5, 13, 14!
Has fandom ever ruined a pairing for you?
Yes, although I can’t come up with a really good example from any of my current fandoms; the one that comes to mind for me is Duncan/Methos from Highlander. Basically it was a classic case of “why are you people shipping a thing when you clearly hate one half of it” and the way the majority of the fandom wrote that pairing, and talked about it, just ended up making me nope out on the whole thing. I really liked both characters from watching the show -- which I marathoned years after it went off the air -- but the fandom kinda made me end up hating Methos and everything to do with him. Thanks, fandom. (For the record, I don’t now; it’s been ten years and I’m pretty much over it. But yeah, at the time I was so salty that my salt had salt on top.)
OH NO WAIT I did just think of one from a current fandom: Peggy/Angie. I’m pretty okay with the pairing in general, but during/after season two, a certain segment of the fandom was so incredibly strident that the pairing was canon and therefore anyone who shipped anything else was wrong that I ended up with a kneejerk NOTP reaction to it. That wasn’t a case where I really shipped it going into it, though; I mean, it was a “would read occasionally, but not one of my big pairings” kind of ship even before that happened.
Unpopular opinion about XXX character?
Well, going back to an older fandom for me (White Collar), I will maintain to my dying day that Peter Burke did not abuse Neal and most of what he did in the show was justified. Not ALL of it -- I mean, a big part of what I liked about the show was two strong-willed and well-intentioned people butting heads, and they both had their excesses and times when they went over the line. But the majority of the time I tended to come down in Peter’s corner during their conflicts. Much of the fandom did not feel that way ...
Unpopular opinion about your fandom?
I already answered this for the MCU, but as a general thing, I just kind of want to staple to fandom’s collective forehead that shipping two characters who are canonically archenemies, try to kill/torture/beat each other up in canon, hate each other in canon, etc. is not wrong or bad; it does not make you an ~abuse apologist~ or say ANYTHING about you as a person except that you like that pairing. People have been shipping that kind of thing ever since fandom has existed (actually quite a long time before; see also, any mythology you care to name) and even though I don’t really HAVE any ships among the ones that are commonly hated on for that -- or at least none I can think of; my own shipping preferences lean heavily in the “friends to lovers” direction -- I absolutely hate the puritanical mentality that tries to guilt and shame people into giving up their favorite ships. Fantasy =/= real life. Just ship and let ship, ffs.
