You know, there are a lot of stories that I could never get into and at least one novel where I felt that the main pairing was negligible to the story. Thousand Autumn fans will swear by Yan Wushi and Shen Qiao’s romance, but the first time any character even hints at liking the other is Yan Wushi at damn near the end of the novel. In fact, most of the romance takes place in the post-canon extras, but not once have I seen anyone argue that the author “meant” for the audience to focus on side characters and that Thousand Autumn “shouldn’t count” as a romance. I consistently don’t like the main couples in Priest novels; something just never meshes with me about them. But I don’t go around then arguing that the censored Word of Honor is a better story than its source, Faraway Wanderers, because the romance aspect that I didn’t like being censored makes it a “better story” to me. When I don’t like the main romance of a romance novel, I simply move aside and let the people who do enjoy the novels as the authors wrote them.
The problem with the mdzs fandom is you have a whole bunch of people who actually don’t like the book but refuse to leave the fandom, so instead they find something else about the story to latch onto—the side characters—and try to argue that “this is what the author meant all along!” to cover the fact that they literally don’t like what the author actually wrote. They want the validation of being “included” in the biggest thing in the genre, but they are also self-centered enough to feel like their hatred of the source should be centered. They don’t like the novel, so fuck the actual fans that do, the novel should be changed to match their hatred of the story. But god forbid you call them out on it, then you’re the bully for telling them that they don’t belong here if their only investment in the story is some completely divorced fanon a random account made up.
