The five deadly sins of transformative fandom:
- Treating popular fanon regarding a character as authoritative, and getting angry at people whose feelings toward that character are informed by the version who appears in the actual text
- Conflating “it’s possible to construct this particular narrative from elements present in the text” with “this is the narrative the text in fact presents“
- Dismissing criticism of a particular aspect of the text on the grounds that you can imagine some hypothetical context in which the cited elements wouldn’t be problematic
- Elevating a particular body of fan-work above the source material, and acting like anybody whose fandom doesn’t take the former into account is missing the point
- Getting so immersed in a deep subtextual reading that you reflexively assume anyone who has an issue with the explicit text of the source material is engaging in bad faith
Can we add “deciding that an interpretation of canon is problematic because it would be if a popular headcanon were true”?







