I haven't heard much about affirmational versus transformative fandom of late, but I have been seeing both a resurgence of commenting discourse and discussions of the entitled ways people are acting towards creators these days, and in the process of considering all three of these things together I have come to the conclusion that at least some of the various discourse is the result of an affirmational sensibility in a transformational setting which isn't designed to handle it.
Normally I'd then go "In this essay I will" except in this instance I am actually attempting at least some of the essay.
Because affirmational fandom is all about collection and holding the original creator as sacred. They're the people who memorize facts and want to nail down details. They want to ask the creator questions and they take the creator's answers as final word.
Transformative fandom doesn't care; that's the whole point. If anything, it has its roots in disagreement with canon--while obviously there are exceptions, canons that have weird worldbuilding holes are more likely to develop heavy fic writing cultures. (This is part of why HP developed such an intense fic writing culture; the world is very interesting and also frequently makes zero sense.) Transformative fandom leans kind of hard into death of the author, or at least into the idea that the author is not an all-consuming authority and canon exists to be played with--you write half a dozen mutually exclusive versions of these same characters and it's fun.
The run-in described in the original essay is between creators and fans with the hostility coming from the creators in response to being criticized by the fans. The modern run-ins tend to have the hostility coming more from the fans in response to their headcanons not becoming canon.
Which is to say, people who favor the poke-at-it element of transformative fandom but also the need for the creator to be the final word of affirmational fandom.
These two things are not compatible.
A major focal point of transformative fandom is that it doesn't rely on the creators. Some creators are certainly fond of transformative fandom, and you can enjoy it when they interact--my beloved Deep Space Nine has been having Siddig and Robinson encourage our shipping habits for decades--but we don't rely on it. (Using Deep Space Nine as an example again, while the actors who played them have certainly been encouraging of the Garashir ship, no one gets hostility from within the fandom for shipping either Garak or Bashir with someone else.) It's generally understood that it's rude to go chasing creators down.
Except of course that in a lot of newer fandoms that's not true anymore. They've developed the need for validation from the creator that goes with affirmational fandom, and they want what they write, what they create, to go into the canon, because that's what makes it True. And when it doesn't happen, they harass creators. They also harass people in the fandom with opposing headcanons or works, because those people are writing things that are not True.
The earliest proto-example of this that I'm aware of is TJLC, and it's to this day one of the most widespread and dramatic; these days they're more likely to stay contained to their original fandom rather than go sprawling into others. But it's probably not the actual first.
Unfortunately I don't really have a dramatic conclusion for this--this is unquestionably a bad thing, but I very much doubt pointing this out will get any of the people doing it to stop. It's an observation of a phenomenon, nothing more.
(If one carries this even further--and while this actually was the original sparking point for this essay I think it's going to wait until I have time to write a part two--one can use this as a base for consumer culture versus community culture where fic--and based on some Discord conversations with people who create other fan stuff, not just fic, but fic is what I know-- is concerned, transferring the "creator" aspect of it to the fic writer. But that part is much less dramatic than the aspect I've described above, since it tends to manifest mainly in people not commenting, which while disappointing and sometimes demoralizing, is not generally threatening.)
