actual peace and love would involve letting anyone who wants to do things do them, without judgment.

I don't think there is anything unreasonable about the idea that if someone isn't comfortable with actual discussions of the source material they should probably not insert themselves into the fandom. And I struggle to see how this has anything to do with ableism as per your tags.

Well, when you demand a certain amount of effort to be input before you consider someone's creative work valid, that's ableist.

The issue at hand isn't one of the validity of transformative works (and I agree with you there that art doesn't derive meaning or validity from the amount of "effort" poured into it) but of fandom social dynamics and the very simple fact that people involved in a fandom will find people who have not engaged with the source material yet insist on inserting themselves into the fandom annoying. This user articulated it well imo and I'm tired right now:

Unfortunately it's still gatekeeping and still ableist.

The gate is wide open. You are being invited to read/play/experience the source material and discuss it. There is no resource or community you are being denied access too.

Actually, there is. When you demand that someone put in a specific amount of effort, that is gatekeeping. That's the definition. "You have to do this first" is gatekeeping and is ableist. It doesn't matter if the thing you're asking them to do is a little or a lot. It's the action of asking at all. When you say, in effect, "you need to do homework before you interact with this fandom", then... yeah. Yeah, man, that's gatekeeping. That's ableist to do. That's denying something-- recognition, access, interaction, respect-- to people until they perform for you. In this case, what you're asking is for them to interact with the source material to your satisfaction.

Why do you hate disabled people?

I'm sorry but your position is really indefensible. You are approaching the whole concept of ableism through an extremely individualistic framework and your resultant analysis is extremely shallow. If a group of people have gathered together to discuss a certain piece of media and someone wishes to insert themselves into that conversation to talk about something completely different, such as their impressions of said media based on absolutely nothing, then being turned away from that group has nothing to do with ableism and is in fact a completely understandable reaction to what is extremely antisocial behavior.

Imagine a book club. They read and discuss a full book every week. You can't read a full book every week, but you join anyway.

If you do your best to try and keep up with the conversation, maybe you read cliff's notes, watch the movie version, read as much as you're able to, and don't try to dominate the conversation with wild guesses about what you reckon the book is about, you can probably hang with the book club discussion. It might not be the best use of your time, but nobody reasonable is gonna get mad at you.

If you insist however on putting all your effort into participating in the discussion rather than putting any effort into preparing for the discussion, and just speculate and bullshit based on what you read on the blurb, the book club still probably won't kick you out but I wouldn't expect to make any lifelong friends there.

If you join the book club knowing you can't read the books, and then every week you try and discuss, I dunno, what you saw on TV that week instead, people are gonna be understandably upset at you for derailing the conversation. They came here to discuss the book. If you knew you weren't going to be able to do that, why did you join the book club?

All this to say, like, yeah, if your definition of gatekeeping is acknowledging that some places have gates, gatekeeping is really really normal and fine, actually. Like, you can't join the Peanut Butter Tasting Club if you're deathly allergic to nuts (or at least you're gonna have to be okay with missing a lot of meetings). The gate is there for a reason. It defines the boundaries of what is and is not the peanut butter clubhouse.

Like, it would be nice if we could make all corners of society accessible to everyone, but there's no way to accomodate someone in a book club if they are 100% unable to engage with the text.