dusty / eleanor 𖦹°⋆

firstly, you have to take in the social context of the time- tumblr wasn't quite new when superwholock first took off, but this was when it first started gaining almost exponential traction from both fandom and personal bloggers moving away from declining sites such as livejournal and fandom specific archives. suddenly there was a lot of fandom stuff in one place and it was increasingly easy to see create links between under a single heading which leads onto the next point.

all three fandoms all became relatively prominent at roughly the same time due to increased global exposure. sherlock and doctor who, for example, were united by both being bbc dramas with the same showrunner (stephen moffat). they also began to gain traction overseas, particularly in the us and canada at roughly the same time. this was significant especially for doctor who, which while a staple of british culture, assumed a more underground cult status in countries where it wasn't obligatory dinner time entertainment for people of all ages. supernatural was a us show that also began to rise in popularity virtually in tandem with the bbc shows, and due to the nature of tumblr turning fandom from a more niche activity to a readily available pastime (despite still being dubbed 'cringe') this spread out across the site, and the three big fandoms began to appear next to each other, if not yet united.

the third key player was not just rising mutual popularity, but other parallels across the shows, including shared actors (e.g. mark sheppard, who appeared in both supernatural and series six of doctor who, and mark gatiss, who wrote episodes of both doctor who and sherlock and appeared as a vast member in both) and similar plotlines and settings. for example, from season four (five?)(I can't remember exactly and it's too late at night to go trudging through my citations) time travel becomes a semi-regular point of lore on supernatural, and as convuluted and badly worldbuilt as this may be, it opens up the doors for canons such as doctor who. furthermore, the idea of alternate universes/timelines is explored (explicitly) as early as season four of supernatural and has been a fixture of whovian lore since long before that, though the most noteworthy version of this would be the alternate universe that appears in series two of the reboot (rise of the cybermen). doctor who and sherlock both take place in london, and though the genre of shows is quite different, the similar writing style and shared showrunners makes the characters relatively compatible with one another. though sherlock and supernatural share perhaps the most tenuous link of all with regard to content, both shows include a certain detective vibe to them, sherlock for fairly obvious reasons and supernatural through its original premise of solving the mystery of both individual adventures of characters and john winchester's disappearance. this is also tenuously prevelant in doctor who as well, as the show often utilises so called "mystery box arcs" that span a series or two. there has been criticism of this approach, firstly with the impossible girl arc in series seven with regards to the objectification of clara/oswin oswald and in later years with the timeless child, yet this is largely irrelevant to the time period in relation to superwholock, so i won't go into extensive detail. the premises were individually defined, but contained just the right blend of common and disparate features to make crossovers not only interesting to see, but fun to divine. and you can't fault people for seeing the value in that.

this next factor is a little harder to define, because it is built less of subsantial textual evidence but off analysis of source material, so i must ask you bear with me a little. one of the key uniting factors (though it may not have always been admitted, particularly in superwholock's golden days) is the relative incompetence of the respective fandoms. in the year of our lord 2022 and in any future period in which you may be reading this, it would be laughable to suggest that supernatural was a genuinely good show. loveable? yes. addictive? certainly. and was it peppered with moments of such outstanding storytelling and thematic potency that you almost forgot about the actual shitshow that was the main narrative (if you are reading this casually, i am begging you to look up the plotline for season seven, you will lose your MIND)? yes, and this is the key player. supernatural, even more than the others, was a show with so much subtextual potential it could almost be mistaken for good writing, were the rest of the narrative not so batshit insane. there is a similar situation with sherlock: though this is a far more intelligently written show, it is not without its moments of imperfection, moments where its hubris and belief that it is far cleverer than it really is overshadows the narrative framework and breaks the audience's suspension of disbelief (seriously, i CAN'T have been the only one who saw the taxi driver thing in 1.1 coming, that crap drove me up the wall aged fourteen). doctor who, though again not perfect, i would argue that within this period, the worldbuilding is most airtight, purely because the premise of the show would not work without a certain degree of wiggle room. but the fact remains that in each of the franchises, there is a sense of unfulfillment, a lack of catharsis which is a magnet for fandom. people don't get that invested in something they think is perfect because there are no points of contention or debate. people don't write alternate endings or fix it fics if they are totally happy that every plothole was filled or that the ending was something to be desired. and i know i'm veering into the territory or general fandom theory rather than the specific here, but this is a key driver for what turns a popular franchise into a cult fandom!! and with superwholock's components all leaving similar plot points to be filled and concepts to be explored, it was almost inevitable that people would start putting the pattern together and creating parallels where they thought it would be fun..... and we're back to the start. because of the structure of tumblr in relation to its predecessors, it had the new ability to spread like the wacky plague it was.

