The wild thing about Tumblr and enemies-to-lovers is that while it seems magnetically drawn to stuff that does it so badly it'd work better as deliberate subversion than sincere endorsement, its instincts as to what should happen in a good enemies-to-lovers arc are actually spot on! It's just that instead of seeking out stories where those things, what's the word, actually happen, they seem to prefer ones where they don't, and then just pile on headcanons and "this must have happened at some point because it'd be stupid not to" until their version of the story is impossible to reconcile with the original media.
Like, the idea that C*tra was pulling her punches on Adora throughout the first four seasons of SP0P is nonsense. It's overtly incompatible with literally every interaction the characters have between the first outright murder attempt in "The Promise" and the apology in "Corridors", in which C*tra repeatedly tries to kill Adora in painful ways, layers on the emotional cruelty with a trowel and literally tries to end the world just to hurt her*. It's brought into the show in S5 and it doesn't make much sense when it is because it meshes so poorly with what we've been shown!
But this nonsensical claim has so much traction because it would have been smart for the writers to make it true. And I don't mean in the "it doesn't make sense but S5 pretends it does" way, I mean if C*tra had been pulling her punches, had dialled back on the awfulness instead of cranking it up to maximum every time Adora entered her line of sight, the romance might actually have been good.
You get similar nonsense from R*ylo. That post about "a character who wants to be evil but inadvertently does good" does not describe Kylo Ren, whose attempts to resist "the call of the light" are entirely successful by the end of TLJ and then he's just magically saved by the power of JJ Abrams' hackery. But the romance might begin to maybe sorta make sense if he was, so obviously that must be true, and the degree to which he just sucked as a person needs to be rewritten in light of that necessary truth.
It's just...wild to me that these very good instincts about what it would be a good idea for enemies-to-lovers writers to put in are used not to identify ones that do those things, but to encrust the ones that don't in such a dense layer of fanon that the original form is entirely unrecognisable, like a dead parasite at the heart of a pearl.
*"but ND said C*tra pulled the lever out of curiosity-" I have dismissed that claim on the grounds that I've actually watched the actual episode under discussion with my own fucking eyes, twice, and if the original intent was to portray C*tra as being motivated by curiosity it failed so hard it deserves some sort of high-velocity medal
