The idea that fandom arguments at all involve proving each other wrong is bizarre to me.
Somewhere along the line, we forgot that stories are about exploring human nature through our different, subjective perspectives, and not about discovering absolute truth. There are some people whom I am never going to agree with, and some whom my arguments will never be able to convince, and that’s the point.
The point of exploring media is embracing and understanding our own human subjectivity, not trying to create a false objectivity in its stead.
The point of fandom should be possibility. It isn’t canon, and that means it can be anything. That means you can tell the same story a million different ways, from a million different POVs, with a million different ships, with a million different endings, switching it up the way YOU want to do. Fandom gives you the freedom to experiment, to think about things in the opposite way you’ve been told to, and then to go back to the first way if you want, or to never go back. It lets you pick the ship that will never be canon or the ship that is endgame. Or it lets you never pick a ship and ship everyone with everyone else. Or to change your mind and go back and forth if you want.
The point is, fandom is your opportunity to do the speaking instead of being spoken to; to fight back against being dictated to by an “all-powerful creator” who tells you how and what to think; to throw aside being passive consumers forced to digest whatever someone else has chosen for you and seize your own storytelling and make it into what you want. Fandom can be EVERYTHING…so why would you ever want to reduce it to the tinyness of one single path? What’s even the point of fandom if you just want one accepted narrative and no meandering tangents into different possibilities? Having just one accepted narrative is called canon; you don’t need fandom for that. You can enjoy that perfectly well if that’s what you want! You do you, and that’s awesome! But fandom should be for all of the fun wilderness off the canon beaten path. Fandom should be for remembering that creativity is supposed to be fun.
