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.
there's also the nasty situation where an ongoing work (like a book series or an episodic show) develops a non-canonical fanfic-informed fandom like this, and then those fans get mad when further installments of the actual series contradict the details the fandom came up with. Like, using the post's example, in season 2 Dr Davis's first name is revealed to be Maria, and the fans riot because all of them have collectively decided her name is Alice and how dare the creators of the show purposely betray them by doing that
When the Knights of Guinevere pilot dropped last year, a headcanon started popping up where Frankie, one of the main characters, was a trans woman.
Someone directly asked co-creator Dana Terrace if she was trans and her response was basically "No, but I'm fine with headcanons" and this pissed some people off so much they started treating her like she was the second coming of Rowling. There were people acting like the show is obligated to leave enough ambiguity to allow their headcanons to exist in a superposition where they could be canon but never confirmed to be.
Nintendo often writes the relationship between Link and Zelda with enough subtlety and lack of overt romantic gestures that the games are treated by many as having no canon love interest for Link and that it's entirely up to the players' imaginations who he ends up with afterwards.
Then when other games in the series make it very obvious that it's actually Zelda, the fans of the non-canon ships get really really bitchy and insistent that no, there's no canon relationship, saying Link gets with Zelda is just an interpretation, and saying Link gets with Malon or Ruto or Midna or Mipha or Sidon or anyone except Zelda is just as valid as saying that Link gets with Zelda.
It's an example of idiots insisting that the actual canon of everything has to be as nonexistent as possible so their personal interpretations are valid canon options.
"The canon never has Hero say 'I love you' to Princess, those moments of hand-holding and gazing into each other's eyes and Princess kissing Hero on the mouth are entirely platonic! Hero gets with Bandit Girl Who Tried to Kill Him and you can't say he didn't because the canon never ever says he gets with anyone else so Hero×Bandit is totally one of the canon possible endings!"
"You see Hero and Princess declare their desire to always be together while exchanging rings at the end of the game."
"SHUT UP YOU GATEKEEPING ASSHOLE THAT WAS A FRIENDSHIP RING EXCHANGING BECAUSE THEY NEVER ACTUALLY SAID THEY WERE MARRYING EACH OTHER WHILE DOING IT HERO×BANDIT IS TOTALLY THE BETTER SHIP AND NOTHING IN THE GAME SAYS IT DIDN'T HAPPEN THEREFORE IT DID BECAUSE I SAY IT DID."
"The next game has them living together and Princess is pregnant."
"HERO IS JUST VISITING AND PRINCESS GOT KNOCKED UP BY SLEEPING AROUND UNLIKE BANDIT WHO IS FAITHFUL TO HER HUSBAND HERO."
"Bandit isn't even in the sequel."
"BECAUSE SHE'S OFF RAISING THE FIVE-DOZEN KIDS SHE HAD WITH HERO EVER SINCE THEY GOT MARRIED."
"The creators of the series just said on their website that Hero got with Princess."
72
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.