The other day when I was at the grocery store checkout I noticed my cashier had had a lot of Flash gear on and I asked her about it and she went on about how much she loved the Flash and then I asked her if she ever read any of his comic books and she looked at me like I had said the most offensive thing and said no.
Obviously people are free to like what they like and you do need normies to make money. Normie isn't a bad thing as I am a normie in some areas (I mentioned before that I am working my out out of normie status with Anime/Manga). I guess my annoyance is that the people who act like experts about the MCU for instance are the same people who wouldn't have been caught dead reading a comic book or the same people who clap like seals with every "reimagined" butchering of source material. I don't know how many people I've seen in comments section saying that it doesn't matter that Halo/Wheel of Time/LOTR doesn't follow the lore.
I get that casual fans bring in money but in a perfect world shouldn't the people who are in charge of the IPs appreciate the more hardcore fans who actually read the source material. Like Amazon should've taken into account the people who actually read WOT before hiring a douchebag who didn't care or maybe Marvel shouldn't hire showrunners who openly admit to never reading comic books. I get if you have never been into them but if you get a job to direct a show based on a comic book character shouldn't you at least do some research?
As a life long Star Wars fan one of the worst examples is Disney erasing the EU. I get that they wanted to do their own thing but the least they could've done was continue making stories in that universe along with their own as a tip of the cap to the fans who kept Star Wars going by reading books/comics or playing the video games when there were no movies. Or maybe they could've done Clone Wars style animation of some of the better stories. It does make me chuckle to see how Disney will keep re-releasing the EU books because they make money.
Sorry for the long post, rant over.
I ran across a cashier the other day that had buttons from The Adventure Zone on her smock, and when I noted it (as I had listened to the full run of it years ago) she actually seemed well-versed in the show and its lore, so I was pleased to see that she wasn't one of those "casual fans".
That being said, I definitely get where you're coming from in that the newly-introduced "fans" can be frustrating, especially when they don't want to dive any deeper than a surface skim of the material. We, as the old guard fans, see the signs of fandom and we've been trained to expect that those "showing the colors" are as deep in the fandom as we are. We expect our adaptations of the material to be true to the source, we expect a certain level of knowledge from those who are the keepers of the lore, and when that's not there it drives us up the wall.
I feel like all we can really do is boycott it and move on to trying to create the next thing. Once there is no more profit left in the original product, the parasites will likely leave it, and maybe we can circle back to the original thing and revive it if we can.