myladylyssa:

redscudery:

madresearcher:

tea-and-liminality:

melrosing:

ravenmorganleigh:

melrosing:

unreconstructedfangirl:

doctornerdington:

pennypaperbrain:

OK, one other thing because this is deadly serious.

We’re seeing various posts about young people calling suicide lines etc because tjlc didn’t happen.

If you are an adult and you encouraged teenagers to invest in this *barefaced drivel* you need to look at yourself a little. It only takes a basic understanding of the world to realise that powerful mainstream male British media creators were never going to shape their commercial project around the dreams of young, queer, mostly-American fans. However fair or unfair it is, it’s starkly obvious. And then they told us outright, time and again.

Don’t wank, don’t scream, just think harder next time, because yes, it is serious.

I haven’t commented on the acronym-of-doom much, not wanting to be doomed, myself. However. I have been increasingly worried about the mental health of some proponents and, especially, some acolytes. And I absolutely agree with Penny that much of this “movement” or whatever has been driven by some seriously irresponsible adults.

Investing yourself in fandom? AWESOME! Shipping? AWESOME. But encouraging dogmatic belief is almost never a cool thing to do. I’m not saying this to hurt people who are hurting. I am genuinely sorry for your pain. But it didn’t have to be this way – it didn’t have to hurt so many people so much.

IMO, what happened here was an impressive and spontaneous attempt to engage in academic-style textual analysis – but crucially it missed the checks and balances stage: the peer review. That’s the part where you ask for wide input on your reading, where you consider the critiques, and incorporate them into your revised argument in order to make it stronger and more valid. It is ESSENTIAL. It hurts and it’s hard, but it is necessary. Fandom is so instant and so insular that peer review is easy to avoid. “Don’t like it? Block me!” I’m as guilty of that as anyone. But wow, in this case it has been dangerous. That’s something for all of us to think about and reflect on.

I love you, fandom. I’m sorry so many of you are hurting.

Agree wholeheartedly.

Big fat rant incoming.

The adults who encouraged this need to take some responsibility right now. I don’t doubt it when there are fans who say they’re feel on the brink of harming themselves, because I’ve been watching TJLC build them up for this for literally years.

When Moffat and Gatiss said in interviews they would not write a Johnlock ending, I saw TJLC kids having their ‘doubts’, and I thought, good, best they have them before the show airs and it really knocks them for six. But then I saw twenty-somethings and thirty-somethings telling them never to doubt, that they could absolutely afford to invest all hope in this because there was no way it wasn’t happening.

And these same older fans created an environment where anyone who couldn’t see the inevitable Johnlock ending ahead was at best foolish, at worst actively homophobic. There was no middle ground – there was only ‘you’re right or you’re wrong, and you’re going to feel so stupid when John and Sherlock kiss and you were wrong the whole time.’

And whilst claiming this ethical high ground, these adults claimed that all academia was behind this ONE reading of this ONE show. For a kid who hasn’t engaged in critical analysis and academia, this becomes pretty convincing when you’ve heard it enough.

These adults knew they were dealing with queer kids, many of whom had mental illnesses, and they not only watched these kids lay all their hopes and happiness on the uncertain future of a TV show, but actively encouraged it because of their own inability to admit they might possibly be wrong.

But now they want to blame the resulting carnage on the writers? The writers who have always, always, always said they were never going to write Johnlock? Anyone remember this interview?

“[…] There is no hidden or exposed agenda. We’re not trying to fuck with people’s heads. Not trying to insult anybody or make any kind of issue out of it, there’s nothing there. It’s just our show and that’s what these characters are like. If people want to do that on websites absolutely fine. But there’s nothing there.” (x) Mark Gatiss, 2016

I remember when this interview came out, because it caused a hell of a lot of backlash. And I remember exactly the blogs that led the way in insisting that Moffat and Gatiss were ‘lying liars who lie’ and nothing they ever said could possibly be true and everyone should continue in their blind doubt. This would’ve been an excellent opportunity for a lot of TJLCers to start rationing their hopes for a Johnlock ending, but the opportunity wasn’t taken because for a group of grown women, it was more important that they were fucking right.

Even when The Six Thatchers came out, we started seeing theories that it wasn’t even a real episode – hell, we’re getting those theories NOW about The Final Problem. They’re not reasonable, and they’re doing damage to people who cannot afford to invest anymore hope in this. If you are an influential TJLC blogger who has advocated blind belief in this theory, you now owe it to your followers to get a grip.

I’ve sympathy for those who are feeling hurt and disappointed right now, and I have endless sympathy for the desire to see LGBT+ representation on television, but BBC Sherlock was clearly not the basket for your eggs. Yet TJLC has been shrouded in cult-like denial for years and this was always going to be the result.

I don’t think it is productive to try and lay the blame at anyone’s feet in particular, but to acknowledge WHY these kids are feeling the way they are, and the fact that it is NOT because two writers, who none of you know personally, and who have always denied they would write the ending you thought they would, eventually didn’t write the ending you thought they would.

