I could probably write a white paper on this, sadly

Monitoring the starting conditions of an incipient ficcing fandom: my favourite activity! XD In XM:FC a pairing-centric comm seems to have won out as the pillar, which means it's going to look really different from Sherlock (where a mixed-use but strictly-enforced on-topic comm won) and NuTrek (where an ONTD-format comm won). I prefer the flexibility of the last option - the scope is both broad and conceptually well-defined - but suspect one would need a pre-movie head start, plus a canon backlog full of endlessly-trawlable deep weirdness thereafter (which the three I've just named have, of course, but eg. Inception didn't...). I think XM:FC is distinguishable from the earlier iterations of the X-Men movie fandom by... a lower activation energy? Perhaps? K-memes didn't really exist circa X1-X2, let alone as the sandbox environments they are now. I have a memory of sort of lacklusterly poking about on FFnet. XD;;; So there is an impact. On the other hand - should I even make an attempt to phrase this delicately - a lot of the younger characters had superpowers with narrow applications. Or ones where the interest was actually in the workaround. That is not the case with XM:FC. Possibly it is a truism in every 'verse that sex was better before the 1980s.

On the other-other hand, I am in my corner until someone comes to inform me that the geographical proximity of the words "Holocaust" and "kink meme" has come to an end, thx all the same.

EDIT -- I forgot to talk about the dreaded seme/uke issue, but that's because with NuTrek it was interesting, you could sort of ponder the wherefores. The wherefores of XM:FC = "the casting director's brief said to find dudes who are quote incredibly easy for amateur manga artists to draw unquote"