One of the things I'm always fascinated about any fandom is when fan works become obsolete.
Like, I'm not talking "Oh, your ship got DECANONIZED." I'm talking about fandom works where later canon media alters the foundation that work relied on, or heavily alters it.
For a personal example, about twenty years ago I wrote a fanfiction in the first season of a popular series. That series would go on to have nine seasons, a spinoff series, and at least one movie. Basically everything I wrote had become completely invalidated in some way, shape, or form. It's become an artifact of a different time in the fandom.
(Spoilers for: My Hero Academia, Space Runaway Ideon, Gundam SEED, and She-Ra and the Princesses of Power behind the cut. They're used as examples.)
To take a more modern example, the manga/anime My Hero Academia recently ended, and that ending included a timeskip. Characters are physically scarred in distinctive ways. One character has a new powerset. One is literally haunted.
So, like, for example, if you're reading a fanfiction or see a piece of fanart where, say, Deku still has One For All and doesn't have the scar on his face, the odds are pretty good it was created before the end of the series, unless the artist is trying to Do Something.
It almost becomes fandom archeology, especially if you're going through a social media platform like Pinterest where you cannot rely on upload dates, or if it's been posted to a proper website that might not have good dating practices.
It's an interesting dynamic. In many ways, fandom works that are produced early on have more of an open canvas to work with. Stories aren't complete. Relationships are starting. Characters aren't fully fleshed out. It gives the artist more of a blank slate to work with. But on the other hand, there's higher odds that you just end up being off the mark. You write a character in a way that will be unrecognizable to someone reading it a few years later. Maybe you're relying on character interactions that don't wind up being as significant as it looked at the time. Maybe you've written a fandom set in the future but uh-oh, you wound up actually missing half the cast that gets introduced later.
Conversely, however, later era fanworks, particularly after a piece of media has ended, have more to work with, and a stronger base to work on. Characters and relationships are better established. Plots have progressed, there are new ideas, sets and props you can work with, and you know what's actually going to happen in the story. Conversely, however, that also means your canvas diminishes. There's less room and more static ideas. This can be especially problematic if a story has a tightly closed ending that can make it hard to continue without heavy alterations to the core premise. A piece of media like MHA has a wide open ending that allows for plenty of new stories to be written past the finale. A piece like Space Runaway Ideon, where the ending is "Everyone Fucking Dies" doesn't.
Of course, I made a joke about it earlier, but this is *very* true when it comes to your shipping section of fandoms. Certain relationships that look viable either wither on the vine or die violent deaths when new information is revealed. Look at any ship that died due to familial revelations. For instance, in the early days of the Gundam SEED fandom, people were large fans of Kira and Cagalli as a romantic pairing. That swiftly died when it was revealed that it was a Star Wars situation and they turned out to be siblings. So pretty much any fanwork where there's a romantic relationship between the two, it's either obsolete, or the artist is into incest.
Meanwhile, look at the ship that's far and away the most popular ship for the She-Ra and the Princesses of Power fandom, Catradora. Catradora was always popular and in fact wound up canon by the end, but it's easy to forget that most of the forward progress in terms of the romance, and the most memorable moments between the two characters happened in the final season. There are a couple of middle seasons where the two barely interact! Most Catradora stuff heavily relied on the first season material. So the dynamic between the two in the fanworks from before season 5 take on a completely different tone and identity than the ones set after the series finale. Nothing is settled, most of the memorable scenes can't be referred to, and neither character has had their character development that led up to them getting together.
Then there are ships that essentially go from zero to one hundred thanks to essentially, maybe one or two events that just so happen to hit like a meteor. For an example of this, let's to back to my first example in this long-ass diatribe and talk again about My Hero Academia, specifically the main female character, Ochaco Uraraka.
For the vast majority of MHA's run, the main female ship for Ochaco was with Tsuyu Asui, her best friend. Not surprising, they're almost always paired with each other in the story. Now, this is the internet, and you can literally find fanmedia of any romantic pairing you like. It's why terms like rare pairs and crackships exist. One of those rarepairs was with antagonist Himiko Toga. There were a few, bolstered by natural "They are rivals" energym and Himiko using her ability to transform to become Ochaco a couple of times through the story. But it certainly wasn't the largest.
Then Issues 391-395 of the manga (Episodes 158/159 of the anime) hit, which details the final conflict between Ochaco and Himiko, and the "Togachako" ship absolutely skyrocketed in popularity, becoming Ochaco's far and away most popular female ship, and competing in popularity with her most popular ship with series protagonist Izuku Midoriya.
It's not hard to see why, the events that play out are extremely memorable (I'd seen the "Am I cute?" "The cutest girl in the world." scene redone in multiple fandoms before I watched MHA), and absolutely offers multiple in-roads for fans to build off of, either through artwork or fan-fiction. (It's angst. Fans absolutely desire angst, either to wallow in it, or to alleviate it. They devour it whole. Togachako is FULL of angst.)
But this means that the people who were cruising this ship before those issues basically had to make up their own foundation. They essentially had almost nothing to work with.
I don't know, I just find this all very interesting. How things can evolve as a piece of media starts, continues, concludes. How ideas that one minute absolutely dominate fandom discourse may vanish the next. How one major story event can radically alter fandom trajectory out of seemingly nowhere.
I dunno. Fandom archeology gets interesting when you've been hanging around the internet as long as I have.
