A Johnlock Shipper’s Thought Process Right Now
I don’t know if anyone else feels the same way, but I’m going to say this. Because I want it to be said. I’d like to share some of my personal opinions, if that’s alright with you all.
Martin Freeman’s comment, and the reactions of other ship bases stemming from that, kinda solidified why I wanted to leave the BBC Sherlock fandom to begin with.
I’m not going to sit here and deny that there weren’t some people who took it too far. Under no circumstances should the people who sent barrages of hate to the cast and creators be justified.
But the thing is, most of us DIDN’T SEND HATE. We, including myself, wrote to the BBC asking them why there was queerbaiting in their show.
It’s a legitimate thing to write to them about. If what you all say is true, and all of the “gayness” were just jokes made on behalf of the writers, then that’s something to speak up about. You don’t “joke” about that. That hurts the LGBT+ community.
I also would have thought, since one of the show’s creators is a gay man himself and understands the representation issue the LGBT+ community faces, that the showrunners wouldn’t have considered making those “gay jokes” to begin with. I also would have expected a more mature reaction to the criticism, since Mofftiss have been in this business for quite some time and know what to expect and how to deal with it. I think that’s a pretty good standard to hold famous artists to, don’t you think?
I don’t agree with the bashing of an entire group of shippers, whose “craziness,” as you all call it, is the main reason that show for going as far as it did, for the actions of a handful of outliers. Or because a few show creators weren’t expecting the criticism they got and didn’t know how else to prepare for it and/or hide their hurt feelings about it.
And by the way, Martin and the rest of them likely wouldn’t have had their jobs either in show if it weren’t for us. We were the ones buying merchandise and writing fanfic and metals and rewatching the show during those long hiatuses. We helped keep the Sherlock tag going. Our fanfiction is what got the Sherlock section up to the top five of the fanfiction.net archives. Sherlock was a cash cow to begin with, but our efforts did help it get to what seems to be cultural iconery. The least they can do is give us a little credit there.
But I do agree with the interpretation of Martin’s “We’re not f— lovers” as a Freebatch diss. I don’t think Martin cares who ships what, as long as they’re shipping the characters and not the cast themselves. Freebatch isn’t as popular to begin with anymore, since Freeman and Cumberbatch’s emphasis on their personal privacy was translated into a standard of behavior for the great majority of this fandom.
I also agree with the notion that Johnlockers get a lot of hate from other ship bases that aren’t held to the same standard. Way back when S4 aired, I posted an opinion piece that was similar to what I’ve already said here. I received numerous hate messages about it. My favorite one of all was “Go sit on a cactus.” And they say that they are more mature than us…
And to say nothing of the amount of hate the meta writers receive! I can’t imagine it. Spending so much time and effort into analyzing something you like on an English professor caliber only to have other shippers hold up your efforts as a reason why you suck and your ship sucks. To me, that seems to be a pretty toxic thing that happens in this fandom.
And headcanons are not an exception to this too. Y’all remember the bed discourse? Mmhmm. That one? Yeah. The fact that one character received a twin bed instead of a queen bed in the meme lead to a week of arguments. Because that twin bed offended them.
This type of crap happens all the time. And now, we’re getting even more crap. I, and many other people like me, are just trying to enjoy ourselves.
Can you let us enjoy ourselves?
Can you let us question things and respond in a mature way to them? (That is for both the rest of the fandom and the cast and crew in general.)
Is that so hard?
Is it?
These thing make me so mad, man.
I like a show. That they made. And I express my liking for it in a proper way. The same as the other ship bases and causals do. And I take pride in my ship the same way they do. So I don’t understand the reason why I, and many other people, have to suffer the blame for all of this.
Because our ship is LGBT+, and we questioned the amount of LGBT+ “tropes and jokes” in the show?
Fuck. Fuck it all.
I swear, I want to just throw my Sherlock stuff away and just go full-force into Granada and Russian Holmes. Sometimes the only thing that stops me is the fact that I’ve spent hundreds of dollars on that stuff. (That’s right. Hundreds of dollars. I paid the utility bill for the showrunners with my own money with all my mercy purchases alone. That’s not counting all the revenue my continued viewing gives to the BBC and Hartswood Films.Maybe the showrunners shouldn’t be so quick to bash the “Johnlock craziness”…)
