We need concise moments of romantic/sexual tropes used
We need queer coded moments
We need the comments of both writers and cast that suggested johnlock
We need Arwel’s winks and clues
We need to have it addressed coherently and systematically
We need a history of previous Holmes/Watson romance
Sorry if anyone feels as if this is too aggressive, but it’s advocacy with free speech. It’s resistance to discrimination. It’s never going to be pretty.
The response needs to go to all the press outlets in countries were the show is shown
Copies to all advocate groups
We need to contact allies
Anger is good, we just need to use it well, not let it burn out into depression or surrender. We have been treated abominably. So anyone who wants to proceed, let’s do it. We can be the monstrous regiment if they force us to be. We have the proof, we have the metas, we have the intelligence and we have staying power. I know this may not be for everyone, but some of us need to do this. It matters.
Yes, an open letter! a short version with maybe links to the extended version.
We also need pr experts, and people who have contact to the media. We need allies with power or a huge following on social media. We need a strategy. We need visibility.
We need to work as a team, essential. Venting anger on Tumblr won’t help us, we need to take this into the main stream press. We need a secure forum set up to plan and strategise. Anyone want to help?
Hey y’all 🙂 I know some of us have been throwing around the idea of a TJLC tattoo, so I wanted to add my contribution: a heart made out of the letters tjlc.
The blue and red colors are chosen to resemble a diagram of a real human heart– twisty aorta (the cursive “L” at the top) and all- and to make it look like the cables from the traincar heart bomb in “The Empty Hearse”.
On a practical note: it’s simple, so it should be less expensive and easier to replicate. It’s also pretty flexible- it could be different colors or plain black, with the space between letters or without, depending on what you’re looking for (the one I drew on my wrist being an extremely simple and discreet example).
Hope you like it, tell me what you think!!! ❤
-Elise
(Tags & some other cool little details below the cut)
One of
the things among many that wounded me about series 4 was the death of a
partnership that occurs between Sherlock and John here. People may or may not
ship a romantic entanglement between the two men, but I think most followers of
the Holmes and Watson universe enjoy that camaraderie between Sherlock and his
Boswell, his right hand man. They’ve got each other’s backs, they work as a
team. Until … suddenly they just don’t.
In TST,
we get some lovely banter between Mary, John and Sherlock in which Mary and
Sherlock gang up on John, call him next to useless and compare him to a dog.
This is not to say that a dog is a bad thing to be equated with, Sherlock likes
dogs, and John apparently as well, but he has no troubles dragging John with Mary for a
larf.
At the
end of TST, John blames Sherlock for Mary’s death in a frankly unbelievable
soap opera-ish kind of way that really doesn’t make any sense. If it were a
heat-of-the-moment thing, there might be a reconciliation later, but no, John
simply give Molly a mysterious letter we may never see to tell Sherlock to … piss off? We presume.
In TLD, it
takes Hudders kidnapping Sherlock in the boot of her car to get John to even
talk with him. Sherlock manages to pull John along in his orbit on a case, but
later, when Sherlock is falling apart on drugs and self-abuse, John literally attacks
him until he is pulled away by others. Misplaced
blame and plot complications may be needed to further a story along, but in
what universe does Dr. John H. Watson beat Sherlock Holmes into a bloody pulp
on the floor when he needs him most?
We got a
sweet one-sided hug at the end of TLD, and with the start of TFP, the two men
seem to be working together again as a team, but as soon as they get to Shutter
Island, this all falls by the wayside again. John gives Sherlock their fail safe code,
their this-means-business phrase, Vatican Cameos, and Sherlock IGNORES him, takes
his earpiece off so John won’t bother him again. Wow, way to bro, bro.
For the
rest of the episode as two of the smartest people in the UK dance through ridiculous
experiments set by their even smarter edgelord mad sister, John becomes almost
background noise. Sherlock and Mycroft dance around each while trying to
placate Eurus, until Sherlock can find his sister to comfort her and make
everything all better with a hug. When Sherlock holds a gun under his jaw and
counts down to his death, John does NOTHING. He barely reacts. When Sherlock
hears that John is in a quickly-filling well, chained to the floor, he says,
cool, dude, try not to drown, be with you in a mo’. True he needs to solve some
weird puzzle involving tombstones and numbers (hell I don’t even know) for
Eurus to magically stop the flow of water into the well, but John has ceased to
be character in the show and has become a damsel in distress to be saved and little
more. Moftiss seems to be saying that Sherlock really can only have one friend
at a time, and for TFP, Eurus needs to take that seat
A moment
that might have had some emotional impact, John being saved from the well, is
reduced to a few seconds of air time as a rope end is thrown down to him. We see
no valiant effort to cut the chains that bind him, the people who hauled him up
out of the hole, or the emotional moment when Sherlock finally lay hands on him
to make sure he was alright. Nope we just flash forward to John wrapped in a
blanket beside Sherlock, and for all we know, he had to leave his feet at the
bottom of the well to escape.
