#when you have to make johnlock canon because no one else does it

[consult-sherlockholmes]

Before the election results are officially in, I have to make a confession. Something that I should have done a long time ago.

John, I lov-

[amyreadsandstresses]

Oh! I actually have a semi useful experience for this.

Here's the thing, I'm one of those people that don't see ships. Like, I'll watch a show or a movie and I'll say, "cool, I loved every second of that very much" but that's it. It's not until I interact with fandom that I even comprehend that certain ships are a possibility and are a thing.

The secret? I'M AROACE.

I literally forget that romance and sex and everything that comes with that are real things that real people experience. So, when I'm looking at a story, I FORGET that romance can exist in it unless you basically slap me with it (as a lot of romance-centric straight shows and films and books tend to do, which is part of why I don't like them, because I DON'T UNDERSTAND THEM).

This happened to me with everything. It happened with Johnlock (BBC Sherlock), with Merthur and Merwaine (BBC Merlin), with Moreid (Criminal Minds), With Supercop (Supergirl), etc etc etc

Those are all ships I love, but I only love them because of fandom, because I only see them thanks to fandom.

Of course, the "not everything has to be gay" argument is bullshit, right? It's usally just because someone doesn't want to see something queer because it's queer.

But I can say that not seeing through shipping lenses naturally is a thing for sure, and it can seriously just be because we don't see the difference, yk that *spark* that makes something turn romantic.

'Cus here's the thing, my blog is mainly Sherlock, right? I've watched the show countless times. Do I see Johnlock in the canon when I'm watching? No. Do I see it and love it in fandom and when I look at the show through the eyes of people in fandom? Yeah!

All those behaviours of being soulmates, each other's priority, the love and adoration and devotion, the whole "my life is not really a life without you" thing? To me that isn't romantic at all. But that's due to the way my brain works.

The pinning looks? Everyone involved is suffering and know they can help each other but don't know how, or hope, or emotions and thoughts that aren't being expressed. The nicknames? Yes proof that the person is special and even prefered over others but that's it. Intimacy? Intimacy, yeah. Seeing someone when nobody else does? Exactly that, which is beautiful.

In my brain, loving someone more than you love anyone or anything doesn't mean you're *in-love* with them. It means you love them more than anyone or anything.

I think of some friends like that. My best friend, for instance. I can also say there is NOTHING romantic there and never has been in the almost ten years we've known each other (to the dismay of everyone we grew up with who wanted some tea). I call one of my best friends "darling" "my love" "sweetheart", bc to me that's what she is.

I know most people who complain over something being "made" queer are just being prejudiced and are often uncomfortable with the sheer idea of interacting with queerness, let alone liking anything queer. But I can say that, sometimes, the argument of "they can be best friends" is well-meaning. Or QueerPlatonic, too (which I find usually stands for "follows behaviours and traits society see as romantic but the people involved don't and is a stronger relationship than most")

This is in no way meant to attack OP btw, or dear helloliriels. Just another perspective.

Ok, I have a honest question.

How is it for people who don't see shippings?

Like actually I don't know how they watch something, like Sherlock, and are just like: they are good friends, don't make them gay.

And I get it. not everything is gay... So? Not everything is straight.

Sherlock, good omens, Sandman, Poirot etc.

I always fighting with my parents (mostly my father) about shippings. And everytime he say something like: "not everything is gay." or "they are friends, best friends at least. Of course they love each other in some kind; just not romantically."

So, not everything is gay but again not everything is straight. And friends love each other, we all know. But not in that way, everyone there is looking at each other. Either I don't make something gay, they can perfectly doing it theyself.

Like in 'good omens' (the book especially) were Crowley hit Anathema with his Car and he and Aziraphale take her home. He said something like: "get in, Angel" and in the books we can read her thoughts about that. She is just like: "oh they are gay. That explains everything." And that's just one thing.

And don't get me started about 'sherlock'. In the old books John just love to watch Sherlocks humanity. Not his brain! The moments were he shows, he's actuall human and have a heart. The movies with robert downey jr... He just sit there in prison and literally say: "you are my boyfriend, I have the rights to wear your clothes." And of course the series. These looks. Mh... purness of love and pining.

How does other people interpretate these looks. Because my parents are like: "they are Friends and trust each other blablabla...-"

But actually I don't think I look at my friends Like that. And I love and trust them in a platonic way.

I am just very confused. How is it to see the world through those little brains?

Today I watched a episode of 'poirot' the series. (S2e5) and Hastings had hold the umbrella for both of them; like permanently. The way he looked when Poirot compliments him; just like: I love you so much, thank you 🙏"; it's like I think they are in a secret relationship.

And not only in this episode. I see it everytime I watch an episode in the series.

My father didn't get it... And I don't know how?

Like i know why, because he deosn't ship anything. But how can you see through such this much gayness?

(gif is from "the three caballeros 1944")

My little compadre Pablo here is excactly what I feel like. I can't see through the gayness, even if I try.

So how does all of this look for people who don't see gay?

[ogsherlockholmes]

Did Holmes live alone to keep bees after retirement? 😢

Also, what did he mean by "There's an East Wind coming, Watson."?

(P.S.- I've just finished reading'The War Service of Sherlock Holmes and I've got a few questions.)

Hello! My inbox has been glitching lately, so sorry if you asked me this a while ago, I promise, I haven't been ignoring you.

So, it is generally implied that Holmes lived alone during retirement. He was tired of the detective work and wanted to further his studies in nature (and bees, of course), so moved to the countryside. That's the general consensus on what happened, which is sad to think he was all alone.

HOWEVER

I don't believe for one second that Watson would have stayed in the city without him. The canon does state that Watson visited at times, but it also said that his orphaned wife went to visit her parents, so we can't really believe everything. On the topic of wives, it's up for debate how many there were and if there were any at all. I won't get into it now, but I'll simply say: the canon is inaccurate because we're not supposed to put our full faith in it.

So, maybe ACD told us that Watson and Sherlock lived apart, but why would we believe that? Even when Watson was 'married', he was basically living in Baker Street with Sherlock, so there's no real argument to say he didn't also move to the countryside.

To sum it up, yes, canon says Sherlock was alone. But, we don't have to believe that.

To answer your second question, I admit I had to search up what The War Service of Sherlock Holmes is, but Google told me it was just the final story, His Last Bow, which I do know.

To refresh myself and anyone reading, this is the 'east wind' extract.

“There’s an east wind coming, Watson.” “I think not, Holmes. It is very warm.” “Good old Watson! You are the one fixed point in a changing age. There’s an east wind coming all the same, such a wind as never blew on England yet. It will be cold and bitter, Watson, and a good many of us may wither before its blast. But it’s God’s own wind none the less, and a cleaner, better, stronger land will lie in the sunshine when the storm has cleared."

Explicitly, Sherlock is referencing World War One, in which (and I'm not going to go into detail, because I know far too much about both World Wars) Germany and England fought against each other. Germany is to the East of England, so the 'east wind' is the German invasion the English were expecting.

However, there is a lot more to the 'east wind' metaphor.

When ACD was growing up in the god-fearing Victorian England, there was a lot of religious imagery involved in stories. In the Bible, the east wind was used as a metaphor for the destruction of the wicked by God. In a way, ACD is implying that the Germans will destroy England, or that they want to. It isn't the best inference, as this also means ACD thought the English were the wicked and the Germans were sent by God, and I don't think English censorship would let him publish that.

To look at it on a surface level, we can just say that ACD was talking about solely the war, nothing else. Sherlock is talking about how some may die in the war, some will survive, and a new land will be born, the same as any British propaganda. To be like me and overthink things far too much, there's a more interesting side to it.

If we are viewing this as a Johnlock reading, it has nothing to do with WWI. In this reading, anything ACD states in the canon is not generally taken as the truth (like Sherlock living alone when he retired), and could imply something else about Sherlock and Watson's relationship. This may not be true, but it's nicer to think of it this way, since it makes more sense and is generally more enjoyable.

Sherlock says to Watson 'You are the one fixed point in a changing age.' This changing age could just be the war, but it might be about homosexuality becoming legalised. WOAH I know big jump, what am I talking about, crazy, yes, but.

If the 'east wind' references God destroying the evil, and God is generally used as a symbol against homosexuality (which is NOT true, since homosexuality and Christianity have nothing to do with each other), and Sherlock and Watson were two gay men living in a homophobic world, does it not make a bit of sense that Sherlock could be talking about this?

It's very difficult to explain, and I'm sure I'm not the only person to say this before (if you know who did, please tell me so I can give credit), but I'm going to rewrite the speech before as what I think Sherlock is trying to say (quick warning, the dialogue is badly written and cringy, but I don't know how else to explain it).

"They might criminalise homosexuality more severely, Watson."

"I don't think so, it's been easy to hide so far."

"Watson, you've always been the same, you'll never change who you are even when the world is trying to make you. The world is still going to change, unlike any change before. It will be difficult, and some of us may give up before change happens, or be hurt in some other way. But, that's what they're saying God wants, and that a new country will be made."

When Sherlock talks about the new land, he's not stating if it will be more excepting or more homophobic, but he obviously wants it to be more excepting (everyone does). Also, when he says "in the sunshine when the storm has cleared." he is leaning towards homophobia being reduced (homophobia is the storm, which will clear).

So, that's my very out there and quite extreme reading on the 'east wind' metaphor. The first one is what most people believe, but the Johnlock reading is (in my opinion) plausible as well.

Thank you for asking, and I hope I haven't rambled on for too long!

[merlinoutofcontext]

wait so why do you think merlin isn’t queerbaiting? this isn’t meant to be rude im just curious

hey! happy to answer, and i didn’t perceive your question as rude at all btw. here are my thoughts, i’m sorry they’re so long but i also don’t think this is a topic that can be summarized in a few sentences, so...

i don’t really know how else to say that it isn’t queerbaiting by just stating that it isn’t. there is very little evidence in the actual show to even claim that the show was at any point queerbaiting. but to be fair, i also think it’s important to note the term “queerbaiting” doesn’t even have an “official” definition so it can mean very different things to different people. this is the definition that i am working with.

