Ruby Dixon is one of my favorite sci-fi romance writers, one of the few whose sex scenes and romantic scenes work for me equally well, because they’re so well integrated into the overall characterization. Beyond that, I’d have thought that I’m always thinking like a writer, but I have to say it never occurred to me to literally analyze Ruby’s sex scenes. But it’s actually a really good idea, and I think that if you’re a writer who’s remotely likely to write sex, you should give this essay a read. Below is Jan O’Hara’s own summary.

Applying the Lessons:

→Create characters who have divergent expectations and understandings about what a given sex act signifies.

→Unless their sex act occurs at the end of the story and is signifies a couple’s resolved interpersonal conflicts, create a sex-specific point of conflict that will impact each individual’s internal and external story goals.

→Find a series written by one author with sex scenes akin to those you’d like to write. Study how they create different moods and meanings within the same sexual act. Specifically note the amount of time devoted to describing body mechanics versus the emotional experience of the body mechanics. Note the language used for body parts and how they reflect the individual’s education, culture, and social background.

→Does your story world include gender politics? (If writing any form of realism, it probably should.) If so, can you make the future couple embody opposite points of view on a sexual or reproductive issue? Alternatively, can you make your couple’s sexual conflict create consequences that will ripple through the public realm?

→What does your character go into the sex scene believing? By the scene’s end, how are they changed? (In other words, sex scenes should contain a character arc.)

I can only assume I used to be a lot more laid-back, less analytical than I am now. Plenty of total nerds love Star Trek, though, and even write books like 'The Physics of Star Trek'. To be clear, I admire that sort of analysis; analysis should be fun. Unfortunately, though, TNG came on cable recently and all I could think was that it really pained me that in a roomful of aliens, everyone was human. Human, human, human. Ugh.

This is another nerd thing, I realize that. This is the flavor of tilting-at-windmills some teenage fanboys in particular seem to like, right up there with whining about why certain writers can't be faster and how sci-fi didn't use to include so many people of color. Or perhaps that's not fair, and it's more the people who went on and on about how Luke Skywalker Was Wronged. But no. Isn't this arguing about certain foundational things that no one does or should care about? After all, everyone accepts that budgets are what they are, and humans don't care about aliens anyway. It's just... the latter really frustrates me, when you're talking about aliens, you know? It seems childish, or patronizing the childish audience, perhaps.

The fact is, I'd group 'human aliens' with a bunch of things we just accept in genre fiction, or the price of admission. So it's actually more like complaining about 'fated mates' in sci-fi romance or how everyone is inevitably made hot in Hollywood adaptations. To be honest, those things do irritate me too. You could-- or possibly should-- add that it depends on how it's done. That's the reasonable way to go. But the way I feel that it needs to be done is for some lip-service to exist, some justification either for the 'human alien' or the 'fated mate' scenario in question. Star Trek TNG often doesn't bother having the aliens even be a different color. Often they're just white people with different ears or noses. Possibly you could do horns.

Sadly, I very much relate to the whiny nerds, for I am one of them, even though this is the sort of thing I handwaved away with BBC Sherlock. Plenty of analytical people in fandom complained about how the cases (or their resolution) didn't make sense for one reason or another. This was particularly true in Series 4, though there were always those grumbles. I myself never cared, because I was there for characterization and style. Still, when the 'heightened reality' genre is badly done, or you're not distracted by the characterization, it grates. Sort of like going to an amateur theater hour where everyone's wearing third-rate paper costumes.

I complain, even if inconsistently, of course, while I realize that certain silly tropes allow the very concept of 'genre'. A trailblazing work like LoTR crosses every t and dots every i; JRR Tolkien even created a language and a fictional history book to suit. He went back to the original legends and their languages and made something of them. The people writing in the epic fantasy *genre* can-- and often do-- just wave in the direction of what elves are and what they're doing, then throwing in an evil master and a few other magical races. Many writers focus on the character relationships and take the plot elements a bit for granted. Or more than a bit. After all, genre fans have been there, done that. We can connect the dots, right? And a source such as Conan Doyle might be more rigorous than its adaptations in BBC Sherlock in some ways, but plenty of people famously laugh about the timeline errors. So not every writer's idea of 'serious work' is the same, or perhaps it's more accurate to say that Conan Doyle was never truly serious about Sherlock Holmes regardless. From what I can tell, Moffat and Gatiss *were* serious, but had different priorities and interests.