Even if
you put the idea of an actualized homosexual relationship aside, and there are
plenty of people who enjoy other ships alongside the freighter that is
Johnlock, the connection between Sherlock and John remains a necessary component
of the Holmes and Watson franchise. Even the end of TFP, as they try to give us
a “what happened next” montage of images, they do so under the weight of Mary’s
voice running over it as a framing device. Never are John and Sherlock allowed
to just be together, to talk, to work out SOMETHING between them that seems to
have gone seriously awry.
I’m sad
about the poor writing choices of S4 and the plot holes that Jim Moriarty could
fly his helicopter through, sad about the
loss of meaning in anything in Sherlock beyond enjoying car chases and creepy
clowns, and sad about the twisting of a partnership that has endured for over a
hundred years into something that feels shallow and flat. Also, I can’t help
feeling sad that John had to leave his feet in the bottom of that well.
I believe it was my soul’s fate to happen upon Sherlock post S1 and to become so obsessed with it that I did what I’d never done before which was join a fandom. I came to the show having studied film theory in grad school- film sound, the technology of filmmaking, film semiotics, the inner workings of film scores, the materialism of film production. I had studied narrative theory for years and years. I taught film and television narratives as a university literature instructor of undergraduates for over 15 years. I came to Sherlock prepared to recognize the show’s semantic nuances quite clearly and to delight in them until what was meant to happen for me happened. While I waited unawares I wrote meta.
I wrote Johnlock meta for fun. I found the ship (once I figured out what a ship IS) exciting, titillating. I wrote some mediocre fic. I meta’d like the pro I was. I got hung up on the cinematography, a topic I’d dabbled in but didn’t understand in any honest, practical depth until later. And I began to try to explain how shot selection and camera movement and light and color helped make meaning which I’ve always maintained is the work of the viewer ultimately. I used shipping as my case study. I waffled back and forth, argued with myself and others for the sake of fun and exercising my brain and trying out thoughts. (Wank happened but I’m not interested in talking about tjlc right now.)
So I’d written a lot of meta post S2 about my fave episodes and it turns out that they were lit by the same Director of Photography who also happened to have operated “A” camera on the eps. (Not all DoPs operate and if they do, they don’t always operate “A” camera.) I was meant to meet him. Kismet. Destiny. That was the point. I didn’t know it at the time– I just did what I was compelled to do which was to fangirl. And anyway I had no way to contact him until S3 production began and he began tweeting. I eventually asked him if he meant the real lost Vermeer of TGG to be visible in the cinematography. It was THERE but was it conscious? Yes, it turned out it was. I feel that I have been interested for years in the question of authorial “intentionality” and the transmission of a predetermined, transmitted/telegraphed meaning in narratives for the express reason that I was supposed to recognize this one person’s intelligence– the intelligence of that one person behind the camera. That was my destiny. Sherlock was just the conduit in the end for us to meet and for our acquaintanceship to grow into a cherished friendship.
We had many conversations over the years– both joking and philosophical– about Johnlock. I knew from the start that it was never consciously imprinted into the text in any way by him or the directors he worked with. The phenom kind of mystified and mildly amused him at first. Johnlock eventually grew and grew as a pop culture phenom after S3 so we did have some nuanced discussions about it from time to time- conversations about things like this, for example:
Johnlock was a topic that came up prominently in our final entanglement.
We were friends and have become estranged. But this was right, and we do not want to conceal and obscure it from ourselves as if we had reason to feel ashamed. We are two ships each of which has its goal and course; our paths may cross and we may celebrate a feast together, as we did – and then the good ships rested so quietly in one harbor and one sunshine that it may have looked as if they had reached their goal and as if they had one goal. But then the mighty force of our tasks drove us apart again into different seas and sunny zones, and perhaps we shall never see each other again; perhaps we shall meet again but fail to recognize each other: our exposure to different seas and suns has changed us.
― Roland Barthes
Looking back now it was inevitable I suppose. The context of our last musings on Johnlock and its consequences made it crystal clear to me that the ship is this dangerous kind of cosmic lightning rod. If there are concepts that have mythic-level powers then that ship is one of them. John and Sherlock are these other worldly archetypes with the ability to utterly entrance people, to blind them to sense and to make them fall into a deep obsession with the world of 221b. It’s been that way since “A Study in Scarlet” found its first audience. Imbue Sherlock and John’s story with sex and/or romance and what do you get? I have mainly experienced incredible turmoil and massive psychic destruction.
