The singular person the "discourse" is stemming from basically just said "finding out some of the popular fanartists haven't even played the game Or Watched Any Playthroughs Of It makes a lot of sense", with the implication there being that people who haven't engaged with the game in any meaningful way are probably going to make them act ooc. They even clarified that they're not talking about people who have only seen playthroughs; they were talking about people who literally only know the characters through fanart and fanfic
Clearly it's not a "singular person", unless you're suggesting that you are that "singular person" hunting down people on Tumblr to defend yourself.
I appreciate what you're trying to say here. I do. But look: accusations of characters being OOC in fanfic/fanart are total bullshit fandom policing.
Every fanwork is, definitionally, OOC, because none of it is being produced by the original creator. Only the original writer(s) can determine what is "in character" or not. The best, most canon-compliant fanfic you've ever read? OOC. It's just that you perceive it as being less OOC than other fanworks.
I do understand feeling frustrated that there are people whose works are popular who haven't Done Their Research. But, like, this is just a thing that happens in fandom, especially in very large ones. I recall fandoms in the '90s where large contingents of fans hadn't actually watched/read the source material. And some of those people produced very popular fanworks. And that can be annoying if you're Doing Your Research and yet Aren't As Popular.
But why do Deltarune fans think that their fandom ought to be the exception of every large fandom of the past few decades? Wait until the end of this post to find out why!
I think there's a difference between, say, fans who don't interact with the source material because they think the source material is problematic, and fans who have not yet interacted with the source material due to having families or full-time jobs or lives outside of the Internet, but pick up the fandom because their friends are into it. And if some of those people's works become popular, maybe that says something about what people like to read/look at in fandom, and not anything about the creators.
As another person replying on the original post pointed out, there's also a LOT of material for Spamtenna specifically and Deltarune in general that does not appear anywhere in the video game. Are you a fake fan if you weren't there for the sweepstakes? Are you a fake fan if you haven't spent hours trawling through screencaps of various webpages? Is it acceptable to watch someone's YT video dissecting the above, or is that lazy fake-fan behavior? What about people who haven't memorized the names of each song on the soundtrack and broken down why it's important for the ship that certain leitmotifs are repeated in each other's songs?
Fandom policing is bullshit because it doesn't end. Once you fall for the game of "Oh, this person's interpretation of the characters is fake because they aren't engaging with the source material the right way", it's all you end up playing. And there's no way to win that game. You only temporarily win it by driving other people out of the fandom for being Not As Good As You... but there's always someone who's doing it better than you.
Also, shaming people for Doing Fandom Wrong drives them out of the fandom and makes them not want to interact with the source material ever again. I think hurting people in fandom is wrong. The fact that folks are quitting the fandom over this means people have been hurt. I think that is wrong.
But your mileage may vary.
(As for why DR fans are like this, here's my real rent-lowering gunshot: DR fans are extremely sensitive about anyone who doesn't think of Deltarune [and/or Undertale] as The Greatest Work Of Art Ever Made. There's a major insecurity in the fandom that goes all the way back to Undertale fans bricking over a poll that chose Super Mario Brothers as the greatest video game of all time. Undertale was #2 in that poll, an incredible result considering the game had come out that same year, but that wasn't good enough; the idea that anyone thought of Undertale as not being TGWOAEM was taken as an insult by a vocal part of the fandom. Which, wow.
(The originator of the fake fan accusations, I'm willing to bet, thinks that people who are Doing Fandom Wrong are insulting TGWOAEM by not playing it. And that they would produce The Correct Art In The Correct Manner if only they had directly engaged with TGWOAEM. In reality, Deltarune is part of the same compost heap as everything else. It is not special and it is not exempt from baseline fan behavior. Including the behavior of snobbish gatekeepers.)
