While they kiss, John’s hands move a lot. He touches: Sherlock’s hair (more or less constantly, with one hand or the other), Sherlock’s neck (12% of the time), Sherlock’s shoulders (between 15 and 22% of the time, depending on precisely where he draws his lines), Sherlock’s chest (between 21 and 24% of the time, same reason), Sherlock’s back (between 34 and 38% of the time, and how Sherlock loathes imprecision), Sherlock’s hips (3% of the time), and what are inarguably Sherlock’s buttocks (8% of the time, though a nontrivial amount of the time John’s hands spend on his back makes Sherlock feel shivery enough that he feels like that particular dividing line should be moved substantially upwards, anatomical realities be damned).
Detatched precision in describing erotic content isn’t exactly new information. The Marquis de Sade long ago catalogued a near-exhaustive collection of sexual recombinations with all the passion of an encyclopedia, but Sade is the very antithesis of romance. The larger point here, though, is that greywash used electronic storytelling methods when it made sense for her story, and other methods when it didn’t. greywash’s style isn’t a gimmick, it’s integrated into the storyline and characterization.
Updating storytelling to a more twenty-first-century visual and technological context is of a piece not only with Sherlock’s update of late Victorian Holmesiana, but also with the BBC series’ updated techniques: its visual presence, its stylish editing, its use of texts and blogs. These innovations, in turn, are in keeping with the series source. In other words: the inspiration is not just content. By publishing in The Strand, Arthur Conan Doyle used mass media to the outer extreme of its capabilities in the 1880s—just as his characters used the latest detection technologies. Throughout his life, Doyle authorized and collaborated on stage and early film adaptations; similarly, Sherlock not only represents but also maintains a transmedia presence. The blogs featured in the series—The Blog of John Watson and Sherlock’s The Science of Deduction—are online, comment on each other, and even include Doyle’s conceit of referencing stories that aren’t actually told—by Doyle, that is—but that have been told by others ever since. A series companion volume even records John and Sherlock’s interaction via yellow sticky note—it reads like visual fic for its own series.
Like greywash’s multimedia storytelling method, the plot of greywash’s fic directly responds to the BBC series, but much less in the spirit of homage than in the tried and trusted fandom spirit of irritation. Apparently greywash had some problems with Sherlock’s season 2 and wondered what “to jettison” so as to be able to embrace the season in fic. And then, a change of heart:
I told myself to stop being a weenie, and then I told myself I had to keep some of it, and then I kind of found myself with my head cocked to one side, asking, what if I keep everything? What if I take the stuff that bothers me and make it be central?15
Accordingly, greywash’s plot is convoluted: Sherlock overthinks everything and is crippled by an adolescent understanding of love; the characters who love each other most lie most to each other. Taking dissatisfaction for inspiration is a common and very productive strategy in fanfiction, but it is also one of the least understood by outsiders.
Frustration may also, of course, be shared by some of the characters. Sherlock fic often presents its various lovestruck John Watsons with a kind of dangerous gambit: the exciting scrutiny that defamiliarizes the dependable and comfortable and makes it exotic, erotic, and exciting is often the scrutiny of the mad. No one—by which I mean, no one who I know of writing today in any venue, not just in the Sherlock fandom—explores this gambit with more narrative, lexical, and emotional precision than wordstrings.
wordstrings’ Paradox Series is stunning, spinning. This Sherlock reminds us of what we use the thick filters of convention to help us forget: that life gives us “shocking amounts of detail to sift through.” George Eliot—whom we’ve already met as a writer of Sir Walter Scott fanfiction—had room for more in her novel Middlemarch than an epigraph-length homage to her fangirl childhood. She also wrote, a bit more famously, about what life might be like without those filters of convention:
If we had a keen vision and feeling of all ordinary human life, it would be like hearing the grass grow and the squirrel’s heart beat, and we should die of that roar which lies on the other side of silence.
wordstrings’ Sherlock lives in that roar:
Just for an instant, let there be nothing, he thinks.
