I'm not in Transformers fandom, but I'd hazard a guess that it's a combination of it being an old fandom that has new material consistently added to it. So on the one hand you have the Old Guard in the fandom who probably are as you described them, moving with the gravity of the Great Old Ones. And on the other side you've got the people who came of age on Tumblr and who came into TF fandom through that particular pressure-cooker of an environment. This is the exact state YGO fandom is in right now -- the older series have (with a few exceptions) relatively chill, ship-and-let-ship fandoms, whereas the newer series are stuck with a whole bevy of harassers and fandom-policer types. They've also slowly started spreading into the older series, but the old guard is putting up resistance and more or less telling them to fuck right off.
Oh yeah, I very much get what you mean with "this character is like me." I used to find that transgressive and now no longer don't as well, probably because mainstream works all too often either completely botch things or tone them down / water them down so much that they're not particularly satisfying in the end. Far more than marketing, I end up disliking when mainstream media, still beholden to producers and conservative markets, delivers something that's more of a wet fart than anything else (the end of Voltron and how they treated Shiro's arc is the best example I can think of now). It's one of the reasons why mu faith for good queer content lies almost entirely with indie creators and people in transformative fandom, nowadays.
"there are no good fandoms, only good friends?"
That's exactly what I was told by a good friend, over a decade ago. Best advice I ever got.
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Date: 21/10/19 16:53 (UTC)Oh yeah, I very much get what you mean with "this character is like me." I used to find that transgressive and now no longer don't as well, probably because mainstream works all too often either completely botch things or tone them down / water them down so much that they're not particularly satisfying in the end. Far more than marketing, I end up disliking when mainstream media, still beholden to producers and conservative markets, delivers something that's more of a wet fart than anything else (the end of Voltron and how they treated Shiro's arc is the best example I can think of now). It's one of the reasons why mu faith for good queer content lies almost entirely with indie creators and people in transformative fandom, nowadays.
"there are no good fandoms, only good friends?"
That's exactly what I was told by a good friend, over a decade ago. Best advice I ever got.