I will never, ever understand why that particular pairing took off.

I mean, I have my theories, but I try not to be sneery or dismissive of things that other people like, so I tend to keep quiet about this.

Not that it isn't great that you found a Better Way fandom-wise, but just that you felt like you had to get out of bigger fandoms. I would have wished for a different path for you.

To be honest, I think it was just a convergence of a bunch of different stuff — fandom on Tumblr making it hard to escape things you disliked unless you ruthlessly blocked a bunch of tags (that people weren't always consistent in using), those particular fandoms being really argumentative and vocal in character hate, and me being really thin-skinned at a particularly vulnerable time of my life. I think if I'd encountered those same fandoms, with exactly the same character/relationship preferences back in the LJ heyday, everything would have been a lot easier, because we would have stuck to our respective comms and ignored each other's existence for the most part.