popular fanon as desire path: crowley's feet at the beach

CROWLEY: Sorry. Consecrated ground. It's like being at the beach in bare feet.
FANON FROM PEOPLE WHO HAVE EVIDENTLY NEVER BEEN TO THE BEACH: Crowley nearly died... Crowley's feet were burned to blisters for weeks... Crowley still has white scars all over his soles eighty years later.

I've read a direct treatment of this scene and concept that was clever and which I quite liked just now - this one:

Burnt (10069 words) by flamethrower
Chapters: 1/1
Fandom: Good Omens - Neil Gaiman & Terry Pratchett, Good Omens (TV)
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Relationships: Aziraphale/Crowley (Good Omens)
Characters: Aziraphale, Crowley, Cassiel, God, OFC, OMC
Additional Tags: GFY, the London Blitz, 1941, Dumpster Fire of Angst, with a happy ending, Non graphic mentions of burn wounds, Crowley is still seriously bitter about the Crucifixion, the Church scene except sideways, Nazis die and all is well, Ineffable Idiots, ineffable husbands, meant to become canon compliant, mostly - Freeform, Shh, Panic, PTSD, the old hurt/comfort tag makes an appearance
Summary:

Crowley has time to prepare for the fact that he's going to have to enter a bloody sanctified church to save an idiot during the Blitz in 1941. It's too bad there isn't really enough prep time in the world to cope with this consecrated ground shit if you're a demon.

- which definitively, knowingly, and explicitly departs from canon in this point, as indicated by the tags.

But the greater portion of the above fanon trope that I've seen are simply sprinkled around in the background of other stories, many of them good, but with no indication that it is a departure from canon (or to put it another way, a very slight AU on this one point only, along the lines of 'Everything the Same Except They Kissed Once' or 'Everything the Same Except He Spells His Name Differently', or to borrow from another fandom, 'Everything the Same Except He Wears Glasses and Has Long Hair in a Ponytail').

Of course, you can wriggle around the canon by assuming that Crowley was lying when he said that, much like any spackle. And an awful lot of people choose to do that, possibly because the angstier and more melodramatic alternative is like catnip.

... But maybe also a little bit because following fanon can be a lot like following a desire path through a field: it's faster and feels comfortable and peer-endorsed and you might not even consciously notice that you've done it; although I think usually these runaway popular bits of fanon are ones that don't come so close to contradicting canon.

So my conclusion is that fanon has carved out a well-worn interpretation of least resistance and that people for the most part aren't noticing any conflict between it and canon.

This conclusion, however, I feel relies on a large portion of the fanon's adherents not having much experience of the beach in bare feet, at least not enough for the memory to leap up in their minds and say "That's not AT ALL what the beach in bare feet is like" every time they read it (not all of them, obviously, and not in the cases like the above rec; more the ones where it slides by unquestioned in the background as a throwaway).

Perhaps they've been on asphalt in bare feet and are (incorrectly) extrapolating.