Fic: Why Fanfiction Is Taking Over the World

by Jamison, Anne

  First and foremost, they are hungry.

  Devotees of American TV dramas get twenty-two episodes a year. Fans of most British dramas enjoy six, eight, maybe a dozen.

  The Sherlock fandom gets three. The Sherlock fandom gets three television episodes every eighteen to twenty-four months. The Sherlock fandom is deeply, abidingly, and very inventively starving. With three #@%$& episodes doled out every year and a half it’s clear someone’s got to fill in the gaps.

  And fill them we do, with stories of the Baker Street boys in love and in lust. They may be married or dating or dads. Sometimes they’re on a case in London, or searching for clues at the Louvre or Hogwarts, or in America. And everywhere you look they’re having sex. Sex everywhere.

  There’s not one lonely little kink left unloved in the Sherlock fandom. Have a fetish for a slim man in high heels, perhaps wearing a tailored suit and striding around a crime scene? This fandom’s got you covered.

  Care to see that same alluring creature in thigh-high stockings and indecent knickers? Done.

  Maybe you have a thing for height differences, riding crops, army fatigues, dragons? Perhaps you’re partial to public sex, slow sex, fast sex, loud sex, silent sex? Do you like dirty talk, golden showers, food porn? There’s an app for—uh, there are dozens of fanfictions for that.

  And the stories are so often superb. Possibly because, unlike those fine TV shows with the king and the wizard, the forever-shirtless teenage wolves, or the brothers and the angel, this fandom’s drawn a huge post-thirty and over-forty following, a surprising number of whom write actual books by day and then unwind by writing Sherlock fanfiction by night.

  Yet hunger isn’t the only thing firing the creative furnace of Sherlock fans. The humanity of the characters is also a draw.

  Second, Sherlock’s a superhero who pays a price.

  In Sherlock nothing’s free. Annoy your nemesis and he straps a bomb to your best friend. Continue to rattle the madman’s cage and he’ll convince you to jump from a roof to save the lives of those you love. For every case Sherlock closes via his heroic deductions, there are those who insist the genius planted the evidence, cobbled together the clues, that he damn well put the dead body there himself.

  Nothing comes without strings for this brilliant idiot with the superhuman ability to deduce so much from so little, but who often has the emotional intelligence of a child. And there’s something profoundly empowering about that.

  When you write about this modern-day Sherlock, he can metaphorically fly, soaring over everyone as his fast-blink gaze takes in everything. But after telling tales of the near-impossible, you have to come down to earth and talk about his heart, how what he does affects people, how it sometimes hurts more than it heals.

  It’s a brilliant combination, to give free rein to your imagination, to invent poisons and improbabilities and at the same time bring it back to the real world because the creators, the actors, everyone involved with Sherlock has done just that—they’ve rooted the magic in mundane reality, where brothers are disappointed in you, where best friends stalk off in a huff, and where you’re on a ledge and weeping because there’s so much to say but no time left to say it.

  To quote Sherlock fandom’s most well-known fanfiction writer: “Sherlock just feels . . . real.” Verity Burns knows Sherlock Holmes isn’t, but that hasn’t stopped her from writing four novel-length mysteries for Sherlock, and it hasn’t stopped hundreds of others from writing thousands of stories. For so many of us, these fantastical and fragile characters feel complex and believable even as they fly, but especially when they fall.

  Another reason I think the Sherlock fandom is as fantastically creative as it is:

  The actors and writers give us so much to work with.

  Have you seen Benedict Cumberbatch?

  A rising star who’s in every other blockbuster lately—Star Trek baddie, war hero in War Horse, deep-voiced dragon in The Hobbit—Cumberbatch’s gifts go far beyond his pretty face.

  As Sherlock Holmes, he’s taken an unsocial genius and, through sheer acting skill, made the man breakable and bold, annoying and endearing, tender, tough, a bit bad and beautiful.

  Then there’s Martin Freeman as John Watson.

  Freeman’s gift is a splendid ability to seem real. As good-looking as Cumberbatch but in a more down-to-earth way, you’ll forget Freeman’s not John, and catch yourself railing each time he puts up with Sherlock’s jibes, or cheering when he takes out the villain with a single shot.