I think we need to be very, very careful about blaming adults in the fandom, when anyone who dared to urge caution was immediately branded homophobic, and “anti” and blocked— in that environment, many people– including older adults simply chose not to engage. 

Not interested in being part of the circular firing squad. 

I’ll agree that the qualifier ‘some’ was needed there. There were plenty of older fans whose voices would’ve eased the tension of this years back if they’d been allowed, but they were shut down. And there have many militant younger fans, definitely. I’ve just been especially troubled by the grown women who have spent the TJLC years using their adult status to claim a mature and experienced outlook on the theory, when it was honestly anything but, and then nominated themselves (seriously) as online mother/big sister figures for the younger fans that followed them… which just added a strange psychological level that meant the younger fans swallowed everything they said like gospel and became basically even more ambivalent to anyone who disagreed because you’re disagreeing with their ‘mom’.

It’s all been a bit creepy tbh.

God, I’m sorry to do this when all people want is TJLC off their dashboards, so I’ll say this quick and tag accordingly. 

Academia has NEVER been in the business of deciding that certain ships will become canon. Never. There has been academic discussion of queerbaiting in Sherlock, discussion of subtext and queer readings, but to the best of my knowledge, there is nothing that ever argued for canonical Johnlock as some kind of thing that would happen – that’s not how scholarship works. And it’s really rich to read that the ringleaders were saying this when they actively ran academics out of the fandom by calling us elitist. I get how people got to TJLC and as far as that goes, fine. My heart goes out to impressionable people who are hurting and never spent time harassing and abusing other fans. But I have less than no sympathy for those who did – they still don’t acknowledge it, they still are harassing and blaming everyone but themselves, and I really have nothing but disdain and disgust for them – ESPECIALLY the adults who should have fucking known better.

Right as an academic who has my name on published work to do with Sherlock I’m reblogging for those final comments. Academia didn’t do this.

But while I’m here: There are responsible adults out there who should have been behaving better.

I’m sorry to younger impressionable fans who are hurting, I’m sorry people who should know better did this.

I’m also sorry for all the reasonable people out there who tried to have reasonable discussion and have been harassed and bullied.

I agree so much with all of this, both the anger and bitterness at the cult-like aspects of TJLC and the pain that so many members of our fandom are going through. 

First, though, I want to say that I agree that there was queerbaiting. As a literature person, there were things that were very clearly queer-coded, especially in S1 and S2–it’s why I’m here, ffs. The desire and, to some extent, the expectation that we’d finally see an openly gay Holmes adaptation wasn’t built on nothing. I think Moftiss backed away from that, for whatever reason, and I am pretty pissed about that too. And they have been super condescending and unpleasant to fans. On their part, it’s a failure. 

What has been so frustrating for me in terms of the so-called “academic” readings of Sherlock is the utter refusal to see alternate perspectives. Some of the TJLC meta was, and is, really high-quality, but that quality was compromised when it didn’t allow any deviation from the overall Johnlock is canon/Trust our dads line, which is only like literary scholarship if your literary scholarship is pre-1965.  

However, the main point of my addition to this post is this: Johnlock is not canon. Moftiss never meant it to be canon. And that fucking sucks the big one for every Johnlock shipper, TJLC or no. 

If you’re devastated, no matter who you are, I’m sorry. I’m so sorry. I am too. I watched TFP and I mourned. I’m not even ready to fic. But I am here for everyone who is sad and bereft.

One final thing, especially if you’re really low: watch how people act now. If people are retconning their own actions and words, if they’re denying any kind of responsibility, if they’re saying “It was just a joke”? Maybe they don’t have your best interests at heart. You don’t deserve that, so protect yourself from being used as fodder for someone else’s ego. 

Hi and thank you, @redscudery! I just wanted to add to this discussion that I am also a literature person, an academic, and queer, and I’ve always been fascinated and appreciative of the well-reasoned Johnlock readings and meta. They’ve enhanced my reading of this show and gave me a fun sense of community. This what I am currently writing about, the function and form of the meta.

I really, really wanted Mofftiss to go this route, because of the queer coding, the romance coding. It is there, in abundance. I am highly disappointed, too, but not because of any blind belief, only a fervent wish that maybe, just maybe it would happen, because of what was contained in the text. It was a narrative I knew was purposely (and I thought cleverly) ambiguous. But to what end? I was hoping it was the fun game we wanted it to be. It was not. Now it hard to see it as anything but cruel.

And yet still I wonder–is it queer (in that it refused to set boundaries/concede to binaries and expectations) or queerbaiting or somewhere in between? S4 really threw me for its (to me the no homo) gratuitous het references and the shortchanging of the narrative.

The “gay or trash” has never worked for me–it’s a false binary that undermines complexity.  I’ve tried to stay out of the politics and encourage thought and other perspectives. 

But it doesn’t mean that I’m still not massively disappointed or that the range of TJLC analysis and buy-in hasn’t enriched the experience. I hate when TJLC is seen as a monolith as well, even if there are some problematic aspects.