“When an author/director/etc. gives hints, and clever twists to paint a character as possibly being queer, to satisfy queer audiences, but never outright says they are so they can keep their heterosexual audience.”

bbc merlin is a family show. and i don’t mean “family show” in the way that it is usually insinuated - as in it’s supposed to be “clean” and “nice” and “appealing” to a family audience, so therefore any queercoded message is bad and not appropriate. what i mean is that it’s a tv show that was expected to be approachable by families of all ages, at any point throughout the series, so that they can understand what’s happening. whether or not you watched the episode that aired the previous week has absolutely no bearing on the next episode. merlin only started having multi-episode arcs in series 3. and it’s this reason why i think so many ppl are dissatisfied with the show, bc it wasn’t meant to be this deep narrative. they didn't have enough time to write in full fledged storylines. but i digress.

i’m going to be using other tumblr obsessed tv show and ship as examples here. 

i will admit that my original post was sparked by some of the stuff surrounding supernatural that’s happened, but i’m not really going to speak to it much. i do think the internet may have went a bit overboard, and i don’t want to sit here and claim spn was queerbaiting its audience because i actually do think thats kind of a subjective thing. but in my opinion, the fact that they waited until their final season, and what appears to be a characters last episode, to make the ship that has been a large driving force of their remaining audience for the past 12 years, canon, does sit a little weird with me. anyway.

lets use another ship as an example that is literally, unequivocally queerbaiting. i don’t care about your opinion here, this show queerbaited the hell out of its audience for 7 literal years. johnlock.

multiple times throughout the show the relationship between john and sherlock is hinted at through the language of the show, by characters in the show, etc. more often than not, the concept of a relationship between them is framed as a joke. additionally, bbc’s sherlock kept the sexuality of their main character (coincidentally the titular character) ambiguous, while also managing to make fun of their audience of shippers for even thinking that johnlock could be a possibility. 

never once in bbc’s merlin is the concept of arthur and merlin being close to one another, or connected by fate/destiny/magic (which is often seen as being coded for sexuality) as a bad thing. not in the text of the show, not by the creators of the show, not by the actors in the show. in fact, even in the last episode, merlin’s devotion to arthur is only ever framed as a positive:

“Some men are born to plow fields, some live to be great physicians, others to be great kings. Me, I was born to serve you Arthur and I’m proud of that. And I wouldn’t change a thing.”

similarly, sometime after this arthur tells merlin to never change. in my opinion, a distinct aspect of a queerbaiting show is when the show places hints in the language used by the characters to say that a character might a) be queer in some way or b) have a relationship with someone of the same gender as them. but then when the fandom talks about this towards the actors, or the creators of the show, it’s immediately pushed away by creators and seen as a negative thing. or it’s completely ridiculous that the fandom would even think of such at thing.

people will argue that merlin’s devotion to arthur, and their relationship in general is what makes it queerbaiting. that by the sheer existence of some longwinded eye contact, or statements of friendship and devotion to each other that the show was queerbaiting its audience. but the difference is that merlin’s devotion to arthur and subsequently arthur’s devotion to merlin was never framed as a joke for the audience, or as a negative thing. it was written as something we are supposed to celebrate about merlin.

this show was never written with the intention for merlin and arthur to be together. it’s a retelling of arthurian myth with a bit of a twist in it. merlin and arthur are meant to be the main characters, but a romantic relationship was never on the table. 

characters do remark on merlin’s loyalty to arthur, but it’s always in a questioning way, a why is this man so loyal to the king? what is the big reason? and, yeah, the Big Reason is his magic and their shared destiny. and yes it’s a valid interpretation that magic/destiny = sexuality, and merlin = gay (used as an umbrella term here). but that doesn’t mean it’s queerbaiting. it’s just subtext.

and subtext =/= queerbaiting.

[inthememetime]

Do they text? Gandalf + The Company (and bonus Dís & Tauriel)

Thorin: Yes, but only when he's in a happy or normal mood. When upset, he calls or it's complete silence. He prefers texting to calling in general.

Dwalin: No. In fact, every time someone texts him, he just calls them or physically goes out to find them and talk face to face.

Oin: Yes, he does. He didn't when texting first came out, but due to his hearing loss, he finds it really useful.

Gloin: He is in 5 group chats right now, and spamming all of them with pictures of his children's sporting events, family vacations, and baby pictures.

Bifur: Not really. He uses a Nokia flip phone from the 90s. When he does text, he amazes literally everyone by how fast he can do it on that little thing.

Bofur: Yes, but there are so many autocorrect mistakes that nobody can understand him half the time.

Bombur: He thinks texting is too impersonal, and prefers to call or meet face to face. He will happily make an exception for sending pictures of food.

Balin: Yes. Especially when dealing with work, because he's a fan of CYA, and texts are, legally speaking, written and can be used in a court of law. Everyone is always surprised due to his age.

Dori: V e r y s l o w l y. W I t h l o t s o f e r e r s. C a n y o u j u s t c a l l m e ?

Ori: Yes! He loves to text because he's a little quiet and shy over the phone or face to face.

Nori: No, and he doesn't for the same reason Balin does. The only times he texts are answering texts from Ori or when he needs an alibi.

Fíli: All the time. To friends, family, pretty girls, pretty boys, pretty people in general. He's also the main one Thorin calls over to translate Bofur's autocorrects. He also texts people back to back one word by word until they respond if he feels like being a jerk.

Kíli: Yes, and outside of family, it tends to be strange conversations. Fíli is pretty sure dinosaurs are code for something in his and Tauriel's convos, but he is a paleontology major and she's a biology major, so maybe not? And why is he talking about ships and cannons so much? Thorin does not ask him to translate txt spch because once, Kíli told him LOL meant Lots of Love, and then he got a lot of angry calls from relatives when his grandfather finally kicked the bucket passed away.

(Dinosaurs are not code, but ice cream flavors are! He doesn't even eat ice cream, he's lactose intolerant.)

Tauriel: Pretty much exclusively to Dís, Kíli, Fíli, or Legolas. And she is a Forensic Pathology major, thank you very much Fíli! 50% of her convos are school or fic and fanart related with Kíli, the other half is for everyone else. She likes to send him pictures of half completed fanart and make him guess what it will be.

Bilbo: Usually, yeah. He's bad about getting distracted and forgetting he had a text though thanks to ADHD, so it's best to call him if you need something ASAP.

Gandalf: This man has to keep up with so many people. He's in 12 group chats, regrets all of them, and yet still asks for gossip.

Dís: Yes. She is also the only one who does understand Kíli's texts about ships and canons. They have a long running bet on how many Destiel, Johnlock, Tasertricks, and Matt/Foggy references they can make before anyone picks up on it.

This is also the reason Kíli has two AO3 accounts. He posts the cute, family friendly ones on the account his mom know about, and his...less family friendly ones on the other.

[tundrainafrica]

Hi!! Do you think Levihan as a ship is kinda underrated? Like even though its the third most popular ship(just behind Ereri and Eruri) but I don't really think many people give it the credit it actually deserves. Someone on reddit pointed out how if the interactions LH had, especially the ones in and after ch 115, were between some ship involving two cis man, literally everyone would've called it canon. Do you agree?

Do you think Levihan as a ship is kinda underrated?

You know, I actually used to think Levihan is underrated. But i was surprised to find out that Levihan actually still has a fair amount of fics. In fact it has more fics in ao3 than Aruani or Eremika and maybe even Connie/Sasha. It’s actually surprisingly one of the top non M/M ships in the AOT fandom in ao3. But I don’t know how much the number of AO3 fics have to do with popularity though.

But why is it lower than Eruri and Ereri? 

I think you partially answered your own question by pointing this out.  “Someone on reddit pointed out how if the interactions LH had, especially the ones in and after ch 115, were between some ship involving two cis man, literally everyone would've called it canon. “

But there is something else I want to point out actually. I think that even if Levihan was a relationship between two CIS men, I still think it would remain less popular than Eruri and Ereri. 

First things first though, let’s answer the question: Why are Ereri and Eruri popular? Because Levi is popular and the general consensus of the majority of fangirls is to put Levi aka the most popular character in ao3 with the two sexiest men in the whole fandom who have at least a reachable and justifiable bond with Levi. 

If we consider what actually gets people into a ship, (personally I still don’t understand Ereri but lemme try), 

1. They look cute together

2. They have a very obviously deep bond with each other. 

3. The enemies to friends trope gets incredibly enticing.

So Ereri I think fell with number 1 and number 3 (I’m honestly thinking of the courtroom scene now).

 And I read a fair amount of Ereri fics (no, I never liked Ereri I just wanted my hurt Levi fic and I was desperate), and one thing which a lot of Ereri fans like to explore is the fact that Levi becomes his bodyguard for a while and Eren has to stick close to Levi right? There are a lot of themes relationship wise (enemies to lovers, slowburns, bodyguard and ward) which can be explored with this set up. Eren is obviously one of the most popular characters in AOT too and the main protagonist so it is only natural that this would fall on top. 

On top of that Eren is pretty cute. 

What about Eruri? Eruri takes the cake for reasons 1 and 2 first of all.

On top of that, Eruri rose through the ranks of one of the top ships in AOT because of Season 3 in particular but I think even before that, Erwin and Levi had enough crumbs already to justify shipping them. 

Sure, Levihan won with the fact that Levi was first introduced next to Hange. But, in the more iconic Levi scenes in Season 1-3, for example when Eren got to talk to Levi for the first time in the dungeon, who was Levi with? Erwin. 

When it came to the more serious, more plot relevant scenes, Erwin and Levi were almost always together. Actually, the only time Levi and Hange spent a lot of time together in very plot relevant scenes was during the uprising arc when Erwin was out of commission. 

But then after that, we get the Take back Shiganshina arc where Erwin and Levi had their most iconic moments. 

So with Levi and Erwin constantly together during the more plot heavy scenes, most of the audience, even the most casual people would remember their relationship over Hange.

That’s why Eruri is still more popular than Levihan. 

What about Levihan? Only number 2 applies to Levihan actually.

Also, it’s not very memorable? Like if you’re not looking for a relationship in AOT you won’t find it. And really, who looks for a relationship in AOT.

Most of the scenes where Hange and Levi are shown together are incredibly light scenes and they’re usually shown for the lolz and are not as blatantly plot heavy as the scenes where Erwin and Levi are seen together,. Most of the plot heavy Hange and Levi scenes happen when Erwin was out of commission which makes it easy for the audience to think that Hange and Levi were together out of necessity.