What do you see going around you now in the fandom after The Final Problem?
Our problem. The final problem. Have you figured it out yet?
Sherlock beguiles us. Johnlock entices us from our moorings.
The final problem is fucking Johnlock.
The bastard form of mass culture is humiliated repetition… always new books, new programs, new films, news items, but always the same meaning.
-Roland Barthes
What is the meaning of Johnlock? How in rereading it might we disarm its power over us?
Oh yeah, the political part!
Here is one example of Johnlock at play in the wild. How many months were spent by how many people (most of them female let’s be honest) who were convinced that is would have been a Very Good Idea for Mofftiss (an imaginary entity) to HIDE the sexual attraction/romance between two men for YEARS until a grand reveal- a reveal that was, however, only anticipated, only visible to those in the know, with the secret keys to decode The Love That Dare Not Speak Its Name?
Why the draw? It’s not just powerful adults brainwashing the queer youth as tumblr would have you believe. No. Johnlock is a vortex, a shorthand for every kind of power implied by the inner workings of its narrative. Sex, drugs, infidelity, secrecy, shame, hubris, ego, hedonism, desire, bodily fluids. Johnlock is inherently political.
Johnlock is the pattern formed when magnetic shavings collide on a table. It’s the phallus, the phalluses, in the steel dust.
How many problematic things come to fruition in The Final Problem? Sexism. The erasure of race (a non issue). The worship of the male genius, the pathologizing of the female, the fetish for the trappings of wealth, class difference as comedy, the unbearable romanticization of the Byronic…junkie, smackhead, who everyone serves. (How does Wiggins get by I wonder?)
I loved the episode– not because it wrapped everything up in a bow of domestic bliss and semantic certainty, but because it did quite the opposite. It blew apart– literally blew apart– the domestic petri dish that gave birth to Johnlock. And in the 221b explosion went the trappings of some twisted homonormative imperative marriage plot demanded by the show’s most obsessed, most rabid fans in the name of queer representation “a happy ending.” Those fans who degraded and damaged hundreds of real people in the name of fidelity to the coupling of TV show characters and the author-gods they made and worshiped like…dads.
Somehow The Final Problem broke the fucking spell. It derailed the fantasy and dismantled, in many permanent ways, the Johnlock “community.”
Moffat and Gatiss laid waste to Mofftiss.
We laid waste to us.
Wow. What a reading! I don’t agree with some of it (and on other points, I’m undecided), but this is a virtuoso reading. Incredibly thought-provoking a and productively challenging. Thanks, @mid0nz. This is such a valuable contribution.
I enjoyed this read, too. It articulates something I really enjoyed about TFP, and also why I’m actually HAPPY that they did not offer up the “happy ending” TJLC crowd demanded, and strongly feel that the rupture of it all is so much more desirable a consummation.
That said, I also loved the space they left for domesticity and bliss. Quite a trick, I thought.
Fascinating and well-articulated theory, but not one that rings true for me. As an older Johnlocker (who was NOT predisposed to seek slash themes in the show), I believe this theory glosses over the culpability of the writers in making Johnlock not only a viable reading of the show, but a very likely reading. The evidence for future Johnlock was overwhelmingly strong in the first three seasons, and millions of fans saw it, trusted the writers, took Johnlock to heart, and loved it passionately.
What “Moftiss” did in S4 was a form of character assassination (especially with John), and showed a meanness of spirit that took us all by surprise. Moftiss fathered Johnlock, promoted it, reveled in it, took credit for its subtle (and not-so-subtle) brilliance, and were happy when the show exploded into fame. Why they changed horses mid-stream and cruelly denounced the very fans who loved and supported Sherlock the most for seeing what they saw, hearing what they heard, believing in Johnlock as they did….well, they have some ‘splainin’ to do.
The Final Problem was a big mess, full of plot holes, contradictions and character behaviors that just don’t make sense in the canon of Sherlock past. SHERLOCK was glorious. And now, none of us can know what is to come, if it is to continue, or if Moffat and Gatiss will seek to cure the disease that afflicted S4. S4 was Mary-centric in its character arc. Redeeming Mary was beyond the pale, and ending TFP with a Mary voice-over about HER Baker Street Boys was a travesty. Mary was elevated at the expense of Sherlock and John, both. To what end?–To deny Johnlock? Throwing the baby out with the bath water is what happened. What a sad, unsatisfying ending to the glorious show that was SHERLOCK.
<p>Tfw when amazing, clever people like @thanangst articulate your every thought much more eloquently than you ever could. Thank you for this.