One thing I've noticed is that different writers as well as audiences have different attitudes and approaches to the idea of logical consistency in fiction, or 'common sense'. Like, certainly, it's common sense that actual aliens would have to be alien (and very not-human), communication across species would be very difficult, and love takes time. That said, it's certainly inconvenient. Just like certain plot points would not be easily overlooked (unless they're handwaved away), such as Sherlock's fake suicide and subsequent torture in Eastern Europe. That too is inconvenient. How important is it that things stand up to logical analysis depends on the individual, though. If I had to guess, I'd say most people care more about how a story makes them *feel*. Even writers.

I was still thinking about the discussion about Mary's self-sacrifice in TST, and the projection in both directions by the fans who were mothers. Whether people said a mother *would* or *could* do it or couldn't (and both were important), the underlying assumption was that this personal experience was somehow relevant and important, or should be. Like, Mofftiss would have something to answer for if they portrayed 'mothers of newborns' as a group incorrectly somehow. Mary's status as a mother was relevant either as representative of the 'typical' mother, devoted only to her child, or the 'modern' mother, who's got other things she cares about. Regardless of where you stand on this, the assumption that using a given person's anecdotal experience as a frame is *relevant* wasn't questioned. Of course Mary is automatically representative of 'real' mothers, and of course this means you, if you too are a real mother. John's status as a father is not really representative, probably because most people in fandom aren't fathers, and of course men aren't nearly as socially defined or dependent on their fatherhood for a sense of identity.

My point is that I just realized people genuinely seem to think projection (or, logic using yourself and your life experiences) is not only sound but *important* to use, as a matter of fact. It's not that people are just blissfully unaware this is not a sound basis for analysis. It struck me that because this is *natural* for how people relate to fiction (using themselves and their experience as a guide), the conclusion is that this is how they *should* think about it. I can't even argue with that logic; it's not as if there are rules to being an audience, when Steven Moffat thinks there are no rules to writing, either. Unfortunately, of course, if there's no guidelines, no one's going to be on the same page, in the end. Satisfaction is very much *not* guaranteed, given people insist on using a different language, one the text doesn't speak. In the end, people blame the show for this (which I don't think is helpful), but I suppose blaming their own expectations and experiences wouldn't be a good idea either.

It seems that my reply to @smirkdoctor's post on what would happen if we let problematic things in fiction go unchecked was off-base, 'cause the question was about fandom resistance to con-crit. That is definitely something near and dear to my heart. I certainly think fandom could use more facility with genuine criticism of the media we consume, more comfort with it, more understanding of its uses and its importance. But.

Yeah, there's certainly a but. I guess it's hard to explain if you don't intuitively get the difference or the shadings of nuance between critique (even strong critique) and *negativity*. Some people are also overly sensitive, which doesn't help. But the thing is that what I consider 'true' critique isn't *at all* negative. It's just neutral; it's analysis, not a rant. The issue is, what people call con-crit in fandom (and the thing that gives it a bad name) is actually complaining, ranting and so on. No one likes that except for people who already agree with you, and feel the same.

Of course, it's not that there isn't a place in fandom for letting off steam; quite the contrary: there's as much of that as there is squee (if not more, at least on Tumblr). Still, by its very nature, negativity brings you down. People who just want to enjoy their favorite show (even analytically), at least, are bound to be frustrated with such 'critique'. This is particularly the case when a good number of the ranty critical posts actually misread, misrepresent and/or misunderstand some core aspect of the text and/or characterization. That's definitely unpleasant, at least speaking for myself.

I think this sort of conflict is an unnecessary but perhaps inevitable misunderstanding, in the end, of the sort that often happens between warmer feeling-centric types and cooler analysis-centric types of people. The feelers just wanna feel good, and the thinkers just wanna understand, and this makes them feel good (needless to say, this is an exaggeration for effect, seeing as it's not really a binary). I'm a feeler who just wants to understand, so I get the best and worst of both worlds: usually, I get frustrated both because I just want to enjoy my favorite media *and* because people are wrong on the internets. I guess my point is, a) not all media or fic critique is created equal, and a lot of people seem to think using emotionally charged words or concepts like 'representation' or 'homophobia', 'racism', etc, substitutes for actually doing some real analysis or close reading of the text. And b), there's also precious little positive or canon-friendly close readings in most fandoms I've seen, with some glorious exceptions in the bigger fandoms (this must actually be a big reason why I've been so attracted to TJLC intellectually: it's positive criticism by its very nature).