And when we consider reason number 1. Hange is not conventionally attractive or cool to the average viewer. I have lots of friends who actually don’t like Hange and they’re casual watchers. They find her weird, crazy, and not as clear cut or cool as Erwin or Levi so even if Hange were a guy, I don’t think her relationship with Levi would have topped the AOT charts

Where does Levihan actually shine though? 

It shines in Season 4. We notice in Season 4 that Levi and Hange are constantly together. But the thing is, with Season 4, we kinda ended up with a new setting, we have new characters and we have new perspectives on how to approach the story. So even if Levihan is more obvious there, even if Levi and Hange are shown to have a closer bond in Season 4, it gets overshadowed by other things like the Marleyans, the actual war and the actual chaos. 

Let alone the fact that Levi and Hange spent a huge chunk of the chapters before chapter 115 away from each other. And when they are together, the plot and the overall war ends up outshining whatever relationship development they have. 

Yet regardless, even if a lot of their interactions weren’t very plot relevant thus, very forgettable for the casual reader who is not in the mood to analyze relationships, I think that 115, 126 and 132 are still very important for the relationship of Levihan and are decisive evidence that there is definitely something there. Like actually I showed 115, 126 and 132 to multiple people who have never watched AOT in their life and a lot commented that the scene in 126 in particular screams ‘COUPLE.’ but the thing is, the forest scene in 126 was overshadowed by more pressing things. In fact a lot of people criticized it for being a slow chapter. 115 was overshadowed by Zeke’s backstory and the actual war. 132 was overshadowed by her death.

And when I did notice the relationship enough to appreciate it, I did look back at the previous AOT episodes and the previous Levihan scenes and I really did see that most of the interactions of Levi and Hange in the earlier seasons are not as obviously relevant to the overall plot. So if people don’t actually look for it, they won’t see it. 

It’s an incredibly subtle ship and as a fan, I actually only appreciated it in retrospect so I kinda understand why it’s not so popular. 

So to answer your next question.

Someone on reddit pointed out how if the interactions LH had, especially the ones in and after ch 115, were between some ship involving two cis man, literally everyone would've called it canon. Do you agree?

Actually, I don’t agree with this. 

Sure, if Levihan was a ship between two CIS men then Levihan would probably be more popular. But I think a lot of people still wouldn’t consider it canon. 

I used to read a lot of works and participate a lot in Shonen manga fandoms, sports anime fandoms (I’m literally a simp for sports animes man I think I’ve watched most of the iconic ones) in particular so I am aware of how ships with two cismen go. And even if they do have a lot of sexual tension like let’s say Daichi and Sugawara, Kageyama and Hinata  from Haikyuu, Kuroko and Aomine from Kuroko no Basuke, Oishi x Tezuka from Prince of Tennis, people in the fandom at least have the head to say “It’s not canon.” 

But at the same time, people still ship them. 

On the contrary, I think people are actually more likely to deem something canon if they are a heterosexual ship because we live in a heteronormative society. On top of that, writers (especially Japanese writers) are more likely to make something canon if it’s a heterosexual pairing because societal expectations and marketing and corporate synergy and bullshit like that. 

I need to point out something about male writers though. Male writers are incredibly good at writing male to male dynamics but for some reason tend to fuck writing women up a lot. So we end up with incredibly blah ‘die for our ship’ women and two guys with so much sexual tension if they were a man and a woman, people are more likely to deem them canon. 

Naruto and Sasuke for example or Riku and Sora from Kingdom Hearts. I can swear that Riku and Sora had way more development over the course of five games than Sora and Kairi but Sora and Kairi became canon. Naruto and Sasuke had more than enough development and literally Naruto did the equivalent of Hange jumping into the river at 115 by literally begging all the fucking kages to spare Sasuke during the great ninja war but Naruto married Hinata and Sasuke married Sakura.

And even in Western media, we have Johnlock, we have Destiel. And even among female writers I have half the mind to add Will and Jem from Clockwork Princess to the mix for men with the most sexual tension but are never made canon. 

So I don’t think it’s the male/male dynamic which makes people think, oh they’re canon. I think it is the premise of the show overall which makes people hesitant to deem Levihan canon. 

The scenes which are very important to the Levihan shippers are scenes which the casual watchers who are allergic to romance will skim over. We saw a taste of that when people got angry that ch. 126 was winning the Besatsu polls for example. 

People just wanna focus on the titans, the action and the exposition. And the moment anyone decides to add romance to the mix, suddenly people are like, NO DON’T RUIN THEIR CHARACTER. OR NO STOP TURNING AOT INTO A ROMANCE.

Because people have this idea that the moment we decide to explore the relationships of the show, when people start falling in love in the show, the show becomes bad. Really, I believe a lot of the reason for this though is because a lot of male writers don’t know how to handle romance or it becomes difficult to pair people off in the end because a lot of their Male x male relationships actually have more sexual tension than a lot of the male x female relationships they write so a lot of the endgame heterosexual pairings end up falling flat.

Going back to AOT though....

One other thing to note:  Looking from the eye of those who don’t look for romance or are just a casual watcher,  the scenes which had more titans and action and overall exposition (which most people watch AOT for) tended to show Levi and Eren together or Levi and Erwin together more which explains why these relationships ended up shining more since these scenes are more memorable. 

I like to think of Levihan as this awesome product with lots of potential but has the shittiest marketing team ever. Because the marketing team just did a horrible job on where to put the ‘billboards’ and how to design their flyers if you know what I mean. So even if Levihan is a great product, it won’t sell because they just didn’t have the right ‘billboards’ ‘flyers’ or other marketing material in canon. Like people have to make the effort to look for it to actually find it and to actually appreciate the canon but when they do, they got some high quality product. 

So I like to compare Levihan to those  hole in the wall restaurants in the small towns or those street shops which sell the most authentic cuisines or those treasures we find in the antique shops. 

Thanks for reading and sorry for this long ass meta. Anyway...

I’d like to end this long ass rant with just two tweets which summarize my overall thoughts on this.

Link to the tweets: 1 2

Again, Thanks for reading!

[the-lincyclopedia]

Fic writer questions I never get asked

Thanks for the tag, @khashanakalashtar! This is an interesting list! 

What date did you make your AO3 profile? What date did you post your first fic?

I joined AO3 on February 5, 2018. Seriously. I was FFN-only for so long. I posted my first fics on AO3 the day I joined. My first fics ever to hit the internet, however, were published on July 13, 2011, which is when I got my FFN account.

Do you cross-post your work?

Yeah, still. When I first got my AO3 account, I posted a bunch of things that were already on my FFN account, and these days I put basically everything on both. I like that FFN gives a pretty accurate and nearly complete timeline of my fanworks, which is the main reason I’m still posting there. Nothing I’ve posted there in the past three years has gotten much engagement, and I know the site is dying. 

What’s your fic with the most comment threads? The most bookmarks? Are the top 5 of those categories basically the same, and basically the same as the top 5 kudos?

Top 5 by comment threads: 

Face the Future with You (Check Please)

Man Oh Man, You’re My Best Friend (Check Please)

It’s Always You (Check Please)

Love in the Time of Influenza (Carry On)

I Love You, All Right? (Check Please)

Top 5 by bookmarks: 

Love in the Time of Influenza (Carry On)

The Aftermath of Angelic Assumptions (Good Omens)

Man Oh Man, You’re My Best Friend (Check Please)

Nightmares (Carry On)

Christmas Planning (Carry On)

Top 5 by kudos: 

Love in the Time of Influenza (Carry On)

Face the Future with You (Check Please)

Nightmares (Carry On)

The Aftermath of Angelic Assumptions (Good Omens)

Christmas Planning (Carry On)

So basically the Check Please fandom comments more and the Carry On fandom is more into bookmarks and kudos, and there’s more of a correlation between kudos and bookmarks than between either of those and comments. 

What’s the word count of your longest fic or series?

“The Jumper Chronicles,” my longest fic on FFN, is 111,223 words. I abandoned it in 2015 and I really would not recommend it. On AO3, my longest fic is “who could ask to be unbroken (or be brave again)” at 14,772 words. It’s part of my longest series on AO3: “Samwell Men’s Harmonies” at 29,921 words. 

What’s your most underrated fic?

MOST underrated? I have 132 fics on AO3, so there are a lot of potential answers. I guess I’ll pick my work with literally the fewest kudos: it’s a charming little rhyming poem about Harry Potter called “The Willow May Whomp You.” It has two kudos, fewer than 70 hits, no bookmarks, and no comments. I was so proud of it when I finished it, and AO3 really did not care. 

Does your early work contain any writing sins?

I had heard that not breaking up your dialogue was bad (which it’s not? Who told me this? Why did I believe them? Ugh), and I thought that adding adverbs to dialogue tags constituted breaking up your dialogue. So I had lots of unnecessary beats and adverbs and internal monologue mixed up in what otherwise might have been passable dialogue scenes. (I don’t remember whether this came up a ton in my fics and I don’t feel like looking, but I remember it pretty clearly in the original stuff I was working on back then.)

Have you ever had a work podficced?

Yes! I requested it for Fandom Trumps Hate, though, so I don’t know if it counts, exactly. It’s not like someone read my work and approached me about podding it. Anyway, my Yuri on Ice fic “When and If” has a podfic version. 

Have you posted any podfics? Fanvids? Fanart?

I was going to say no, and then I remembered that back in, like, 2009, I tried to make a couple Romione fanvids, one to Taylor Swift’s “You Belong with Me” and one to “I’m Not That Girl” from Wicked. Unfortunately for everyone involved, I didn’t have a clue how to pull bits of video from a movie (still don’t, actually), so they were basically slideshows. I’ve long since taken them down from YouTube and the computer I made them on has long since died, so I can’t prove any of this to you, but . . . uh, yeah. That happened. 

Are there any trends in your favorite ships?

