I can buy that theory, and given what we have to work with at this point, that's currently more or less what I consider to be canon. I particularly like the idea of his father shunning him because he reminded him of his mother (Gokudera does look remarkably like her).

And yeah, there are a lot of fandoms where the shipping wars can get really intense. Bleach fandom is divided between people who ship Ichigo with Orhime and people who ship him with Rukia; Naruto fandom used to be (dunno if it still is) incredibly wanky about all of the Team 7 pairings, Harry Potter fandom is still divided between Harry/Hermione and Ron/Hermione shippers even though the series has ended, and so on. Just as an example, I dunno if you've ever been to fandomsecrets, but it's a rare day that doesn't see some kind of pairing drama-related secret over there.

But with KHR, I don't know if it's just that the main LJ community is really well-modded, or that the fans are just generally more easygoing or what, but it's been two and a half years since I got into the fandom and I can still count the instances of really bad wank I've seen one hand. And most of those are from back when we used to have anon memes, which are banned from hitman_reborn now, so we're pretty much in the clear. I love this fandom so much.