I would actually make the argument that the heart of the problem here is not either about fans, as the article claims, or production companies being exploitative cowards, as some of the comments are claiming. The heart of the problem is the increasingly eroding privacy we are seeing in the modern age.
There's some people in the comments saying "fandoms have always been like this" and others saying "No, it's worse than it was." And both are to some extent right. Fans (or at least a small percentage of fans, and the larger a fanbase gets the larger a group this will describe) have always been Like That; but they did not always have the level of access to creators and actors that they have now.
The notion that a performer needs to be constantly available to public scrutiny, that their personal information should by default be available to any rando with google, is pretty new. It used to be that actors would only be expected to engage with the public on limited, specific, and controlled occasions, usually with security provided. Now they're being asked to rawdog exposure to the mob 24/7 on their own.
(Also, production companies have always always always been exploitative cowards, just to get that straight; reading the biographies of literally any actress from golden Hollywood years makes that clear. It's just, again, more public now.)
There has also been a negative feedback loop as fandoms come to realize that the constant access they have to creatives increases their leverage and power. It did not use to be the case that this was so; fandoms pre-internet largely worked under the assumption that they didn't really have any meaningful way to contact or influence the publication houses. Even if they sent a letter or a campaign of letters, they wouldn't even know whether the letters were being received or read unless the publishing house chose to respond. So, without that expectation of access, the drama usually stayed internal. Nowadays, with constant immediate feedback from creators and publishers, fans are ever more incentivized to act out to try to push an agenda, get attention, or just vent whatever is going on in their lives onto a face contractually obliged to be friendly to them.
"it would be so good if it was good" will haunt you but "it's extremely good, except for the one or two parts which are so bad it's genuinely kind of insulting" will straight up drive you insane
one has you making posts like "okay but if the author UNDERSTOOD the POLITICAL IMPLICATIONS of the story they were telling, and leaned into it, it would actually be a really interesting exploration of..."
the other has you pacing your bedroom at one in the morning going "why. why would you ever in a million years do it like that. genuinely what possible thought process was involved. was the writer possessed by a fucking ghost or something."
always funny when someone makes an analysis post with bold and italics and the whole nine yards about something that was extremely obvious and part of any surface level understanding of the story and or characters
I've been seeing people talk about the "if you like a Bad Character/Ship you are a Bad Person" concept, and obviously that is an unhelpful framing, but it got me thinking about how I personally tend to end up viewing these sorts of things:
If you talk certain ways about certain characters, I am not going to trust your politics. That doesn't mean I think you're a Bad Person or Evil or whatever, but it means that I am going to assume that you likely have some ideological viewpoints (consciously or unconsciously) that I disagree with.
For example, I don't think anyone is Bad or Evil for liking Draco Malfoy. But when people write Draco Malfoy-friendly fics that lean on/positively portray wizarding versions of white nationalist rhetoric, I'm going to assume those people have some sympathy towards white nationalist ideas, whether they are conscious of them or not.
In the same vein, I don't think anyone is Bad or Evil for disliking a specific Black or female character. But when people talk about Black or female characters certain ways, I'm going to assume that they have some biases (conscious or not) against Black people or women.
To some degree, it doesn't matter if I'm right. I'm not calling specific people out based on perceived ideology; I'm not going out and finding people who I think are Bad or making lists. But when people talk about how they just coincidentally aren't interested in any female character, or all of their favorite characters are white male villains, or they find that Black character just a little too angry, or they think that male character's violent behavior was justified because of something someone else did to them once, I'm going to assume that that reflects their viewpoints about real people, because it's the only thing I have to go off of.
I realize this is probably kicking a hornet's nest that I don't need to kick, but here we are.
Sherlock Holmes and the Case of Bad Jewish Representation
I recently rewatched the Elementary episode Rip Off (S03E05), and while I’ve mentioned it before in comments and reblogs about bad Jewish rep in media, it’s unfortunately worse than I remembered it being.
