Something I know no one will ever contend with when they just want to write a hit piece about us, but…
When Moffat said on the A Scandal in Belgravia commentary, “If you watch the show carefully, there’s subtext about John’s drinking,” what did he mean? He wasn’t being flippant, he’s said one of his favorite writers is William Goldman and writers should study him because he “knows everything.” Goldman’s Ten Commandments on Writing say to “put a subtext under every text” and not to be too on the nose.
So what is the “real” subtext to why John drinks, and why does John drink when he’s alone with Sherlock and trying to get him to open up, or otherwise thinking about Sherlock? If the subtext is not about John’s relationship with Sherlock, then like… who else is in the room in those scenes, what’s going on, who is John actually thinking about, and why is it so important to the story that Moffat would include it? What storyline does the subtext of John’s drinking pertain to? It must be pretty big to not have been revealed yet, so it shouldn’t be hard to make a case for.
Similarly: When Moffat and Gatiss say that The Private Life of Sherlock Holmes, a movie noteworthy for depicting Holmes as a homosexual in love with Watson, is the inspiration for their adaptation, what do people imagine they adapted from it? Because it wasn’t the characterization, they don’t much resemble the BBC Sherlock characterizations. Barely any plot points were borrowed, and minor ones at that. Why did they pick the big overtly gay adaptation for the basis of their show from a hundred straight alternatives? Why did Gatiss say the thing he liked about it was that Holmes was in love with Watson?
I mean, I know people who hate us will never actually watch it, but the movie is not subtle. The movie isn’t a bunch of gay gags, the movie makes very clear that Holmes is genuinely homosexual and in love with Watson in a deeply painful way that queer people can recognize and relate to, and the same vibe is heavy in series 3 especially. For example, the endings of TSoT and HLV are not gay gags, they are things that happened in the plot and were not presented as remotely funny.
There are two reasonable perspectives on this:
1) It is not especially weird for people who pay attention to what the writers have said about their stories to think all the gay stuff is intentional, and its not weird to have fun chasing down things the writers have taken care to talk about. That’s what fans do, they try to predict where stories are going. No one made hit pieces ridiculing Jon and Daeneyrs shippers because they recognized what the foreshadowing in Game of Thrones was saying, and they were basing it off almost nothing compared to what the showrunners of Sherlock have said and taken care to include in the plot and subtext. People write hit pieces about us because they deeply believe it’s stupid for queer people to think a gay romance could be depicted, we had the misfortune of having a sense of humor about ourselves (calling it a “conspiracy” and ourselves a “cult”), and were enthusiastic about the show and writers whose fandom we’re a part of.
2) The gay stuff is intentional, but all a big joke despite appearances to the contrary. Most of the antis even argued that the gay stuff was intentional, they just thought it was to fuck with people or be provocative. Some of them were even dreading S4, including while it was airing, because they thought we were going to be proven right and we’d be insufferable. If people who hated us worried we could be right, then how delusional could we be?
I can understand someone thinking it all being a big joke is more likely than a TV show depicting a gay romance, but it does not follow that people deserve to be an object of public ridicule because they recognized a bunch of queer allusions and painful queer life experiences that resonated with them and considered that the writers, one of whom is queer and unabashedly obsessed with the works in question, may have positive motives for including those things. It feels like punishing people for doing their due diligence of actually researching the writers’ feelings about things and their influences, rather than just piling on and calling them homophobes. I’m not trying to invalidate anyone’s opinions if that’s how they feel about Moffat and Gatiss nowadays, I’m just saying it’s not some shameful thing for people to actually investigate these things and conclude differently. It’s okay to think writers are talented and clever, and their fandom should be a place where it’s okay to explore that.
What makes me most sad about this is that there is genuinely no area of life where people can just play around anymore without being hunted down. Like, politics is fucking miserable, the pandemic is miserable, I just had a friend kill himself a few months ago because of how bad life is lately, a close relative who I never thought would have suicidal ideation has it now, I have been fighting wanting to die for years, in the U.S. none of us have any idea if we’re ever getting any sort of pandemic stimulus again – so many of us are suffering immensely right now, it should be okay to be goofy and creative in a fandom without someone deciding its their prerogative to profit off us because they think we’re weird, or whatever.
The reason there’s a lot of crazy meta analysis is because this was supposed to be a relatively safe, creative place where people can try their hand at analyzing stories without being graded or made to feel inadequate, so we treat metas a lot like fanfics where it’s not really appropriate to just rip people’s shit apart no matter how illogical it is, and we find things we like about analysis we don’t agree with in that same spirit: it’s a cool idea anyway, it’s artistically inspiring, it got close to a more compelling idea, etc. I have a big packet of fan mails where several people told me they had been scared and self-conscious to share their thoughts on things, and TJLC helped them open up and inspired them to major in literary or film-related majors. People start somewhere and it’s cruel to make fun of them because they weren’t great at something that doesn’t fucking matter.
FANDOM IS NOT SUPPOSED TO BE A SUPER SERIOUS SPACE. NO ONE PUTS ON A TUXEDO BEFORE THEY LOG IN TO TUMBLR. NO ONE NEEDS SOME OUTSIDER TAKING THE THINGS THEY OFFERED IN THE SPIRIT OF FUN OUT OF CONTEXT TO PRESENT TO A WIDER AUDIENCE THEY DELIBERATELY AVOID BECAUSE THAT AUDIENCE IS MEAN AND SENDS THEM DEATH THREATS AND HOMOPHOBIC AND MISOGYNISTIC SLURS AND SUICIDE ADVICE. IT IS ACTUALLY NOT AN ENORMOUS CHARACTER FAILING TO SHARE BAD ANALYSES OF A TV SHOW, AND SHOULD NOT BE A MATTER OF NATIONAL INTEREST.
But places where people can open up and try things out increasingly can’t exist anymore, because even in a low stakes environment like a fandom there are busybody ghouls who want to profit off being condescending about how people spend their leisure time. It doesn’t add anything to the world except their bank accounts.
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