  Then there’s the writing. Everything starts with the writing.

  Mark Gatiss and Steven Moffat, the cocreators of Sherlock and its chief scriptwriters, adore their source material, grew up reading the stories, and as longtime writers for Doctor Who, too, they also have a flair for the fantastic.

  Their Sherlock doesn’t just know London; he’s got every road flashing like a neon-bright map in his head. He doesn’t just run; he sails over rooftops, long coat flapping like wings. He isn’t just blindingly brilliant; he’s broken, too, so hobbled by his own genius that, until John Watson comes along, the closest he comes to an endearment is when a cranky colleague calls him a freak.

  And then John Watson does, indeed, come along.

  In Sherlock, John not only calls Sherlock on his antisocial eccentricities, he also praises his gifts. He helps Sherlock with The Work when he can and strives to keep up when he can’t. In exchange Sherlock gives an invalided ex-army doctor the excitement of the battlefield, but with far fewer bullets and a lot more blogging.

  So complementary is their union that nearly from the moment they meet, just about every other character on the show presumes they’re lovers and they say so. Is it any wonder so many fanfiction writers delightedly get these two in bed the moment it’s fictionally feasible to do so?

  Last, it’s always about love.

  We don’t fall in love with explosions or spaceships or mysteries. We fall in love with people. So many fanfiction-writing Sherlockians have fallen in love with the love between these characters, whether they choose to express it with sex and stilettos or mad dashes through London’s night-dark streets.

  Maybe the Merlin, Supernatural, Avengers, and other fandoms offer the same riches, but I’d be surprised. This fandom’s hunger, its wide age range, and the gifts and passions of its creators have helped fan creativity absolutely flourish.

  I’ve met more than one Sherlock fan writer who’s gone on to write and sell original fiction, and I’ve met gifted artists who make money on their beautiful, Sherlock-inspired work. There are many boons to this fandom: the community it creates, the friends made, but its most beautiful has been this fire it’s lit in so many of us, this heart-thrumming belief that we can.

  We can step out of our quiet world and start talking to people who love this thing we do. We can create stunning works of art or edit Hollywood-quality fan videos. And most of all, we can write and write and find an audience who wants, appreciates, absolutely relishes what we’ve made.

  Ultimately, like any passion, whether fanfiction or football, wine tasting or marathons, if it brings joy, if it grows you, who cares what anyone else thinks? Joy is joy and if it brings us together it’s worthy, whatever form it takes.

  In the end, that joy can be an astonishing inspiration. As Atlin Merrick, I’ve written over 400,000 words of Sherlock fanfiction in the last two years, and because of that I have met and made lifelong friends, written original work, and had wonderful doors open for me—the opportunity to write this essay, to write a TV documentary, and to inspire other writers at conventions and meetups are just a few. All because I sat down one night to watch a little TV show called Sherlock and thought to myself after, I wonder . . .

  Excuse me now, there’s a crazy fandom out there and I want to get back to it. Memes are being made, stories are being written, dreams are being formed. Some silly, some sexy, but all of them burning with a fine fire.

  Come join the madness. (Bring your own frogs.)

&nb
sp; “Love Is a Much More Vicious Motivator”

  He is the Napoleon of crime, Watson.

  —Arthur Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes

  You are the Edgar Allan Poe of love.

  —wordstrings’ John Watson

  WRITERS HAVE BEEN ADDING a touch of romance to their mystery plots since . . . Arthur Conan Doyle did it in his second Holmes novel. In the opening scene of The Sign of the Four, the characters themselves haggle over the question of mingling genres. As we’ve seen, the consulting detective in his various incarnations—including this first one—tends to be something of a purist. Unsurprisingly then, Holmes takes issue with generic confusion, faulting Watson’s write-up of A Study in Scarlet:

  “Detection is, or ought to be, an exact science, and should be treated in the same cold and unemotional manner. You have attempted to tinge it with romanticism, which produces much the same effect as if you worked a love-story or an elopement into the fifth proposition of Euclid.”

  “But the romance was there,” I remonstrated. “I could not tamper with the facts.”