I feel like there have been, like, eras of my shipping. When I first started shipping (i.e. before I realized I’m queer), it was basically “girl I can project on” shipped with “literally whoever her canon love interest is, regardless of anything about him” (Romione, Percabeth). Then it was “asshole guy” shipped with “other guy who interfaces between the asshole guy and the rest of the world” (Johnlock, Otayuri to a lesser extent). I feel like it’s becoming “broken person whose coping mechanism is meanness” shipped with “broken person whose coping mechanism is sunshine” (Zimbits, maybe Snowbaz). This is pretty similar to the asshole x interface-with-world, but the relationship is a little more mutual and balanced, and the mean one has a better excuse for being mean. 

Do you have fandoms you’ve written a lot for? Fandoms you’ve only written a one-off for?

Fandoms I’ve written a lot for: Check Please, Carry On, Harry Potter, Sherlock, Lizzie Bennet Diaries, and Yuri on Ice. (I’m defining “a lot” as at least five fics, and please note that I’ve got a 30k Lizzie Bennet Diaries fic that’s only on FFN because I really don’t like the ending.)

Fandoms I’ve only written one-offs for: Discworld, Turtles All the Way Down, Maleficent, the Chronicles of Narnia, Paper Towns, Six of Crows, Hoot, the Odyssey, Song of the Lioness, and Downton Abbey. (There are multiple other fandoms with two fics each.)

What fandom got you into fandom?

Harry Potter. I’d been writing next gen fics for like two years when a school acquaintance shared an FFN link to a Marauders fic on Google Buzz and I was hooked. 

Do you have a strategy for summaries?

I try to describe the premise/first part of the plot, and I add notes that might be relevant (i.e., major trigger warnings or other things that might put people off). I don’t use quotes, either from the story or from anywhere else. 

Do you use beta readers? For what? Do you have a go-to beta?

Occasionally for plot/general “is this good?” type feedback, or if they’re mandatory for an event, I guess. (I’m doing my first bang, so that’s a new thing for me.) I don’t feel the need to use a beta for spelling, grammar, or punctuation since I’m a semi-professional copyeditor. These days I do read most things to my QPP over the phone before publishing them. That’s usually more of a cheer-reading situation than a beta situation, though. 

I tag @doggernaut @carryonsimoncarryonbaz @birlcholtz @cricketnationrise and anyone else who wants to play! 

[bookdork1]

If you don’t want to answer, I am okay with that but why are posts saying that SPN fandom is having their own Johnlock conspiracy?

Hey! I don’t mind answering, but just a quick disclaimer, I wasn’t around for the Johnlock Conspiracy. I watched Sherlock and was aware how unhappy people in the fandom were with the last series, but I didn’t actually witness TJLC unfold in real time and only read about all its events in a masterpost a couple of years after the fact. So I can’t really say for certain how closely what’s going on in the spn fandom right now really correlates to TJLC. 

That being said, the reason people are saying the SPN fandom is in the midst of its own TJLC is because we are extremely suspect that the finale we received was not the finale as it was originally intended. Yet while TJLC was largely driven by pure fan spec, there is already like some actual proof that the CW/WB screwed us over and is in the midst of trying to gaslight unhappy fans into accepting the ending that we got. Below are a list of some of the finer points that have come out or been brought up in the days since the finale aired, some with links to excellent posts that explains each point individually:

1.) The CW/WB pushing the narrative that they couldn’t get Misha back to film because of Covid, despite the fact that we have literal proof that Misha was in Vancouver, quarantining, at the same time as Jensen and Jared.

2.) The weird way in which four separate montages and dean’s overly drawn out death scene are used to fill time in the finale coupled with the fact that there are scenes that are just *missing* (either edited out or just weren’t filmed) from 15x20: 

3.) Misha saying Cas was supposed to have a different ending (this was said separately from what he later said about the Jimmy Novak thing, which is a whole separate spec). It's obvious he can’t speak freely about any of it without having to risk professional repercussions and we can assume that’s true for everyone part of the cast and crew.

4.) Jared being the only main cast (or crew) member to say *anything* positive about the finale episode when everyone else is free from ass kissing while he has a new show set to air in January. He cannot currently make enemies with the network, so his silence would be too deafening, while the others’ is more subtle. I don’t have a direct link to this because I didn’t save/reblog any of it, but his post on twitter and stuff from his interview today is out there. 

5.) Jensen doing ADR work for 15x18 after they had already wrapped filming on the final two episodes. This particular part of the finalegate hasn’t been proven, but it is suspect as hell —edit: we know Jensen did ADR, that’s not what isn’t proven, what’s up for debate is whether or not he dubbed over an (affirmative) verbal response from dean to the love confession—

6.) The market research that went into Destiel. While this particular post doesn’t have strict relevance to what’s going on in the finale, it does indicate that people behind the scenes have been pushing for a long time to get destiel canonized and on the air. There was intent to end the queerbaiting and that intent made it very far up the foodchain, but it obviously still lost out in the end.

7.) The part of this that is most centered on fan instinct is one section of the fandom’s insistence that the bad finale should not be laid squarely at the feet of Dabb and the writers. This piece of the puzzle comes down to simple critical thinking skills, because one look at the carefully crafted four season arc of the show under Dabb’s tenure speaks to why 15x20 is not only ooc for Sam and Dean but also for the writers who helped them grow so much in four seasons. Dabb isn’t D&D, he didn’t just forget what changed in the show while he was in charge, a lot of which was about expanding Sam and Dean’s found family and allowing them to grow away from each other and their toxic codependency. That’s why it makes no sense for Dabb to then give us a brothers-only (and 20 seconds of Bobby!) finale. 

BONUS.) Samantha Ferris saying she and Chad Tyler Lindbergh were never invited back for the final episode of Supernatural. While this one doesn’t have direct bearing on the rest of what I’ve said, it is really weird that they weren’t going to be around for Dean’s heavenly surprise party when it was literally set to occur in Ellen’s roadhouse. I really don’t think Jenny the vampire would have showed up without covid, but why would Ellen and Jo and Ash not be around even in a better world where everything would have filmed on schedule and aired back in May? Its just *weird* that characters that are still beloved would have been shafted like this. 

I *think* I hit all the highlights of #spnfinalegate, I’m honestly no expert, but this has been what I’ve observed going on in the last few days

**edit** other people are tackling this question so much better, so here’s links to those posts as well: 

this one is more a general gathering of off things and sources

and this one is like an overall amazing explanation PLEASE READ THIS ONE

[vulpesmellifera]

Author Interview Tag Game

I was tagged by @discordantwords. Thanks so much for tagging me!

Name: Vulpesmellifera

Fandoms: BBC Sherlock, Hannibal, The Witcher, and Good Omens

Where you post: AO3

Most popular multi-chapter fic: Taking Flight (Mystrade), though I think that’s because it is 51 chapters long, and that gets you a lot of hits. When it comes to kudos or bookmarks, it’s Hand Me Your Armour (Mystrade). 

Favourite story you’ve written so far: WHYYYYYY is this a question? Jeez. Okay, I suppose I really, really love the fic I’m currently posting, The Ghost in the Graphite (Mystrade). It has romance, mystery, and ghosts. But I also love Written in Skin (Mystrade). I wasn’t a fan of it when I first posted it, but the reader response allowed me to see it at other angles, and I grew to love it. It has surprised me. 

Fic you were nervous to post: My very first fic, To Capture Light (Mystrade), was nerve-wracking to post. I had nothing to worry about, because the Mystrade fandom is amazingly kind and warm. And any time I post a fic for a new pairing, so I was very nervous before posting Haunted (Johnlock), The Slippery Dark (The Witcher), and The Thing in the House (Hannigram), which I haven’t finished posting yet. (Okay, so I wrote two other Hannigrams before The Thing in the House, but they were both very short, and I figured would get very little attention.)

How you choose your titles: The titles normally rise up in my brain with the birth of the fic. Sometimes they change. They’re usually based on the overarching theme of the fic. “Haunted” refers to more than actual ghosts, “The Thing the House” is very Bluebeard-esque, “Hand Me Your Armour” is about letting your guard down and being vulnerable with another person. 

Do you outline: Yes. I made the mistake of not really outlining the first fic I ever wrote, the never-been-posted “A Field of Stars.” It’s 200,000 words of a lot of meandering, and I could never bring myself to edit it and post it. Sometimes I think about that Greg or that Mycroft, and an ache of longing prickles between my ribs. But I promise you, it’s a mess. I’ve outlined every story since then and oh boy, does that make it easier for me. 

Complete: I have 32 completed works, but that includes like five drabbles.

In progress: The Thing in the House and The Ghost in the Graphite are being posted. The Killing Principle (Johnlock) and The Pull of You (Johnlock) are being edited.  And The Skin-Eater’s Bible (Hannigram) is being written. 

Coming soon/not yet started: I’ve got six fics chasing their tails in my mind. One is a Johnlock AU with a forbidden forest, another is a Johnlock canon-divergence after the morgue scene, the third is a Mystrade English Murder Village, the fourth is a Hannigram AU with Will as a horror writer, the fifth is a Mystrade continuation of Craquelure, and the sixth is a Sherlock and Hannibal crossover. I wish I could just write fic all day. Not sure what order I’ll end up writing these. 

Do you accept prompts: I’m open to prompts, but I don’t always get to them. I have about five unfinished WIPs that are prompts from other people, but I write them basically when I have a little time to add to them. 

Upcoming story you are most excited to write: The Johnlock AU with the forbidden forest has some scenes that I CANNOT WAIT to write. 

Upcoming story you are most excited about: I am excited about posting The Killing Principle...it’s a Johnlock AU with serial killers and assassins, and a Johnlock pairing that are super sweet together until the shit hits the fan. I think people will like it.

Tagging: @hippocrates460, @mottlemoth , @lavenderandvanilla , @merindab , @oneblueumbrella, @meansgirlwrites and absolutely anyone else who sees this and wants to play along!

[theories-just-for-funzies]

“What’s the very worst thing you can do to your very best friends? Tell them your darkest secret, because if you tell them, and they decide they’d rather not know... You can’t take it back. You can’t unsay it. Once you’ve opened your heart, you can’t close it again.”

This is the second post I’m making about BBC Sherlock S4 (or anything about any fandom, really). You can find the first one here, the topic is almost the same. I’m really slow in writing down my theories in a way that is comprehensible by others, so I’m sorry if i don’t have a lot for the moment. Read this with the knowledge that I firmly believe in TJLC as explained by Rebekah on YouTube, and that S4 is not real as we see it, but is telling us what we need to know before they release S5 (or the special if that’ll come first) through unusual ways, TJLC style.

