A message from Ian (Mark’s husband) about why Mark doesn’t particularly enjoy being sent insulting and abusive tweets – whether meant humorously or not. Please just be polite folks, keep the funny ‘you little shit you’re ruining my life’ messages to your friends and your tags.
Filed under: Things that I assumed were general human decency before tumblr/twitter.
During ComicCon this year, there were a few posts going around wondering why the creators and writers of Sherlock didn’t have the same sort of open, friendly, joking relationship with their fans that the creative crew of Hannibal did. The obvious implication in all of those posts was of course that everyone involved with Sherlock (Moffat especially) was horrible and treated the fans like shit and oh my god why can’t they just be like the wonderful people who make all these other shows that just started airing?
This is why.
A few years back during the first hiatus, things were different. The Sherlock crew had an entirelydifferent relationship with the fans, one that was much more open and welcoming when the number of fans was small and things hadn’t gotten out of hand yet. But you know what, if you consistently treat people who are just trying to do their job like crap for years on end, they’re going to pull back. I’m frankly amazed that they even interact with the fans at all at this point, and whenever people wonder why Benedict, Martin, or various other actors don’t have twitter accounts I want to sit them down and show them shit like this. Why should they? After Steven Moffat had to leave twitter because of the literal death threats he was getting on a regular basis, I wouldn’t want to touch it with a ten foot pole.
Relationships go both ways, people. If you want a good relationship with someone you admire you have to earn it, and acting like aggressive, petulant children is no way to do that.
Not just relevant to Sherlock fandom, either. I hope fans of Hannibal, Night Vale, and other awesome programs don’t become similarly hurtful.
And it is hurtful. No matter how cute or funny you think you’re being, when you tell someone things like, “You’re too perfect I hate you” or “This story is ruining my life!” to the creator it feels like a slap in the face. It might be cute the first two or three times, but if even a fanfic writer has 10,000 readers and 1% of them send messages like this, that is 100 times they’re hearing ‘I hate you.’ At that point, it doesn’t feel funny anymore.
And for an internationally popular show like Sherlock, with millions of viewers…how often do you think they hear things like this? Every person who sends hate mail or death threats or even ironic backhanded compliments is doing something really hurtful and harmful.