I’ve posted it below the cut because spoilers [for episodes S02E11, S02E18, and S03E05] and because this ended up so much longer than I expected it to be.
To summarize the episode: In Manhattan, a severed hand, and then later the victim’s body are found. The hand had been torn off and then the victim killed, after which the victim got dragged by a tow truck (his body had gotten stuck under an illegally parked car) to the impound lot. At the morgue, the victim is identified as being a cancer patient, and then Sherlock identifies him as an Orthodox Jew, so they make the rounds to all the Orthodox shuls in Manhattan [via TV magic, Sherlock knows offhand, exactly how many there are], where they find Moshe’s brother. He tells them about Moshe’s business, which is a postal service store, where they find a hidden safe and deduce [based on a ledger that they find in the safe, which is written in mostly childish Hebrew lettering and which we find out later has a grease stain from non-kosher food on it] that Moshe was a diamond smuggler. In the end, they find out that Moshe had decided to stop smuggling, and Amit, his employee (and previous smuggling partner), paid someone to kill Moshe because he wanted to keep the enterprise going.
(the ledger; the grease stain is on a different page, not depicted)
Okay, let’s dig in.
One of the things that annoyed me the most was the scene at the morgue where Sherlock identified the man as an Orthodox Jew, but it turns out I misremembered it.
I thought he held up a tallis katan sans tzitzis and said they’re tzitzis, or ‘zeetzeet’ as he pronounced them.
What actually happened is that he held up the tallis katan sans tzitzis and said, “...these holes are tailored. Sewn in to hold tzitzit, the ritual fringe worn by devout Jewish men.”
So all that, other than the horrific pronunciation, is correct. But I don’t see any reason why the tzitzis were actually missing, other than to drive the plot. No ‘devout Jew’ would wear a tallis katan without tzitzis. It literally defeats the purpose. I also don’t think it’s likely that all four of the tzitzis would have been torn out while the holes for the tzitzis remained mostly intact, but that’s what we see when Sherlock holds up the tallis katan.
Right, so now we're at the shul where we meet Moshe’s brother, who according to IMDb is named Josef Shapiro. Josef has a big black yarmulke [on the back of his head rather than the top], Hollywood-curled peyos, longer hair than would usually be seen on someone with the irl version of those peyos in real life, and a decent beard and mustache by Hollywood standards. He’s wearing no tie, a white button up shirt, a sweater or vest, and a black jacket [they don’t show him below the waist so you can’t see the length but from the cut it looks like a long jacket]... and a wedding ring.
The shul they’re in is most likely an actual Orthodox shul, given there are separate men’s and women’s sections. [Josef is sitting in a pew in the men’ section.] The women’s section consists of two balconies that look like they run the length of the room, with a space in the middle so they can look down. There are (short) railings at the top of the (short) balcony walls, which if you want to be generous, could potentially in real life usually have curtains over them, but I’m inclined to think they’re there for safety purposes only.
(I did actually look on Google and then on Google maps to try and find the shul where they filmed to see if I was correct about the railing but I was unable to find it.)
Oof, where to start. So we know by now that Hollywood doesn’t know how to handle hair for Orthodox Jews and/or thinks all Orthodox Jewish men have curled peyos. Ironically, the hair, yarmulke placement, type of shul, and maybe even the ring could all be acceptable if not for the curled peyos. (Josef’s English name could be passable even with the peyos because there are chassidim who use English names in non-Jewish/business settings.)
In my previous mentions of this episode, I said that Josef was the rabbi, but there’s actually nothing in the episode transcript to suggest that. The incongruity of the peyos and the shul is more glaring if he were the rabbi, but maybe we can let it slide just a tiny bit if that’s not the case. And if we’re being generous again, maybe he’s sitting in a pew in an otherwise empty shul because davening just ended and everyone else cleared out while he remained to speak to Sherlock and Kitty (Sherlock’s protege).