I think here Culverton smith is mirroring the writers, and his friends are the viewers. During the whole scene we have TONS of mirrored shots in the windows, most of it infact. In all of the previous seasons mirrors and character shots in mirrors were there to signal “hey this character is currently mirroring this other thing”, so idk it might be even this time??

Faith when she’s still drugged and tries to remember something about the conference, the first shot of her that we see, she’s in a mirror, even the desk reflect her image. Wander which part of the audience Faith is mirroring? Yeah, you guessed it. The tjlc fandom. The ones that analyze things. The ones that are questioning.

And the nurses? Idk, I’ve never seen a nurse that’s just putting an IV wearing a mask (unless under special circumstances of course), it never happens even when you’re taking blood samples, it just doesn’t ring right to me. So, who are the nurses? They’re people working for Culverton, they know what’s happening, they know what the solution is and what it does, they know how to administrate it, but they leave the room in the moment of confession. The nurses are mirroring BBC Sherlock’s crew.

If you’ve never worked on a set let me tell you: nobody, apart from the smallest possible amount of selected people, knows the whole picture, they can’t risk it, usually it’s just the writers, the producers, and most f the times the main actor; everyone else just knows the smallest informations to do their single job of adjusting the lights or hair for that single scene just like it’s written in their schedule.

So the crew knows partially what they’re doing, but they can’t speak, because their mouth is covered.

I’m thinking this is exactly the reason of S4. S4 is the memory drug. Everything made sense till now, tjlc was more and more evident, it was extremely obvious to everyone that johnlock was an actual thing, i mean just look at the sign of three, MY MOM THOUGHT THEY WERE CANONICALLY IN LOVE BEFORE I EVEN DID (at the time the fandom wasn’t the greatest so I avoided pretty much anything that wasn’t fan fictions or fan art, and just thought it was queer bait). Everything was super clever and well made. And then S4 came. A cheap Hollywood movie where nothing made sense and with john and sherlock great platonic friendship. And it was the last season so how could you not except what they already gave you and still want more, right?

Wrong. S4 is either complete bullshit or a distortion of what actually happens.

Culverton say that he can’t say his darkest secret because he can’t take it back, yet he does tell, and he does take it back.

The show does say that sherlock and john love each other (and are still pining) but S4 takes that back. You want the distorted version? Ok. Sherlock does explicitly says the words “i love you” in S4 to Molly in a physical mirror, a character’s mirror for John, whose description of the coffin perfectly fits John. The show does say that the writers aren’t stupid and aren’t making a tv show that’s just a blockbuster action movie, with cheap Hollywood effects and made up physic laws. Yet S4 takes that back.

The whole thing they kept saying in earlier seasons about “making history of television” and “making unprecedented things”? What unprecedented things? That was extreamely cheap cinematic, with really poor writings and a rip off of James Bond and classic horror movies. Nothing about S4 was memorable or relevant.

They already said everything they had to say (for the moment) but then they couldn’t leave the public waiting for another 6 years before S5 with all that hope and knowledge. Especially considering the fandom suspected even the phone\heart metaphor before ASiB even aired. Leave those people with the tiniest hope and you’d find your plans stripped naked for everyone to see in less than half of that hiatus. That’s really not Moffat style, he needs to give you hope, rip your heart open, surprise you leaving you gasping, only then he can make another plot twist and make everything super beautiful again and making you crying because it’s too many emotions.

So they said their things before S4, the fans that were still not sold on johnlock or didn’t want it canon were the friends who would rather not know, they went on with the brain washing of S4, and said “ok, we’re done here, nothing else to see, the show is finished, good night”. But just as with Faith’s story you can reconstruct if not all, part of what happened; because i don’t know if you noticed, but S4 doesn’t have a lot of plot holes, it is one single gigantic plot hole.

But what happens if they kill everyone just like Culverton Smith said? What happens if they make S4 so bad and destroy everything they said up until now with the show itself? What happens if the same people that were able to decode everything suddenly lost any faith because they were let down so much they just let the fandom die, and there was no one left to analyze what they were actually saying?

Everyone would forget all about TJLC and about how clever of a show it was. They would erase the whole show from people’s memories, letting it pass by like any other show that’s there to fill your Sunday evening.

Also there’s another thing that doesn’t sit right with me, although i don’t have any proof backing this up and am not sure of what I’m saying, it’s basically just speculation, but still. TD12 package:

obviously this drug doesn’t exist, the only thing i came across with that name is a percussion sound module, you’re welcome to make your own theories with this informations since i know absolutely nothing about music technology and am not the smartest tool in the shed when it comes to music theories or clues.

I presume TD12 it’s something along the line of saline solution, since Sherlock made that replacement himself later in the episde, my research (because i also have no knowledge about medical stuff) told me that saline solution has en expiration time of roughly 2 years. On the package we see that the expiration’s date is October 2018, so counting back, assuming Culverton got the drug shortly before doing his speach, the scene takes place somewhere around October 2016. Wander what happened in October 2016?

On BBC Sherlock official YouTube channel they release just one video: Sherlock Series 4 release date. Now. You might say I’m looking a little to much into it, but if you go check the release dates of the other YouTube videos you would see that they usually don’t post just one video per month, that’s the only one around that time period. Idk if you ask me it’s a lot of strange coincidences.

Anyway, in the scene he then says “these drip feeds will keep the drug in your blood streams at exactly the right levels. Nothing that is happening to you now will stay with you for more than a few minutes. I’m afraid that some of the memories you’ve had up to this point might also be... corrupted.”.

So the victims starting now, will continue to take the drug for the next idk 30 minutes???? But apparently some of the events preceding that moment can be “corrupted”. Translated: everything starting from October 2016 is fucked up because of the drug, not only that, but also some things from before that. I’m guessing the “drips” would be the little occasional posts or news??

Might I add the information that in December 2018 the escape room Sherlock the game is now opened? Like, i know it’s not October, maybe I’m just looking where i want to look, but... I genuinely don’t know, that’s why I’m sharing things, so that people with a more objective point of view can come and say to me “hey you’re not making any sense, what the fuck are you talking about”.

And overall, I’m not native English speaker, but I don’t think you say “corrupted” when talking about human memories. It sounds more something used in the context of digital memories, usually it’s files that gets corrupted, not human brain memories.

[kajaono]

Open letter to Sarah Z

I genuinely believe that you, Sarah, are a really clever human. How else would you be able to get 700.000+ people to watch YT videos that are longer then an hour in a time where most do not even have the patience to read simple newspaper articles? You know how to polarize people, for sure

Nevertheless here you seem to forget that you are talk about real human beings. You promise to treat us with repsect but your tweets tell another story.

Allready know you comments are full of people calling us dumb (And the video is not even released yet)

Comments like that have allready forced Rebs to take down her videos, because you are not the first nor the last person to make a video about TJLC and creating an influx of trolls and harassment.

You are working with this material for long, were even an ex-fan(?), but many of your viewers will be new to TJLC. Instead of knowing TJLC and all the nuance for years, they will encounter if for 1 to 2 hours. And no matter how respctful your video will be, they will laugh at us. Because they know better. They know how the show ended, we didn’t. Not when we wrote the metas. And most importantly: We are not responsible for how the show ended.

If Johnlock would be canon by now, what video could you make instead?

Another comment came up in your answeres and I know many people will think like that. Maybe even you:

Which is of course wrong. You know why many of us do not use our real names. Because tumblr is one of the few places in the internet noone is paying attention to. That is completly LGBTQ positive. Many people come here to figure out their sexuality or live their sexuality out in the open, because where they come from they are not allowed to do so. TJLC was such a place. I figured out I am bisexual of TJLC. Many people found friends, romantic partners, published Thesis and started with writing, drawing and video editing. Even In a hearbeat is by ex-Johnlockers. We created a safe place with TJLC. A safe place that many left once the show was over. But our posts are still there, for everyone to find. And you, Sarah, decided to dig them out again, present them to your viewers who will also come here and laugh at us. And you know they do.

Some parts of the internet are on tumblr, without real names for a reason. because we want to stay in anonymity. It is free to everyone to enter, but if you want to shit on it, don’t act surprised and as the victim when we fight back,

Let us go back to: Respect, okay? You wrote you will be respectful, but how do you call selling merch with OUR slogans? IF you would be repsctful you would point out people to real TJLC merch. Yes, you retweet Char’s posts, but only to make fun of it, knowing your followers will see. Who attacked Char because they lost their job due to the pandemic. Great fucking job Sarah!

Respect.... Respect would to invite us into your show. Let US talk. Yeah, you might be an ex-fan, but i know way to sure how bitter ex fan can be. Let US, who we are still here in the TJLC fandom, tell our story. Do not talk of us, but WITH us.

Johnlock is even longer around then the Spirk fandom. What next? mocking spirks for hoping that it will be canon soon? Creating content  years after the show ended? We are not here for your entertainment Sarah.

WE are real human beings, who deserve some respect. Our content might be out there for everyone else to read, but that is not an inventation to laugh at us, harrass us. We deserve the same repsct as a straight ship that became canon in the end. Even more talking in mind that we are queer beings, who created our own safe space and you want to throw 100.000s of trolls on us.

Respect does not mean that we have to justify us even BEFORE the video is even released

And at least, what goal do you follow with that video? Educate people? Do you really think people died unhappy because they didn’t knew what TJLC is/was? Definitly not. It is for your own profit and amusment. Never forget that.

Signed,

Kaja

[thesharondefenseleague]

Yesss thank you for bringing up the Sam Bucky queerbaiting like the moment they ended up on top of each other?

They knew absolutely what they were doing how it could be seen and that there was an audience out there that would love that indication that they were appealing to with that content. But of course its just to get their money and views and they never intend to follow through on that indication and loose their homophobic fans.

So ya absolute queer bait. Steve and Bucky never had moments like that. Ya they had dramatic maybe slightly cheesy heartfelt dialogue but thats not the same thing.

I so often see SteveBucky on the same list as Destiel or Johnlock for like examples of queerbaited couples and it seems like fans just see queerbaiting as any duo that could have had romantic potential that they liked and wasn't made canon. And like i get it you feel strongly for your otp.

