My assurance of Johnlock goes up and down like a roller coaster, but I’m never more sure of it then when I picture Mark Gatiss and Steven Moffat on that train to Cardiff all those years ago chatting about doing a modern Sherlock adaptation. I can just imaging Gatiss saying, “You know, I’ve always wanted to do an update of The Private Life of Sherlock Holmes and watch Sherlock slowly fall in love with Watson.” And Moffat says, “That would never work,” and Gatiss says, “But what if we lied to the audience and the press the entire time? We could make TV history.”
And Moffat’s just like …
“Oh, fuck yeah, let’s make TV history.”
This would be pretty awesome in a lot of ways, but… why do you need ‘assurance’? Do you lose something personally if you ship it and never becomes canon? Not just you-you, OP, but anybody who feels like they need the assurance.
I’m really curious. I’ve talked to people who are on the fringes of this fandom with histories in other fandoms, and their take is that the Sherlock fandom is more invested than most in their ships becoming canon. I have no basis for comparison myself, so I can’t say.
Ideas? What is it about this ship that drives this investment?
I have been in many other fandoms, and I agree that the level of investment in the ‘realness’ of Johnlock is higher in this fandom than I’ve seen in others.
I can’t speak for others, but for me it’s not about what we would lose if they don’t. It’s about what we’d stand to gain if they do. Queer stories are making a few inroads in mainstream popular culture—a little bit, slowly—but for a mainstream popular Sherlock Holmes adaptation to go there would be HUGE.
The literary tradition of Holmes even establishes historic precedent for it, with existing adaptations like Private Life and with a body of queer-lit scholarship on these stories that dates back nearly as far as the stories do themselves. If there’s any story that’s got the chops to make history on this, it’s this one.
As great as I think that would be, though, I don’t think BBC’s Sherlock will be the one that films the on-screen kiss.
It seems Gatiss may be interested in such an interpretation (at least based on his oft-mentioned love for Private Life), but Moffat seems less so (though he lies even about stuff he has no reason to lie about). And the Doyle Estate is on the books as being anti-gay Holmes, lest you find their approval yanked from your adaptation mid-filming, so even if both showrunners did want to go there, they’d find themselves tied up in legal issues if they did.
But I imagine that this ties in with the reason a lot of people are so invested in the pairing.
Because that means that yes, in fact they DO have a legitimate reason to code homosexual desire in this story. Which means that you have to take into consideration that the queerbaiting on the show might NOT be queerbaiting. At which point, you have to give some weight to the possibility that (at this point tremendous) amount of supposedly joking subtext might not be a joke at all, but a body of evidence hidden behind a veil, if only you choose to pull it back and look.
With this particular adaptation, there’s a passionate attachment between Sherlock and John that goes beyond what I’ve seen in any other adaptation (and considering some of those adaptations, that’s saying a lot). It’s already more than a friendship, everybody can see that. If you don’t want to frame it as a latent homoerotic romance, then you have to fall back on words like ‘soulmates’ and ‘queerplatonic’ and ‘romantic friendship.’
The strength of their attachment to each other is used as a plot point, again and again, in a way we are more used to seeing romantic relationships used in media. And the text itself has highlighted that its use of that parallel is deliberate and conscious (“your damsel in distress”). So now we are faced with the prospect that denying Johnlock as at least being a text-supported plausibility is as much an act of denial as romantically shipping two male characters is considered to be in most other fandoms.
Have you ever read Kiss of the Spider Woman? That story does a thing where the ‘possible’ homosexual subtext of the narrative is called out and made explicit via footnotes (which are also part of the narrative), thus removing any ability to dismiss the implication. Now if you remove those footnotes from the picture, I can make an easier case for a homosexual reading of Sherlock than I can for Kiss of the Spider Woman.
I imagine that’s part of what fires people up about it. At the very least, it’s closer than almost any other show to it being real, and there is a real, solid argument to be made that maybe it is real.
And so we stand at a point where frankly I don’t see any less reason for being invested in this pairing than for being invested in Mulder/Scully or Ron/Hermione.
And in fact, I see more reason to be invested, because there’s a hell of a lot less solid representation of queer pairings in media than there is for het pairings or platonic bromance.