But even with those generous allowances, given the hodgepodge of hair (all inclusive), outfit [none of which has been torn even though he just found out his brother died], and location, plus Josef’s inconsistent and potentially mildly offensive accent [I looked up the actor; he’s Jewish but he doesn’t speak with that accent irl], and his and everyone else’s atrocious pronunciation of Moshe as ‘moh-shee’, all this tells us is that the show couldn’t be bothered to properly research Orthodox Judaism or get the TV equivalent of a sensitivity reader [someone who is/was part of that community, not just a token Jew to sign off on it] to check that they weren’t stereotyping or misrepresenting.
And sure, there could be Jews that look and sound like this and attend that kind of shul, but they’re pretty much not the average Orthodox Jew [even given all the different types of Orthodox Jews] anywhere other than in fictional media. [HT to @knaidelmaidel for reminding me that I wanted to include this.]
I’ve previously said that I think there are two types of not-good Jewish representation in media: bad rep and harmful rep. Up until now, all this has been bad rep. I personally think no rep is better than bad rep, but I’d understand why people would disagree.
Unfortunately, this episode doesn’t stay at just bad rep, it takes a sharp turn into harmful rep, which I strongly believe is significantly worse than no rep at all.
We start with a less-sharp turn with the non-kosher food grease stain that they find on the ledger. After calling Moshe a hypocrite, Sherlock says, “It wouldn't be the first time a man's looming sense of his own mortality had loosened his sense of piety.” Later, Kitty suggests that the food stain was left by Amit, but this is never confirmed. This is another thing that Hollywood likes doing ― portraying Jews as rebelling against their religion, because clearly all religious Jews are all oppressed and want to turn their back on their religion (/s).
While we’re on the topic of Amit, when asked if Moshe was a good boss, Amit says, “He was the best. He's really tight with his community and still hired a guy named Amit. He had a big heart.” If we ignore the fact that Amit is also a Hebrew name and the actor who plays Amit is named [I literally cannot make this up] Rafi Silver [though I can’t find any indication online that he is, in fact, Jewish], and presume that Amit Hattengatti, which if you go by Google’s correction of Hattangadi, is an Indian name, why would Moshe not hire an Indian employee? The answer is poor research. Because Jewish stores are full of non-Jewish employees, including South Asians. But this poor research results in the implication that most Jews wouldn’t hire [non-Jewish/Indian/South Asian/fill in the blank because once we’re being antisemitic let’s go all out] employees.
Each of the above two aspects on their own might not be too bad, but taken together, they start to paint a picture.
But those two aspects pale in comparison to the rest of the picture, the most harmful aspect of this episode. And that’s Moshe being a diamond smuggler. Oh also not only was he a smuggler, he was also extra-dirty dealing by selling to another smuggler’s customers at lower prices.
So we have a stealing, dishonest Jew [Kitty calls him a scoundrel], which welp, yeah, major harmful stereotype, even if by the end of the episode we know that he “regains his virtue” and decided to stop smuggling before he was killed.
And here’s the thing. This isn’t the first time there’s a stealing, dishonest Jew portrayed on Elementary. In Internal Audit (S02E11), we find out that Jacob Weiss, who runs a nonprofit that recovers money/seeks reparations for Holocaust victims and their families, is found to be “embezzling millions from your own charity by filing false claims in the names of survivors who are either dead, or who were simply never informed”. Jacob isn’t identified as a Jew, but that’s a likely assumption that any viewer would make, given the name and the nature of the charity.
Now, you might say two instances is a mere coincidence. And yes, often that is the case. But I don’t think that’s the case here. Because up to this point, out of a total of 53 episodes, there are exactly three that involve Jews in a role that’s more than just a mention.
The third of these episodes, The Hound of the Cancer Cells (S02E18) involves Mossad agents [Sherlock and co only interact with one, Dalit Zirin] operating in the US. I’m not going to go into that too much even though I think there are countless other foreign intelligence agencies that they could have used instead of Mossad that wouldn’t reflect poorly on a marginalized, very small group of people, especially because the whole Mossad part isn’t actually super significant to the episode plot.
