My Virtual Reading Room

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. The pining, put-upon character of Molly Hooper in Sherlock, one of the few characters with no easy equivalent in the original stories, is painful to watch as she mopes around after Holmes like a lovesick puppy. A lot of fanfic sets out to put that right, ensuring that Molly gets the boy, her own adventure, revenge, or all three.

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The dream-scenario in which Sherlock and Moriarty are actually lovers playing a trick on Watson and end up in a crafty rooftop clinch was so much fun that the people sitting either side of me as it aired had to hold me down lest I levitate off the sofa. The scene then cuts to a grumpy teenage member of a conspiracy club - a lovely cameo by Sharon Rooney - explaining that the “Sherlock elopes with his nemesis” story is hardly less fanciful than anything anyone else has come up with. She’s dead right. Later in the series two men are stabbed with skewers but we’re supposed to believe they can’t feel it because their uniforms are too tight, and a train full of explosives at an abandoned underground station right under parliament somehow remains undetected until zero hour. All of these things are significantly less plausible than gay sex. I’m just saying.

What is significant about 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.