Yeah, I feel like most of the drama started because the artist made the fat -dad into a mom with comically big boobs and no bra. Or at least that's mostly what I was seeing on my twitter feed. Then a few trans folk were asking if the character was being drawn as a trans woman or if they were being drawn as someone who was born a woman (one of which would be an issue) and I guess it escalated from there.
This phenomenon of fans attacking fan-artists and smaller creators (think storyboard artists, podcasters, and indie cartoonists) had been going on for a while for a few reasons.
-Trying to get your voice heard by a bigger creator (movie studios, etc) is not as easy, bigger creators rarely listen to fans because they can make movies that flop because of white-washing or insensitivity to lgbtq+ characters and it doesn't matter to them. If even financial flops aren't making them pay attention, a few angry tweets isn't going to cut it.
-So, these typically young fans, feel unheard and unhappy with the media they see on a daily basis, but they can't get Warner Brothers to pay attention. They CAN however get the McElroy Brothers and other small/indie creators to read their tweets and emails.
-Sometimes this is good! Like telling if a fan writes in to tell a podcaster they're accidentally using an offensive term for a group of people and the host can correct that and apologize. Direct fan interaction + creator who is paying attention = good in that case
-Other times, people take it, as you said "too far". Everyone wants to get in on it. So if one person is like "hey this kind of offends me personally" to the creator in a public sphere and then others see it and comment that they're also offended and soon people are looking for other things to be upset about and they want to be the most upset because it's cathartic and because they feel like it's accomplishing something. They feel powerful in a way they probably don't get to usually... and things get out of hand.
And this is a problem because usually (I'm not talking about the Dream Mommy thing at this point, more about the issue as a whole) they attack creators who are attempting to create diverse and sensitive media. But it's those people who care about the feelings of their fans who are most likely to listen. The easiest targets. This goes for fan-artists as well, because unlike indie creators they're not even used to getting that much attention. Sometimes the day they get negative attention because of something taking off on twitter is the most attention they've ever gotten, and it's negative, so obviously that can have a big effect on a person. It can even scare people off from creating things that handle certain topics for fear that they'll do something offensive.
I think laying all the blame on the fandoms themselves might be misplaced though. A lot of the issues come from the people in the fandoms still being young and not knowing how to handle their feelings about certain sensitive topics and lashing out. I think if media as a whole were to become more inclusive so that these fans weren't just looking toward small time creators for that kind of content... and also not expecting that content to be perfect because there's such a limited amount of it that they need it to be perfect, then this issues might die down. BUT who knows when that will happen, big studios and publishers take a while to listen to fans. It's easier to blame declining sales on things like millennials and netflix than to check twitter and see that people want to see more variety in their media. Disney seems to be getting it now, so maybe others will follow.