  This fascinating discussion of genre is interrupted by the arrival of Watson’s love interest, Mary Morstan. How meta. In The Sign of the Four, of course, the courtship of John Watson is a minor B-plot. No bookseller need doubt whether to shelve Sherlock Holmes stories with the genre he helped establish. Clear generic identity is an important convention of contemporary publishing, the question of “where is it going to go on the shelf” being a constant reality check to writers who envision various kinds of crossover appeal.

  Fanfiction doesn’t have to draw such clear lines—the use of tags can easily classify a story into many categories at once without insisting on a hierarchy among them. There are excellent Sherlock fics that focus on mysteries—Verity Burns’ “The Green Mile” is among the best known and most successful case fics, incorporating as it does a compelling plot and extensive deduction scenes while also exploring the platonic but intense relationship between Sherlock and John. Many others follow romance and mystery plots with equal attention; several that I discuss here fall into that category.

  My primary goal here, however, is to show how Sherlock fics that center on romantic and sexualized relationships also explore innovative narrative, representational, and psychological territory. These fics serve to remind us that romance, largely ignored by major review outlets and derided by literary writers, can be literary in its telling and engage a wide range of topics and motivations, as can works with erotic content. At the level of representation, too, Sherlock fandom often favors romance of the nontypical, exploring the possibilities of love as experienced by neurological or physical disability, mental illness, and addiction, as well as through gradations of asexuality, bisexuality, demisexuality, and other forms of queerness. Nor are these forms of difference posed simply as plot or character devices. They are explored, sometimes shockingly, for their romantic, erotic, and stylistic possibilities—with a complexity, pacing, and nuance that would be difficult to place in commercial genre publishing, but would likely, on genre grounds, be excluded from the literary publishing world as well. At its best, the Sherlock fandom lives up to the literary promise of online fanfiction—consistently producing experiments in topic and form that a dedicated audience is willing to try and, often enough, embrace for the fresh perspectives and twists on beloved characters and scenes they offer.

  Sherlock fanfiction takes its inspiration for much of this from a show “canon” that’s making similar moves, if giving somewhat less emphasis to the erotic (though it did reimagine Irene Adler as a dominatrix—in plenty of detail). Sherlock the canon character (much like his pantheon of sources) combines analytic genius and perceptive overload with a sometimes debilitating lack of emotional intelligence; an enthusiasm for experiment and risk with extreme guardedness; a rejection of all things bodily with a constant need for stimulation—all of it filtered through the unprecedented quality of his observation and the precision with which he insists these observations be related. Unlike Doyle’s original, however, the BBC series hints at diagnosable thought and affective disorders. In the fanfiction Sherlock inspires, the ins and outs of human relationship—of romance, whether sexual in nature or not—are defamiliarized by what amounts to Sherlock’s outsider perspective.

  This arresting detail, and the unusual filter of the consciousness that must sift through it, are the boons that Sherlock’s hyper-intense perception gives writers. Sherlock’s close observation defamiliarizes the familiar but doubles as an exercise in character development. He helps fic writers do for character, voice, and even erotica what Viktor Shklovsky wanted of art: “to impart the sensation of things as they are perceived and not as they are known.”14 Sherlock is the ostranenie of romance.

  Case in point: Ivy Blossom’s “The Progress of Sherlock Holmes” begins with Sherlock waking up. Lots of stories begin with the main character waking up—it’s a trope, one that’s been long decried in professional publishing contexts as stale, clichéd. This isn’t:

  Half second of disorientation that dissolves sharply into perfect awareness. Pain radiating from my face. Stabbing ache in ribs like a punch in the gut. Broken rib, probably. More than one? Uncertain. Hurts on inhale, exhale. Morning.

  Strange dream lingers: John with teacups for eyes, disposable razor blades for fingers: disturbing. Odd sensation coiled up in chest, like breath not caught. Distress.

  [. . .]

  Don’t want to open my eyes yet; reality is never quite as interesting as the insides of my head. Teacups for eyes? How bizarre. John was naked in that dream. Naked and fourteen-feet tall. Still irrelevant. I was tiny; he could hold me in the palm of his hand, trap me with his disposable razor blade fingers. My subconscious is mad.

  Eyes are gummy, nose feels flattened and sore, mild ache in left mandibular lateral incisor. Probe it with my tongue. Loose, but won’t fall out.

