Yeah I Was A Lot Younger And Newer To The Fandom - Tumblr Posts
I'm gonna say it now, before I get into what I actually want to say because this fandom can get wildly toxic; but this applies to ships too. (can we please stop fighting over them already?)
Fan creations have long since disregarded canon, and I don't see why the UTMV would be exempt.
I love writing Nightmare's Gang as sympathetic characters who love one another and would die to keep the others safe. I sometimes indulge in reading and writing Dream as a bad brother. Sometimes I do write Nightmare as a bad person.
An old saying of mine that I used to use rather frequently, which came about due to the nature of multiverses (especially with characters like Ink, Error, and their variants) , is that there will always be a multiverse where all your headcanons are canon!
There's not a right or wrong way to see this (or any, really) fandom! That's the beauty of fan works! It's all how you want it to be!
Something I see a lot in the UTMV fandom nowadays is people talking about canon. "Canon Nightmare wouldn't act like that," "Ink is morally gray," that type of stuff.
The issue is that UTMV started out as a community project and will continue to be a community project. Fanon is incredibly important to certain pillars of the fandom. People are allowed to interpret the characters differently!
It's important to recognize the source material and respect it, but you must also respect different creator's stories. This isn't a community based around one big canon source material. It's based around countless comics, animations, characters, and fanfics that have been shared for years now.
People are not just going to abandon ideas they have loved for years because of the canon of the source AU. I LOVEE seeing canon Nightmare stuff, but I love dadmare or any other interpretation just as much!
In the UTMV fandom, canon and fanon literally have to coexist. It's no fun otherwise.