I read a bit somewhere (and I cant find it now) that a tv producer was saying that you wanted fanfic for your show, and to insure fanfic you had to be vague and leave lots to the imagination. I think that may be simplistic, but it may also be true in a sense. Harry Potter gets a lot of fic because they left off the story just as the kids were finishing high school. Sherlock has that nebulous Johnlock stuff to be filled in. But Elementary has a long season that fills in the blanks. thoughts
OMG jcporter1! You know I have answered some asks privately before, but I think this is meant to be a public question so I am doing it! Answering an ask! Using Tumblr correctly! Baby steps here.
I would really like to find this producer’s quote, because that’s incredibly interesting—and serves as a nice counterpoint to everyone who assumes that when writers and producers try to “give fans what they want” they have to do so with specific plot choices, pairings, etc. I’ve seen so much fanfic that has to…well, unwrite some stupid plot decisions or terrible pairings and in that sense, everyone might have preferred that it’d all been kept vague.
I spent close to a decade in the Harry Potter fandom, and most of that time in a very specific corner—MWPP, shipping Remus/Sirius, with boring old tangential James/Lily. It was fascinating to watch (I mean in retrospect; I was having a constant crisis trying to process it as it happened) the fandom contend with and absorb and then fic the sheer information dump with every new book. She gave us all direction, but then, as she moved the story along, she made things so much harder to write around. I mean, in the space of three books she kills half the ship, pairs the surviving half with what felt like (at the time) the first woman he saw, and then kills the both of them.
How much do I care about the author? How much do I care about canon? Depends on the day. Have I read HP fanfic that’s better than anything in canon? I mean, obviously. But I also value the source material so much. If I didn’t, I wouldn’t have the desire to interrogate it with fanfiction. Right?
So wait. Back to the question at hand. I suppose there are a few ways to go about it. You could build an extraordinary world, JKR style. You could create compelling relationships—all SH adaptations have compelling relationships at heart. I’ve only seen a couple of episodes of Elementary but I have to imagine more gap-filling just creates new gaps to be filled—or small moments, more scenes to explore from different angles, more of a rhythm to write into, procedural-style. And then there are the gaps in Sherlock, as wide as the ocean that separates these two adaptations.
No matter what the outcome of the show, however the Johnlock question is resolved (or not), it’ll never be exactly how I want it. I do want them together, but on my terms; I have a different background and different personal stakes from these writers, and likely from many fans, even here on Tumblr; it’s not anyone’s responsibility to write to me alone—that’s my responsibility, and that’s the sheer beauty of fanfiction. For me, a television show simply can’t do what a long, slow-burn fanfic does. I have complicated headcannons about their rich inner lives that I can only really imagine in prose. Form inherently dictates how a story is told, yes? And what I want is more unconventional than most of what I see people clamoring for on Tumblr. I find it, in some fic, because that’s what’s so extraordinary about fanfic: maybe there are two of us in the world who want to see something, but there we are. Maybe there is one of us alone: we write it ourselves, for ourselves. Excuse me while I tear up a little about fanfiction. Occupational hazard.
If your show is total crap and it’s all vague, no one is going to want to play in your sandbox, as the expression goes. (Or not! Hate-ficcing is totally a thing, too. A different thing. Don’t get me started.) But I think however much you try to dictate someone’s reading of your plot and characters, someone will read it another way. Fanfiction—all fan engagement with a source text—is an uncontrollable thing. And that’s what makes it so much damn fun.
(How did my first ask go? OK?)
