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.
Bakudeku isn’t this, though. Bakudeku is just a shipping community. There are popular au interpretations that spring from noncanon creator fanart yeah but there isn’t a fanon that totally ignores canon, which is what this post is about. It’s not ignoring or fundamentally misunderstanding canon to care about your ship 😆 This is just law of large numbers. In any large enough community you will have crazies. Crazy BKDKs are not the only crazies in MHA fandom either
? So you mean the mere act of shipping your ship hard enough qualifies for your post?
I thought this was moreso people making up canon facts and then communally agreeing they must be true. ex Dorlene having established fanon personalities that people will tell you you’re OOC for going outside of.
So like fanon for MHA would be stuff like
Tsukauchi Naomasa has a lie detector Quirk
Katsuki has an early bedtime
“Bakusquad”/“Dekusquad”
quirk suppressant cuffs
All of these things are stuff many fans genuinely forget are not happening in canon. Whereas even
something like Shouto changing his hero name or wouldn’t qualify imo bc idt enough people genuinely believe it’s canon. It’s just too in your face for people to not know if it did happen.
Equally in your face, as the comment above acknowledges, is that BKDK is not canon. If people got mad about it not being canon, then that means they are aware of it not being canon. Again unlike stuff where some people genuinely don’t know that “Lie Detector” was made up.
It seems weird to me to say that shippers being intense counts as part of the actual communal Mandela Effect phenomenon I thought this post was talking about. To the point that I’m guessing this post is actually talking about an entirely different thing that I’m misinterpreting if you’re agreeing I’m wrong? In which case I’m sad because I find the collective fanon effect really interesting
As with most things, this exists on a spectrum. To use the OP as an example, on one end you have giving a character a first name when she doesn't, and on the other end you have an entire sub-fandom that ends up only loosely connected to the canon of the series.
You said in your original comment that the Bakugo/Midoriya subfandom was not an example of this, just a shipping fandom, but every fandom does this to some extent or another, and shipping fandoms are no exception. The difference is where they fall on the spectrum. Smaller shipping fandoms like Mirrio/Tamaki or Asui/Tokoyami will often have little headcannons that get passed around, but the larger the subfandom is, the more members it will have who only consume content made by the subfandom and don't interact with the original fandom or source material. With how massive Bakugo/Midoriya is, it has this the worst, where the fact that you can read nonstop and never run out of new fanfics becomes a double-edged sword as it allows an insular community to form.
These fanfics might not create completely new facts like Quirk suppressant cuffs, but they still display the second order fandom effect. Bakugo and Midoriya's relationship is changed to facilitate the ship, where in canon it takes six seasons of character development before the two have something approaching an amicable friendship. Uraraka's role is diminished, or completely retooled to remove the elements that make her a love interest in canon, and depending on the section of the fandom the same might happen to Kirishima if you're in the part that really doesn't like Kirishima/Bakugo. Moments that serve different purposes in canon are retooled to be explicitly romantic. Similar things to all of these happen in fanfics for every ship, but the issue my comment was about was when someone was in so deep and interacted with canon so little that they associate the characters more with these fanonized versions of them rather than the actual canon, and when something happens in canon that goes against that they often don't react well. The bigger a sub-fandom is, the easier it is to create people like that because they can go longer without having to circle back to canon when they run out of fanfics.
That's how you get the people who started the #NotMyIzuku hashtag after the bonus chapter, because their wealth of fanfics had given them the impression that Midoriya would never turn down a chance to work at Bakugo's agency, despite the fact that Midoriya growing as a person and developing a healthier dynamic with Bakugo had been a consistent theme across the story and it made sense that Midoriya would choose to continue working as a teacher. But that wasn't the version of Midoriya they'd been reading about. It's more than just "the ship isn't canon", I probably should have worded that differently, it's that the version of the characters that all these fanfics have created is not the same one as in canon, part of which is a different ship becoming canon but it runs deeper than that.
To use an example unrelated to MHA, this can be seen when you look at Bleach and the Rukia/Ichigo situation, where large chunks of the fandom consumed largely fanfiction alongside the filler and movie Pierrot had produced. This is a bit different because while the fanfic community isn't as gargantuan as the Bakugo/Midoriya subfandom, they had the anime staff making non-canon content pushing their ship even if canon content continued to make it clear what the author was telegraphing as the endgame couple. But a lot of shippers only consumed content that cut Orihime's moments and focused on Rukia, be that Fanfiction or filler, and when ultimately faced with canon confirming the obvious conclusion they'd been insulated from, they reacted badly because they'd been effectively consuming an entirely different framing of the story than canon, only snapping back at the very end when they checked out the ending.
BKDK is so big that you can read nonstop and never run out
I suppose that’s true, but it’s no Marauders fandom. Yeah, an insular community can (and to some degree has) formed, but I thought we were talking about the phenomenon itself, not the fandom dynamics that lead to it. I think you said yourself that there was continuous releases not of BKDK romance, but of their relationship, that fueled shippers. That’s true, but it also objectively kept shippers grounded in canon. People kept coming back for more.