The evidence of Johnlock did not only blow me away during the first three seasons; especially the TLD scene with Chekov’s “romantic entanglement” and “I wanted more, and I still do” made it pretty much… inescapable to me. I left TLD in high spirits, absolutely convinced–with every fibre of my being–that TFP would bring canon Johnlock: the only logical resolution for the narrative that kept steadily building towards it, and nothing else. “Great to good”? I think that was sherlock in s3 already. “The final problem”–what? Staying alive? TLD: “I don’t want to die.” All done before TFP aired. What was TFP, then? The necessary bone thrown to sensationalist, entertainment-hungry audiences that expected a grand finale–one that was not queer?
Sherlock was never about the cases or the action or the STORIES, like TFP tried to sell us. It was from the very start the “John and Sherlock show,” and if that narrative arc should have been a platonic one then they should have shown John getting married, Sherlock being happy about it and them continuing to solve crimes after the wedding as best friends, content to be so. But we got TSoT, the tarmac, the coming back to life, TAB, TLD. You don’t build these elements into the story to not have them go off. If it was supposed to be some quietly titillating queer subtext for a minority of viewers, okay, knock yourself out–a hint here, an allusion there… but don’t structure your story like this.
but s4 as a whole is a mess to me, anyway. I’m still trying to rationalise John’s character arc. I understand it in parts–the breakdown in TLD was the required catharsis–but I remain undecided on the necessity of beating Sherlock. Likewise was Mary’s redemption arc not a redemption arc at all; it should not have happened; Mary should have gone the path that was so clearly laid for her, but she didn’t. Iceman Mycroft shrinking away from blood? Soldier John, steady and stoic, being unable shoot a man? Sherlock, the forever child, suddenly always having been the grown up? The retconning of a three subversive seasons with a patronising voice over of a character meant to be a villain? Mad woman in the attic–the necessarily mad genius because she’s a she? a baby i was supposed to care about but which didn’t actually make it into the show at all, leaving me cold? The INCREDULITY of blowing 221b up and I just don’t care at all? The back story of the protagonist revealed–arguably the climax–and it’s so weak, so badly done, even non-Johnlockers shout it’s fake because it’s just so bad?
Welcome to sherlock season four. Where every established story writing rule is laid to rest and consistency and narrative arcs matter no longer.
i think it was the idea to give sherlock a back story. some fucked up childhood background to explain how he became the man he is today. the premise here is: there’s something wrong with this man and we’re going to be the first ones to explain why. and that’s where it started to go to shit. because there’s no need to give sherlock a difficult past or a childhood trauma to explain the way he is. apart from the fact that there was never anything wrong with canon holmes that had to be explained, their version of sherlock, with his habits and obsessions, has always been… a more extreme version of canon holmes (see: drug use etc) but there was still nothing wrong with him that had to be explained away
they had a chance to convey this beautiful uplifting message; you can be deeply flawed, gifted but troubled, struggling with addiction, gay, lonely, suicidal, afraid of committment, possibly on the autism spectrum (not making an absolute statement concerning sherlock here because i’m not educated enough on this topic, correct me pls), you can make it to your mid-thirties as a virgin, and none of this means you’re not an amazing fantastic person, admired by many and still able to find the love of your life. like. that’s what it could have been i guess?
but it’s none of this. sherlock would be a totally normal dudebro with friends and relationships if *spins wheel* his mad sister hadn’t been institutionalized by his 13 year-old brother for *rolls dice* arson and murder at age 5 and “consults ouija board” the dog hadn’t been a child with an eye patch. boom mystery solved. thank god we figured out why this weirdo is not normal lol
I’ve been venting about many of my S4 disappointments – and I swear, I’m almost done – but in some ways, this is the toughest one for me.
I’m so disappointed in the lack of John and Sherlock moments in this season – the real ones, the ones with all the chemistry. The plots they chose for these 3 episodes were nearly devoid of any moments with the two of them together. We got one magnificent hug, yes – but in 3 90-minute episodes, we have shockingly few scenes with the two leads, together, alone.
Watching the new eps, I started to get the feeling that John and Sherlock were being chaperoned. And I’m not saying that Moftiss did this on purpose. But here’s the breakdown, episode by episode:
@marsdaydream and @alexxphoenix42, thank you for articulating what has been bothering me so well. They are chaperoned and mediated to death. Any intimacy was triangulated or usurped by a woman. This feels very deliberate.
So I’ve had some more time to think about S4, and while I am more sanguine about S4 than some fans, and I can see some of the good stuff, I do have some reservations. The biggest relates to our dearest John Watson.
I know many people have been saying this, or something like it, for a couple of weeks now, but if S4 really is this—just this and nothing more—here is my question for Mofftiss: What was John for?
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