#This is directly about the Sherlock BBC blogs I interact with.

[myeyesblurry]

Just a reminder, I am a roleplay blog. Blurry is a character. This post is regarding the Sherlock BBC roleplayer drama.

If I talk about things on my blog, it's in character. If we talk in DM's it's a 50/50 if I'll be in character or not. You'll be able to tell, by the fact if I start slurring you or not. (If you request we talk mod to mod; sure. If not I'll let you know- but this has never happened. I don't have reason to not be kind or myself in general.) If i send asks, it's 90% of the time in character. I am quick to drop a character if the conversation gets serious and I am trying to comfort the people behind the blogs.

I don't have beef with anyone personally.

It's all roleplay.

I do have addiction issues, and yes I did go on a binge last month and overdose. I've been (rather painfully) sober since. I smoke weed now though, in attempts to help me stay away from harder drugs. It's worked so far. I mostly am here when sober, and again am sober now as I write all of this, and have been during a lot of this situation. The weed has been during weaker moments.

If you want to ask me about in character drama, I will GLADLY spill all I know! If we have the energy at the time, anyway. If there are gaps between posts or replies, remember I'm an addict and I have a disociative disorder. Simply put; my body might be here, but my mind isn't all of the time. I'm too tired or too high to be in it sometimes, and you get gaps. Days, weeks, whatever. Often not weeks, I think 3 weeks was the max recently.

If you want drama between mods; the character will not. And if I am not part of the mod drama, I have nothing to say. Do I know more than I let on? Yes. Do I talk about it? Not unless they're a dangerous person and I fear for you. Could I warn you again talking OOC with a character, while saying it's safe to talk to the character? Yah. Sure. Just be cautious and I need to remind you that these characters are not the mods, and that these characters are not your friend.

I will give people my personal blog or otherwise show my hand if I am trying to express I will be open/be your friend. I'm not saying every blog that doesn't tell you their main is bad, and I'm not saying any blog that does tell you their main is good.

But that to blindly trust a character, without establishing any real connection outside of that, and taking what they say as gospel or telling them secrets, is dangerous. Remember that just because one person speaks first, doesn't automatically mean they are in the right. Remember also; that neither is the second, middle, last, whoever! For clearance. Stories have two sides, and sometimes the truth is muddy and somewhere in the middle. Sometimes hearing more stories might help gather intel for you to make a decision, but can never truly be perfect.

If you need to ask about my personal experiences with someone, I can tell you as well, if I'm feeling up for it. If not, I won't lie, I'll say I'm not ready or it's private. I can't speak for anyone else, or tell a story that's happened to anyone else. I'll tell my personal story, if I have one, and you can use it to help guide on who you believe, if you want. But my personal experience will not be a public post on this blog. But private, dm's, or even on one of my personal blogs.

Remember the world isn't black and white, and that people can be good and make mistakes or do bad actions, and that bad people can make mistakes and do good actions. With or without manipulation. That if things sound insane, it might be because they are just exaggerating their story. That they might or might not be the victim, and that good can handle bad for a long time before they break, or any other situation. Good can do bad things, when they've suffered a long time; and that you can't always believe everyone's story to be gospel. Good, bad, we're just people.

These are real people, don't blur the lines of rp and them. They might do bad actions, and be good. They might do good actions, and be bad. But they could just be people, who make mistakes, have misunderstandings, and suffer the fallout for a long, long, time. Hold grudges and hold them long after others change, and when that happens, they could see any good action as manipulation or some other negativr reason for the way they're acting. That they could accidentally become manipulators themselves. Cycle of abuse is real, and the victim turns into a new abuser, but often the one they are abusing is a new innocent person, a new victim. No one deserves abuse, and often there's no reason behind it. Certainly not a good, justifiable, reason.

Remember any time you've acted crazy, sometimes you were pushed to it, sometimes it was deserved, sometimes you were in the wrong, but you felt it was the right often, or otherwise had a reason, didn't you? It's important to self reflect, because sometimes we make mistakes.

