it's partly because of the fandom's boner for tumblr-SJ-style headcanon, people project so much racial/gender/romantic/sexual identity onto the characters (and spend so many thousands of words defending it) it's fucking ridiculous

i mean yeah, canonically a lot of that shit is left super vague because it doesn't fucking matter how you headcanon it, but i feel like the fandom spends a lot of time conflating popular headcanon with actual canon progressiveness