You may have heard of a little film project that’s recently come to theaters probably near you. In keeping with that film’s spirit of investigation and intuition, let me give you a few clue phrases and see if you can figure out which one I’m talking about.
Clue 2: Flirty blink (at .24 over thisaway)
Clue 3: Commasculation
Theories to be put forward at this juncture please, my dear readers. Now, if you are one tenth the intellectual powerhouse that the eponymous character of said movie is, you will have ascertained by now that I am referring to Sherlock Holmes. And because this is a blog about fandom, that’s what I intend to focus on here.
I saw Sherlock Holmes on its opening day, and, fannishly speaking, I was struck by two things.
Item the First: The much-discussed, blatant homosocial/homoerotic undercurrent running through all of Holmes and Watson’s interactions. (Please note here that I’m including both the potentially sexualized ‘homoerotic‘ and the more generic ‘homosocial‘ on purpose.)
Item the Second: How short-lived I predict this fandom will be.
While it might seem at first glance that the more homosociality present in a canon source, the more the fandom (and yes, we’re dealing primarily with slash fans here, but that’s going to be true for a lot of this blog, so if you don’t like slash, you’re in for a lot of yawning) would explode, it’s been my experience that pretty much the exact opposite is the case.
Feel free to jump in and comment if you disagree with me. Hell, I’d be interested. But when I think of the ‘slashiest’ movies I’ve seen and books I’ve read, where the homoerotic tension wins the day over the homosocial, those aren’t the ones with the slavish fic writers and die-hard shippers and thriving online communities. Where are all the fen for something like Velvet Goldmine that gives us this sort of thing:
Total VG stories archived at the (admittedly-young) Archive of Our Own: 8.
How about the canonically-slashy Swordspoint? AO3 tally: 39.
Blatantly gay-focused Queer as Folk? AO3′s got 101 total, including both the US and UK series.
But keep things squarely in the more nebulous world of the homosocial, and you get some serious results. Classic slash fandoms like Due South give us AO3 results like 1051. House returns 660 stories. The 2009 Star Trek re-boot has 588. Harry Potter a whopping 2896.
Now, obviously those are basic searches, and not all of those stories are same-sex pairings, or even sexualized pairings at all, since those results aren’t filtered. But still. I think you see what I’m getting at.
We fen like to have to do some of the work ourselves. Fandoms are built on what the fen create. And the fen are inspired to creative acts when everything isn’t neatly laid out for them. We’re a subtle bunch when we want to be. We know when we’re being aggressively courted by the media. So while I may gleefully smile at Robert Downey Jr quipping (at 1.50) to David Letterman about Sherlock Holmes and Dr John Watson being homos:
and I may (and indeed, did) love the movie for including a pretty blatantly homoerotic subtext, I am not inspired to go off and conjure up gay scenarios for Holmes and Watson to enjoy together. They’ve already put that in the film. They’ve stuck it into all the promotion for the film. It’s already there on the screen, and I don’t have to do any work at all to make the Holmes/Watson dynamic a slashy one.
It’s that having to do the work that I think is one of the key factors in creating lasting fandoms. Sure, the idea of some after-hours Holmes/Watson action is a pretty one in my head, but ultimately what’s already in the canon is obvious enough that I’m not going hunting for more. And while I know this is something of a shiny new fandom at the moment, I don’t think it’s got staying power. It’s a flash-in-the-pan kind of thing, if you ask me.
After all, the movie’s racked up only 16 stories so far at the AO3, while the Arthur Conan Doyle book fandom (a canon source full of emotionally rich, humorous, only-partially-defined homosociality instead of the movie’s obvious push toward the homoerotic) has 66.
Now, by all means, jump in and tell me about how Torchwood defies this model I’ve set up or why you see Sherlock Holmes movie fandom lasting forever and ever and ever.
[...] terms of fannish following. I mentioned Velvet Goldmine and its relatively small fan following in this post. Partly, as I said there, that comes from the fact that the subtlety of the subtext is [...]