Often, someone being mean might be a bad day. Maybe they got in a fight with someone they like, or got shouted at, or one too many people cut them off (maybe drive faster bbg. thats a joke). It's not justified, but understanding is the first step. Maybe they're being mistreated, and it comes out, or they just simply don't have anything else to compare it to.

But at the end of the day, communication is key, and make your own judgements on your experiences or others if you listen. If you are weary but like their character, that's alright. These are real people and sometimes good and bad are just colors on a spectrum. You can be good, and do something bad.

People are just people, with traumas and triggers and it can be hard to stay out of a cycle of abuse when perhaps everything might be bringing them down. Not justified, but understanding.

And if someone is truly bad to you, mean to you, the block button is easy to find. If they start to do something, anon asks or messages, harass you, report for harassment and block again. Tell others and show them, maybe, so they can help, close friends, or people who listen.

Stay safe, everyone. Blocking and walking away is sometimes the best option.

[teacup-captor]

I have a ko-fi now. Billionares if you see this and you have a billion to spare please follow the link below

(alternatively if you do not have a billion to spare but you have some money for business transactions I do commissions)

[Psst! I roleplay on my main. Everything under the "#Gargoyle Leo" (old tag) and "#sir gargoyle Leo" (new tag) is rp! ]

Call us Teacup (have fun with the pronouns we go by All of them.) feel free 2 ask who's fronting :P

PLEASE SEND ME BEES. I WILL BE SO HAPPY. PUT A BEE IN MY INBOX /NF

Or just tell me about your day or make random noises at me <333 infodump if you'd like omg!!! /g

Other blogs I have!!!

@teacup-crafter (creative stuff archive PLS PLS PLS SEND ME ASKS WITH SHERLOCK ART REQUESTS)

@tths-system-antics (system blog (very inactive. Sorry))

@your-fave-is-soup (gimmick blog for souping blorbos. I'm active I just don't get asks. I love souping blorbos)

@bentleysbeetle (Good Omens RP blog. Adoptive child of Aziraphale (and by proxy, Crowley) and best friends with Bentley. Dabbles in crime solving. Also- I do tarot readings there. Long story. You get a silly one and a serious one if you ask.)

@youngpoetthomasthorne (poetry + aesthetic but mainly Thomas Thorne BBC Ghosts rp blog)

Tag system:

#Gargoyle Leo - this is my tag for the Good Omens roleplay :) everything under this tag is roleplay!! Everything else is ooc :P as a general I'm only roleplaying when I'm directly interacting with other Good Omens roleplayers. My character is called Leo and uses it/they/he/she/ne pronouns. They're totally not based on anyone what are you even saying /j

#sigmord - stimboards

#trinket box - things I am saving <3 little trinkets :D

#bees for me - bees sent in my inbox or bee posts I have been tagged in

#why can't i just be normal moments - I AM NOT BEING SELF-DEPRICATING. This is my tag for unhinged things I've said (on Discord mostly, but I'm open for other things too)

#good omens season 2 spoilers - self-explanatory

#bbc ghosts 5 - bbc ghosts s5 spoilers

Trigger warnings get tagged as #tw [trigger] and #[trigger] tw just so you're covered

I also have tags for my friends. If I reblogged your post and you don't understand one of my tags it's probably bc I reblogged it from a friend

DNI:

-PROSHIPPERS/SUPPORTERS, THINSPO/PRO ED OR ANYTHING BODY FOCUSED*. I WILL NOT DISCUSS THIS GET THE FUCK OFF OF MY PAGE, YOU ARE PROMOTING SELF-HARM AND I DO NOT WANT THAT ANYWHERE NEAR ME.

(* body focused as in you post only/primarily pictures of bodies especially in a weight focused way)

-ZIONSTS/PRO-GENOCIDE/WHATEVER THE FUCK YOU WANNA CALL YOURSELF F U C K OFF. THIS PAGE IS PRO PALESTINE. FUCK MY ASS IF YOU'RE NOT PRO PALESTINE

(if you don't know what's going on regarding Israel vs Palestine I'm very happy to give an explanation but I am N O T discussing this. Good people are pro Palestine.)