And there was nothing.
For exactly three seconds, there was nothing at all.
God had it entirely backwards, didn’t he, all the things in the world, all the useless, petty, undusted, uncared-for, forgotten, overlooked things in the world, it’s an utter sham isn’t it, the way there are so many individual things with their individual smells and textures, and half of them warped and cracked, and green and teal being so different and there being a thousand varieties of blue at the minimum, I ask you do we need it all, and God probably doesn’t exist anyway, but if He did, that would be a joke, wouldn’t it, leaving someone alone here who can see all of it at once and knows that pink tastes different from vermillion in a certain way,
Mad Humbert Humbert brings to Lolita something of this kind of attention, this kind of discomfort, but John Watson is no fourteen-year-old girl. He’s middle-aged. So we can feel less creepy about watching a self-diagnosed sociopath’s obsession with him unfold. Maybe. John is a willing, desperately eager object of this obsession. His only fear is that the obsession will fade. He gets angry, of course:
John touches his tongue to his lower lip, still staggeringly furious. It’s like watching National Geographic, Sherlock thinks, when something very small and furry and soft suddenly seems made of teeth.
It’s relatively quiet in his head at the moment, but that’s temporary. So he thinks over what he should bring back to John by way of apology for being who he is.
For anyone who has struggled with mental illness, or loved someone who struggled with it, wordstrings’ series resonates, as its comments section attested. For those who haven’t, it gives a taste. John is not the only object of this Sherlock’s scrutiny; the most unrelenting examinations catalogue his own aberrant desires, his feared moral failings, and his terror at his organic inability to distinguish right from wrong. He rigorously transcribes and categorizes his various desires into two lists, which he labels “Fine” and “Not Fine”; one of the central conflicts of the series is that he cannot reliably tell the difference. At one point, after Sherlock has eviscerated all of the Ten Commandments in his journey to become a more high-functioning person, John convinces him to share the full contents of the lists (readers only ever get samples) and then insists on moving several of them around. (Divorce, for example, which Sherlock had categorized as “Fine” because it’s normal, in that lots of people do it, John moves emphatically to the “Not Fine” list.) We watch these agonies unfold from the inside, through the distorting lens of Sherlock’s mental illness (or neuro-atypicality), and from the outside, from the midst of John’s helpless adoration of someone he believes to be “The William Shakespeare of Atrociously Skewed Morals.”
In wordstrings’ erotic scenes as in many others, Sherlock’s observational and deductive skills—in most canonical and official versions, a largely asexual character particular—have been a boon. Even devoted readers of erotica complain that such scenes have a tendency to become stale, rote. This can hold even more true when the scenes repeatedly unfold between (versions of) the same characters. As in fanfiction.
Or, you know, in monogamy.
Fanfiction Sherlock and John’s erotic and romantic dealings offer hope that, under the right kind of scrutiny, with the right kind of attention paid, even an average person might continue to be full of surprises.
In this way, “Johnlock” as a romantic pairing often lives up to, albeit in a different configuration, Thackeray’s dream of “middle-aged” romance. The BBC Sherlock and John are in their mid- to late thirties, but in the D
oyle stories, they age together. They visit each other in retirement. This long partnership—of which readers never tired, even if their author did—presents a relationship that remains (sometimes) exciting and fulfilling into old age, even if it also—as Rex Stout pointed out—sometimes felt like habit. Retirement fic is its own Sherlock subgenre. As a whole, Johnlock fic depicts long-term exclusivity in a complex light, and with an attention that much professionally produced culture seems to find impossible or unattractive. Yet all the Johns and Sherlocks continue to find each other fascinating, irritating, and uniquely sustaining—much as the originals seemed to do over their (first) decades of fictional partnership.