The biggest issue is probably still a more general misunderstanding of the difference between criticism and negativity, of course. That's true even though, well, a lot of people's critiques *are* quite negative, usually 'cause they're clearly writing to complain rather than simply to expand upon some problematic aspect of the text. That's just... a question of the nature of fandom and the platform, and the fact that we're not writing academic papers (which are edited for clarity and then edited again for tone, among other things). Anyway, the negativity is what ensures people will get fed up, not the analysis itself. Note, criticism is really just analysis that happens to point out flaws or inconsistencies, which is simply part of its nature. Ranting is when it gets personal, and starts proclaiming or demanding consequences and/or passing for activism.

To be clear, analysis is not activism. Hell, fandom meta is not activism. Of course, it can *inspire* or generate such activity; I'm just saying the meta itself is not equivalent to or equipped to pass for radical action to combat racism, homophobia, etc etc. Meta can certainly be used to raise awareness to some degree, as any communication or community building can accomplish, but that's not its responsibility or the primary function, either of fandom meta or of the mass media. People seem to kind of... miss this on Tumblr sometimes. A lot of times.

monalisa72 replied to your post: What is a plausible theory?

So looking at your older post, you talk about checking to see whether a theory fits the plot arc, whether a reading integrates with character development. What do you do when faced with a canon like TFP, where things have gone so off the rails that it seems we’re expected to suspend even the laws of physics? How do we determine what is a reasonable theory when faced with implausible canon?

This is hard for me to answer, ‘cause I have to assume and integrate a response that I just didn’t have as a viewer, myself. Still, I’ve been trying!  

Basically: separate what’s implausible from what’s not your headcanon, a genre mismatch issue, or simply flawed execution of a fundamentally sound resolution on its own terms. A critique can coexist with comprehension, or seeing how a development does fit into Sherlock’s arc... even if it’s not the way I would have done it. I’m sure confused people would prefer more details, though.

For what it's worth, even though I admit I was wrong, it seems a bit ironic that the main arguments people have against TJLC still ring false to me. Possibly because they haven't evolved with the times. Quite the opposite: there's many signs of the same old fannish polarization we see in society at large in response to divisive social or political issues. I guess saying 'well, that wasn't what they were going for after all, but good points!' doesn't quite give people that certain... schadenfreude. So the arguments I do hear are, 1) Moffat and Gatiss are bad writers; 2) Moffat and Gatiss should simply always have been taken at their word. There's also 3) we're reading too much into things and indulging in confirmation bias. One is perhaps a little subjective but largely obviously incorrect (look at the awards, if nothing else), and two is objectively ill-advised, since they've said they lie and cannot be trusted multiple times. Personally, I've always had a particular sore spot for the argument that boils down to 'Moffat and Gatiss are bad writers', and I take issue with those who argue against or otherwise mock the idea of canon Johnlock without both understanding and loving the show first. Even so, I realize it can be difficult to understand both perspectives at once. I just think it's important to integrate if there's any desire to engage with the different sides of the Johnlock fandom, and honestly the Sherlockians at large at this point.

The core of the issue cognitively might be summarized by the TJLC interpretation of this quote by Moffat: he initially said they wanted to do the show not just to update it but to correct everyone else, to say 'Now this is the way it should be done'. This ties in with all the hype-- and the hope-- about the BBC LGBT report and the way the BBC hyped Series 4 as 'making history', though I personally was taking a break from fandom at the time and in any case, always take such things with a grain of salt (at best). My point is that there's certainly been circumstances aside from 'confirmation bias' that lead people to think something a bit bigger and more exciting than... Sherlock's origin story and journey to being a 'good man' was going on, which culminated in TFP, as @ivyblossom described. That is (more or less) what I currently think Mofftiss were *going for* with that quote, but the fact is that Gatiss admitted he's interested in 'flirting with the homoeroticism in Sherlock', and they certainly followed through with that on a large scale. I think that it's a bit of a case of po-tay-to/po-tah-to, honestly. When you build a character growth arc where the main character is being 'humanized' by his relationship with his colleague/best friend/conductor of light/family, *and* you add many classic romantic tropes and rampant queer coding and subtextual homoeroticism... what you have is a love story, pure and simple.

Regardless of intent, it exists and is valid at least as much as an accented pronunciation of the same word would be equally 'valid'. In Sherlock's case, I would argue they'd gone far enough (too far) with the subtext and tropes, and indeed the romantic reading became the primary, most fully correct textual reading. At this point, I imagine this situation got out of Moffat and Gatiss's control... which is a huge challenge for any writer, and one that they didn't really address (in part because of a penchant for self-indulgence, I think), but this still doesn't make them *bad writers*, per se.

