ruth0007:
soundsofmyuniverse:
To the very best of times, John.
This is how I feel about fandom. A year out from the last new episodes. Less voices. More echoes.
Well, every fandom sort of gets quiet when there’s no more new content. But I think this show ended in a way that makes it really hard to continue creating it, which is basically what fandom eventually does in this situation.
So, first of all, I’m sure there are Sherlock fans out there who loved “The Final Problem.” There are X-Files fans out there, I have discovered, who will defend anything Chris Carter writes, no matter how bad it is. For those fans who love the show unconditionally, I’m sure the conversation continues without a hitch. I just don’t interact a lot with that segment of the fandom.
There’s probably also a section of the Sherlock fandom which was never invested in Johnlock, liked Mary Morstan fine, accepted the craziness of “His Last Vow,” “The Six Thatchers,” and “The Lying Detective”….and then got to “The Final Problem” and just went, NO. Because really…the whole Eurus thing was a truly terrible decision, just from a series arc standpoint. It really drives home how little Moffat knows or cares about plotting and narrative. At the end of the show you should be resolving things that were introduced earlier, not introducing brand new characters and plot lines. Who in their right mind builds the last episode of their show around a character the viewers have never heard of? Instead of using “The Final Problem” to resolve things between John and Sherlock, they spent 90 minutes answering a question that the viewers had never asked themselves and didn’t care about. If they’d introduced Eurus at the beginning of S2 or something, they’d have had a chance to develop her and then maybe by S4 the viewers would have something invested in her. Instead, the viewers don’t even know she exists until the last 5 minutes of the second-to-last episode. I don’t know how that made sense to anyone.
But on the segment of the fandom that was invested in Johnlock, the impact of TFP was devastating, both to individuals and to the community. Because it really is in S4 that it becomes clear that Moffat and Gatiss have become fed up with the whole canon Johnlock thing and are actively trying to destroy that reading of the show. As exhibit A I offer the sudden reintroduction of Irene Adler as a potential romantic partner for Sherlock. She doesn’t appear; but John spends part of that climactic conversation in “The Lying Detective” trying to convince Sherlock to re-connect with her, and it’s revealed that she’s still occasionally texting him. I had to rewatch “The Final Problem” to write “Christmas Time After Time,” and one thing I noticed this time around is that in the final montage of the two of them in 221b, there’s a shot of Sherlock texting someone, “You know where to find me.” He can’t be texting Moriarty or Eurus; John’s in the room with him; I figure he’s supposed to be sending that to Irene Adler.
So after TFP, that segment of the fandom split in all kinds of directions. There’s the split between people who now accept that Moffat and Gatiss either are no longer or were never planning for a canon Johnlock ending, and the people who are keeping TJLC alive by inventing ever more elaborate explanations for why Johnlock really IS canon. This split has, I think, been very destructive. It used to be easy enough for people who were pro-Johnlock but not TJLC to interact with TJLC true believers without anyone getting their feelings hurt. But now, the TJLC reading of the show is so divergent from the non-TJLC reading of it–the two groups cannot agree even on things like the number of episodes of S4 that were actually shot, or whether/how much of any given S3 or S4 episode is set in someone’s mind palace or part of someone’s dying hallucination–that these two segments of the fandom don’t share enough common assumptions to have a real conversation about the show. Then, amongst the non- or ex-TJLCers, there was the split about how to respond to Moffat and Gatiss’s refusal to make Johnlock canon after having hinted at it fairly persistently in the first two seasons. And so on.
But for the Johnlock-positive but also non- or ex-TJLC segment of the fandom, which is the part of the fandom that I have the most contact with, I think the show just hurt a lot of people’s feelings so much that they don’t want to maintain a relationship with it. Moffat and Gatiss, as showrunners, never cared about the viewer’s emotions; it was all about what they wanted and how clever and badass they could be. They lost their grip on the fact that fans engage with television, primarily, emotionally. The small screen pulls people in emotionally in ways that the big screen doesn’t, and their emotional investment in characters and relationships makes them vulnerable. So it is possible to give your fans an emotional shock so painful that it functions as aversion therapy. That’s what happened with the “Children of Earth” series of Torchwood, which not only killed off half of the canon m/m couple but forced the surviving partner to commit an act so morally heinous and emotionally painful that I, at least, had no desire to watch that character do anything else, ever again.
I don’t think Moffat and Gatiss ever understood that. For instance, the biggest obstacle to me in trying to write fic about this show after S4, apart from the absolutely bonkers plotting, was John beating Sherlock up at the end of “The Lying Detective.” How do they get past that? How do *I*, as a viewer, get past that? I don’t. And that’s a loss.
Anyway. Yeah, echoes, I guess. Echoes and elegies for a show I used to love.
@plaidadder Eloquently put, thank you.
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