The Slasher Who Is Not One (An Interview with Katie Forsythe and wordstrings)
TWO OF THE MOST ADMIRED and well-loved writers in the vast, multilayered Sherlock Holmes universe(s) are Katie Forsythe, who has been writing pitch-perfect Victorian-style erotica for many years, and wordstrings, discussed previously. Katie Forsythe’s Fanlore entry16 calls her “probably the most-recced writer of book-canon Holmes/Watson stories.” These stories prompted another fan (damned_colonial) to propose the term Forsythian as an alternative to the terms Doylist (in which continuity breaks in canon are due to author error) or Watsonian (in which continuity breaks in canon are due to Watson’s mistake or strategy):
A Forsythian perspective interprets the text from the standpoint of the text as written by Watson while trying to divert attention from his and Holmes’s homosexual relationship. Any discrepancies, such as jumps in time, gaping plot holes, or bizarre non-sequiturs (as, for instance, Holmes’s musings on a rose during The Naval Treaty) are due to this attempt to rewrite history. The more irreconcilable the discrepancy, the hotter the sex being covered up.17
The Fanlore entry for wordstrings’ Paradox Series is more extensive, incorporating text from several lengthy online reviews and samples from the large quantity of fanart, video, music mixes, and translations the series has inspired—all of which the author welcomes, and about which she declares herself “staggered and flattered.”
Despite their vastly divergent styles, settings, and characterizations, Katie Forsythe and wordstrings’ distinctive written universes share a driving interest in the intricacies of codependency, mental illness, and addiction. Each also attends with a kind of haunting precision to the particularities of individual desires and the perplexing failings of language to communicate—especially when caught up in these desires—exactly when and what we most need it to.
These shared preoccupations make it less surprising that Katie Forsythe and wordstrings are the same person, a fact that became fully public knowledge only recently, when she announced it on her profile page. After this interview was conducted, wordstrings deleted her LiveJournal account, where all the thousands of comments to her fiction were housed, for the stated reason that the huge personal response to her stories and characters had become too much for her. Her work as wordstrings is at Archive of Our Own; her work as Katie Forsythe is at liquidfic.org.
What first drew you to write about Sherlock Holmes?
I read the stories as a child, like a lot of people did. Even when I was very young, my favorite books all featured what I sort of characterize as “I’d die for you” male friendships—Lord of the Rings, Sherlock Holmes, et cetera. Something about the abundance of love in the canon really drew me into the world of Holmes and his doctor friend.
When I was about seventeen or eighteen—seventeen, I think, I’m only in my thirties now—I discovered that classic H/W site However Improbable. And as far as I can recall it, sex hadn’t really entered into my slashy little consciousness yet, at least as far as Holmes and Watson were concerned. I’d imagined them in all kinds of dangerous hurt/comfort-creating situations, but I didn’t know other people were writing material that directly appealed to me—fic writers like Pandapony and Irene Adler. I took a stab at it myself and the result was “The Sign of Change,” the first part of which is still up on However Improbable. Before I quite knew what was happening, there was a hell of a lot of material.
My background was very, very conservative Catholic—I was pent up about all kinds of things sexually, bisexual without really realizing it, genderqueer on a spectrum I’ve never really scrutinized too closely. Meanwhile, I look like a tiny über-feminine girl (I somewhat resemble that most loathed of characters from The L Word, Jenny Schecter), and slash was a way to unload a ton of angst and personal conflict.
Do you write other kinds of work—fiction, poetry, nonfiction—or is your writing mostly focused on fic?
I’m a fic girl.
In canon-verse, your vocabulary—including historically appropriate slang for homosexuality—is very accurate and authentic. What kinds of research do you do, or have you been so immersed in period literature that it comes naturally at this point?
I think the latter. I love period literature, so I don’t find myself having to do a great deal of research, although there have certainly been occasions I’ve used slang dictionaries. And I equally love the history of queer culture, so that isn’t too challenging. As for the rest of the historical settings, “The Presbury Letters,” for instance, God bless Google.
Why did you choose to write under a new pseudonym?
