replying to myself to say that i'm one of the people who took "kinning" to mean "i am a fan & relate to this character" - didn't realize that it's popularly taken to the "i AM this character & not even the original creator knows him like i do because he IS me" level, RIP (though that's not to say we can't "take" a character away from their original creator & write them "better" in our fanworks, lol).

i'm not in the "MCYT/minecraft youtuber" circles, but i read some wild stuff recently about how one of the artists working on some MCYT-related project had a discord server for that project where another member one day suddenly "developed an alter" of that artist (who i'll just call A for Artist because i'm having trouble finding the source of the story) and was posting in the discord "acting like" A, with a display name like A's, et cetera. A obviously was very discomfited by this, and when A expressed discomfort and asked that person to stop (because who would want to be impersonated by someone in their own discord server?), the other people in the server started calling A ableist because "the person with the A alter can't help who they are" and such. this snowballed into an entire receipts-type post calling for A to be removed from the project because "they're just an artist so they're easy to replace, and this ableism shouldn't be tolerated." so, a real social media campaign against an artist for... not wanting to be impersonated? that's not helping anybody.