(If you apply for the rest of my DNI feel free to ask why or discuss calmly with me but if you start getting angry you're fucking blocked)

-Homophobes, transphobes, enbyphobes, racist, yadda yadda if ya hate people fur things they cannot or should not change fuck off right to hell

-Against therians/otherkins

-Ableists (that includes if you believe NPD or other PDs are inherently bad or use terms like "nArC AbUsE". They're people too and they can be nice.)

-Against mspec gays/lesbians, turigirls, lesboys, or other contradicting labels

-Against self-diagnosis

-Endo/t*lpa (*u) systems and their supporters (if you're syscourse neutral you can stay, just know that I'm under the belief that endo systems are either not systems or they're invalidating their own trauma. If you use labels such as "neurogenic" to say you formed from trauma bc of a mental illness, that is literally trauma and makes you traumagenic)

[talenlee]

The Johnlock Conspiracy Conspiracy

First of all this is going to be building off a point first cast into relief for me by Sarah Z’s video on The Johnlock Conspiracy. She is both directly connected with the experience of this space and did the research into the actual history of the people involved, a sort of on-the-spot observer recounting her experiences ethnographically. If you want a longer form deep dive on what The Johnlock Conspiracy is, check out that video. I will be providing a quick summary.

I’m also going to talk about fanagement, which I wrote about last year, which is about the way that fan engagement was seen as being a thing that corporate entities could deliberately engage for commercial ends. Fanagement isn’t necessarily an inherently evil or corrupting thing, but it’s something to know about as something that exists, and knowing it exists can colour your relationship to the media created in response to fanagement.

There’s this idea of ‘The Johnlock conspiracy.’

In the agonisingly mediocre BBC mystery drama Sherlock that ran from who cares to also who cares, starring in the loosest sense of the word Benedict Cumberbatch and Martin Freeman (a man ‘renowned’ for this, The Office and the Hobbit trilogy, on a scale of poisonous influence to actual outright evil), as a modern day re-imagining of Sherlock Holmes and John Watson that has some interesting ideas that it absolutely does not use well, mysteries that are not interesting and a relationship tension that was making itself up as it went along. Much ink has been spilled about how this series is not very good, and that’s good, because it’s a very expensively made bad series that banks on the reliable draw of the same fistful of boring privilege.

Part of what made it popular, sort of, was the tension of the relationship between John and Sherlock. See, they were both men, you see, and what if they kissed.

Now, tumblr is, by volume, mostly connections to other parts of tumblr. If you make something popular, it becomes amplified and exploded and brought to the attention of others and curated into lists. Content that gets shared is the very sinew of what Tumblr is, which means that doing things people share around is a strange form of primacy on the site. Making content is powerful, heady, druglike. Commanding curation where you determine what does and does not get shared is even moreso. It is a space for an audience that is engaged deeply with the concept of being engaged, and in this space, fandom happened.

There’s not a lot of Sherlock. There were big gaps between the seasons. When a season came out, it did not explain itself or deliver on its promise at all. It is, as I’ve said, bad. But it was well made and used actors you’d heard of and was treated as being prestigious and so, when the show came out, and because people liked the idea of what it could be, fandom struck on a conspiracy:

What if this terrible show is secretly great?

And I understand the impulse. It’s heart to a lot of fandom. I can’t possibly have spent this time and energy on something I don’t like, it must be that the thing I like is secretly this thing I really like. And so scaffolding comes out to buttress the idea. We’re not taught that fandom is right – we’re taught that fandom is something that justifies itself by being right. If you have a story in your heart about a Dark Fuckprince and his soft bean injured Watson, that story is real and right, and doesn’t need the official endorsement of the BBC to be good.

Without that armour of love, though, instead the fandom turned into this endless oroborous of hostility centered around three people, who seem to just be total dickheads, great job you. This resulted in the blossoming of what was known as ‘the Johnlock Conspiracy,’ where through thousands of pages of well intentioned fumes, these fans huffed themselves into believing that Steven Moffat and Mark Gattis were secretly building up to exactly what they wanted, and they were the smartest people ever for noticing it. The lack of payoff of their beliefs and the active hostility Moffat had to their ideas and positions in person, that was all part of the conspiracy.