Oh dear, and not everyone knows I’m Katie Forsythe, though most people do (I wasn’t exactly keeping a tight lid on it). Well, for one thing, my canon ’verse stuff is exactly that, canon ’verse, and I was keen to keep it that way. For another, and this is going to sound awful, I was getting a bit frightened at the level of response to my work, and feeling a rather strange responsibility for creating ever more of it, and I wanted a nice quiet little LJ [LiveJournal] where I could post utterly mad BBC Sherlock fic and no one would see it. In all seriousness, that was the plan.
I sent messages to about fifteen of my closest fandom acquaintances, telling them I’d be posting under wordstrings and then I cross-posted the fic to the BBC Sherlock group and to Cox & Co. It worked like a charm until “The Death and Resurrection of the English Language,” and then I opened my inbox one day and had something like 300 comments. It was completely unexpected. I literally stepped away from my laptop in shock.
Have you written fic for other versions or offshoots of Arthur Conan Doyle’s world? If so, which ones? If not, what in particular about the BBC Sherlock inspired you to take on a new style and identity?
No, just canon and BBC. BBC Sherlock just captures the intensity of their relationship so well. And it’s far more serious in tone than the Warner Bros. version, though I love that, too. I don’t know; there’s just such a light in their eyes when they’re off adventuring together. I was a bit sick of filling in canonical blanks in high Victorian style, and I thought it would be fun times to play over in the BBC yard. All sunshine and daisies and fuzzy jumpers. Then a lot of things happened in my personal life, and the world of the Paradox ’verse took a sharp turn for the dark.
Commentators describe your Sherlock as “neuro-atypical.” Do you have a diagnosis you prefer?
Do they really? Well, most of my work relies on the series to inform it, though many, many people have informed me (and I entirely agree with them) that my Sherlock is darker and madder than the one on the show. I admit, when season two came along and Sherlock drugged John and locked him in a lab making demon dog noises, I was like, yep, there you are, my favorite crazed sociopath. To be clear, I don’t think the Sherlock of the show is in fact a sociopath, but the Sherlock of the Paradox ’verse posits that he is. He’s also simply a genius, and suffers from synesthesia and episodes resembling bipolar disorder, a topic with which I am regrettably familiar. Other things, like the white letters, are completely inspired by the production design.
Your Sherlock is sometimes overwhelmed by particulars and believes himself to be unique—do you agree? Is he “Sherlock-atypical” in the same way he is “John-sexual”—an entirely fictional singularity?
If he were entirely fictional, if he weren’t based on real
humans, no one would respond to the series the way they have—which is to say, very, very enthusiastically, for which I am eternally grateful for their generosity of spirit. Sherlock’s set of issues are unique to him, yes, but I think everyone experiences shades of acting selfishly even though they know better, wishing you could turn your head off, hurting the people you love without wanting to. He’s a character who is deeply uncomfortable inside himself, and I relate to that, and it turns out a lot of other people do as well. My Sherlock just takes those feelings and ramps them up to eleven.
Are there negative experiences you’ve had as a result of this fic (people upset over content, for example when Sherlock is stereotypically “shamming gay,” or simply too much internet fame)?
Plenty. I don’t blame anyone for it, but my stories tend to bring out a lot of feelings and people tend to want to express them to me directly. For instance, one of the reasons I slowed way down in my canon ’verse is because very kind people were sharing with me all sorts of aspects of their own experiences with mental health problems, addiction, and abuse, and here I was trying to write the crazies out of my head for myself, and the whole process turned into another animal entirely. I’ve had multiple people inform me that I’ve stopped them from suicide. Now, that’s an enormous honor and an incredibly brave statement and completely unbelievable and something I’ll carry with me for the rest of my life. It justifies my existence on the planet in some ways. But the volume was turned up way too high for me, through no direct fault of anyone’s.
Fic: Why Fanfiction Is Taking Over the World Page 8