  This is our restricted view for the entire course of the story: a cracked if sometimes maudlin Sherlock in the style of Beckett’s Watt, a consummate observer who cannot help but recognize in himself “the signs and symptoms of being desperately, hopelessly in love.”

  Imagine an anchorite, hidden away in a cave for decades, living a life of sleep and prayer, not speaking to a soul for years and years, then trying to form words with vocal chords that have been so disused they’ve forgotten their purpose; the human body needs to be used to fully function. Like your heart, says the third man, my knowing subconscious. Like your heart, Sherlock. Like an anchorite trying to speak. Metaphor: not really my area.

  By her own account, Ivy Blossom’s primary interests in writing fiction are voice and character. There’s plot, but it’s not what my formalist and structuralist forebears would call “foregrounded.” Her longer story “The Quiet Man” relates John’s attempts and ultimate inability to cope with Sherlock’s loss, a loss compounded by John’s equally debilitating inability to comprehend his own centrality to Sherlock. In the slow, excruciating space of grief and longing, John incorporates his dead friend’s peculiar filter into his own thinking. As he does, the narration shifts between first and second person, the “you” always being the absent friend, the missing person John recreates as a more articulate and romantic figure than he was in life—even as John worries that these psychological compensations are erasing the singular personhood of his beloved. As a writer, Ivy Blossom is interested in experiments in voice as plot, and she puts the long in longing. When the action does come, the consciousness that filters it is thick. Ivy Blossom finds a welcoming audience for these efforts; in fanfiction, the difficult, the long, and the complex often coincide not only with the romantic and the erotic, but with the popular. This audience has, after all, already decided more is better.

  thisprettywren experiments differently. Taken, as many in the Sherlock community are, with perceptive differences and differing abilities, this-prettywren created a “disability!verse” (called the SenseVerse) in which the only “freaks” (an insult fr
equently thrown at Sherlock in the series and its fic) are those with all five senses. In “Quintessential,” Sherlock lacks the ability to feel touch, while John, the transcriber, the blogger, has no voice—an avox, historically the target of the greatest derision. In the new era of more politically enlightened thinking (at least officially), such ableist prejudices only reflect badly on those who hold them.

  We learn of this world and its rules through a series of mockup memoranda and other bureaucratic detritus—pages from official university handbooks, for example—that explain in the neutral language of government how the various abilities and their absence are to be discussed and treated. Mycroft Holmes, MP, Undersecretary of State for Public Health, distributes a memorandum on “Annual Amendments to the Comprehensive Senso-Variant Registry Handbook” that stipulates various testing requirements. University College London handouts on, for example, “Your Anoptic Peers,” list do’s (do “report blinking lights on echolocation devices”) and don’ts (don’t “hesitate to invite anoptic students to art galleries and other events; there is always a variant-appropriate interpretation for them to enjoy!”). All this material converges around a Baskervilles-related plot, conveyed to the story’s characters as well as the readers in large part via blog and text message, since John can’t speak.

  Following the lead of the technologically updated BBC Sherlock itself (which took its own lead from canon Holmes’ interest in the latest methods and technologies), the fic author greywash has also experimented with new digital forms of storytelling: visual codings of text, blog, Wikipedia entries, Google searches, and other diverse internet formats. greywash’s fic “the sensation of falling just as you hit sleep” also chronicles the familiar territory of Sherlock’s post-Reichenbach absence (aka The Great Hiatus). Sherlock tries to communicate with John without disclosing his survival to his enemies, and tracks these enemies by the same technology. There’s always a pseudonym, and (as is true of all our electronic communications) we can never be sure of the identity behind it. In this fic, in fact, the identity shifts. We see John receive these communications and doubt their disembodied reality—a play on disembodiment that is grotesquely but still somehow poignantly reversed when John falls in love with a photograph of Sherlock’s corpse—which turns out to be as fake as it is naked. With the help of some skilled coding, we see all this unfold in various electronic formats. There’s even a soundtrack. John and Sherlock are reunited, and as the fic shifts in focus to their newly (hyperconsciously) sexual relationship, it abandons electronic formatting for more (much more) personal communications and interior monologues: