Here are some random shower musings…
I remember reading about something about how MySpace failed. It wasn’t just people dropping one-by-one…it seems that some people act as social “hubs”. If one person drops, a lot of other people would tend to drop with them.
I’ve seen it where if one artist drops, others drop too because they really admire the one artist. Their stuff was the reason that kept a lot of others going.
I think in some fandoms (like furry), there’s no real central “thing” keeping the whole thing together. There’s a vague concept of liking anthropomorphic animals in one theme or another, and people mostly decide what exactly that means for themselves. Occasionally an artist would burn out on that fandom—like a friend did many years ago—and some other people would be bummed and leave, too. Most people would stay, and the fandom remains stable.
When you have a concept centered around an IP, if some changes in the IP drive more people away than it attracts for any reason at all I can see artists dropping from a fandom at an increasing rate. After all, the reason why artists usually start drawing fan art of an IP is because it’s fun. If it stops feeling fun—like the show—I think people wander away. If people feel put off enough by the changes in IP, I can see some people not just losing interesting, but actively becoming disgusted. And thus they trigger the social hub phenomenon, above.
So, musing, the show would have to do something really phenomenally good to get people excited again.
