So people have been wondering you know, “reasons why fandom is so toxic” and shit and one I’d like to put out there is this: in the modern social media age, people are often exposed to a show’s fandom and fanon before they get to its canon. Hell you can comfortably exist in a fandom for a lot of things while consuming little to no canon material at all and instead feeding just off what other fans tell you.
This can then lead to shock and possibly upset when you do actually encounter canon and discover that maybe what you “loved” most about it was being misrepresented in some way. One I’ve seen crop up on tumblr a few times is a certain ship from a show I used to watch. People introduced to the show by shippers of that ship or who came in through parts of the fandom heavy with support for that ship were convinced by their fellow fans that the subtext was all over the place, that it was their great and supportive relationship, and how obviously the show’s writing was moving towards making it canon. There are even some posts from people who were stunned at how much that fanon misrepresented both characters involved and how, when actually watching the show, it was clearly not a thing the writers were doing. The people who made those posts were more annoyed at the misrepresentation, but I can certainly see others lashing out at the show for not being what they were told it was instead.
Heck, take my recent experience with My Hero Academia. I mostly got into it thanks to a lot of funny and heartwarming fanart I was seeing, which really left out a lot of the angst and darker elements of the series and also (in some cases) really whitewashed Bakugou’s character. Now I personally didn’t mind that because I know fandom has a tendency to sometimes, say misrepresent stuff for comedy or play up the fluff for catharsis or not pay much attention to the worse traits of characters it likes. But someone else might not feel that way and again might get upset that something wasn’t what they thought it was. And since they’re likely to know there was no malice on the part of the rest of the fandom, they may assign the malice to the show itself. Which is also a wrong conclusion but those looking for something to blame might not care. In their eyes they were sold on something that does not exist and that’s lousy, so they get upset.
So I do wonder what effect this way of encountering and existing in fandom has had on fandom in general. You can easily ship a ship for a show you’ve never watched simply by taking the fanon of whatever sect of the fandom you find yourself in as gospel and shipping that interpretation of the ship (which would incidentally explain quite a lot of shippers I’ve seen on this site, but that’s neither here nor there). This is especially common in fanon-heavy fandoms, like Overwatch today or Hetalia was back when I was in college, where people invent these huge whole separate aspects to the show, based off the smallest things (like for Hetalia there were practically whole separate fandoms for the playing card suits stuff, the police stuff, the 2P stuff, and so on). There is so much fandom content that you could almost never touch canon and still remain afloat easily. And I have to wonder what effect that’s had on fandoms as a whole.
