This is rather a trite observation, but: in any sort of fandom (including scifi, fanfic, etc) you have lots of conflicts, and people often cast it in terms of "We are just expressing our love for X, while these haters putting us down are motivated by elitism/anti-intellectualism/peversion/narrow-mindedness etc" But most of the time, while those things may be in play, a lot of it is just that people are expressing their love in different ways.
I think one of the main ones which comes up in many different guises is "I love canon as is" versus "I express my love for canon by looking at it from different angeles/picking it apart/recreating it etc".
The most obvious example is people who make fanfic vs people who hate fanfic. Within fanfic you have people who stick to canon and those who write AUs etc.
You also have people who love all of canon versus people who only love certain aspects. Most people are a mix of the two. Harry Potter fandom has a lot of this: some people genuinely think the books are High Art and really well written, other people like certain characters and aspects of the setting but think they're really badly written. Both can be taken to bad extremes: at one end you have people who refuse to acknowledge any flaws in canon, including stuff like sexism and racism, at the other you have people who go on about how the author got the story wrong. And of course there's always conflict between people who love different aspects and think everyone else is missing the point, character vs plot being a common conflict.
Within fanfic fandom you have people who are in it because they love the canon, and people who are in it because they love the fandom (and again most people are mix of the two) This post was inspired while I was writing this reply to a post about fanfic fandoms lemming-like tendency to jump en masse to new fandoms.
And now I am done. I didn't have any major conclusion, just felt like getting this off my chest :)
I think one of the main ones which comes up in many different guises is "I love canon as is" versus "I express my love for canon by looking at it from different angeles/picking it apart/recreating it etc".
The most obvious example is people who make fanfic vs people who hate fanfic. Within fanfic you have people who stick to canon and those who write AUs etc.
You also have people who love all of canon versus people who only love certain aspects. Most people are a mix of the two. Harry Potter fandom has a lot of this: some people genuinely think the books are High Art and really well written, other people like certain characters and aspects of the setting but think they're really badly written. Both can be taken to bad extremes: at one end you have people who refuse to acknowledge any flaws in canon, including stuff like sexism and racism, at the other you have people who go on about how the author got the story wrong. And of course there's always conflict between people who love different aspects and think everyone else is missing the point, character vs plot being a common conflict.
Within fanfic fandom you have people who are in it because they love the canon, and people who are in it because they love the fandom (and again most people are mix of the two) This post was inspired while I was writing this reply to a post about fanfic fandoms lemming-like tendency to jump en masse to new fandoms.
And now I am done. I didn't have any major conclusion, just felt like getting this off my chest :)