans (who signed up in 2011 or 2012) talk about "old Odyssey fans". From the perspective of people who've been around when the Town Hall was active, these 2011 members are new. I would suggest a more accurate labeling system would place TH-era and maybe early ToO fans as the "old guard" (many or most of who grew up with truly classic AIO episodes, such as those from the late 80s or early/mid-90s), late ToO/SS-era fans as the "middle guard" (who grew up listening to late 90s/00s episodes and call album 50 "the last great Odyssey album"), and anything after that as the "young guard".

For the record, I suspect that back in the mid-2000s there were plenty of old guards talking about how terrible those episodes were that the middle guard hold up as "classics" today. If I had been on Odyssey forums at the time, I very possibly might have. As it was I did make a number of topics and posts in 2010/2011 or so talking about how bad mid/late 2000s episodes were.

The evidence suggests that there are still plenty of young fans out and about "in the wild". If you look at the comment sections on the AIO site, those are active. When I hear our youth in real life talking about the show, they're not talking about old Odyssey. They're familiar with and interested in what's going on now. The OAC subscription service is apparently successful and has a lot of members, at least some of which comment or else send messages to FotF. Clearly, these young people haven't gotten the message about the show being bad now, even though their parents likely listened to the show before and "should know better" if it is objectively that obvious. And on average, listening to it today, I think episodes today are on average as enjoyable as ones made in the mid/late-2000s (most of which I've warmed up to over the past few years).

I think the main difference from now and then is just that they're not coming here or to the ToO, which has to do with a combination of bad marketing and the change in online culture.

Even if they did come here, though, I'm not sure why they would stay. The SS in particular has largely become an anti- or former fan community. 40% of the people here dislike the show in general, regardless of time period, often because they've acquired belief systems diametrically opposed to FotF's and Odyssey's over the past few years. And another 40% claim to still like the show, but according to them FotF can't do anything right nowadays. So, I'm not sure why a young fan who loves the show would stick around here and put up with all the negativity. Sure, 20% of the members still like the show, but that's a far cry from what you would expect for an alleged fan community.

As far as the ToO goes, it isn't as negative about the show, but nothing ever happens there anymore and the posts that do come are generally from old members talking about how they're getting married or having kids. That's not really something a young person can relate to. So it is also part of the "former fan" community, albeit not in the same sense as the SS, since at least some of these people might still have fond feelings about the show and expose their children to it when they're old enough.


*Some people would say that AIO bounced back quickly with Novacom and this kept their weak period from having a big impact. It's worth noting that the post-Novacom episodes weren't considered to be all that great either, and even Novacom has its detractors. For instance, although I listened avidly to every new episode as it came out, and I think my (older) sister was interested, my parents didn't really like the story arc, and still don't... and I had been listening to all the new episodes when they came out before Novacom anyway. So at least in a poll of my family, I'm not sure it can be said that on average Novacom helped drive up interest in the show, which had already been high before that, although it certainly began to decrease after Novacom ended.)
A classic never goes out of style.
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