Oh, by the way, that idea – conspiracy – is when you have an unfalsifiable conjecture. If you can’t prove it false, no matter what, that’s when you’re dealing with a conspiracy theory.

The dramatic conclusion to all this was the series ended, their conspiracy was wrong, they theorycrafted themselves a few more months of content, and then most people let it drop.

But what if I told you there was a conspiracy?

Because there was. It just wasn’t the conspiracy they thought.

See, a conspiracy is a real thing: it’s a secret plan to do something harmful. And the BBC, since they published the work that Matt Hill described in Torchwoods Trans-Transmedia: Media Tie-Ins and Brand Fanagement, worked with the parameters of their experiment aggressively.

The idea, as I outlined in my article about Fanagement was that making the program so it could engage fans directly, and give fans feelings of creative ownership over the work would drive viewership and the kinds of engagement they liked (like, paying for things). Fanagement sought to make media ‘gifable’ – low saturation backgrounds with cuts of under a second so you could break a scene apart easily and conveniently. It wanted to make fan media easy to make, and to minimise hard declarative statements.

The lessons learned from this paper included things like ship teasing as a deliberate task – and I do mean teasing, with the idea that you had to do it in deniable and ambiguous ways. Making things definite wouldn’t get you as much fan engagement as keeping things ambiguous, because fans would make an inference based on what you show them, talk about it, then other fans would watch it again to make sure they could argue with you about it.

A mystery show like Sherlock was perfect for this kind of treatment. Treating the series as if there was some really deep, thoughtful question at the heart of it meant that there was always a reason to keep from ‘revealing’ the secret of the story, to string the audience along, like they’d believe or tolerate it, if it was all in service of a clever explanation. You get it, right? After all, we gave you all the clues.

The toxic fandom of Sherlock did not form as much as it was fostered.

A lesson from this experience, a lesson easily escaping notice, is that it’s not that ‘fandoms are all the same.’ They really aren’t. They are wildly varying in the terms of their problems and those problems root causes. What they tend to have in common is dynamics, but those dynamics are expressed in a lot of different ways. It’s not that ‘fandoms’ naturally become toxic and awful. There are fandoms that are generally, quite nice, and they tend to be that way because of the values of the central movers and shakers and the conscious willingness of people who perceive themselves as part of the fandom as taking care of it. The dynamic is the same – you have common nexuses of community that people interact with – and the kind of behaviour that’s acceptable and reasonable is filtered through them. If the idea of asking people to modify their behaviour or respect people’s boundaries is seen as unreasonable, then you can get a toxic space.

Also, as I talk about ‘toxic fandoms,’ understand toxicity is relative. There is, after all, a very real, very unironic Hitler Fandom, and they are probably one of the worst fandoms out there. Being a mean lawyer on the internet is bad, and I’ve no doubt the fandom curators known now as the Powerpuff Girls absolutely wrecked some teenagers’ lives – like, there are definitely people with, I am not joking or being hyperbolic, some PTSD triggers about (say) Tumblr or whatnot, based on the kind of social force these people were leveraging.

And then remember that holding that lever at the high end, right at the top with the most power over it was a company that made TV shows that was trying to make sure you watched their shows.

Also: The tools for doing this are available to all the companies that read the paper.

My advice? Exhort and uplift queer creators. Be positive about it, not negative. Don’t make your time about attacking other people’s dark fuckprince. Bring what you like to life, and bring that life into the light. Share and love each other, rather than find reasons to be mad at one another for how you’re all playing with toys a corporation wants you to treat with respect and only play properly. And as always, the standard you walk past is the standard you accept – so make sure your fandom circles aren’t putting up with some Powerpuff Girls.

Originally posted on my Blog.

[inevitably-johnlocked]

Hi Steph! I'm new to tumblr but was introduced to the TJLC fandom through the TJLC explained videos (which I still really love). I have some ideas and want to write metas, but have no idea how to do that. Do you have some tips? Aside from sharing my weird ideas about BBC Sherlock, I mostly want to write metas to hopefully meet some new people and talk about TJLC with them. So I guess that would be a second question, on how to make friends on tumblr. Anyways, I love your whole Nonny Q&A thing

Hi Lovely!!

