(Note: The following contains spoilers for Doctor Who up through "The Silence in the Library," all of Star Trek: Voyager, and speculation on the end of Battlestar Galactica.  Read at your own risk.)

So, like, there was this fanboy, and he loved this one show, and when he got older, he and his group of buddies did this shared universe story, right? Okay, so they introduced this OC who was all way cool, and it was way slashy, and they totally started writing stories just about him and the hot guys and girls he had sex with, and meanwhile, in the shared universe stories, they brought back an old character from a long time ago, and she was so much fun to write that they started writing stories about her too. And then they wrote this one story where the main character got a daughter out of nowhere, but she was already grown up, and totally hot, and she could snark and kick ass and do gymnastic leaps through lasers (because that's so kewl) and they killed her off but only kind of and then everybody felt bad (even the people who only knew her for five minutes) so they brought her back. And meanwhile, there was this one character they really liked, so even though they'd written her out of the story, they started bringing her back again because omg One True Pairing!

Or maybe Dr. Merlin is watching a little too much Whoniverse these days. Whatever.

Strange things happen when the fanboys are put in charge of the very things they geeked about as kids, and it's only getting stranger as we move solidly into the middle of the Second Generation (third for comics geeks). It's cliché to point out that there are no new ideas in Hollywood, but look around. Michael Bay's vision of an '80s cartoon killed at the box office last year. Jon Favreau's "Iron Man" is already being called the best comics adaptation of all time. Ron Moore's reworking of Battlestar Galactica has been showered in critical acclaim. Justin Marks might as well put "I get paid to write fanfic" on his resume and be done with it, considering he's the pen behind the upcoming "Voltron," "Green Arrow," and "He-Man" adaptations. Robert Orci, who wrote the script of the new J.J. Abrams Star Trek film, has been a Trekkie for years. And of course, the news came out just two weeks ago that Stephen Moffat, who's been writing Doctor Who stories since the age of seven, will be in charge of that franchise starting next year. In the comics world, this is old news: not a soul is writing comics these days who didn't grow up reading the adventures of these same characters as a kid. The story even goes that big name fanboy Kevin Smith insisted on resurrecting fallen Green Arrow Oliver Queen as a condition of writing that comic. (The story also goes that Devin Grayson got her job writing at DC after sending in a Batman/Nightwing spec, but that particular story has been denied by all involved.)

On the one hand, the rise of the fans to control the things we love is amazing news for the rest of us. Not only does it provide hope for every aspiring fanwriter, it also creates a deeper bond between creator and audience. Joss Whedon can pull the old "I don't give fans what they want, I give them what they need" routine, but writers who are keenly aware that the characters they're playing with were created by someone else and will be played with again by someone new when they're finished are far more likely to play nicely. The writers who started as fans know they too will have to live with this canon until the end of time. They have both the luxury of thinking someone will come along behind them and fix the mistakes, and also the fear that the next person will come along to make those mistakes worse.

Let us consider Frank Miller. Before his writing went to self-parody, Miller's "The Dark Knight Returns" was the definitive work on the modern Batman myth. Everything that has involved Batman ever since, from Batman: The Animated Series to "Batman Begins," has drawn on that series. But his own obsession started as a child, reading comics and even writing his own works back when Adam West was the best-known face behind the mask, and the books he read were themselves written by writers who'd been reading Detective Comics for twenty years.

Fandom builds on itself. It always has. We admire writer-creators such a J. Michael Straczynski and Joss Whedon, but we also know that it's only when someone else can pick up the characters and make them breathe that the story is greater than its author. Sometimes that's with fanfiction alone, sometimes it's through the tie-in novels and comics, sometimes it's a reboot twenty years later by someone who was once an awestruck kid with a cardboard paper towel holder as a sword. The Goldberg definition says only the latter two outlets are creatively legitimate, but honestly, the line is blurring so much and so fast that soon the only way to tell will be identifying who can send C&D letters.

Think about it. Once upon a time, a show was a show. Creators wrote a forty-five (or so) page script, shot it, and that was canon. Tie-in materials were optional, but usually considered fanon, not least because they just as often as not got jossed by canon later anyway ala the original Star Wars novelizations. In rare cases, there would be a deleted scene, or a photocopy of a script that was filmed slightly differently than written. (TNG's "Attached," I'm look at you.) Potential canon. Optional canon. Now we live in the age of webisodes, of corporate-sponsored contests for fanvids and open solicits for fanfiction, and the Goldberg line is very fine indeed.

On the opposite side of the coin, though, we have the fear. Fear of screwing up the canon permanently. Fear of being remembered as the one who made the revamp uncool. (How much did you pay to see the future Governor of California throw around bad cold puns as Clooney donned a suit with nipples? 'Cause I paid waaaay too much for that particular ticket.) And the very simple fear of not knowing what to do with a hit.

