Odd question maybe but I'm wondering if you could elaborate on the house MD fandom dramatics? I watched the show on and off since I was little but never really participated in the fandom so I'm curious 👀
Just saw this! So the biggest dramas I recall:
1. Shipping Wars - A classic, tale as old as time, but with extra bitter vitriol when it came to House/Cameron in particular. And then along came Amber. Amber/Wilson vs House/Wilson was vicious. Not helped at all by the way the show wrote women. So fans who didn't like their characterization often gave them the Evil Idiot Woman ball to hold in fics. (Also unfortunately not uncommon in fandoms at the time when it came to women characters.)
2. Big Name Fan wars - Many prominent fan creators did NOT get along, which lead to drama because in the days of LiveJournal communities you would post your fic to your journal (sometimes directly to a community that was relevant to the ship/topic) and then cross-advertise by posting a summary and link in other communities. Which meant that when the BNFs were fighting, access to certain fanworks would require you to be on good terms with the author and/or their main fandom besties, because the entire blog was password protected. Sometimes entire communities would go on password lock/invitation only. I remember there was one BNF (who I see around on Tumblr still sometimes!) who would regularly mass-delete all of their very popular and well written/drawn works because of arguments they would have with other fans in the comments or other communities all together. Ironically, I remember a lot of that bickering being related to the medical accuracy of different fics (when the show itself is by no means realistic) and whose characterization was the truest to the show.
3. For a show about how a group of smart, ambitious people with big egos can collectively convince themselves that the fucked up things they do are justified because the patient of the week lives at the end of the episode even as their own professional lives, personal relationships, and physical/mental health burn and crumble into dust, there sure were a lot of arguments about how Character A did nothing wrong and Character B was the true villain.
4. Racism - Foreman was all but erased from the majority of fanworks. People who pointed this out would get bashed by those offended at any insinuation that his race had anything to do with it, insisting that he was "boring" and not a character they could really connect with (despite the show hammering over and over that all the characters were mirrors of the worst parts of each other).
Looking back a lot of it is explained by how there was heavy crossover with a lot of fannish communities and drama communities like sf_drama, fandom-drama, Encyclopedia Dramatica, and the general popularity of snarky call-out posts/receipts. There was definitely a Tone popular within LJ spaces that meshed with and amplified the know-it-all and intentionally abrasive snark that was House himself.