I’m so happy you’ve come into our corner of the hell hole, LOL. For meeting new people and interacting with the fandom, I’ve actually written about that before, so you can check out these posts here and here. Plus, English doesn’t have to be your first language ;)

As for meta writing, some people have a method, like brainstorming it all out on paper in really complicated steps, but for me personally: I just jot down whatever comes to my head (sort of a “thesis” line") and springboard from there. I literally have no direction whenever I write original meta, and it’s mostly lines of shitposts to refine into a cohesive narrative written in a style that will appeal to my audience. That’s honestly it.

My advice: don’t write a meta just because there’s a place for it; write about it because you are PASSIONATE about your view on the topic you are writing, especially if there is some sort of personal experience involved. For instance, I write passionately about Mary’s character because it helped me understand the motives of a person in my real life and helped me come to terms with the fact that I can’t change said person, so cutting them out of my life was the healthy option. I write passionately about Sherlock’s character because I too feel like a lonely outcast who loves too much and tries to hide it. I write passionately about the narrative arc because I hate things not making sense, and in order for me to make sense of it, I thrive on connecting the dots and helping others do the same. Your readers will KNOW how much love and thought you put into your meta if you’re writing it not for the views but FOR YOURSELF. The notes and additions to it are always a lovely bonus to it. One of my fave metas turned into a community discussion about people’s life experiences, and it REALLY was so amazing to me to see people just as passionate about a character and his life as I was.

Also: don’t be discouraged to write just because you think someone has already written about it! No one has written how YOU view the scene or story or character, and adding your two cents always helps to engage the fandom in your meta! As well, especially if you’re starting out, cite other meta or posts that may have inspired you to that conclusion, and DON’T BE AFRAID TO TAG “MORE POPULAR” PEOPLE" who share a similar viewpoint; they’re all just like you (many of them just not even aware they have any pull in the fandom) and are always up for interesting discussion about anything.

What else? OH If you’re going to write your meta directly into Tumblr rather than in a word or textedit doc, THE “SAVE DRAFT” BUTTON IS YOUR FRIEND. Dear lord, after every paragraph or if you leave your browser window for a few minutes to make accompanying gifs or to find links to add to your post, SAVE DRAFT. I cannot tell you how many meta I have lost and said “fuck it” to because I just wrote it all for hours and didn’t save and my browser crashed or I have accidentally closed the tab instead of going back to the tab (which is mostly MY problem, because I literally have 50 tabs open on any given window, so it gets… small)… this happens more when I do asks (which a large portion of my meta are nowadays) because it’s easy to forget to save it as you’re writing.

Pictures as supporting proof is always a great way to break up walls of text as well. Even if the pics are just used as section headers, it just really gives the eyes a break. Sometimes our eyes get tired, and showing with canonical proof often leaves a greater impact. Have a nice ratio of images to text, your readers will thank you for it :) Image width for tumblr is currently 540px for the dashboard. Though all blogs have their own ratios; find out what yours is, and tumblr *should* auto-resize that pic to fit the dash ratio, so long as it’s over 150px, I believe.

Finally, as you write more and more, I recommend keeping an RTF document of EVERYTHING you’ve ever written, especially if you’re gonna post to tumblr. I myself do have an efficient tagging system, but after awhile it gets messy and harder and harder to find some of my posts since tumblr doesn’t have a way to look at the tags at-a-glance, so I have been cataloguing my posts and replies on a document so I can find them later so I can reference them. Referencing your own posts keep you from not only constantly repeating yourself, but also saves your regulars from reading the same thing over and over again – a link will give people the option to read your extended thoughts on a topic if they so choose. Eventually, your blog will become a Wikipedia of meta – as in THERE’S NO WAY OUT LOL…. Seriously though, people appreciate if you tell them what your posts are referencing or if you just keep a succinct liner about your thoughts with a link to additional thoughts.

Other than that�� JUST HAVE FUN. Seriously, just enjoy it! And if-when you do write your meta, feel free to DM it to me! (I get tagged on a lot of things so I tend to miss them, LOL)

Happy writing, Lovely!!