Fannish Friday!

[lirazel]

A variation on last week's question: tell me about a character (or ship) that fandom made you either love or hate. Maybe you loved or hated them in canon but fandom made you do a 180. Maybe you liked them fine or disliked them in an un-intense way, but fandom pushed you in a different direction. Maybe you had no particular feelings about them at all until fandom made you change your mind!

A ship I didn't really pay much attention to in canon is Wen Qing/Jiang Cheng from CQL. I was so focused on the other relationships on the show that this very quiet one didn't catch my eye. But then I read a lot of short meta posts on Tumblr about them and I fell in love with them. In my subsequent re-watch, I noticed how beautifully they were portrayed in the show. Maybe I would have noticed that the second time around regardless, but I don't think so. I think this is a gift that fandom gave me!

Also giving a shout-out to Dawn Summers. I liked her in the show, I loved her relationship with Buffy, but fandom is what made me become a die-hard Dawn fan. I was just so annoyed at the hate she got for being a teenage girl that I ended up loving her more out of spite. And then the more I paid attention to her out of spite, the more I just loved her for who she is till the spite became irrelevant.

As for hating, I'm not really a person who ends up hating things because of fandom? If the fandom is particularly annoying or dumb about a given character or ship, I am annoyed at the fandom, not the character or ship. But I know a lot of people have fandom-made-me-hate-it stories, so feel free to rant about those now!

Comments

[sawthefaeriequeen]

Oooh, there are a lot of characters who fandom made me love even more out of spite. Robby on Cobra Kai (at this point I feel like I'm a broken record about him but: my son!), Scott on Teen Wolf, Skyler on Breaking Bad, Nancy on Stranger Things...

As for made me hate it... I mean, someone on Discord in 20-fucking-20 tried to evangelize to me about how Harry/Hermione shippers were always of superior intelligence and maturity and more morally right, so uh, yeah. Was meh about the ship, but its fandom made me hate it.

[sophia_sol]

Wen Qing/Jiang Cheng is so great!

"fandom made me love it" is like, the story of my existence in fandom, tbh. The majority of the fandoms and ships I've been in, I got into because of the fandom, and only watched/read the canon later. So fandom helped me find many things I've loved over the years!

Possibly the funniest example of this is how for years I saw references to Highlander but felt I could not take it seriously and it could never be my fandom because the name of one of the characters in the juggernaut ship was so silly. And then that character became one of my favourite characters of all times. Hat tip to Methos, whose name looked too similar to mentos to young me!

Going the other direction, there are a few cases where fandom made me hate the way a ship is portrayed in fandom, but I still love what I see in the canon version of them. I'm fairly out of step with broader fandom on Enjolras/Grantaire and Aziraphale/Crowley, for example.

There's only one case I can think of where seeing what fandom was doing led me to hate a ship as a whole, and even that was me going merely from profound indifference to hate. This was from my MCU days, when Clint and Coulson had the most minor of appearances in one movie together, and then all of a sudden it felt like everyone was writing lengthy odes to their love story, and I was just like. WHAT. To me it felt like the blandest of Any Two (White) Guys ships, and the more I saw it the more I developed an enormous grudge that somehow this was the thing getting so much attention when there were so many other interesting characters and relationships available.

(Anyway now I mostly have an enormous grudge against MCU as a whole lol so like. Clint/Coulson isn't special. But that's not because of fandom.)

[jo_lasalle]

I meant to comment on last week's question but then lost track of it - but belatedly, both of your examples really spoke to me!

I don't think I've ever gone full-on from love to hate regarding a character or ship based on the fandom. But fandom has definitely nudged me along the love-and-hate axis with a few. I think because it's never swung that widely based on fandom, I can't really think of older examples, but for my current fannishness:

Not-really-for-me to fondness: Nie Mingjue. Hand on heart, I think fandom by and large writes him as at least a bit fluffier than he actually is, but his slightly fanon-y-fied version has really grown on me, and has also made me warm up more to his canon self. Reading a famous-in-2019 Twitter social media AU whre he's long-suffering Chef Nie left a lasting impression. *g*

Fine-to-NOPE: novel!LWJ. I've always been CQL-all-the-way but I could enjoy novel!LWJ and novel!Wangxian, especially for some of the porn flavors that don't really work as well for drama!Wangxian. But a mix of fanonization, constant Frankencanon bleedover and fandom wank has made me really sour on him. I don't enjoy that, it makes my reading life harder, but I can't turn it off/around anymore. :/

Like-to-meh: Lan Xichen/Meng Yao. I was quite taken with it as a secondary ship on my first watch, and I was primed to get more deeply into it. But then I never found the perfect-for-me story, and fandom swayed me more towards Nie Mingjue, and there was JGY wank, and I kind of drifted away from the interest. (Jin Guangyao was defeated by Chef Nie!)

