#pleasebebrave

I’m here because of you. You took a pretty cool show and put it through a beautiful metamorphosis. Your story, your interpretation, is the one I want to read. Your ideas fascinate me. Your creations delight me. You make me want to think harder and write more. You are some of the funniest, whip-smart people I’ve ever had the good fortunate to ‘meet’. And did I mention brave?

As the community shifts around the show’s tremors and pitfalls, I’m staying because the show was merely a springboard for your brilliance.

Yes, it started with Sherlock. I was in agony. At first I loved their re-telling. I have never been so smitten with a goofy tv show. It helped that I’d loved the HolmesWatson dynamic forever. But the chemistry between these actors! The score! The sets! But it hurt, too. My beloved Watson and Holmes were clearly falling in love and doing it messily and painfully and… wait, was the show even telling that story? So I hunted my way here, like thousands of others, looking for meaning in a messy, sometimes brilliant, story. Your clever analysis and observation, the theories and debates, the puzzles and codes, the huge array of interpretation were marvelous. Through YOUR lens, the story became what I had needed it to be.

I don’t give a fig how Moftiss mops up their mess or unveils their Reveal. I’m curious, but wary. They lost my trust years ago as storytellers. You made it right. If the writers were telling the Love Story, I disliked that they chose to do it with intense subterfuge. I mean for chrissakes I knew when I was 7 in 1987 growing up in a close-minded backwater corner of the world that these men were Only For Each Other and loved them for it. How could that be such a mindfuck to today’s audience? How could the writers blow the chance to be Storytellers on the side of Good?

But I could be mollified if the love story I perceived was being told as a Sherlockian mystery that had to be decoded in order to wow the world with its Big, Vital Statement for our times. I mean, I guess. A really well-crafted, patiently evolving love story for long-repressed historical characters would have been perfectly acceptable for our times, too, and earth-shattering and history-making all by itself (sadly).

All this is to explain why I haven’t left this fandom after a Bizarre and Deeply Unsettling s4. They have been unsettling me for years.

I’m here because of you. And it’s totally fine if you want to do other things. I just want you to know it mattered, and it was fantastic.

So there. Please reblog if you’d like to spread the love. There is no way I could possibly reach all who deserve to see this.