one more thing wrt 'if you read hp youre poisoned forever' discourse is like. i get the sense that some ppl think there is an object out there that is so morally sound that critical analysis is not required to engage with it, and that the goal is to dispense with bad objects that have bad things in them and trade up to something you don't actually have to question or push on because its worldview is your worldview. 'well you shouldnt be reading hp anyway cause it's antisemitic and fatphobic' it certainly is and if those things bother you, you can absolutely avoid it but the vibe in those conversations sometimes is like. that that isn't true of plenty of other media.. plenty of books reproduce prejudice and we continue to read them and there will never be a book or other analytical object that is so ethically unimpeachable that it will give you permission to turn your brain off while you engage with it. and yet it feels like that's what some ppl are looking to assure themselves of by campaigning against hp, the idea that if we can whittle out the bad books we'll be left with the benign ones that you can consume mindlessly without worrying that they'll poison your brain when you're not looking... like if hp can poison you as an adult by infecting you with prejudice it's because you're not reading it critically. and some people really do seem to be terrified of books that might have this nefarious infectious ability e.g. lolita because they don't trust in their own or others' ability to resist becoming enmeshed with the worldview of whatever they're reading or watching. people are not confident in their own critical abilities and also they would rather be absolved of the responsibility to employ them.. like youre not gonna get better at something by avoiding it at all costs!!
i think maybe the problem with kuang's "yellowface" is that there ISN'T a constructive way to write that kind of story. either you do what she did, and make the white protag a parody of personhood (which further obscures the material and systemic realities of racism in the US, while allowing white readers a sort of...distance from id-ing with a Bad Person). or you write something very subtle, with the understanding that readers and reviewers might totally miss the mark, rendering your "critique" worthless. either you write a popular, obvious satire, or you--idk, don't, i guess. because i'm not entirely sure who this book is FOR. we KNOW whiteness hates us. we KNOW we're the Other. we know how they think about us. and white people based entire (economic, social) systems around antiblack, anti-indigenous hierarchies that profits off our creative labor while denying us personhood. so they're aware, too. no matter how much they pretend ignorance.
I’ve been thinking about the radically different kinds of stories that people believe Sherlock is telling, especially now, after series 4.
I mostly bowed out of the Sherlock fandom post-series 3, for a variety of reasons that had to do with the show itself and the fandom and my own evolving tastes and desires. TAB was barely a blip on my radar, but with the airing of series 4 I’ve found myself unable not to think about it constantly and read through post after post on Tumblr. And honestly I’ve been, if not totally blindsided, pretty startled by the intense divergence in the way different fans understand the story the show is telling. I once loved Sherlock passionately, and it was one of the first fandoms I experienced. I don’t think it or any fandom has ever been conflict-free, but right now It’s all sort of heartbreaking, honestly, to watch people tear themselves and others to bits--not that I think there’s nothing to be torn up about. While I don’t really get it, on one level, because I feel like I’m seeing a completely different show from other people, on another level, I do get it--that’s the point. We ARE seeing different shows. Or we might as well be, because we are interpreting them, reading into them, really differently. And sometimes those different ways rub up against each other.
More under the cut.
Some of us read Sherlock as if there’s a complex, incredibly elaborate, deliberate mystery hidden below the surface of the show. That’s not ridiculous: the methodology and philosophy of Sherlock Holmes (“You see, but you do not observe”) encourage this reading practice, which is presumably why fans of the character have been engaging in it for decades. BBC’s show didn’t invent “the Great Game,” after all. Some of us believe the answer to that under-the-surface mystery is sexuality and/or same-sex romance. That’s not ridiculous: sexuality is often presented as a secret to be revealed, whether in older narratives that couldn’t name it explicitly or in the notion of “coming out of the closet.”
Some of us read Sherlock as if it’s not just what’s on screen that counts, but also as part of a broader system of cultural beliefs, commercial interests, and lots and lots of individual contributors with many different priorities. Some of us think that means Sherlock won’t, even if its creators wanted it to, make their male main characters kiss, or make them explicitly LGBTQ+. That’s not ridiculous: cultural homophobia and its milder cousin cultural heteronormativity are pervasive roadblocks to that kind of storytelling, and a commercially successful show, even on a generally queer-friendly network, might not feel it can “go there” with its main characters. And many of the people involved in making it might not even consider that as a real possibility, for a plethora of reasons both cultural and personal, both heteronormative and not so much.
Some of us read Sherlock as if it’s light entertainment—fun, but not particularly meaningful and certainly not ethically responsible for flouting or shifting cultural attitudes. That’s not ridiculous: we are so often told that television shows, especially “genre” shows, are basically just fluff. And sometimes we want to watch television as a much-needed break from the pressures of daily life and, often, daily prejudices.
Some of us read Sherlock as if what’s on the surface is all that’s there. That a “no homo” joke is just a “no homo” joke, and that maybe that’s bad or maybe it doesn’t matter, but either way it’s not a clue to something deeper. That’s not ridiculous: it’s what the creators keep telling us, and it takes into account the limited amount of time, money, and resources those behind Sherlock have to pull it off.
Some of us read Sherlock as if it’s a bit of a mess, for better and often for worse. As if perhaps the many different people working on it didn’t sit down and have a conversation about what they were trying to say about intimacy, love, desire, kinship and how those things interact with gender and sexuality. That’s not ridiculous: the very diversity of ways people read Sherlock suggests that there’s something profoundly unclear about it. Is it a gay romance? Is it queerbaiting—a gay romance that stops short of being explicitly gay? Is it a no-homo, heteronormative buddy cop show? Is it about nonsexual but non-heteronormative queer intimacy and kinship, about experiencing desires and practicing intimacies and forging families of choice that aren’t culturally legible? Some of us read Sherlock as if it’s all of those things or maybe none of them, that at any given moment a particular kind of potential might surface or that one viewer might understand something very differently from another. Some of us think this is at least partly down to a lack of intentionality on the show’s part. Some of us wish the Sherlock team had done a little more dramaturgical work.
