Hey friend, I started watching Sherlock right before TAB and I was wondering... Before s3 came out, did the fandom *hope* for Johnlock becoming canon or *believe* in it? This year, it seems that we all believe s4 will confirm tjlc. Is this year's attitude different from 2013's? I know this matter isn't as pressing, but it's interesting. skulls-and-tea recommended you to satisfy my curiosity. Thank you and I love your blog!
The 2013 fandom was a wasteland of people who hated the show and the showrunners and used tortured social justice discourse to write self-congratulatory posts about how the writers were ruining everything with their misogyny and homophobia and it was the fans who were the only good thing about the show. I was a lurker and couldn’t stand anyone but some fanartists and tunalock and a few stray blogs; I thought it was fucked up that the fandom was a toxic place for anyone who actually thought our dads were brilliant and were grateful for a show that had given them so much entertainment.
I had been working to untangle the show for a while but especially once S3 setlock started. Dunno if the post is in my archived stuff but I told part of the story in early 2014. Basically, before S3 I had written a LOT to myself trying to figure out what the narrative meant if they were gay because it made more sense than them being straight, but I hadn’t posted anything because the environment in the fandom wasn’t one that would accept the evidence I had at the time; nothing super obvious and damning came out until S3 and everyone was on some weird Johnl0ckary Stockholm Syndrome kick to preserve their own feelings. I made myself a deal that if the wedding episode parallels ASiB like I predicted it should, then I *did* understand the show and our dads *were* doing an intentionally gay show, and it was fucked up that their fandom was calling them misogynists and homophobes and I should at least suggest otherwise. So as soon as TSoT aired and there was so much evidence, I made the Operation Johnlock is Go post and started posting about the devices the show uses and such.
Once I did that, the tide turned immediately and people latched onto the idea and contributed a ton. Turns out hardly anyone liked the pre-S3 fandom environment but didn’t feel safe speaking up because anyone who complimented the gay shit in the show got condescending lectures about queerbaiting. We started figuring things out as a group way faster than I could have done anything alone so I was pumped. I got the first 10k~15k followers in a few months but there were still a lot of frustrating battles, some of which never really ended. There seemed to be solid support after Skully gave me the BBC LGB report and I wrote Softly, Softly in 2014 but I still got constant messages from doubters and haters and it was STILL really common for people to baselessly slander our dads which made me crazy. Lots of people’s belief seemed fragile to me in 2014. I tried to keep things pleasant by not posting all the harassment I got and just responding with satire when the Usual Suspects started bleating the same shit in public. Then I wrote A Deception so Audacious with the hopes of shutting up the most annoying ones, with mixed success. Back then I was naive enough to think that 1) they might respond to reasoned arguments and solid proof, and 2) they would get tired of harassing us. But in reality they were way worse people than I had assumed and they still had another two years or so left in them.
In retrospect 2015 (especially the second half) was when TJLC seemed to have a unshakeable hold as the most popular community/perspective, but it didn’t feel that way to me at the time because I get so focused on righting things I feel are wrong; I was pretty much massively depressed that year by how certain people refused to leave us alone and kept chasing TJLCers off the internet and doxing TJLCers despite my utterly wasted attempts at diplomacy. But belief then was stronger than I realized. Terrible people don’t cede the floor without stirring shit and in retrospect that’s all it was: they’d lost the idea war and couldn’t accept it, but it didn’t change anything. Whenever they tried to drag me I’d get hundreds of followers from the free publicity (some of the haters’ followers were Johnlockers) so they actually played a huge role in TJLC becoming as popular as it did.
By 2016 and especially after TAB, TJLC was a rock. But again, it didn’t feel that way to me at the time because I was always getting constant shit from people even when others weren’t – though it had let up on me considerably, I was pretty worn down by that point and wasn’t seeing things realistically – and the community was so big (I had about 27k followers) that many TJLCers who found TJLC after TAB treated me like garbage because I wasn’t a real person to them, just some content machine. It took me months, personally, to realize how strong the community actually was this year. 2016 I think is when it’s been safest for anyone to blog about TJLC, and when belief has been strongest. It seems like there was less harassment, that some people finally got tired.
Though people still spread lies about me personally even months after I left, so. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ Sorry, my view of things is inherently colored by what I had to go through as a figurehead versus what the rest of the community was experiencing, so I’m never sure how accurate my perception of everyone else’s experience is. I went through a lot of stuff *with* everyone, but behind the scenes I went through a lot more alone, and I seem to have processed many things much differently by necessity of having to be the person to represent TJLC to everyone who despises it, the person who sometimes had to act on certain things that other people just had to witness, the person who was constantly having to try and squash drama behind the scenes. Most people just dealt with stuff on Tumblr, meanwhile my perspective gets warped by people bashing me on other social media sites and in other languages. I think that’s why I’ve always felt a little isolated even with my friends around me. When other people were upset in the early years, I had trouble relating because I still assumed it would blow over; then after I got worn down by so many battles and so much harassment, most other people were just sitting mostly safe and happy and I had trouble relating to that, too. So just be aware this is all just filtered through the lens of my experience, and I’ve always been out of step with everyone else by merit of my position in all this.
So 2013, 2014, 2015, and 2016 all feel like very different eras to me, both in terms of what I went through and what it seems to me that the community went through.
I’ll tell the more detailed story one day soon. After I deleted I spent a lot of time processing everything and realized how weirdly my entire life had fed into my doing all that pre-S3 analysis. Been processing a lot still lately, tbh.
But god, the 2013 fandom was completely unenjoyable if you didn’t focus on tunalock like I did. No “belief” or even “hope” to speak of. Imagine your favorite thing, and going to an internet forum about it, and every post was “fans” talking about how that thing was terrible and its creators were terrible human beings based on no real evidence, and *they,* the “fans” slandering them, are actually what makes it so good. A complete lack of gratitude to our dads would have been one thing, but jfc it was nauseating to read.
I was in Sherlock fandom in 2012. I remember it being mostly johnlock shippers but almost no one thinking johnlock would be canon. The level of whining about canon was how it is in any fandom. I eventually left because Sally was my favorite, and I was tired of the fandom hating on her and the other female characters.
But from a john/sherlock shipping perspective, the pre-season 3 fandom wasn’t dark or depressed or anything: we were just happy shipping a non-canon ship.