The thing about Battlestar Galactica is that it's going to end with them finding Earth. Stuff may happen when they get there, everyone may die, but everyone already knows that's how this story will finish. It's not a spoiler, it's where the quest ends. Same thing happened with Star Trek: Voyager. It was always going to end with the ship coming back to Earth, or being destroyed just as it arrived. In BSG's case, the storytelling was always going to be a function of how long it took to get there, and how often SciFi would renew the show in the meantime, which meant stories happened in the middle that might have been best left behind. Lost has had a similar problem: the writers have (allegedly) always known how the story would end, but until recently, the series didn't have an official end-date to work towards. Mid-season blahs are killer.  Contrast this with the Legend of JMS, which is all about how he wrote the five year plan in advance. Babylon 5 is remembered because he stuck to that plan (at least until he thought he was being cancelled after season four). Knowing where you're headed helps you get there, as long as you know how much time you have to arrive. Too much time, too many renewals between "critically-acclaim premiere" and the announced ending date, and our shows wind up treading water, creating drama for the sake of drama, and losing the focus that drew us in back when the world-building began.

Series that run from year to year without multiyear story arcs have things much easier in terms of telling the story they intend. Buffy and Doctor Who, while building on previous material and offering loose ends for later, use the season to show the beginning, middle, and end of each storyline, much like a book. Who goes one further and ends each season (these days) with a tag starting the story for next time, but these are not classic season-ending cliffhangers so much as tastes of what's yet to come. (Compare this with what became obligatory cliffhangers on Star Trek: TNG, where the writing staff fully admitted they didn't sit down to write how the stories would resolve until after the summer hiatus.) Encapsulated storylines also make it easier to see what did and didn't work over the year, and to change those aspects (or pound them even harder next time). On the other hand, year-to-year stories often fall out as episode-to-episode stories, where without the overriding reach of an intended arc, individual episodes can feel like anthology pieces, with little to no sense of continuity between episodes. (Again, see TNG. If Rick Berman and Brannon Braga are ever allowed to touch the franchise again, it'll be too soon.)

In fanfiction terms, the heavily-plotted series with The Plan is like a WIP; you dive in, never knowing how or if it's going to land, but you're willing to take the plunge anyway. The best single-season arced shows are like a long, complete story; you know the author has already figured out how it's all going to work out, and you hope the resolution is worth all the descriptions of what the characters had for lunch.

So what does all this mean for fans? A banquet. No more are we forced to watch the one science fiction or fantasy television series available or else go without. We're not coerced into buying a ticket for the comic book adaptation movie, so that we can show Hollywood we like comic book adaptations. Instead, we're swimming in genre media, in big and small doses, in epic storylines and week-to-week brain candy and web-only content and creators who hang out on comment boards to get feedback and network shows and specialty cable channels and movie treatment after movie treatment based on the stories we loved as kids. Some of the stories are the same stories we told ourselves when we were kids, the good and the bad, starring the same characters only cooler, faster, stronger, and with better dental work. Some of the stories are brand new, offbeat grandchildren of the same sources: Princess Leia->Ellen Ripley->Lt. Yar->Sarah Connor Mk. 1->Major Kira->Cmdr. Ivanova->Xena->Buffy->Aeryn->Starbuck Mk. 2->Sarah Connor Mk.2. (No, it's not exactly continuous. Yes, your version probably differentiates in interesting ways. Sure, you can post your own list in the comments section.) But there's out there for us, and they're run by people more or less just like us, telling the stories we've waited lifetimes to see. Gay relationships in canon. ANY relationships in canon. Female characters in positions of power treated as rounded characters rather than "the girl(s)." Characters of color given story arcs and development rather than a token episode once per season. Multiple characters who are not straight white males so that there's room to show different stories and develop characters in different ways. Characters with children and grandchildren, meeting them, watching them grow up. Stories that break the rules. Stories that intentionally follow, and then tweak, every rule ever made. We're getting the cream (and yes, sometimes the crap, too) of all the fanfic ideas we ever had, playing out in front of us if we want to watch.

So we do. We tune in to see the latest round of "Fanboy Rules the Universe" and sometimes it's the fanfic we've been writing, and sometimes it's That Other Fanfic, which we don't discuss in polite company, or at least in unlocked posts. We take our chances and we pick and choose, and we enjoy the threads we can see woven in ("retcon," "spoilers") or we mutter at the seams showing and move on because we've seen this story before and it never ends well. And we give the fanboys a thumbs-up, because they made it, even when we quickly switch to another finger because of what they turned it into later, and some of us hope to be standing there someday, and some of us just hope not to get caught doing what we're doing.

The line between Them and Us is going away. If/when it's our turn, we can only hope we don't screw up too badly and that we can learn from our (and their) mistakes.