More Life

I wonder if people's reactions to the cis/het swap are the same or different for canon or noncanon m/m ships. I've read fic where one character was genderswapped and it got a lot of comments saying "I never considered shipping these characters until I read this" and that was probably because they were minor background characters and the fic fleshed them out a lot more, not because they were both originally male, but it would be easy to read comments like that as homophobic. And I wonder if that's what's going on with this criticism, the assumption that people are making them het because that's the only way they can ship them? But it would be very strange to apply that to wangxian.