But anyway. Let’s say that the Mossad episode wasn’t negative. So we have three Jewish or Jew-ish episodes out of 53 episodes, and two of them portray Jews as dishonest thieves. So yeah, not a mere coincidence in my opinion, and very much harmful representation.
The sad thing is, all this isn’t even specifically an indictment of Elementary’s writers or directors. Sure, I think they could have done a lot better than relying on harmful and inaccurate stereotypes. [And the show actually hiring Jewish actors to portray those three Jews with speaking roles (Stuart Zagnit, Richard Mansur, and Shiri Appleby) is great in general but doesn’t make up for the harmful representation.] But the fact of the matter is that this all is just a reflection of how Hollywood sees Jews. Which is especially egregious when you consider the fact that the US film industry was largely founded by Jews. [This is further proof that we don’t run Hollywood, because if we did, we’d ensure we had better representation.]
just saw someone call superman a white savior narrative. what? hello?? you can’t just call every “outsider does good things” story a white savior narrative. but of course you’d say the obviously jewish character a white savior
Absolutely wild to find out another indie author has been referring to you as "the competition" this entire time. Like there can only be one disabled werewolf Romance novel.
I'd like there to be more, actually. I'd like them to hold hands. I would have liked us to hold hands, but alas.
We could have gone on mailing lists together. We could have shared readers. We could have had a beautiful Fall wedding under the eldritch glow of a blood moon. Why, why must we be forsaken?!
Absolutely insane to consider any other indie author "the competition" unless they're directly attacking you. Readers are (usually) not going out there like "hmm, which is the one single disabled werewolf romance book I will read?" More often, they will read one and if they like it, go ahead and get the other one. It's such a rising tide lifts all boats type of profession. Other books in your genre (assuming they're not reputation-ruiningly terrible) bring more readers to your genre! Ten amazing disabled werewolf romances is so much better than standing alone! It increases audience size for everyone!
"The competition" do they even understand their job?
Here's some of the notes, starting with the things multiple people brought up:
SHRIMP COCKTAIL:
banahbanah: #flashback to that one fic where Peter Parker frets about drinking shrimp cocktail because of the alcohol
generaldeliciousness: adding: what a prawn/shrimp cocktail is
#why is your character turning it down because they're under 21 #do you think prawn cocktail is a cocktail #this lives in my brain rent-free constantly #the rest of the fic was so normal #and good enough that i'll still re-read it #but bro
And then many, MANY, people wondering if this was actually authour mistake, since Peter really would do this!
POMEGRANATES:
zhajhassa: #haha where's that post that was like someone describing someone eating a pomegranate but they ate it like an apple
thornhands: #once someone wrote persephone biting into a whole Pomegranate #had to stop and stare at a wall for a minute
sungsingsanguine: I once saw someone very confidently write about a character eating slices of pomegranate.
FRUIT TREES:
zagreuses-toast: #given a very endearing glimpse into a writers blindspots by seeing them describe someone sitting under a ''pineapple tree''
salatrash: I remember something about picking watermelons... OF A FUCKING TREE
baander: #cranberry trees
DOUGH/BATTER:
maycelium: #I'm a chef so I'm really used to people not accurately describing how to cook food #But I was surprisingly flabbergasted when someone was writing making a cake and was kneading it. Which uh #Not necessary for cake. It was interesting for sure but just bizarre
livebloggingmydescentintomadness: #the one that drove me nuts was when a character set aside a batch of PASTA DOUGH 'to rise' #pasta doesn't have yeast!! #it does need to REST but it will never RISE #you do not want an airy crumb on your noodles
lovesodeepandwideandwell: #THE ONE WHERE THEY MADE COOKIES BY LADLING BATTER INTO A TRAY
Some other topics:
ANIMALS:
catenarwhal: #mandatory 'how cows produce milk' mention#i'll never recover from that one I fear
piromantic: #one time i saw someone fake their way through describing how spiders behave
pluto-lichen: horses
misskittypotter: #stardew valley faking its way through what fresh fish smell like
pa-pa-plasma: #saw someone faking their way through knowing what a seal is once #i still am fucked up over that one to this day. they just straight up did not know #& they were NOT good at guessing it either like it was clear they had never googled that animal ever #& was only just now realizing via answering questions from anons that seals are not!! what they assumed. initially
SEX:
dykevandyke: #what a prostate is #and where it is located #as in. external.
