#to a lesser extent you sometimes see it in other fandoms like transformers with terms like bayverse

[stairset]

This might be a controversial opinion but I actually think Star Wars fans using terms like "Filoniverse" or "Mandoverse" as if they're somehow separate from the rest of Star Wars canon is fucking stupid cause like that's just not how "____verse" is supposed to be used. Where I come from we use names like that for franchises that have big multiverses with multiple continuities to tell them apart. Star Wars canon does not have and will never have a multiverse no matter how bad some people seem to want it to for some reason. It's all one continuity there is simply no need for it.

[princeescaluswords]

Rather than ‘transformative’ I often feel that there should be a shorthand term for fandom/fic writers who attempt to reassert traditional, racist/heteronormative patriarchal social orders into properties that even marginally dare to push against them,

What's he gonna do? Get a job?

The term you want already exists, though it may not have occurred to you in this context.

Bourgeois.

This adjective describes actions or aesthetic choices which support middle-class and conventional values. I will further narrow it in this instance to white middle-class conventional values of the United States, as those are the ones that I know best.

First caveat: of course, this doesn't apply to all fanfiction, even to all fanfiction within a given fandom or even a given ship. But the bourgeois strain of writing definitely exists within the phenomenon. Second caveat: I am not a radical progressive by any measure. There are certainly some conventional values of the white middle-class that I appreciate and embrace. However, that doesn't prevent me from identifying trends in group behavior. If it looks like a duck, and it walks like a duck, and it quacks like a duck, it's probably a duck.

I will now illustrate what I mean by this with examples from my primary fandom, Teen Wolf, but what I found is that this can easily be applied to many other fandoms, to greater or lesser extents: the Star Wars fandom, the MCU fandom, the Lord of the Rings fandom (!), and so on. The bourgeois need to support aristocratic, privileged, white males as cultural objects and status leaders pervades all of these fandoms; there's a reason Kylo Ren, a genocidal space fascist, received such manic devotion.

What I find extraordinarily interesting is how often elements of transgressive or counter-cultural behavior is introduced to conceal the bourgeois impulse from the audience, or sometimes even from the authors themselves. In the case of my fandom, there is an emphasis on the inhumanity of the characters as werewolves, or a defense of a serial killer, or the reconstruction of the primary romantic relationship as gay (often ignoring canon gay relationships), but this transgressive element never actually threatens the conventional social structure. On to the examples.

Peter Hale's vengeance is recontextualized as justice. The triggering event in canon is the Hale Fire, which is presented as a disruption of the social order, as it should be. And yet, canon's insistence that Peter's resulting murder spree is both self-serving and absolutely destructive vanishes from fanfiction, because it doesn't reinforce the bourgeois idea that the tragedy must be corrected to the satisfaction of white men because of the Hale's privileged status. Peter's actions are vindicated through claims of mental incapacity (which canon rejected), through the conjuration of non-existent social roles (the mythical Left Hand), or through uncritical sympathy (fanon Stiles claiming that he'd do the same thing). You don't see this impulse in fanfiction extended to Noshiko Yukimura's actions at Oak Creek or Tamora Monroe's crusade against the supernatural, because they don't have the same social status.

Ste rek (and Ste ter) is written as heterosexual romance in gay drag. While presented as something radical, the actual details of these relationships are astoundingly conventional. Why, as it often seems, is it required that Derek and/or Peter be alphas? There's no romantic or emotional reason; the impulse is purely about social status, like the heroines of fairy tales discovering that their handsome rescuer is actually a prince. Or how the canonically brave, impulsive, and audacious Stiles is written as a neglected, wilting dormouse, waiting for his (her) true love to rescue him (her) from her oblivious, selfish friends and family. The fact that it's between two men doesn't make it any less a PG-rated rehashed variation on Cinderella.

Scott McCall's role as heroic protagonist MUST be delegitimized. That canon chose a working-class Latino as it's primary focus over wealthy white men is, for many in the fandom, the production's original sin. As a consequence, his role must be rendered invalid. His struggles with school work are presented, contrary to canon, as a result of stupidity or simply being a bad student. His morals are presented as foolishness, tyranny, or the manipulations of a sinister black man. His romances are presented as either vapid infatuation or a dangerous sexual obsession. Above all, he is presented again and again as uncultivated, immature and driven by appetite.

Ever notice how often Scott appears in these fanfictions as a gluttonous eater? How he is portrayed as someone who doesn't know how to cook or clean or take care of himself? How his musical tastes run to the most banal of banal pop? How he's characterized as stubborn or incurious about lycanthropy? Of course, it's all designed to make him unworthy of his position as lead protagonist by positioning him as inferior to the white intellectual middle class, but what strikes me as funny is how much it resembles the critiques of the anarchist labor movements of the late nineteenth/early twentieth century, which portrayed labor agitators as an uneducated, unenlightened foreign mob threatening the prosperity of hard-working people.

These are just three examples. I could go on for like, an hour. And then I could select another fandom and give you examples of the same type of behavior, the same laborious defense of white middle-class patriarchal values hidden behind a very carefully constructed transgressive act, one that somehow never seems to disrupt the society in which they live.

Yeah, bourgeois pretty much covers it.