I impose my vision of the thing on other people by writing fanfic. This is obviously a pretty uncharitable-sounding explanation of the motivation behind my writing, and I don’t really mean it in a bad way, but— fiction is a very sneaky way of pulling people around to your point of view. [...] writing (if you can do it well enough that people want to read your stuff and voluntarily adopt your point of view for the purposes of extracting enjoyment from the story) can be a kind of power play, a statement of ownership.

Agreed! I view it this way too. I'm not really great at writing those ship manifestos I see other people making, so my fics tend to serve as manifestos as examples of "here's why I think these characters would work well together."

I enjoy fanfiction so much more than meta. I actually actively avoid fan-produced meta about stuff I care about, because my reaction to the vast majority of it is “fuck you, don’t tell me what to think!” Whereas if the same person had produced a piece of fanfiction advancing exactly the same opinions as were contained in the meta, but through the lens of a character study… it would feel OK to adopt their point of view and agree with it.
LOL same though!