dreamyeyedrose: #I remember back in the ff.net days reading an Ichigo/Renji fic where the writer assumed the penises go inside each other #and I was like “I mean I don't know how it works for sure I don't have one but idk if that's how it works”
SOME OTHER FOOD STUFF:
thetrekkiehasthephonebox: #add another one to the list bloggers#this character is cooking a salad
shosta: #still baffled about the published work that didn't know food could freeze
sun-dari: #once i read a fic where the author didn't understand cinnamon
alto-tenure: #read something recently where the author was just. blatantly wrong about spices
dramatic-dolphin: #i saw someone try to fake their way through what ramen is once. like 14 years ago.#but i remember.#i was very confused about ramen for a few months. they were writing it so authoritatively.
the-celery-stalks-at-midnight: #i will never ever forget someone putting leftover fries in the microwave to reheat them and setting the timer for five minutes
typeghost: #this sparked a memory of a hannibal fic where the author had to fake their way through writing about gravy
draculin: #the one fanfic where the author knows about coffee only as a concept wrote a character as a coffee drinker#was very interesting#I don't remember the fandom or the plot but I was mesmerized by the coffee actions and choices
11235811235811: #there's a lot of faking their way thru congee in the svsss fandom i'll also note
fishali3n: #read one where the person clearly didnt know what tofu is
emmy-everafter: #in the aftermath of shadow and bone s2 i saw a lot of people pretending to know what stroopwafels are #babes they are more like cookies than breakfast waffles #like yes there is a waffle pattern but you're not gonna cut into a stack of them with syrup and sugar#🤣🤣🤣
NON-FOOD STUFF:
red-umbrella-811: Shoutout to Dame Agatha Christie for faking her way through what a wrench is in a very popular published work.
bluebeetle: #once saw someone have a character put an entire phone book in their pocket
nonametis: #- sex talk in languages other than english #<- or just the petnames in a different language other than English
sadisticpony: #the fanfiction i saw this week where op DIDNT KNOW HOW AUTOMATIC DOORS WORKED #and that they arent in peoples homes!!! of course. also opening the automatic door for someone is unironically very funny but its not #its not like. grabbing the door handle to let someone in. helpppp
danmeichael: #reminds me of the fic with the figure drawing class where the character started with the feet. #i love you feet first figure drawing author
meowmix1100blr: #me watching this one fic absolutely obliterate what the board of directors does
vexedhexes: #one time i read an architect character making a doorway bigger by building a bigger door #what a beautiful world. #OH. also gravity falls fic where they go 'oh piedmont is in california so its warm all year round'
leveragehunters: #characters going to a beer garden #And it's literally a garden outside the pub#It was a very cute mistake
fitofpique: #yes! #grown men do not get blind drunk off two beers #but i am possibly guilty of the hypothermia one #assuming it does not make you very horny?