Obviously, I'm not saying this in self-defense or to 'prove' explicitly romantic canon Johnlock at this point. Besides, I do think that critique number three makes a good point, in that plenty of meta *was* reading too much into things, but you can say that about any type of meta, of any flavor. For example, I realize I tried way too hard to deny the surface reading of HLV, which... I clearly should have integrated more closely instead, if the Mary storyline resolution in TST is any indication. And many, many people enjoy speculation and pattern-matching and playing with metaphors or symbolism, but don't make a hobby of analyzing either their own thinking or other people's, perhaps understandably. Many fans who had donned the 'conspiracist hat' haven't been as vigilant as we could be about other people's analyses, never mind our own work. Anyway, overall, I still think any truly competent literary/media critic of BBC Sherlock I've ever seen would have to acknowledge the queer/romantic subtext in it at some point, even if they disagreed or simply wouldn't care about it becoming explicitly textual. So just as a total lit nerd, it's unfortunate that people can now continue to think that being dismissive and heteronormative is somehow a superior mode in analysis. And it's also unfortunate that 'bad writing' continues to be a one-size-fits-all approach to excusing one's lack of understanding of the show's deeper layers, more or less.

Basically, my point is that I still believe that Moffat and Gatiss are good-- or at least intelligent, often complex and certainly fundamentally competent-- writers in many ways. They do have their own preset ideas about what they want and don't always communicate those ideas to the broader audience effectively. And I have to further qualify that by saying that the thing I object to is dismissive thinking and 'explaining' stuff that doesn't make sense in the text with the offhand response that 'the writers suck'; I don't mean you can't simply have that as a subjective opinion, obviously, or critique the lack of follow-through in the writing. I definitely need to admit that they can be sloppy and leave plot holes when they lose interest in following up on the details, or introduce significant plot elements that they try to build and build without slowing down and integrating properly. I think @girlofthemirror's postmortem on what went wrong in Series 4 definitely speaks to this issue of too many 'spinning plates' in the plot and no room to breathe, particularly starting with Series 3. Just like Sherlock, they can get arrogant and try to be too clever for their own good. Worse than simple plot holes fixed by mild retcons, like Eurus shooting John with a tranquilizer, or the genre-related writing choices that @plaidadder took issue with in TFP, there's the truly unfortunately executed stuff like Mary's arc or that baby. Including a baby as a plot device to keep John and Mary together and then basically doing nothing else with it is inexcusable. Even with all those caveats, Moffat and Gatiss are so good in other ways that I really don't think you can hand-wave all analysis with 'it's just incompetence', surely.

I get that the true reason for the fake!TFP theory is simply that the episode 'feels' wrong, too different from the rest, as @deducingbbcsherlock wrote. If I step away a bit, I get that feeling too. I just don't trust that feeling, as I know it's deceptive for the purposes of analysis. When things feel wrong intuitively, it's human nature to think there's an explanation that suits the facts as we perceive them. A lot of times, though, there is no such explanation, because the questions we're asking are subjective or essentially emotive in some way. Like 'why does this feel wrong?' is not a question that can have an answer, as I've found out many times when I tried explaining canon intent and characterization issues to people who don't get it intuitively. It's basically impossible to explain things unless we share the same starting points and accept and integrate (not deconstruct) the axioms of canon. Otherwise, even the right answer (like Ivy's recent post about John's characterization in TST and TLD, for example) will not be enough and will 'feel' wrong, no matter what. That's why I said that if you want to know what's happening in a text, it's crucial to ask the right questions.

And so, in trying to find the central question people had about TFP, I've found a meta by @warmth-and-constancy that explains the 'TFP isn't real' theory in some depth, as well as responding to some of the more obvious issues with it. The problem, of course, lies mainly in equating TAB with some other episode that just plays with reality or is 'altered' in any way, whether that's HLV or TFP.

I think it's important to be wrong sometimes, and it's also important to know how and *why* you're wrong, quite aside from the issue of assigning ultimate responsibility for whatever went wrong that most people in fandom seem most concerned with. That's not really my area, to be clear; I'm not interested in the question of fault so much as I'm interested in keeping my own mind and my thought processes as clear as possible. I do sympathize with the gaslighting aspect of the situation in Sherlock, of course. I've always been very sensitive about issues pertaining to my perception of reality, ever since I was a teenager who believed in aliens and wanted to escape to faery but idolized science, logic and everything Sherlock Holmes stood for. I think it's normal and to be expected to misinterpret some things which are obvious to others, while at the same time being right about some other things that others may not even perceive. Essentially, I think there's actually no need to worry about one's grasp on reality or even one's grasp of literary analysis, 'cause as I've said, there are just so many variables contingent on unpredictable plot twists and the internal motivations of the creators, who are people we don't know. In an ongoing mystery show, weighting them properly would be impossible. The trick is to find ways to question yourself and the world around you while retaining the genuine self-confidence to stand by and defend the conclusions most closely based on the data you have available. It's a delicate balance.

