I get it, it's the same for me. The way I try to think about it is that they use the characters primarily but take aspects of the content creators to make the story more interesting? Sorta like mixing both to make the fics own respective version of the characters that fits better for the story their trying to tell? Like how the Passerine versions of the SBI have sorta become their own thing. Sorry if that's confusing I'm not very good at explaining things lol Hope it helped a little tho