There’s a lot of fandom meta and analysis that is so predicated on people starting from their conclusion and working backwards, so you get these bizarrely sanctimonious posts that are all like “lmao do Just Friends look at each other like this???????” and “if [Plot Point] isn’t true, then how do you explain the look on this character’s face?” and these metas or gifs or whatever become Canonical Proof of the thing they were reverse engineered to conclude, so that eventually there’s entire subgroups of fandoms who’ll be like “don’t believe us?? lemme show you the receipts” and I feel like the clerk at the returns desk at Target who’s like “these are lovely receipts, really, you put a lot of thought into them and I can clearly see your inspiration and interpretation, but I can’t give you store credit, my dude, you drew the damn things yourself”
nothingidputbeforeyou 