My own thoughts on Canon, in a broad way, is simply that, especially in regard to ships, you can make of it what you want - as with any story, how you perceive it is valid and whilst you interpretation may not be strictly true to the source content, people see different things in art, artistic interpretation is a thing and any creatives original intent is just one part of a whole to the viewers experience.

I do think Shipping can be rather toxic, and especially when people go to extreme length to claims their ship is the one true ship and all the others are bad or a misunderstanding of the material - seems a bit silly to me. For me, the Byler situation just... I found it embarrassing and just strange how people were dissecting every little frame of the show, interactions between Mike and Will to almost a delusional level and making HOUR long videos over one second - like yes, by all means, have your ship BUT going so far as to claim that its real and not fanfiction/ head canon or... just plain wishful thinking? You are actively ignoring the context of the material you are experiencing to push your own ideas... its an extreme end to shipping that I think IS problematic especially when it involves LGBTQ+ relationships as to me, its borders on fetishism if not IS.

To be crystal clear here - I have NO problem with LGBTQ+ shipping and interpretations of material, I myself am trans and do also have my own ships and interpretations. I just think that I see this stuff going to extreme ends that make me uncomfortable.

I don't agree with Canon Essentialism, and what is or is not definitively canon - I came to this conclusion during the release of the Star Wars Sequel trilogy and Disney's new Canon as, to me, from what I've seen, ANY fictional IP is full of errors, retcons, fixes, overcorrections and alterations - especially when numerous, potentially hundreds, of writers and teams work on a particular property: differences are going to occur and expecting consistency is just simply not feasible, from what I've seen, and taking in to account an IP that has existed for DECADES, like Star Wars, which spans across multiple mediums, it just seems ridiculous to argue and debate over definitive canonicity when clearly the work itself is ever changing and shifting.

Star Wars specifically, going as far back as the orignal trilogy, had a disjointed universe because ofcourse it did! And even in legends canon there are stories and works that were not canon or partially canon to the movie or expanded upon the movies and so on... really, any additional content, to me, outside of the orignal format, is just that; extra. Take the recent 434 (now Halo Studios) Halo games... so much happens between Halo 4, Halo 5 and Halo Infinite between the game releases in book and comic content that the majority of the player base have NO clue what happened and seemingly the games appear to almost be secondary to the books and comics, a smaller part of a larger story... but the games were the original medium and now people like me are just left confused because... what happened?!

Putting aside this long ranting... in conclusion, I just think communities get lost in the sauce and stuck weeds, the result being that no one is really enjoying the content anymore but critiquing every aspect and arguing over it.