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My impression w/r/t fanfiction is that it runs kinda "orthogonally" to being a fan of a specific franchise: people doing it are fans of a specific modes of expression and specific story tropes, and they move across franchises an communities squashing the characters as they're actually written into their preferred archetypes, AUs and story beats. (As opposed, in the other extreme, to an obsessive curator on a spectrum who spend time cataloguing all eleventy gazillion kinds of spaceships that appeared tn the screen for 5 seconds in one episode in 1974.)
The publishing model of contemporary "young adult" book series and netflix shows seems to cater to such audience. I see it on my sister-in-law's tumblr - every other month there are new gifs with a new cast of completely interchangeable Blorbos, and the show inevitable won't be renewed for the 3rd season, but it doesn't matter, the viewers did their share of shipping and moved on. These days the viewers/readers don't even have to hallucinate homosexuality like they did in the case of Kirk, Frodo or Steve Rogers - the shows come with the batteries included, so to say.
I don't know if I agree with this. Now it's true that people who write fanfiction for one thing probably also like other things, and if they're the type of person who likes to write and read fanfiction then they will probably also write and read fanfiction about the other things they like, but that doesn't make them fans of fanfiction rather than fans of those particular stories. Obviously it varies from person to person, and some people have a deeper attachment than others, but my experience is that people who write fanfiction do it because they genuinely love the story and the characters, they've seen all the episodes/movies several times, they want to see those characters in new situations. Some people just move on when the show doesn't get renewed, but some people complain about the cancellation for months and years and keep watching the old episodes over and over.
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That probably heavily depends on the type of fanfiction, and that depends on the audience and the series.
I actually write for Worm, which as fanfiction is very unusual. It has a majority male fandom doing the writing and even though there's a noncanon (female) gay couple that appears in a lot of fanfic, I've never seen a fic which is mainly based around shipping them.
Out of curiosity, what is the general direction/thrust of Worm fanfic?
"author did it wrong, I'll fix it"?
"explore another character's perspective"
"I just want to play with these toys some more"?
Recommend any high quality ones?
1 and 3 mostly, but you see everything. Worm is also a very pessimistic setting so you see lots of stories that import powers from other series, or other kinds of overpowered ideas. Worm fanfics notoriously focus on Taylor a lot, though sometimes you'll see someone else.
Recommending anything would be controversial, and there are a couple of notorious cases of very long, popular, fics where nothing happens.
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