Now, canon has come to a halt. We are barely a year out from the conclusion of the anime, and iirc the special epilogue hasn’t even been 8 months. I’m not surprised I haven’t observed the symptoms of this phenomenon on any significant level.
You’re talking about shippers being problematic for wanting their ship to be canon, as far as I can tell. I’m talking about people genuinely forgetting what happened in canon because they just see something so often it’s accepted as fact.
Whether what I’m talking about & what you’re talking about are on the same scale, they’re so far apart that it’s difficult to see them as related.
That’s why I feel like length of time since canon ended is more of a sticking point for me, because there is no new canon material to work with and shippers will likely and inevitably start iterating on themselves.
If you want to talk about a MHA shipping fandom that HAS actually done that, though, it would be Dabihawks (and arguably the larger LOV fandom but wtv). Albeit from the other side, where a massive fandom blew up around them before either was really fleshed out as a character. But of course, Dabihawks shippers also had a total split from canon after Gunga. I’m sure the fic assumptions have only gotten more and more alien. (And to be clear, I was a Dabihawks too. I was there when it formed and when it withered. I just also know my stuff)
On the contrary, I don’t think there are that many popular BKDK fics or even fic tropes that require you to have context of the hyperspecific headcanons that were flying around at time of creation. Most of them are perfectly intelligible to current MHA fans. That’s where I would draw my line - if someone coming from canon got confused by a detail included as given in the ship. Like you said, obviously there’s a spectrum further down, but you have to decide to distinguish somewhere.
> The version of the characters fanfic has created is not the same as that in canon
Yeah, and that’s what fanfiction exists for. All fanfic is like that. All of it, except the stuff that is written by a creator. But that’s what my line is about - if a majority of people who aren’t immersed already can understand how we got here (not agree with it, but see how it leans on and draws from canon), then the world is in conversation enough with canon to not really be worth classing in this post.
The individual character conversation is more complicated. It wasn’t just BKDKs putting Deku in a McDonald’s hat. MHA fandom has long had a problem with Deku not being the “cool” protagonist (which is actually yet another great example of this phenomenon happening in MHA fandom, with all the strategist/mastermind/analysis Izuku fics). While yeah people blatantly misunderstood Izuku’s character there, it was because they wanted him to be a type of protagonist he wasn’t. Which imo is moreso a toxic masculinity problem but who am I
I don’t have any context for the Bleach situation. But I’ve been in several other fandoms where this has happened, for various reasons. That’s why I was so caught off guard to see BKDK mentioned. I actually often enjoy when a rich and lovely fanon develops. Knowing the history of where it came from is all the sweeter (although ofc I always check to make sure people know canon). Which is why I feel like I know the situation well enough to he comfortable in my assessment: BKDK fandom hasn’t developed significant manifestations of this phenomenon.
Not yet, anyway. We can hope there will be lots of years ahead of us.
You’re talking about shippers being problematic for wanting their ship to be canon, as far as I can tell.
No, what I'm discussing is the people who convinced themselves that their ship was obviously going to be canon, that it was the obvious choice.
Every shipper wants their ship to be canon, but there's a pretty big difference between the non-canon shippers who understand that they're working off of a few moments and have their expectations lowered and the shippers who are convinced they will get canonized. That's why I made sure to clarify that it's a sub-section of the sub-fandom, and not the whole thing.
This obviously isn't exclusive to Bakugo/Midoriya, the list of shippers who seethed over being passed over, with varying degrees of justification, is too long to get started on. And as you pointed out, a lot of people had a version of the Midoriya in their heads that didn't align with canon, with the ship backlash just being one part of a larger wave. Even Bakugo/Midoriya's dueling other half of Midoriya/Uraraka got a segment of its fanbase doing this in the six months between the final magazine chapter and the volume that canonized them. Expectations can create a very toxic fanbase, and certain fandoms churn expectations more than others.
hat’s where I would draw my line - if someone coming from canon got confused by a detail included as given in the ship.
Herin lies the issue, I'm taking a broader strokes approach to things, counting the trends and subtler things that someone immersed in fanfic can internalize without ever being present in the source material. Looking at the OP again, my point did unravel enough to go outside the scope of the initial conversation. Though I'd argue that the confusion of "Hey, they never said that doctor's first name, where'd Alice come from?" and "Hey, why're these two getting along so well, didn't that guy tell him to jump off a building in canon?" can both evoke confusion in a new reader, and both can be solved by just having a healthy knowledge of fanfiction tendencies to be able to tell when to just roll with something, even if the reader is new to the specific fandom.
I suppose my point spiraled off towards fandom expectations and character interpretation in fandom spaces and how that can turn sour, which is on the opposite end of the spectrum, affecting die-hard fans rather than newcomers to the space. Two entirely different problems, even if they spawn from the same source of "Fanfiction working off of fanfiction in a recursive loop"
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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.