Sherlock and the Adventure of the Overzealous Fanbase
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| News Media Commentary | |
|---|---|
| Title: | Sherlock and the Adventure of the Overzealous Fanbase |
| Commentator: | Laurie Penny for The New Statesman |
| Date(s): | January 12, 2014 |
| Venue: | online |
| Fandom: | Sherlock (BBC) |
| External Links: | Sherlock and the Adventure of the Overzealous Fanbase, Archived version |
| Click here for related articles on Fanlore. | |
Sherlock and the Adventure of the Overzealous Fanbase is a 2014 commentary by Laurie Penny for The New Statesman. It has the teaser: "Whose wankfest is this anyway? The BBC's Sherlock doesn’t just engage with fan fiction - it is fan fiction."
The article was posted very shortly after the last episode in season three aired in the UK.
Some Topics Discussed
- fanservice and Sherlock (BBC)'s engagement, and disengagement, with fans
- some history about fanfic and its validity
- commentary about who gets to "tell the story" in terms of gender and class
- mentions the writer and Times critic, Caitlin Moran's stunt of having Benedict Cumberbatch and Martin Freeman read some "steamy fanfic she had found on the internet for the amusement of the crowd"
Some Excerpts
Fan-ficcers are used to being treated as the pondscum of the nerd world, a few slimy feet below the table-top roleplayers and historical re-enacters. They don’t care, because they know - alright, alright, because we know - that fanfic is brilliant. I’ve spent many years hanging out in fanfic communities, mostly as a reader rather than a writer (my cringeworthy teenage Buffy slash was mostly done on paper). Fan fiction is where modern storytelling enters the realm of myth and folktale, where characters take on a life beyond the control of their authors, where they are let loose in communities with their own ideas about how to tell a story.
Fan fiction is nothing new, and nor is the statement “fan fiction is nothing new”. Most discussions of the practice speak of Star Trek fanstories dating back to the sixties, and point to the influence of fan speculation on Joss Whedon when he was running Buffy. But actually, fan fiction is far older than that. It wasn’t until the Romantic period that originality was considered an essential skill for a storyteller to have. Before then, a truly great writer would be distinguished by his ability - and it usually was his ability - to provide a new reading of a classic tale or legend, to bring a familiar character or archetype viscerally to life.
What Doctor Who and Sherlock offer us right now is a chance to see what modern fan fiction would look like if it was written by well-paid, well-respected middle-aged men with a big fat budget. That sort of fanfiction is usually referred to simply as “fiction”.
Moffat and Gatiss may write with one eye on their fanbase, but their ideal fanbase still looks a lot like them, which is what people of their demographic usually mean when they talk about writing for a “mainstream audience”. They write the sort of stories that would interest smart teenage boys who grew up in the 1970s and 1960s; stories about “clever men” in which women are dispensable love objects, figures of derision, or both.
What is significant about unofficial, extra-canonical fan fiction is that it often spins the kind of stories that showrunners wouldn’t think to tell, because fanficcers often come from a different demographic. The discomfort seems to be not that the shows are being reinterpreted by fans, but that they are being reinterpreted by the wrong sorts of fans - women, people of colour, queer kids, horny teenagers, people who are not professional writers, people who actually care about continuity (sorry). The proper way for cultural mythmaking to progress, it is implied, is for privileged men to recreate the works of privileged men from previous generations whilst everyone else listens quietly. That’s how it’s always been done. That’s how it should be done in the future, whatever Tumblr says.
... it doesn’t do showrunners any harm to pay attention to their fans. We are living in a world of stories where thousands of new voices from diverse communities are speaking up, sharing ideas and creating new worlds out of the shadows of the ones we knew as children - but so far, a handful of professional chaps still get to make the decisions. Now, where have we heard that one before?
Reactions and Reviews: From the Article's Comment Section
My only issue with this article is that a lot of the fanfiction I've read (and I haven't read that much) is markedly *better* than Sherlock. But yes, this does rather beg the question: if quality has nothing to do with it, why are people so dismissive of fanfiction? One can only surmise that it's down to the politics - the fact that fanfiction often rewrites a world from the perspective of the marginalised, according to new rules. [1]
Fanfiction is easily dismissed because its barrier of entry to be published (in the sense of "exposing it to a wide group of interested people", so not necessarily getting a book printed (though it could mean that!)) is the lowest of all creative works. You post it on the internet, usually on a site that lets people search for fanfiction that caters to their interests. The *best* fanfiction can, qualitatively, be as good as or better than a work that is published in a book or made into a TV show, but the sheer volume of it also means there's a lot of dross that needs filtered out. Of all the publishing methods, there's the least quality control. This means if you asked someone to find the worst TV show, or the worst book published by a major publisher, you'd probably just get mediocrity, but the worst fanfiction can reach spectacular levels of horrendous. It's simple averages. [2]
Just get mediocrity? Have you looked at TV lately? About 80% of scripted and non scripted TV alike is complete shit. Same for movies & books. There might be more fanfiction out there, but in terms of quality, it's on par with mainstream media. Actually, these days, I'd go so far as to say fandom produces, on par, better quality work on average. [3]
[Caitlin] Moran may not have intended to mock fannishness but she sure as hell intended to mock the author of the fan fic she chose - she said, on stage, she thought it would be funny because she thought the last line of the segment she'd chosen was poor. That was direct mockery![4]
Caitlin Moran's behaviour (and that of a lot of newspaper reviewers and columnists, a lot of the time) shows that they believe that they are the ones with the right to a voice and everyone else should shut up. Someone should tell them that the internet's been invented. [5]
I've gone from angry to entertained by the arbitrary line drawn between remakes, reboots, and fanfiction. Not to mention what happens in theater when new actors reinterpret old roles, in comics when new writers and artists take old characters on new adventures, or when musicians do covers of each others' work. All of these are seen as perfectly legitimate forms of artistic expression, and they all serve to make the derision of fanworks look a little silly. As does the idea that certain creative work is more valuable and respectable because it was done for money, as opposed to love. [6]
Yet another nonsensical clickbait article by Laurie Penny on the newstateman website. Why can't anyone at the NS at least try to edit her articles and make them more then just prolonged diary entries? [7]
Excellent article, and mostly spot on. However, I do think it lets Gatiss and Moffat off the hook too easily in its identity-politics inflected conclusion.Of course it would be lovely if the world of professional script writing were more diverse. But the casual determinism in Laurie Penny's argument simplifies things rather too much. Why, after all, should it seem normal that white, male, middle-aged writers primarily produce "stories that would interest smart teenage boys who grew up in the 1970s and 1960s"? Shouldn't we hold these writers to a much higher standard than that?
So while I agree that a more diverse group of authors would be more likely to write from a more diverse set of perspectives, I don't think that means you need to be from a traditionally underrepresented group to write against stereotype. In that sense, Gatiss and Moffat are blinkered because they're blinkered -- not because they're white, middle aged, and male. [8]
My issue with Sherlock season 3 wasn't that so much of the plot and character interaction reflected fanfic scenarios. It was that Sherlock as a character was so inconsistent. And thank you Laurie for pointing this out! Part of the problem is that Mark and Steven and other "consulting writers" (i.e. paid fanficcers), each have very different takes on Sherlock's true personality and character arc. The Sherlock we see in episode one is very different from the Sherlock of episode three, and it is not an improvement. Professional writers can hardly scoff at fanfic when they cannot seem to get any consistency in their own work! [9]