But don't call it queerbaiting when its not. Especially next to those more insidious queerbaiting examples. That makes people think its a shipping thing rather than a minipulative marketing tactic that is often at the expense of minority group that craves representation.

There is that joke about straight girls being the ones who ship these gay ships and get salty about not seeing their favs make out. But there are alot of lgbt people who ( no suprise) gravitate towards these non straight ships too.

So many times ive seen teen girls get shit on for shipping gay ships calling it them fetishizing gay men just for having gay ships and later see that they were actually either not straight or not girls or both. They were just struggling with their sexuality not ready to come out and gravitated towards reprentations of things that were less heteronormative but wasn't associated exclusively with gay people.

And while im sure there were straight people out there who really wanted their gay otp to be canon its the young lgbt people who gonna get screwed over the most by this queerbaiting. They were young and hopeful and thought this mainstream thing they loved was validating them when it was really just leading them on for views. This isnt exclusive to lgbt people either.

Ive seen this happen with black characters too where the promise of them being important and relevant is used to draw in a black people get them watching to drive up viewership and then sideline them ( like say in Star Wars).

Its one thing if you want to put in representation and arent allowed to so you imply as much as possible. You see that often with childrens television for example. But this is almost the opposite of that. Its more insidious and often despite purposely baiting in show they will gaslight in interviews and say fans are reading too much into it. And sometimes there will later be evidence that baiting was discussed in the writers room.

Its all a huge dick move that people are complaining about and putting in say Stucky ,which didnt do that, on the same queerbaiting list of Johnlock or Destiel, which did, kinda makes that level of queerbaiting into just fan favorite gay ships that didn't become canon and people are salty.

Yeah, one of those ships is not like the others. There are a few video essays online about how queerbaiting was used to get fans while the creators simultaneously (for J/L, we all know what happened on 5 November) denied it would be canon. Steve and Bucky on the other hand haven’t been given the J/L treatment. Queerbaiting has to be on the J/L levels of insidious or the Betty and Veronica kissing in the trailer and going right into nowhere levels of baiting for views.

But Sam and Bucky. Is this why we don’t see Sam paired with anyone? Is Sam closeted?? Seriously, let’s run with this. What if Sam is closeted, because it’s hard enough to be a black man who is in the army, then a superhero who is an extremely public figure (because forget secret identities), who is then Captain America and probably the most famous person in the world, and here’s this guy who he wants to be friends with and also kind of prove his worth to, and he’s fun to mess around with, but fuck he’s kind of cute, with that face he makes when he’s messed with, and then you roll around in a field like that...

I would like to point out that in these past few years, we have collectively grown out of a time where m/m ships had a lot of fetishization in fandom. I don’t think we realize it, but I remember how much there used to be (and especially trans fetishization, I haven’t seen that in years when that used to be a huge thing). It’s nice that now we can see these characters as more human and less thing to get off to. And it does have a lot to do with LGBTQ+ fans given more of a voice in fandom. That being said, you can’t just say Steve and Bucky are queerbaited. The writers and directors have never once used that idea to sell you on their films. Their actors have never once played it up for the camera to mess with their fans. The only character that has that is Peggy. (Someone else remembers those being a thing with Agent Carter, right??) And in a time where Marvel is going to have canon queer relationships on-screen, we need to show support of them and stand for the characters who risk having their identities erased, especially when teams like the Young Avengers come around.

But also there is a lot of subtext to support that Sam could have a coming out narrative that I don’t think will ever happen, but would be a plot twist conclusion to the #givecapaboyfriend movement from way back. I mean, Sam has deliberately not been given a romantic story. This could be why. (But don’t hold out for it. Oh god, what if Sam and Bucky are the queerbaited ship??? Another plot twist.)

~Mod R

[marta-bee]

More Mary Thoughts

@wizardlysherlok replied to this post on AGRA/Agra parallels in Doyle-cannon and BBC-canon:

it feels like if AGRA was empty of full, it wouldn’t be right for john neither way: if it was full, it would the the great betrayal and also the “she wasn’t supposed to be like that”, the wife who lied immensely to her husband and(for god sakes) shot his bf. If it was empty it wouldn’t work either because it was boring and the same life john was trying to scape because it was making him unhappy...conclusion : Mary does not work for john in every way 

Ooh, a chance to talk about Mary generally! I’ve apparently got just enough codeine still in my system, and it’s close enough to the witching hour, that this seems like a fun topic rather than the don’t-poke-the-bear dread that usually falls on me when I speak her name in this fandom. Here’s hoping I don’t regret this come tomorrow.

Even in Doyle canon, I never particularly liked Mary’s story, which is meant as a judgment on Doyle and not some fictional woman. She’s clearly introduced because Watson --being a romantic-- needs a romantic partner, and for a whole host of historical reasons Doyle felt like it needed to be a woman. Any woman would do, apparently. And even without getting into issues of whether this is akin to queerbaiting, it also just makes for a very boring character IMO. Mary is the equivalent of a Bond girl : more saintly than sex-appeal, perhaps, but who only really exists as an object the male characters get to react against. There’s precious little of Mary specifically that makes any difference to SIGN.

I do like some of the grace notes Doyle gives her in later stories. I think there’s a reference in one of the stories that she had a reputation for being both kind and clever and women from her neighborhood came to her to help them solve their little problems, a sort of more everyday vision of Sherlock Holmes. But at least in SIGN she’s a walking trope and frustratingly little more. 

I think the Granada series was wise to leave her out almost entirely. (She only appears in the movie version of SIGN, and there is only a client.) She just would have been a distraction to the story they were trying to tell. In the RDJ/Jude Law movies she’s actually brilliantly done, somehow challenging and supporting their relationship at the same time. She’s also witty and daring and would not seem at all out of place in a Jane Austen novel with all that witty back-and-foth, and all three of them have this great chemistry. If ever there was an adaptation that screamed both Johnlock and Johnlockary (and of course Warstan), it’s this one.

Goodness, we need more fanfic about Kelly Reilly’s Mary. I need to write her again. She’s brilliant.

Which brings us to the BBC. I’m going to be very brave and say my biggest problem with her isn’t that she wedged herself into John’s and Sherlock’s relationship and somehow came away with the right to dictate its terms, even posthumously. It’s not even that she lied to her husband and manipulated him, endangering him and their child in the process; or that she shot Sherlock, or was an assassin who apparently went mercenary. All of that could be really interesting if done well! And really, I can think of storylines that would actually justify quite a lot of that. Even shooting, even killing Sherlock, even not being apologetic about it after the fact- I could write a story where that character made sense as a romantic opposite to John. I actually got about 10,000 words into one attempt, though I never finished or published it because the fandom was pretty toxic to anyone interested in a more shades-of-grey ersion of Mary at the time.

No, what really drives me up the wall with BBC’s version of Mary is they don’t really settle on any one version of her. Actually in each of the five episodes she appears in, there’s this radically different version of who she are and what motivates her: supportive friend; bride; sociopath assassin; government agent; martyr. The most sympathetic take on that I can give is that Sherlock himself is trying to figure her out and can’t make sense of her so keeps trying one mold after another. But whatever the intent, the effect is that Mary’s just ridiculously muddled for me, and I never really connected to her because I didn’t understand her. I’m not sure the show-runners did either. Seeing what Moffat in particular did with women characters in Doctor Who makes me think he genuinely struggles to find them interesting if they aren’t really... extra, for lack of a better word. John and Sherlock, being men, had their BAMF moments but also a psychology that actually made sense along somewhat normal terms; Mary had to be a super-sekrit assassin, and a rogue that was targeted by a media mogul, and the hero who saved Holmes and then did it again from beyond the grave. All of which would have been fine if it actually came from a coherent characterization. But BBC’s Mary was all BAMF and stunning reveals and little to no coherence that made that make sense, so her character never really developed any kind of a reality for me. My brain couldn’t make sense of her, so my heart never latched on either. In the end I was just left confused and frustrated

Even all these years later! I still don’t know what to make of her, and that’s just bad writing. I would love to have a Mary who lied from start to finish with John “Trust Issues” Watson, or who shot Sherlock to the chest where it somehow made sense. That could be fascinating. It’s not what we got, though; at least it’s not what I was able to get out of the show.

Here’s another thing that would be fascinating, and I’d really love to see in some adaptation; even this one, though I don’t think we’ll get it. Mary Morstan in 1895 makes some sort of sense even with a suspiciously close friendship between Holmes and Watson, because male friendships operated in a very different realm than heterosexual marriages did. There were different kinds of intimacies in that time, I think. But when you bring the characters into the modern world, it eems like a super-close friendship like Holmes and Watson seem to have, one that seem to emotionally resemble marriage even if there’s no physical/sexual component, would be a challenge to what any self-respecting modern woman would tolerate from her husband. I don’t mean because it makes John gay, and of course married people can have friends, but there’s something about John and Sherlock that in the modern world strays damned close to emotional infidelity. 

I mean, how can you have that without either weakening the relationship between John and Sherlock, or making Mary cuckolded in some sense? Now throw into the mix in this particular adaptation, even before Mary, John and Sherlock had a ... unique relationship. John would date and have sex (or not), Sherlock would be stuck in seemingly perpetual celibacy, but if Sherlock dared to date (and I think this would be true for a man as well as a woman) John goes into a disbelieving jealous rage. This strikes me as not normal male friendship, though it’s not romantic or sexual either. It’s queerplatonic af on Sherlock’s side, increasingly stretching the bounds of what can be called “platonic”, and for John, it’s kind of a monodirectional monogamy in at least an emotional sense. I mean, the man went and got married, but we all saw his reaction when Sherlock dared to (seemingly) date someone else.

Now throw a modern woman into that mix, trying to marry and start a family with one half of a duo in that truly fucked-up dynamic. Imagine what it would be like for her to exist in that world. You can imagine polyamory of some variety, or jealousy, or a very altered view from what the mainstream imagnes are the expectations of married life, or whatever spin you like to put on it. 

I guarantee you -- if done well -- it would be fascinating. And I’d very much like to see it. Or read it, or something. If you want to make that woman as much of a danger junkie as John, as much of a skilled, professional killer, wehther on the government’s payroll or a disillusioned former agent who refused to follow orders and was forced to “branch out” or even just a true psychopath who was utterly self-motivated and ruthless but still wanted to protect John or at least what John represented to her? 

