I think the vantage point of what constitutes “reality of the character” is kind of where the issue of conflict really resides.
It’s like you mentioned with Supernatural fans, there are people who like the reality of what’s given to them and just assume that what they consume in the canon is all there is and justifiably engage with that. But the difference here is that marginalized fans very much engage with “the reality of canon” from a different vantage point. Reality in that sense can be seen as malleable and open to interpretation as opposed to fixed or static. This is where we get the age old transformative vs curative fandom discussions.
And that’s fine. I don’t personally care how others engage with the character or with media in general. I think most iceman fans who read the character as gay or saw themselves in him acknowledge and have consistently had to deal with (mostly straight male) fans who feel like their reality was broken. It’s not hard to find and it’s understandable for either side to become defensive. I just think reducing it to “vocal minority” vs “main fans” implies a correct vs incorrect hierarchy, if that assumption was inaccurate then fine, but I think it’s a fair read of that statement.
Going from “he has lost the majority of his fans” to “he has fans they just read around his sexuality” feels like moving goalposts. It’s no surprise people “read around” his orientation change, but the people giving viral support specifically to the queer centred stories like the pride issue, the infinity comic, the fan art and the goodreads reviews aren’t those people, and there’s a lot of them, which adds more nuance to “he has lost a majority of his fans.” There are straight men and women who don’t care about the change, there are queer fans who always saw it as a possibility and there are new fans that are exploring his narrative because of it. There will always be people who are on either side of the fence and that isn’t uncommon because comics as a whole have been at the forefront of the current culture war, it’s far from exclusive to Bobby, yet despite that, his journey still gets a good amount of viral attention. His one drag race reference in Marauders got almost 2000 notes on Tumblr lol.
Side note; I am aware of all of those female love interests btw, I think I had a few more female crushes than that before I came out, actually. If people genuinely still ship stuff like Bobby/Lev, I feel sorry for them lmao, how mundane. I think some of ya’ll who think someone genuinely having feelings for the opposite sex and then coming out as gay later in life is some incomprehensible narrative, maybe listen to people who actually lived through it? Here’s a primer:
https://www.reddit.com/r/AskGaybrosO...tm_name=iossmf
And here is a good one if you want to watch a video, too:
https://youtu.be/yZiltLvaiDE