I am not a fantard

Really, I'm not.

I mean, yeah, I'm a fangirl. I love my fandoms quite a bit, and if I have nothing better to do, I will talk them to death. But that's different from being a fantard.

Fantards, to me, are the ones that "love" the canon so much that they've completely twisted it around in their heads. Generally speaking, I've seen three kinds of fantards; the haters, the shippers, and the just plain wrong.

Let's start with the last one, since it covers the other two.

The just plain wrong are, well, wrong. They have funny ideas about the characters - funny as in, "haha, someone actually thinks that?" or possibly funny as in funny in the head. These are the people who you dread coming within range of your roleplay, because they have no grasp of the character's personality at all. These are the Kairi-Princess-of-Dark-s, the Lavis in miniskirts, and so forth. They don't really seem to have a grasp on why the characters act the way they do; a character is just their appearance, as often as not, and therefore ugly characters are hated and pretty characters are amazing.

The shipper is a hotness-devoted subtrope of the just plain wrong, and they are, essentially, the ones who don't really care about how the characters interact as long as the sex is hot. Usually, they are yaoi shippers, and they are the source of the stereotypes against yaoi fangirls. They don't care about whether the characters are friends or enemies, brothers or much anything else. If it's hot, it gets shipped, and baw on you if you don't like it.

These guys bother me for two reasons. One of them is OTP syndrome; the idea some shippers have that two characters are absolutely destined for each other, period, and if you ship one half of the pairing with someone else, that's a crime worthy of execution. Heaven forbid I ship Larxel in public, lest I be swarmed by Axel's yaoi fantards. The other, which I encountered closely more recently (IE last night), is the idea that every character needs to be shipped (unless of course they're a female and therefore a slut). For these, it becomes more about the pairing than the characters themselves.

-to be finished later orz-