Well, that could be fascinating, too. Even more so. There’s just one catch: you’ve got to actually tell the story. They never seemed to get around to that, and I think I’m still more than a bit bitter.

..... And apparently I’m rambling. Thanks for allowing me to talk about her a bit. I’ll shut up now. :-)

[fanishjuli]

i wouldn’t mind getting those johnlock fic recs now..... 👉👈

ok, ok that's great, look- idk what you like, idk what you tend to prefer, but! these are some of my favourite fics ever:

Notes On A Love Story by A_Candle_For_Sherlock (@a-candle-for-sherlock ), (G, 4k w, ACD Holmes) "Watson finds a copy of The Picture of Dorian Gray in Holmes' room. Or: what happens when a queer novel upends Baker Street." - this is a canon acd Holmes fic, it's an absolutely lovely story, written in beautiful Victorian style, obviously related to Oscar Wilde and his story-- no spoilers tho! but even if you're not a big fan of Victorian fics or whatever, give this a try, it's a beautiful story and A-Candle-For-Sherlock writes Victorian Holmes like noone else does, really, give this a try

A Case for Domestic Propinquity by SilentAuror (@silentauroriamthereal ), (E, 32k w, post s4 fix it) "As Sherlock and John renovate Baker Street with Rosie underfoot, Sherlock can't help but wondering how he could possibly convince John to just stay indefinitely..." - a friends to lovers fic very domestic

Without Words by allonsys_girl, (E, 12k w, h/c) "John and Sherlock have been together for six months and Sherlock still hasn't said "I love you". Then John gets hurt, and Sherlock expresses how much John really means to him." - super romantic and sweet

Two Years As Your Interpreter by prettyvk (@prettyvk ), (E, 42k w, teenlock, AU) "John isn’t scared of Sherlock or of the adults around them. But he is scared of this Message. He is scared he’ll be there, in two years, right next to Sherlock, watching and unable to do a damn thing when he dies. Because the true Message was, “Don’t expect to make a career out of this interpreter thing. I’ll die in two years.” - a really f-ing beautiful story with teenlock and some supernatural/fantastic elements to it that even if you aren't a fan of AUs is so worth the read

More Things Than Are Dreamt Of (s) by 1electricpirate, (M-E, 38k w, HP AU) "In which John is (reluctantly) a wizard, Mycroft is (apparently) omniscient, and Sherlock is (surprisingly) oblivious." - the best fucking harry potter au I've ever read in my life, it's honestly so good and it's really funny and just a great story overall, even if you've never seen hp, even if you don't like hp, give this series a chance.

The Lost Special: Family Matters (As Do Relationships) by ShirleyCarlton (@shirleycarlton ), (M, 144k w, post s4 fix it) "Sherrinford is not really the name of some high security prison. That was just a figment of John’s frantic coma dream. And Eurus is not actually Sherlock’s sister. That’s just something random she said to John before shooting him. Sherlock and John were never actually estranged. That was just their act to cover up what really happened to Mary – or Rosamund Moran, as her real name has turned out to be. Sherlock does have a secret sibling, though, and his name is Sherrinford.

After finally eliminating Moran – though in a rather dramatically different way than they had envisioned – and exposing the truth about Eurus, John encourages Sherlock to delve into his past and to find out whether the reasons to keep Sherrinford away from Sherlock were the right ones, and to discover what really happened in 1981. Along the way, Sherlock and John gradually, finally, stop keeping each other at a distance, and eventually become a proper family of their own." - the perfect fix it, 144k words over 40 chapters, it's a beautiful story and it literally clears out every single inconsistency that's been on this show no matter how small it is, it's honestly amazing, I think everyone that's ever watched Sherlock should read this, it blew my mind and I've been reccing it in every chance I get ever since lmao

other than that I'm going to shamelessly rec myself, it's just short (1-4k mostly) fluff, that's all I can write lmao

and other than that, these are a bunch of people who often rec fics and are amazing; @alexxphoenix42 or @alexxsficrecs , @inevitably-johnlocked , @swissmissficrecs , @johnlockfanficrec , @sarahthecoat , @strangelock221b (mostly sherlolly tho) annnddd I'm missing someone but I can't remember rn, but there's a lot of amazing people who rec amazing fics

if you want anything specific feel free to ask me! (or any of these guys ☝️ who do the same thing but better) and you can find every other fic I've ever recced on my #fic rec tag (I'm not sure that's gonna work on mobile), and there's a ton of reblogs of other people's recs as well so you could check them out too

[inevitably-johnlocked]

Hi Steph! What are your and you readers' favorite Johnlock visiting the Holmes parents fics? I'm talking about canon Holmeses - the ones we see in the show :)

Hi Nonny!! 

Ah, I’ve only got a few, but I’m sure everyone would love to add their own!

VISITING THE HOLMESES

Engaged by lifeonmars (NR, 3,146 w. || Marriage Proposal, Fluff, Holmes Family, Song Fic) – Sherlock did not believe in marriage, but he wanted to be married. He found this something of a surprise. Part 2 of Damage

Christmas at Holmes Cottage by johnlockedstarkid (G, 4,295 w., 7 Ch. || Christmas, Fake Relationship, Love Confessions, Holmes Family, Pining, Kisses, Fluff, Allusions to Mystrade) – Sherlock doesn’t want to have to deal with his mother’s wishes for him to find a partner when he goes to visit them for Christmas, so asks John to pose as his boyfriend. Little does he know he’s not the only one who wishes that the relationship could be real.

The Only Available Transportation by blueink3 (T, 5,379 w., 1 Ch. || Post S4, Fluff and Angst, Insecure Sherlock, Caring John, Parentlock, Sherlock’s Birthday, Family, Misunderstandings) – It’s possibly the desperation that’s seeped into his voice despite his best intentions, or perhaps it’s just a mother’s intuition, but she knows that whatever he’s calling about is Serious, hangover be damned. “What’s happened?” she asks, tone soft and as comforting as a hot cup of tea on a cold winter’s night. “Mummy,” he begins, voice catching. “I think John may be moving out.”

Maybe This Christmas by feverishsea (T, 6,021 w., 1 Ch. || Matchmaker Anthea, Anthea POV, Slight Mystrade, Holmes Family) – Anthea has given up her life, her own desires, even her name in service of something greater than herself. But that doesn’t mean she can’t see when someone else wants something – even if she doesn’t happen to care overmuch for that person. And it doesn’t mean she isn’t willing to help.

that thing you like by misspamela (E, 7,165 w., 1 Ch. || Holmes Family, Fake Relationship, Friends to Lovers) – “Happy Christmas, etc. etc.” Sherlock and John go to the Holmes’ for Christmas, and everyone thinks they’re together.

Merlot by Itsallfine (E, 14,844 w., 17 Ch. || Christmas, Pining Sherlock, Wine, Slow Burn, First Kiss / Time, Love Confessions, Wine, Holmes Family) – Sherlock and John work toward becoming something more as they prepare to host the Holmes parents at 221B for the holidays. Part of 25 Days of Fic-Mas 2015.

Never-Ending Cycle by orphan_account (T, 17,211 w., 1 Ch. || Christmas, Est. Rel., Proposal, Fluff) – Or, four times Sherlock Holmes attempted to propose to John Watson, and the Christmas Party at which he finally did. Sherlock thinks he’s a miserable failure, John is confused, Mrs. Hudson and Lestrade provide some unsatisfactory advice, and Mummy is, as always, the solution. All in a lovely, fluffy holiday theme.

Winter’s Delights by Kate_Lear (E, 21,173 w., 1 Ch. || Holmes Family, Christmas, Fake Relationship, Friends to Lovers, Bed Sharing, Domestics) – Sherlock takes John home for Christmas to meet the extended Holmes family. Part 1 of Winter’s Delights

echoes through time by chellefic (E, 21,619 w. || First Time, Romance, ACD & BBC, Epistolary) – Mummy sends a trunk from the Holmes cottage in Sussex to 221B. Its contents alter the way John and Sherlock see themselves and one another.

Ghost Stories by SwissMiss (M, 22,256 w., 1 Ch. || Pining, Holmes Family, Christmas, Friends to Lovers, Slow Burn, Bed Sharing, Fluff, Hurt/Comfort, First Time) – Sherlock’s parents think he and John are a couple. They might be onto something.

Hitting the Water at Sixty Miles an Hour by what_alchemy (E, 30,568 w., 5 Ch. || Fake Rel., Roadtrips, Slow Burn, Mummy Holmes) – “You love your mother, Sherlock?” John watched the muscles in Sherlock’s jaw jump. He nodded in one sharp jerk. “Then we’re going to her party and making her happy.” John let out a resigned sigh. “As a ruddy couple, you bastard.”

An Acquired Taste by kinklock (E, 31,059 w., 4 Ch. || Vampires AU || Vampire Sherlock, Misunderstandings, Bat!Sherlock, Pining Sherlock, Humour, Magical Realism, Fluff and Angst, Blood Drinking, Holmes Family, Slow Burn) – At Montague Street when Sherlock was forced to sate his body’s needs, he was at least able to wander about the flat as much as he pleased. At Baker Street, it was mini-bags in a mini-fridge and bedroom confinement.

Spare Change by Ermerness (E, 51,966 w., 14 Ch. || Rich Holmeses AU || First Kiss / Time, Holmes Family, Virgin Sherlock, Anal, First Meetings, Bossy Bottomlock) – The Holmes family is one of the richest and most powerful in England. Sherlock spends his time flying around the world on the family’s private jet drinking a lot and shopping at expensive boutiques as a way of trying to alleviate his endless boredom. His mother decides it’s time he settles down with someone powerful, wealthy and well connected. John Watson happens to be none of those things.

John Watson’s Twelve Days of Christmas by earlgreytea68 (M, 53,464 w., 14 Ch. || Christmas, Holmes Family, Fake Relationship, Alternate First Meeting, Falling in Love, Fluff and Angst, Hardcore Pining) – It’s the holiday season. John Watson needs money. Sherlock Holmes needs something else.