One of the things that are most important to media analysis and the guideline to any critical thinking is the art and science of asking the right questions. That's the first step in any analysis, but it's also the step that one generally returns to when one's initial predictions have not been fully borne out by further evidence. Naturally, it depends on one's ultimate purpose in the analysis, of course, but given that the goal is to understand or illuminate the text, then one has to learn to ask the right questions. Further, these questions have to be genuinely open-ended and as free from preconceptions as possible. Otherwise, it's way too easy to find a collection of 'proofs' that are really just connecting artificially arranged points of dubious relevance. The greatest bane of fannish media analysis is adding this tendency towards seeing the order in chaos with a certain preset, axiomatic ready conclusion. Often enough, no alternative conclusion is genuinely entertained, in the sense of also considering something that seems nonsensical, confusing or otherwise awful. Rather, that very confusing and/or awful aspect of the solution is often treated as the *reason* to discard it as incorrect, which I believe leads to a lot of faulty logic.

Basically, 'this is too awful' or 'this is too confusing' is often seen as the endpoint to questioning in fandom rather than the beginning. In fact, it's a sign that different questions as well as (potentially) different starting axioms are in order. If something seems confusing at first glance, that's a reason to think about it further and ask different follow-up questions to produce more useful avenues for analysis. Further, it pays to be aware of the assumptions one is making in constructing the question. It's impossible to avoid making assumptions or having certain axiomatic starting points; my point is that if one is oblivious to them, any conclusions are suspect. The *possibility* of being wrong in some minor way about things like even a character's characterization should at least be *considered*, particularly if nothing else makes sense. At least for me, the idea is to keep everything on the table, and mix and match certain ideas or possibilities until something 'clicks' and makes sense of the text. That is my process; others almost certainly have a different analytical process, but I'm sure that keeping the options open for the questions being initially asked has to be vital no matter what.

As an example of what I'm talking about: as I said in my initial response to The Lying Detective, I felt there was something weird and plot-related going on, but I was kind of confused. I wasn't *too* too surprised at John's behavior, 'cause he obviously snapped right after Mary's death, and the hallucinations of her only supported the extremity of his break. However, I was kind of confused (though I assumed we'd get more if an explanation than we did in TFP). Anyway, I tried on several versions of an explanation for John's behavior in the morgue incident, even though I wasn't as lost as some of my friends, because I could still tell something was off about John (and Sherlock, obviously) in TLD. I thought about @thecutteralicia's point comparing John's behavior to his adrenaline-driven punching in ASiB, and I thought that seemed relevant, even if indirect. Then I thought, well, the PTSD trauma-driven reading was clearly helpful and asked some of the right questions, at least in terms of Martin Freeman's acting. Still, we've never had outright psychological realism on the show before, so it wouldn't be consistent in terms of writing even if it worked with the acting. These are helpful ideas, but they didn't *entirely* clarify John's characterization in TLD to me, so I kept the question at the back on my mind. I knew immediately there had to be some 'plot stuff' going on, but I'm aware of my limitations in terms of figuring out that sort of thing without some prodding from the fandom. And then today, I saw that analysis of Eurus and John's behavior and it finally clicked into place. The right final question, at last! (Although it's never the final answer, I felt that 'eureka feeling', at least.) So I feel like if you're open to figuring it out and you give it time, you *will* figure it out, basically. Just because you think 'something is off' doesn't mean you're wrong about that, but it also doesn't mean the first halfway plausible explanation has to be correct (needless to say, if it's proven incorrect, it doesn't mean the only other alternative is 'the whole thing sucks and makes no sense'). It helps not allowing your conclusions to be final, in the meantime.

My rule of thumb is to only render my final judgment (of fiction, at least, though also more broadly) once I feel I genuinely understand what I've seen and/or read. I do realize that's a high bar; sometimes you'll find you never really arrive at a full understanding of a complex enough text (which can be a pleasure, really). Besides, why bother if you don't like what you see so far? Fiction isn't supposed to be hard work, let alone in fandom, which is supposed to be a fun hobby. That's a good argument. All I can say is that I'm talking about issues of *analysis*, which presumes you've chosen to engage in the first place. Obviously, you never actually have to engage with a show in any way that isn't fun. These suggestions would only apply given that you're already actively analyzing the text, and *given* you're generally motivated to understand but find it frustrating or even pointless.