One issue with “fandom reflects what we see in canon” wrt the focus on white male characters is that most canon also has a bias towards characters being straight by default. And fandom often has no problem subverting that canonical bias, for various (totally valid!) reasons.
It just seems a bit myopic to point to canon as the sole arbiter of fannish content creation when there’s another element in play: that of fannish choice. Of free will, as it were, since transformative works, by their very nature, are rarely direct duplicates.
Yes, there’s a certain amount of give and take, like a rubber band. Some people like stretching the source material as far as it can go, finding the point where it snaps and becomes something new. But admittedly, that’s not the majority of fans. The majority of fans stretch canon in predictable ways, according to preexisting biases that the community of fandom rewards (and thus perpetuates).
You can see this most clearly when examining fandoms for source media that have diversity, where supporting/minor characters who are white men get elevated by fandom over central/primary characters who are women &/or people of color. Or where a diverse source canon is then used as the setting for a story (or the basis for an AU) focusing on white male characters from another canon. But I would argue that the pattern has always been visible - this issue has been discussed for years, and while certain segments of fandom claim to want more diverse media, their response to existing diverse media tells a different story.
Or rather, it tells the same story: that of prioritizing stories about white men. And that prioritization is a choice, conscious or no.
We choose which source media to build our fandoms around, sometimes uplifting obscure canon and sometimes extending the lifespan of a fandom beyond its visible impact on wider culture. We choose which canonical ships to rally around or to dismiss. We choose which side characters become ‘fan favorites’ within our circles.
(Is it a conscious choice? Is it a deliberate one? maybe, maybe not. but that’s the thing about unexamined, internalized biases: they can shape your behaviors and attitudes without conscious/deliberate action on your part. the active choice is to be aware of our biases, to unlearn them if we think they’re objectionable, and to be careful about how they might crop up in shared community spaces.)
We choose to do more with source media than merely replicate: that’s what makes transformative works transformative.
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