#ugh. sometimes i think i'm being needlessly judgy/picky but like this is WEIRD right??? it's weird.

[whatever-you-can-give-me]

is this post about tristamp!ww cause if so, I COULD NOT AGREE MORE.

it is very important for me to state upfront that i do not begrudge fandom their fun. we all do a little recalibrating of our faves to suit us. i do it all the time. it's normal fandom behavior. it does not cause significant material harm.

(what gets flanderized to the extreme in what kinds of characters is... worthy of serious discussion, especially in the case of characters with canonical or commonly headcanoned marginalized identities [though those are two different things requiring two different kinds of examination] and that is. Not a subject i'm going to get into in a pithy complainpost. but i am Aware. I Am Thinking About It. I Am Thinking About Posting About It.)

but all that aside i genuinely have been. completely boggled and moderately disheartened by the way fandom seems to have just. unpersoned stampede wolfwood? it's happened in such a weird way, too, where he's been replaced by a sort of fandom-telephone version of classic wolfwood, who is himself a composite of like two and half different wolfwoods and 25 years of fandom drift. i've been in various fandoms for like, a decade, i've never seen something like this, where the existing fanon from a completely different canon just swallowed the actual canon.

(how vash's character has fared in all this is. an entirely different can of worms that i have tried and failed to open without sounding like a grumpy asshole, so, moving swiftly on.)

i think the thing that really irks me is that it makes it. so. difficult. to find any specific work for any specific canon, because everyone has decided to make soup instead of differentiating.

which is (grumbles) fine. i guess! i don't like it. the ao3 tags are completely unusable. but like, whatever.

it's just getting kind of tiring that if i want to read about stampede wolfwood, yknow, blorbo from my shows? i have find a needle in a haystack of big buff cowboys who have never shot someone with a laser bc of a ptsd episode in their life and their 150-year-old virgin boyfriends.