The Five Deadly Sins Of Transformative Fandom:

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

king

*says a fact in a conversation and a wikipedia citation appears next to my head*

while im reminiscing about old fate fandom anyway, i think it's hard for anyone who got into the series through fgo or even just after fgo got big to realize just how much impact fgo had. it outright changed how people talk about the characters, before fgo it was viable and common to refer to every single servant by their class and what installment besides fsn they were from (lancer, zero lancer, extra lancer, ccc lancer) and each instalment that had multiple of a single class always provided some other option to refer to them with that would differentiate them while keeping their true name secret (red and black factions in apocrypha, red saber casko and red tea for playable extra servants, launcher for karna so liz could be ccc lancer).

fgo was an actual gamechanger because it was the first time readers were just given every servant's true name upfront and were expected to use it instead of their class. on top of that there'd been several mentions of servants that fit multiple classes before fgo but fgo was the first time we actually saw any servant summoned in an alternate class, making class names even more useless because not only did "fgo lancer" not mean anything but lancer in fgo was also a caster.

for years after fgo's release the type moon wiki clung to its page title name scheme of "[class] - fate/[whatever they're from]" because until fgo (which released 11 years after fsn) that was the most sensible and spoiler-free way to refer to servants and it took a very long list of "[class] - fate/grand order (true name)" pages for them to give up and change every servant's page title to their true name.

fgo tried to get back some of the mystery of true names with epic of remnant but they didn't manage to make it stick or really recapture that magic, and by now effectively nobody really refers to servants outside fgo by class anymore either unless they're veterans like me, and even then most of us only stick to doing it for the fsn servants. fgo has made it much harder for any fate story to write its mystery around true names anymore because out of necessity it has caused fan spaces to no longer respect the mystery of true names.

beginnings