The Wedding Garments by cwb (E, 105,390 w., 36 Ch. || PODFIC AVAILABLE || Alternate Future AU || Alternate First Meeting, Dating / Arranged Marriages, Romance, First Kiss/Time, Heavy Petting, Cuddles, POV Sherlock, Virgin Sherlock, Idiots in Love, Slow Burn / Falling in Love / Dev. Rel., Nervous/Anxious Sherlock, Jealous/Cranky, Hiking, Vacation Homes / Honeymoon, Sherlock’s Family, Horny John/Sherlock, Patient John, Massages, Hand Jobs, Assassination Plots, Hand Jobs / Oral Sex, Case Fic, Emotional Love Making, Bath Time Fun) – This is the story of a young consulting detective who wants nothing to do with marriage and an army doctor who wants to find true love. It’s 2020 post-Brexit England and the British government is encouraging arranged marriages. Candidates meet through state-run agencies and date in hopes of finding love (and tax benefits). Sherlock doesn’t need or want a spouse, at least not until John Watson shows up. Hesitant to give in to his more carnal urges because of the way they derail his mind, how will Sherlock progress toward the more intimate aspects of a relationship? The answer lies in a very special wedding gift.

MARKED FOR LATER

(I haven’t read any of these, but I’ve tagged them as “Holmes Family” so I presume that they play a part in their lives)

Pillow Replacement by Atisenia (T, 4,754 w., 1 Ch. || Fluff, Humour, Domestic Fluff, Misunderstandings, Visiting the Holmeses) – They're visiting Sherlock's parents and Sherlock is acting very domestic. Is he only pretending for his parents' sake?

All I Want For Christmas by Mssmithlove (E, 19,508 w., 1 Ch. || Unilock, Mystrade, Christmas, Holmes Family, Fluff, Friends to Lovers, Pining) – Taking Sherlock’s platonic university flatmate home with him for Christmas can be a tricky business. Especially when he wishes their relationship wasn’t platonic at all. Part 18 of Happiness Awaits

Sherlock Holmes & The Mysterious Ex by Gatergirl79 (M, 27,942 w. || Family, Romance, Holmes Family) – Sherlock and John are forced to spend Christmas with Sherlock’s family. An unsettling idea especially when John will have to play ‘Boyfriend’ thanks to Mycroft. But why exactly does Sherlock want to avoid a family party?

Sacré Coeur by Mamaorion (M, 95,235 w., 27 Ch. || S4 Fix It Rewrite, First Kiss, UST / RST, Eventual Happy Ending, Coming Out, Holmes Family, Marriage Proposal, Husbands, Healing, Evil Mary, Beekeeping, Caretaker Sherlock, Mind Palace, Alzheimer’s Disease, Protective / Big Brother Mycroft, TD-12) – In this s4 fixit, John must piece together the gaps in his altered memory if he and Sherlock are to face the terror that has plagued Sherlock since childhood. As they untangle the web, seven years of hidden love ignite.

October to Hogmanay by snorklepie (E, 127,318 w., 25 Ch. || Post HLV Fix-It, Awkward First Times, Hurt/Comfort, Sherlock is a Mess, Shameless Smut, Sherlock’s Past, Scotland, Poison, Holmes Family, Kilts, Dancing, Angst) – John stared at Sherlock’s profile against the cab window and exhaled slowly. After a long moment, he reached out and touched Sherlock’s long fingers where they were fiddling with the button on his coat. The tall man didn’t look around again, but his fingers slowly unfurled before curling deliberately around John’s hand. Part 2 of Scotland

The Lost Special: Family Matters (As Do Relationships) by ShirleyCarlton  (M, 144,688 w., 40 Ch. || S4 Fix It Fic, Unreliable Narrator, John’s Mind Bungalow, Friends to Lovers, Happy Ending) – Sherrinford is not really the name of some high security prison. That was just a figment of John’s frantic coma dream. And Eurus is not actually Sherlock’s sister. That’s just something random she said to John before shooting him. Sherlock and John were never actually estranged. That was just their act to cover up what really happened to Mary – or Rosamund Moran, as her real name has turned out to be. Sherlock does have a secret sibling, though, and his name is Sherrinford. After finally eliminating Moran – though in a rather dramatically different way than they had envisioned – and exposing the truth about Eurus, John encourages Sherlock to delve into his past and to find out whether the reasons to keep Sherrinford away from Sherlock were the right ones, and to discover what really happened in 1981. Along the way, Sherlock and John gradually, finally, stop keeping each other at a distance, and eventually become a proper family of their own.

The Edinburgh Problem by snorklepie(E, 152,095 w., 39 Ch. || Post-HLV/S3 Fix It, Pre-Slash/Bromance to Romance, Travelling, Humour, First Kiss/Time, Holmes Family, Sherlock’s Big Feelings, Hurt/Comfort, Family Secrets, Case Fic, Slow Burn, Flashbacks, Attempted Sexual Assault, Jealousy, Implied Rape/Non-Con) – After he separates from Mary, John returns to Baker Street. Following a request for help from Sherlock’s cousin Violet, the detective and his blogger take a trip to Edinburgh. John discovers more about the Holmes family and Sherlock than he bargained for, but tries not to run screaming. Part 1 of the Scotland series

[lizthirose]

Ok but supernatural is like super homophobic. (And so is the actor confessing lol). Liek. He literally gets sent to hell right after confessing. The show literally just said “if you are gay you will go to hell”

Hi there Nonni!

Well. This is an interesting point; one, however, I can’t agree with. See, here’s the thing. I get why people think Supernatural is “super homophobic”. I know many think so, that much becomes clear if you spend enough time on Tumblr, which is by the way one of the reasons I have been absent for so long from here.

Because here is the other thing: I don’t see it that way. I recognize there are certain issues, but having grown up the way I have, I have a different view on things. I don’t negate what many feel Supernatural is and does, and that it is sometimes, oftentimes, problematic for them. It’s just not how I see it.

Around seven years ago I received an anon regarding the Johnlock ship. Here I discussed whether popular media and the audience are ready to see such a canon ship between its two main (male) characters. A lot has happened since then; nevertheless it is still not an easy thing to realize on screen. We may be openminded here on Tumblr, and many others out there have since followed. But our society, and I’m talking about earth’s whole population, is still far from accepting homosexuality, or LGBTQ+ in general, as “normal”. If you want to blame anyone for that - don’t blame the people, or the writers. Blame the teachings especially of church(es) that have always and still condemn anything other than the heteronormative. Back in 2014 I said you don’t change the world overnight, and not even in a decade or two. But when I think back, I believe we have already come a long way, and we’ll soldier on, all of us who know that love is love, and who want everyone live their life the way they feel is best for them.

But back to Supernatural. 

No matter what they do on the show, the cast and crew are well aware that there are probably millions of Destiel shippers in the whole world. We are what, 90-95% of the fandom? Okay, maybe a little less, but we certainly are the majority, that I am sure of.

I think we can also agree that the cast and crew, and mostly the writers, are also aware that this show is ending. 

So there is this one thing that has been going around in my head since a few hours earlier (though being in Europe, it was the middle of the night and I decided to first get some sleep instead of writing something about it):

What if they stopped caring? 

Up until now, when there were still episodes and seasons to come, they had to tread carefully. Supernatural may have a strong and massive fanbase around the world, but ratings are still decided in the US. And viewership there does not only consist of fans/shippers. Up until now they had to consider all viewers, what they could gain and what they could lose because of their writing decisions. It’s a fine line between enthralling someone and putting them off.

If they make Destiel truly canon by the end of the last episode, if they let Dean say it back, if they do even more (I’m not gonna say it out loud, I’m afraid I could jinx it ^^), there may be a small percentage of SPN fans who won’t be happy. Maybe. But most of us, of them, will rejoice, and a part of those who don’t ship Destiel will probably be indifferent to it, or be happy for the rest of us. Furthermore, the general audience and their opinion won’t matter anymore.

There are no more episodes. There is no drop in viewership to be feared. It’s a done deal. Show over. So why not do it? For TWELVE YEARS they have dropped hint after hint after hint. Some call it baiting. I call it regular ship tease you see on so many shows. Chuck knows I had to endure it so often, and some didn’t manage to give closure to shippers (of popular ships that had been teased for years as well, but couldn’t become canon for different reasons during the run of the show). And here I am talking about heterosexual ships. 

So long story short, and to answer your question - a part of me really believes that they will give us closure. Let’s look at it this way: Cas has to sacrifice himself to make Dean realize that he loves him too. And not only realize, but also admit it. He has heard it now. Maybe he suspected it before, but hearing it makes it real. It’s out there. 

Look at how Dean wasn’t even able to accept Sam’s call, despite their dire situation, despite Dean maybe had to know that something was up, that Sam needed help. But Dean couldn’t. One can argue it was because he didn’t know how to tell Sam Cas is gone, but let’s be real: We’ve seen Dean devastated before when he thought Cas was dead, seen him keep Cas’ coat in the Impala and so on. This time, he was incapable of doing anything. Their world is literally on the verge of ending, and all he could do was sit there.

While Cas’ speech and confession had me sobbing, seeing Dean sitting there as if paralyzed completely broke me. He hasn’t just lost his best friend; he has lost the one he loves. I believe a dam has been broken. I don’t know what they will make of it, but seriously -- Cas said the three magic words, something I never expected to hear, so all bets are off now. 

In all honesty though -- for me it will already be enough if they bring Cas back and reunite him with Dean. Everything else is a cherry on top.

I have another thing for you, another perspective: 

You say the writers made him openly gay and then sent him to hell as a result and punishment.

I say: they could have chosen anything as his true happiness. They could have come up with whatever. We all have known for a long time that Cas finding/recognizing his true happiness will send him back to the Empty; he was always on borrowed time, because it was clear that they would make use of that plot device. 

So whatever they had chosen, it was only about Cas’ happiness. Could have been anything. But it isn’t. No, they decided to make Dean his happiness. The things he has learned thanks to Dean; the love he feels. 

The Empty didn’t know what it would be. There was never a condition on what his happiness had to be about. 

But the writers decided that there is only ONE thing that can be Cas’ real, true happiness. They gave us this. They could have found something else and we would be none the wiser, except that maybe we complained that it wasn’t Dean. 

The writers have made a decision. They decided to finally make it canon.