like little girls making up stories with Barbie and Ken, except that they only had two Barbies

Oh man, that is so true. At the time I was a much younger and less discerning reader (I mean, we were all younger! but I was actually a teenager) and I think I swallowed a lot of melodrama that I wouldn't now, but sometimes even I would give a J/7 fic the side-eye for being too saccharine. (Not that the same thing didn't exist on the maleslash side. It totally did, in truckloads!)

Of course, with the way the show was written sometimes, doing better than canon was kind of a low bar...