sorry to be a bore again but i have another contextual point to make. i've already talked about how tumblr marked a new "era" of internet fandom (brief disclaimer: this is from secondary sources. i wasn't around in the 90s-early 00s witness this first hand but i have done my research in hindsight) but there was also a subtle change in format. instead of forum posts and fics lumped together, short textposts became increasingly popular. this was swiftly followed by a rise in manip and gif editing, which allowed for the multimedia manipulation of canon that became so characteristic of superwholock more than anything else. you all know what i'm talking about. those gifs of psychic paper with photoshopped fbi aliases written over them. photosets of sherlock deducing dean's daddy issues or oswin's identity as a dalek. angel statues in salt circles, reaper sequences inside a mind palace. black-eyed motiarty. all that jazz that is impossible to escape, even now. i would argue that without this shift in format, many connections would have never been made because they are most obvious visually. and with three shows that share so many common scenes, this is almost tantalisingly easy to do. obviously giffing is still a thing today, as are textposts, photosets and the rest. but while still popular, they lack the novelty they had in 2011, the novelty that coincided with the emergence of these shows. perhaps at another time, they would still have merged, but not with the same amount of unbridled enthusiasm that they did at the time.

on the subject of giffing, this one isn't so much an origin story but more of an observation of the unhinged, chaotic energy of the supernatural fandom hijacking posts because "omg they have a gif for everything". yes, you could argue that similar dynamics have been reached in recent years, notably the complaints that the dsmp/mcyt community make any textpost about characters/streamers, "taking over" posts, resulting in fan responses such as the "PeniSMP" and other counter movements. yet while this and its combatants exist relatively on the down-low, becoming popular for only a short amount of time, the spn gif-pocalypse lasted for years. and my only real explanation for this is because of the egged on, unbridled popularity of the fandom that quite possible gave some participants god complexes (oh, the irony here) combined with the sheer size and absurdity of the supernatural subject matter (also a psychology identity thing i'll talk about properly in a bit). it may have been deeply annoying for the uninvested, but if you have a gif for an angel of the lord suggesting "nurse roleplay and a little light bondage" or an evil ball of black goo called dick being melted by laundry detergent, you might as well utilise them.

jesus, this post is getting long. nearly done. so, superwholock was a thing. great! (or not great, depending on your perspective). but what now? why was it as big as it was, and why did it last that amount of time? part of those questions has already been more or less answered, but one thing we haven't really touched on yet is the sense of shared identity gained from fandom. now, this is by no means exclusive to superwholock. one of the big appeals of fandom is that sense of shared belonging that comes from a community built from a place of a mutual pleasure. this (and we're finally actually overlapping with the source material of my dissertation? wild) is particularly true of minority groups who may not feel safe to exist as their authentic selves outside a setting where their anonymity can be engineered and they feel safe among their peers of mutual interest. but there is a line where fandom communities veer from an inclusive mindset to an "us and them". "us and them" is appealing, and we're all guilty of it, or have been at some point in our lives. but when unchecked, it can develop into genuine prejudice or a fear of the unknown. in political cases, this can itself in queerphobia, misogyny, racism etc, but in a fandom setting, it can also do damage via exclusion, gaslighting and toxicity. this can be demonstrated through subtle means, such as frustration for superwholock fans to make increasingly obscure references on posts intended for only their fandom to get ("bingle bongle dingle dangle lickity too..." plus increasingly odd depictions of mooses immediately come to mind here. and who could forget the mishapocalypse...) that provokes annoyance from other users to the sadistic delighted of the "in", but also more open conflict, for example the spn vs beiber feud of 2014, which... just google it. i'm not explaining that here. the sheer size of the collective fandom made this a far bigger problem than was usual. everyone would have superwholock on their dash because it infected everything. and nothing since has managed to establish that kind of chokehold and therefore create such animosity in response.

okay. last point. honestly, this could just be summarised in one word: "queerbaiting". we never got canon johnlock, despite subtextual allusions since episode one and the writers and actors alike have remained relatively ambiguous about it. and destiel... WELL. though its denial for so many years may have given us some top class quality, it was still problematic. and the actual confession scene was perhaps worse than fourteen years of agonising sexual repression. on this one, it's safe to say that legacy does the explaining for you. but queerbaiting has the triple purpose of attracting both queer fans for representation, slow burn fans for the build up. but... this particular period of fandom culture had a pretty large problem regarding the fetishisation of mlm couples, which may have attracted some people to the sherlock and spn respectively, and by extension doctor who. i'm not mlm so i'm not going to analyse this too deeply, but i think it's important to recognise as a factor, and if you are mlm and would like to add to this, please do.

so... yeah. none of these factors on their own, or even a combination of one or two, would have created the once invincible, many headed beast that was superwholock, but it was the unlikely combination of all, plus many more which i probably failed to notice/mention. superwholock was different to other "big threes" that have emerged over fandom because unlike them, it was greater than the sum of its parts, by which, of course, i mean that it was so large and convuluted and hit the internet at such an insane time that it could never have been anything else.

my mom is in fact aware that dandelions exist. she temporarily forgot the name and there was some miscommunication.

the truth is actually weirder

she’s aware dandelions look like this

she is familiar with this flower. she knows the name of this flower. she declines to believe, however, that these are also dandelions

she does not believe these are the same plant. I tried to explain, and she thought I was either misinformed or lying. so I asked her what exactly did she think the yellow ones were called?

gosh I enjoy this website

happy pride! remember that being a transgender is everything but fiction. there are so many real historical figures from every century about whose transgender identities we aren't even aware of