How's this gonna go down?

[fan_eunice]

This is what I'm wondering about today as I go about getting ready to do the whole con thing. There seems to be a fairly predictable pattern in 'ship wars, in that they are generally at their ugliest while canon is still open, but that once canon closes there's this...thing that happens following the final explosive bang of however it ends up canonically. Namely...given anywhere from a few months to a few years (depending on just how ugly it got) 'shippers in a closed canon tend to start identifying with each other as shippers more than by the 'rightness' of a given 'ship, if that makes any sense. There's a fair bit of "wow, we were rather silly, sorry about that time I called you a delusional moron, that was a wee bit fucked up of me" that goes on, and while long standing grudges certainly remain, the tone of the thing calms down to the point where there's more cooperation than not in keeping the fandom itself alive as first priority. New fans are more likely to be cautioned not to start up old wars or pick at healing scabs, with a certain amount of community dissaproval aimed at those who do. Assuming the fandom doesn't fade away post-canon, it's often the most relaxing and enjoyable time to 'ship fannishly.

So, what happens when your canon never closes? Even if Doctor Who is cancelled tomorrow, history informs us that it's going to come back in one form or another. Another tv series, a movie, books, audios, etc. The odds of having no new canon are pretty slim. So...how does this go down? Do the proponents of 'new' 'ships eventually get absorbed into the 'old' camps, learn to play together nicely, and then grumble about the kids on the lawn when the next set of wars fire up? Or does everyone dig into trenches and stay there, popping up to occasionally throw grenades at each other on an increasingly crowded battlefield? Not having been in old school DW fandom, I don't know if there are clues as to how this settles out in the absence of a defined end point to new source material. Something like loves_them_all certainly points to efforts to find a common point of calm, as well as 'no bashing' rules on more prominent communities and so on. But the continued open canon still leaves the door wide open to the kinds of things that tend to spark off the nastier blow ups. Theories? Thoughts? Old school fans with insight on how these kinds of dynamics have played out before?