#i've seen this idea floating around for a while and. frankly. the return of Dorian and subsequent focus on Dor/ym kind of affirmed it for me

[astralleywright]

d'ya think maybe people are mad about the bh characters this aggressively because it's really fucking hard to make fluffy domestic aus of this campaign or use basic character tropes with them or

OKAY HI ANON YEAH. YEAH I THINK THAT'S PART OF IT. you kind of mention two things in your question; the fluffy aspect and the tropes - and I think both are part of it.

The fluff thing is like, I DO think you can make easy fluffy domestic aus with these characters, because that's what many of these characters ultimately want! The material is there, in baking and craft nights and burlesque shows! But I think people take the fact that the Hells' health/relationships/status are not following a straight upwards progression the way VM and M9's (apparently?) did to mean that the Hells are Doomed to Fail, because in no story have things gotten worse before they got better, culminating in a lowest point before rising to victory. And a lot of people attribute this far too heavily to some personal, inherent failings of the Hells as opposed to their position in this story, because the Fundamental Attribution Error is always getting people's asses.

Which folds into the part abt tropes, because I don't want to say the Hells are, on the whole, more complicated characters than VM or the M9, because I don't believe that's true. But they're definitely more difficult to break down into simple archetypes or fanfic tags, and even if you could, they're not widely appealing ones; they're NPC descriptions. Or the ease of understanding implied by them being tropes is constantly challenged by the story itself; the Hells love each other, are meaningful to each other like a Found Family, but they're still fraught with conflict. Imogen is both Refusing the Call and Accepting the Call and just trying to listen in on it, from a distance. Imodna are Slow Burn Best Friends to Lovers, but its not happily ever after when they get together. Ashton is a Jerk With A Heart Of Gold, but its often their heart of gold that compels them to act like a jerk in the first place. So if someone is trying to (or wants to be able to) rely on tropes to understand most of the Hells, it is probably leaving them in a lurch, and people love to get mad at things they don't understand. (Especially when that thing they don't understand keeps fucking up and doing bad shit).