noldorinsherlock

[noldorinsherlock]

[noldorinsherlock]

I don't know how to put the water overlay edit on things but I've seen this post like twice now and it's Also going to make me become the joker. I don't know how to explain to you that ACD Holmes is, in fact, rude.

[noldorinsherlock]

[noldorinsherlock]

Reblog to renew your TJLC Vows:

[noldorinsherlock]

[noldorinsherlock]

i am going to become the joker i s2g

[noldorinsherlock]

Perhaps rewatching Private Life was a mistake

[noldorinsherlock]

every now and then i can feel doubt creep into the corners of my mind. but [john blog page dot jpeg] is always there to bring me back to the light.

[noldorinsherlock]

sherlock really popped off when he said “bitterness is a paralytic. love is a much more vicious motivator.” HE KNOOOOOOWS

[noldorinsherlock]

it's all ACAB until bbc sherlock actually bullied cops for drugbusting him and everyone on here said he was mean :(

[noldorinsherlock]

plugging in my phone in the dark and thinking about bbc sherlock: tralala yay yippee woo yeah!

[noldorinsherlock]

[noldorinsherlock]

ohhhhh my god you think bbc sherlock is a bad show? should we tell everyone? should we throw a party? should we invite arthur conan doyle

[noldorinsherlock]

[noldorinsherlock]

Even if a creator is a bad person it's still okay to like their work. People need to mind their own business.

Honestly it's not really that sort of situation. I'll actively defend Steven Moffat here.

There was a huge hate movement for him back in the early 2010s - which, in retrospect, formed largely because he was running 2 of the superwholock shows at once, one of which went through extremely long hiatuses* and the other of which was functionally an adaptation of an already well regarded show**, making him subject to a sort of double ire in the eyes of a lot of fandom people. Notably, his co-showrunner, Mark Gatiss, is rarely mentioned and much of his work is still attributed to Moffat (and yes, this includes that Hbomberguy video. Several of "Steven Moffat's bad writing choices" were not actually written by him, they were Gatiss.)

People caricatured the dude into a sort of malicious, arrogant figure who hated women and was deliberately mismanaging these shows to spite fans, to the point where people who never watched them believe this via cultural osmosis. It became very common to take quotes from him out of context to make them look bad***, to cite him as an example of a showrunner who hated his fans, someone who sabotaged his own work just to get at said fans, someone who was too arrogant to take criticism, despite all of this being basically a collective "headcanon" formed on tumblr. Some if it got especially terrible, like lying about sexual assault (I don't mean people accused him of sexual assault and I think they're making it up, I mean people would say things like "many of his actresses have accused him of sexual assault on set" when no such accusations exist in the first place. This gets passed around en masse and is, in my opinion, absolutely rancid.)

On top of that a ton of the criticism directed at the shows themselves is, personally, just terrible media criticism. So much of it came from assuming a very hostile intent from the writer and just refusing to engage with the text at all past that.

Like some really common threads you see with critique of this writer's work, especially in regards to Doctor Who since that's the one I'm most familiar with:

A general belief that his lead characters were meant to be ever perfect self inserts, and so therefore when they act shitty or arrogant or flawed in any way, that's both reflective of the author and meant to be viewed as positive or aspirational.

An overarching thesis that his characters are "too important" in the narrative due to the writer's arrogance and self obsession

A lot of focus on the writer personally "attacking" the fans or making choices primarily out of spite.

A tendency to treat the show being different to what it's adapting as inherently bad and hostile towards the original

Just generally very little consideration of the themes, intent, etc.

This one's a little more nebulous and doesn't apply to all critique but a lot of it, especially recently, is clearly by people who haven't seen the show in like 10 years and their opinion is largely formed secondhand through like, "discourse nostalgia". Which. you know. bad.

I think these are just weird and nonsensical ways to engage with a work of fiction. I also think it's really sad to see the show boiled down to this because that era of who is, in my opinion, very thematically rich and unique among similar shows, and I hate that it's often dismissed in such a paltry way.

This isn't to say people aren't allowed to critique Steven Moffat or anything, but the context in which he basically became The Devil™ to a large portion of fandom and is still remembered in a poor light is very tied to this perfect storm of fan culture and I just don't agree with a ton of it.

* I'm sure most people have seen the way long running shows and hiatuses will cause people to fall out with a show, with some former fans turning around and joining a sort of "anti fandom" for it while it's still airing. That happened with both these shows. ** Doctor Who will change it's entire writing staff, crew, and cast every few years, and with that comes a change in style, tone, theme - the old show basically ends and is replaced by a new show under the same title. As Steven Moffat's era was the first of these handovers for the majority of audiences, you can imagine this wasn't a well loved move for many fans. *** I know for a fact most people have not sought out the sources for a lot of these quotes to check that they read the same in context because 1) most of them were deleted years ago and are very difficult to find now and 2) many of them do actually make sense in the context of their respective interviews

[noldorinsherlock]

obviously i'm biased beyond help. but the way those polls are like johnlock (one of the most-portrayed relationships in the world. foundational masonry of this website. stop pretending superwholock was never a thing.) versus two characters from some show i've seen maybe three people talk about ever.

[noldorinsherlock]

funniest character dynamic in the world to me is when you have one guy knows hes gay but doesnt realise hes in love with his best friend and another guy who knows hes in love with his best friend but does not know hes gay