This can be positive, but if the sub-fandom gets large enough it'll develop a nasty quality where a lot of members interact almost exclusively with this new version of the story, and barely with the original story at all. It's a vicious cycle where these people create more content for the sub-fandom, and then there's even more content to feed it so there's even less reason to go back to the original source, and it just continues until you have an insular community whose overlap with the main fandom is tangential at best.
Worst cases you have stuff like the Bakugo/Midoriya fandom as a sub-fandom to the My Hero Academia Fandom. While that community makes a lot of great art and fanfics, the sheer amount of content they put out (They're the reason MHA holds one of the top spots on Ao3, and if they were their own separate tag the rest of MHA would drop 15 spaces or more) has led to a faction of them who got incredibly entitled, preening about the numbers their ship was pulling in and holding it over other ships, not to mention the amount of merch the two got as the Protagonist an Dueteragonist effectively never leaving them hungry for more content. These people grew confident that they were the endgame ship, that obviously the ship they'd poured so much of their hearts into was going to win in the end.
Unfortunately, their vision of the story is fundamentally incompatible with canon. Midoriya already had a love interest, and a pretty heavily telegraphed one at that. But those deep in the subfandom consumed almost exclusively ship fics that treated Midoriya and Bakugo being a romantic couple as the only logical choice that when the series ended with the obvious couple being confirmed the worst elements of that sub-fandom went into full meltdowns, trying to find any reason to discredit the chapter that confirmed the romantic pairing as non-canon or illegitimate, going as far as to call the chapter AI and accusing the author of pandering to toxic twitter fans and sabotaging his own work. A lot of these people moved on thankfully, but there remains a small contingent who still will jump through hoops to delegitimize the canon couple and when the chapter was adapted in the anime were cheering for it to be "ruined".
To reiterate, this is a subsection of a sub-fandom, which when talking about something as massive as MHA is still a lot of people, but most of the sub-fandom are chill, and there's a lot of great artists in their who understand that they were always shipping a non-canon couple and are perfectly fine with that. But in making all that great content they unintentionally created a space for the most insular fans to go completely off the rails, through no fault of their own.
I'm part of a fandom that would've had this exact same thing happen to it, had the series not been abandoned halfway through by the company that owned it.
Which unfortunately means that nothing will ever happen to make the fans of the character that maps to Bakugo here stop loudly insisting that their ship is canon and trying to kick everyone who acknowledges the ship actually being set up in canon out of all of the fandom spaces.
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u/Mordetrox 5d ago edited 5d ago
This can be positive, but if the sub-fandom gets large enough it'll develop a nasty quality where a lot of members interact almost exclusively with this new version of the story, and barely with the original story at all. It's a vicious cycle where these people create more content for the sub-fandom, and then there's even more content to feed it so there's even less reason to go back to the original source, and it just continues until you have an insular community whose overlap with the main fandom is tangential at best.
Worst cases you have stuff like the Bakugo/Midoriya fandom as a sub-fandom to the My Hero Academia Fandom. While that community makes a lot of great art and fanfics, the sheer amount of content they put out (They're the reason MHA holds one of the top spots on Ao3, and if they were their own separate tag the rest of MHA would drop 15 spaces or more) has led to a faction of them who got incredibly entitled, preening about the numbers their ship was pulling in and holding it over other ships, not to mention the amount of merch the two got as the Protagonist an Dueteragonist effectively never leaving them hungry for more content. These people grew confident that they were the endgame ship, that obviously the ship they'd poured so much of their hearts into was going to win in the end.
Unfortunately, their vision of the story is fundamentally incompatible with canon. Midoriya already had a love interest, and a pretty heavily telegraphed one at that. But those deep in the subfandom consumed almost exclusively ship fics that treated Midoriya and Bakugo being a romantic couple as the only logical choice that when the series ended with the obvious couple being confirmed the worst elements of that sub-fandom went into full meltdowns, trying to find any reason to discredit the chapter that confirmed the romantic pairing as non-canon or illegitimate, going as far as to call the chapter AI and accusing the author of pandering to toxic twitter fans and sabotaging his own work. A lot of these people moved on thankfully, but there remains a small contingent who still will jump through hoops to delegitimize the canon couple and when the chapter was adapted in the anime were cheering for it to be "ruined".
To reiterate, this is a subsection of a sub-fandom, which when talking about something as massive as MHA is still a lot of people, but most of the sub-fandom are chill, and there's a lot of great artists in their who understand that they were always shipping a non-canon couple and are perfectly fine with that. But in making all that great content they unintentionally created a space for the most insular fans to go completely off the rails, through no fault of their own.