Benedict Cumberbatch Is a Gay Erotic God in China
| News Media Commentary | |
|---|---|
| Title: | Benedict Cumberbatch Is a Gay Erotic God in China |
| Commentator: | Liz Carter |
| Date(s): | November 15 2013 |
| Venue: | |
| Fandom: | Sherlock (TV series) |
| External Links: | Benedict Cumberbatch Is a Gay Erotic God in China – Foreign Policy, Archived version |
| Click here for related articles on Fanlore. | |
Benedict Cumberbatch Is a Gay Erotic God in China is an article by Liz Carter on ForeignPolicy.com about fans of the Sherlock series and Benedict Cumberbatch.
The article's subtitle is "Why is the Chinese Internet obsessed with writing gay Sherlock Holmes fanfiction?"
Excerpt
China loves Cumberbatch. According to an Oct. 29 article on the Chinese news site Caijing, the 37-year-old Cumberbatch, whom the Chinese call Curly Fu, "is the reason a new wave of Chinese viewers have turned to British television." (‘Curly’ describes the star’s hairstyle, while ‘Fu’ is a shortened Chinese transliteration of ‘Holmes.’) The Caijing article attributes the recent spike in the popularity of British television in China to "the Sherlock effect," and Cumberbatch’s rising star isn’t limited to the small screen. One journalist with the Beijing-based newspaper Jinghua Times surveying viewers of the 2013 blockbuster sci-fi movie Star Trek Into Darkness found that most had gone to see Curly Fu, a villain they declared "impossible to hate" because they had "never seen a bad guy so handsome before."The enthusiasm is most avid on the Internet, where Cumberbatch is an erotic god. In the Baidu Curly Fu Bar, an Internet forum devoted to the star, fans said they loved his hair, voice, height, eyes, physique, poise, nose, the speed at which he talks, and a certain ineffable charisma. (One viewer compared him favorably to Wikileaks founder Julian Assange, whom he plays in the recent film Fifth Estate, writing that Cumberbatch was "much more handsome.") Some fans cataloguing his good traits also listed his "cute wife" Watson, whom they call ‘Peanut,’ because the Chinese phoneticization of Watson, huasheng, is a homonym for the legume. Amateur cartoon adaptations of Sherlock and Watson holding hands and photo-shopped images of Cumberbatch and Freeman kissing are available on Chinese websites. On Youku, China’s YouTube, a music video that set clips of Cumberbatch’s Holmes and Freeman’s Watson sharing knowing looks to a Chinese love song has received over 70,000 views.
The Chinese Internet is home to a wealth of slash fiction — danmei in Chinese — a genre that imagines existing fictional characters in romantic same-sex relationships, and a body of work in which Cumberbatch’s Sherlock features prominently. Stories range from the explicit "He Is My Bitch," about Sherlock and Watson’s sadomasochistic sex life, to the more romantic "I Write You This Letter from a Foreign Land," in which Watson describes his inner feelings for Sherlock in a diary. There are even novels, like the 39-chapter tome It’s Alright, I’m Here, Sherlock, which describes in great detail the lovers’ long and convoluted path to couplehood.