i think young people in fandoms don't realize a lot of times older shippers actively want their ship to be just fanon, NOT canon, almost desperately. why? because sometimes you just know that if it's canon the writers are going to screw everything up.
i can use the teen wolf fandom as an example. regardless of whether you ship them or not, we have stiles and lydia wanting each other for 5 seasons, but when the writers finally decided to get them together in S6 it was... underwhelming, to say the least, because they didn't even do shit with the ship afterwards.
it was literally like 10 minutes screentime of the couple together (and by that I mean they kissed once and held hands like twice and that's it) and then fuck it, let's move on to something else. and the writers cared so little that in the movie they're not even together anymore for the most absurd reason possible.
many shippers don't want their otp ruined by staff mishandling the story. or because they know canon could stray too far from their own interpretation. so they prefer to stay in their happy corner shipping and playing with their fictional dolls and doing whatever they want with them.
maybe for young people it matters a lot if something is canon or not (even if it's just to show superiority or some shit like that) but for many others it's even a relief if their ship doesn't have anything to do with canon.











