When it comes to obsessively policing the “correctness” of works within their chosen genre, nobody beats horror fans.
Sure, sci-fi readers may have us matched when it comes self-defensive knee-jerk reactions to what we perceive as anti-genre bias in the mainstream. But nobody can get as hot when proposing what should and should not be considered as a valid addition to our pet genre. You couldn’t find a mystery fan who, even if their tastes ran towards the hardest of hardboiled crime fic, would not recognize the elegant classics of Elizabeth Daly, the juvenile Nancy Drew series, and the aw-shucks slapstick of Kinky Friedman as all belonging legitimately to the genre. Sci-fi guys regularly lay down definitions RE the scientific rigor of the romances they read, but they know it’s bullshit: Not a one of them wouldn’t count Philip K. Dick among their number and his works are about as scientifically rigorous as The Great Space Coaster. I can’t imagine you hear many romance novel readers say, “I don’t consider romances between nurses and doctors to be real romance. It’s either lusty pirates with good hearts and the clever, but sheltered – don’t forget sheltered, sheltered is the whole thing! – daughters of wealth shipping magnates or nothing!”
—CRwM, And Now the Screaming Starts
OH MY JESUS YES
By way of follow-up:
There is a contingent of bloc voters for the Hugo Awards who always vote against the work of British sf writers like Charlie Stross, Ken Mcleod, and Ian Banks, because their socialist views make their work fantasy rather than sf and fantasy shouldn’t be included in the Hugos. I’m not making this up. They’re not an especially large bloc – last I heard, maybe a dozen or so seriously committed guys, plus some others who drift in or out, but since Hugo awards draw 800-1000 voters tops, they can and probably have swung the awards at least once.
And there’s similar tension in every field I know of, about whether some popular and generally well-regarded category actually belongs in it at all and if not what can we do with the awful heretics and schismatics.