I'm so pleased you found Wen Qing/Jiang Cheng! They are such a delightful ship! I always loved their vibe in the drama, but they definitely got more layers over time, IMO.

[sunshine304]

A character I definitely fell in love with (more) because of fandom was James Norrington from PotC. I liked him in the first movie but was very much focussed on the three main characters. But there was so much thoughtful meta about him, and also so many fics that used him in great ways that I really started to get invested in him, especially of course after the second movie came out. Sparrington was my first slash ship. XD (And yeah, I guess fandom also made me love that ship.)

Fandom also made me like Mystrade from Sherlock, which I hadn't even thought of while watching the show. XD (I mean, why would I, they share like 5 seconds of screentime. XD)

I also got invested in Xiyao because of fandom (might be similar to you and ChengQing) - I liked that ship on first watch but was so focussed on Wangxian and the Yunmeng siblings that it tended to be a bit forgotten. Fandom has done so much with that ship, but also with the characters indvidually, so much good meta about motivations and flaws etc. Generally, CQL/MDZS fandom has such good meta!

I think fandom never actually made me hate anyone. I got annoyed by some things, though, definitely. XD Like, in PotC, I was super annoyed with the Sparrabeth shippers after the second movie, because they were everywhere and they were loud and they hated so much on the Willabeth shippers it was unreal. (And I was in my little corner of Jack/Anamaria or Jack&Black Pearl plus Willabeth being there as well, and it was just so grating on my nerves.)
But I think that was the worst of it.

[ceciliaj]

You know what's funny, fandom really had me convinced that that guy who created Buffy was really smart and that everything he did was subversive and interesting, and so I really bought it, and then it turned out he was a jackass, and looking back I'm like, yeah, I think my instincts when I was a teenager and only liked movie Buffy (true story!) and thought the show was for medieval weaponry people like my sister, were not that far off. I'm glad I was open-minded because I think that guy knows how to get the attention of people I really like, but he himself is a big ole disappointment. I think maybe my relationship with Buffy in my 20s was kind of like a lot of my relationships with friends I met during my twenties, like I wanted them to embody everything good in the world and have the answer to every question I would ever ask, but that's a whole lot to ask of a friend or TV show.

[gryfndor_godess]

I can't think of any character or ship that fandom has made me love (though certainly there are some that fandom has made me appreciate more; I'll be honest, I'm not a Dawn fan, but the Spuffy group we were in kept me from hating her), but I absolutely hate Destiel because of the fandom, and I don't much care for Cas himself either. If I'm just watching the show and can compartmentalize, I don't usually mind Cas, and objectively, I can see why people would ship him and Dean (I've written one Destiel one-shot myself), but I have to block it on Tumblr because Destiel fandom comes with irrational Sam hatred/erasure and a whole lot of delusions about Dean's characterization. :)))

[chestnut_pod]

Very Silmarillion inside baseball, but OY did the fandom make me extremely leery of reading 90% of fic about the Fëanorions, whose role in the text is to be fantastic and surprisingly complex tragic villains, and whose role in the fandom is to be juggernaut-ship woobies who never did anything wrong.

[dollsome]

We were on decent terms when I got into Gilmore Girls, but twelve years on Tumblr has made the mere mention of Jess Mariano into my nightmare. 😂😭😬🤪🙄🙃 I still like him fine when I watch the show. But i just can’t with the prevailing fandom take on Jess. I CAN’T.

[fleurviolette]

I like Egon as a character. However I find the trend of Egon x oc or reader fics to be cringy. So generally I just avoid reading them.

Instead I ship Egon and Janine so much, I refuse to watch GB2 because they aren’t together in that movie.

If fandom makes me dislike the character or ship, I just avoid the fandom. I’d rather like the character or ship in peace, in theory.

[geckoholic]

I was just so annoyed at the hate she got for being a teenage girl that I ended up loving her more out of spite. -- That is so relatable, I might have also done that with a few characters/ships. XD