dadvans-likes: #always thinking abt the soup kitchen fic #the entire setting of the fic was 'soup kitchen' #and i very quickly realized #the author did not know what a soup kitchen was #and they thought that soup kitchens only served soup #fic
msmargaretmurry: #i love fanfiction #once read a fic where the characters played 20 questions #but the author seemed to not know how to play 20 questions and was just kind of winging it........ #immaculate
shakespeareaddict: #Look I know not all of us are hockey experts #But it takes about ten seconds of research or any attention paid to the show to realize #That the Stanley cup playoffs are not in fucking September
baejax-the-great: #the funniest one i saw #was someone faking what church is like #like 1. they really didn't have to write an entire church experience for their fic #and 2. they had clearly never even watched a show where people went to church #it was bonkers weird
twosunson: #things ive seen authors faking #knowing how to unclog a drain #knowing. literally any history #knowing what ketamine looks like (apparently- oregano) #(you know who you are)
waterhorseyblues-ao3: #beltane being celebrated in winter #wales being portrayed as a completely separated land from england (i wish) #characters getting up after weeks of bedrest like that dosnt completely fuck you up
violetfairydust: #i once read a fic where the flight time from london to seattle was 3 hours
purekesseltrash: One time, in a fic set specifically in Des Moines, IA, two of the characters casually drove 20 minutes to the ocean. The memory continues to delight me. I want to know where that author thought that Iowa was.
Not a fic, but I once found an article of literary criticism where the author very confidently got the who-does-what-to-whom of Shakespeare’s Titus Andronicus so very Wrong that one had to wonder 1) if the article’s author had ever even actually read or seen Titus Andronicus and 2) how the article got published in a peer reviewed publication with such an egregious error in basic understanding of plot (perhaps his peers just hated him and hoped he would be mocked for basically hallucinating a Very Different play to what Shakespeare actually wrote).
But back to fic-related things: you can’t suck on someone’s g-spot under anything resembling normal circumstances.
its 2026 i cannot handle any more fucking "author A obviously ripped off author B" discourse by people Who Have Only Seen the work of author B and admit themselves that they have no further knowledge of the literary landscape they are moving in. like.
Another example of weird heteronormativity in M/M fiction: the bottom being assumed to be/defaulting to being more emotionally intelligent than the top.
In general, I think there are a lot of M/M stories where there is a character who would be the obvious choice to be the female character if this were an M/F story and there is a character who would be the obvious choice to be the male character.
This is not universal, of course, and I think some subgenres lend itself to this more than others, but I have read a lot of M/M romance where I have almost immediately gone, ah, you are the male version of the FMC in the straight version of this genre.
What ends up happening is that, often, that character takes on not only the role that a female character would play but also the characterization that a female character would have.
The character who is strong, stoic, reserved, well trained, well established, either liked and/or feared socially, darker, grumpier, more solid/less flightly, less exciteable, more confident, is generally also the character who plays the same role that a male character would play in the straight version of that romance, while the character who has taken what is typically a female character's role is generally also less confident, more exciteable, younger, less knowledgeable, more naive, less sexually experienced, flighty, more emotionally intelligent, more emotional in general, less trained or not trained at all, a relative social outcast out of disdain rather than out of fear, etc.
I shouldn't be starting star wars discourse in the year of our whatever 2026, but I just have to say:
It is still genuinely weird to me that there are so many modern AU sequel trilogy star wars fics, and yet so many of them have like college professor!kylo ren instead of the obvious modern AU version of kylo ren, which is neo-nazi grandson of high-ranking nazi collaborator.
I recognize people wrote modern AUs to avoid dealing with the uncomfy politics of woobifying the neo-nazi character, but at the same time, we have an obvious modern equivalent to his role, and it's not college professor.
My point here is less "he wouldn't be a college professor" and more "for some reason for kylo ren in particularn modern AU versions are not just modern but also entirely stripped of politics."
Obviously nobody needs to write about the politics of it, but it's just weird to me how many of the modern AUs in particular didn't use any of the modern direct equivalents of his character.
I shouldn't be starting star wars discourse in the year of our whatever 2026, but I just have to say:
It is still genuinely weird to me that there are so many modern AU sequel trilogy star wars fics, and yet so many of them have like college professor!kylo ren instead of the obvious modern AU version of kylo ren, which is neo-nazi grandson of high-ranking nazi collaborator.
I recognize people wrote modern AUs to avoid dealing with the uncomfy politics of woobifying the neo-nazi character, but at the same time, we have an obvious modern equivalent to his role, and it's not college professor.
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