Some of us are disappointed with Sherlock right now, for what it did or didn’t do, for the choices it made, some of them about Sherlock and John’s relationship, some of them not. Some of us blame the creators; some of us blame other fans and their theories and convictions; some of us blame the BBC, or homophobic viewers, or society at large; some of us, I think, feel inclined in this moment to blame ourselves. None of this, really, is ridiculous, and some of these feelings may even be helpful to those who are hurting, as long as they remember to be compassionate and not to aim their anger directly at specific people. People who, for better or worse, and not always without doing harm, read the show differently than they did.
I’m not saying that there’s nothing wrong with Sherlock. I’m not saying that fans’ anger and disappointment, for whatever reason, are invalid: quite the opposite. We have been hurt and we have hurt each other, and neither of these is okay. And I’m not saying that we shouldn’t be critiquing and, above all, creating—making the stories, of all different kinds, that we need right now and always. But what seems a possible antidote to the bitterly polarizing atmosphere that these days tends to pervade the Sherlock fandom is to begin by acknowledging multiple reading practices, multiple contexts, multiple agendas. And that sometimes these reading practices, contexts, and agendas can be good and well-meaning and important on their own and still clash with other good and well-meaning and important reading practices, contexts, and agendas. Sometimes they are radically incompatible with each other. Or sometimes, on their own, they are necessarily incomplete. Sometimes they produce harm. Sometimes they are fun. Sometimes they are all of these things at once.
This is a limited relativism: it is valid to read something differently from someone else, but also critical to ask whether that reading practice is doing harm, and what we might change in order to prevent that harm. Sherlock might have done well to ask these questions; so might we. I am sure that even this practice of acknowledging multiplicity feels to some like it is doing harm—that it is invalidating their singular viewpoint. So we may not, in the end, avoid all harm. But we can try. Reading, watching, emotionally investing in stories—this is, as we all know, a risky business. We can sometimes choose what risks to take, and respect those that others have chosen as well.
every time i read a fanfiction which is essentially a reparative fantasy about the idea of a man who is extremely possessive and controlling but also has exacting moral boundaries when it comes to his love interest and for this reason would die before ever abusing or injuring them, i also make myself read a book on the mechanics of intimate partner abuse in order to counteract the poison said fanfiction leaves in my brain. doesnt stop the fantasy from being compelling though so i guess as an antidote this method leaves something to be desired
anyway even divorced from any shameless tv-related emotions i may have, the concept of an au in which you can't lie to your soulmate is both horrifying and compelling to me. imo everyone should always be allowed to lie at all times, especially to themselves. so much of life requires dishonesty, subversion, trickery, repression, etc. just to survive.. if your soulmate asks you a question can they pull out a truth from you that even you didn't know was true? do you really want to know yourself that intimately, especially if you're doing it with an audience? if i met my soulmate and was compelled to start saying stuff i didn't even know i thought or felt i would run screaming the other way too . like is the implicit claim that having what is essentially an honesty clause baked into soulmateship as a social formation would make soulmates more likely to stay together? because that seems.. counterintuitive to me. i don't think my most honest self is my most lovable self and if telling my soulmate the truth all the time meant i had to tell myself the truth all the time frankly i would not be interested. even a metaphysical truth serum is still essentially a torture device and it should be treated as such!!
As Pierre Bourdieu (1980) suggests, contemporary "bourgeois aesthetics" consistently values "detachment, disinterestedness, indifference" over the affective immediacy and proximity of the popular aesthetic (237-239). The popular, Bourdieu claims, is often characterized by the "desire to enter into the game, identifying with the characters' joys and sufferings, worrying about their fate, espousing their hopes and ideals, living their lives" (237-239). The "bourgeois" aesthetic Bourdieu identifies often distrusts strong feelings and fears the loss of rational control suggested by such intense and close engagement with the popular. Even when such critics accept some popular culture as worthy of serious attention, they typically read popular works as if they were materials of elite culture, introducing "a distance, a gap" between themselves and the text; the intellectual reader of popular texts focuses less on their emotional qualities or narrative interests than upon those aspects which "are only appreciated rationally through a comparison with other works," (upon evaluative notions of authorship, for example) [...] These viewers, Bourdieu suggests, consistently deny the pleasures of affective immediacy in favor of the insights gained by contemplative distance. Bourdieu is careful to specify the historical and social context where this ideal of distanced observation originated, though his followers have not always done so.
Since Brecht, this discomfort with proximity has assumed a specifically political dimension within ideological criticism: the native spectator, drawn too close to the text emotionally, loses the ability to resist or criticize its ideological construction; critical distance, conversely, bestows a certain degree of freedom from the ideological complicitness demanded by the text as a precondition for its enjoyment. Within this formulation, distance empowers, proximity dominates. Mary Anne Doane (1987) [...] argues that the female spectator is often represented as drawn so close to the text that she is unable to view it with critical distance and hence as less capable of resisting its meanings. Such identification, Doane suggests, cannot be "a mechanism by means of which mastery is assured," but rather "can only be seen as reinforcing her submission" to textual authority.
Textual Poachers: Television Fans and Participatory Culture (1992) by Henry Jenkins
it's not that i dont understand and empathize with the desire to see one half of your ship get absolutely destroyed sexually but it just does NOT necessarily follow that it is in character for the other half of said ship to get off on being sexually dominant. sorry
