I suppose I can throw my two cents in here... I came into Holmes fandom when I was twelve, which would have been... 1999/2000. Not that long ago, really, but before the 09 film at the very least. And it should be noted that I was pretty clearly asexual at age twelve, and didn't go searching for slash, and didn't even know what slash was until 14, but with all that in mind...
What I DO remember from fanworks of that age were that, for one, I couldn't find many on-line. I presume that they largely had found other niches before I hopped on-line, but yeah, when I started reading over at ff.net, there were only 28 stories in the archive. And of those 28, I remember a LOT of them being modern reworkings of the stories, often with a female Watson and male Holmes.
(Interesting, that Holmes was always the one who remained male, when Watson was reworked as female- I wonder what that means? Was it an effort to keep the hero/protagonist of the tale a masculine figure? Because, reading the stories now, Watson always pegs me as the one who fits more within the male stereotype, while Holmes is the one who transgresses...)
Thinking about it now, actually, I think the fact that people so often reworked the stories in order to create a female Watson is quite telling about how people wanted to understand that dynamic in the Canon, but because of a heteronormative gaze, someone had to become female. Hmm. Simultaneously, I think it could also be very telling in the sense that we often think of the most important relationship being a romantic one, and so the idea of a platonic relationship being the most important in Canon was odd, and so when these authors reworked it for modern settings they reworked it for the assumption that a romantic relationship takes primacy.
And I will confess- I wrote five novel length modern AUs with a male Holmes and a female Watson, and as an adult who actually knows something about queerness now (I lived in a very isolated, conservative area and never even heard of homosexuality until I was 14), I think I very much saw a queer relationship between Holmes and Watson but, since I didn't think it was possible to have a romantic relationship between members of the same sex, I felt that I had to switch to a female Watson in order to convey the sort of relationship Holmes and Watson had in a modern context.
Of the slash I did see and actually remember from later, I do remember it often being the We're Not Gay trope. At the very least, Holmes had often never been with anyone else, male or female, and no one had ever interested him, except for Watson. And for Watson, Holmes was the only male he had been interested in. I'm not sure- is that still pretty common? I'm actually not too aware of the new stories that sprung from the 09 film.
As for the Affirmational versus Transformational question, I'm really intrigued about how that also ties in with published fanfic. Because we still have that Voice of Authority, but then I look at some of the sheer CRACK that's been published, and the lines blur for me a bit. Because I associate crack fic with the transformational aspects of fandom, where we do whatever we want and put the characters in new situations that, yeah, would never have worked if we stuck with creating new versions of Canon. I think we can see a clear split between works that attempt to imitate and mimic Watson's writing style and focus on the case and deductive element, versus works that set Holmes and Watson against Dracula, which is one of the most popular pastiche tropes around, or the Phantom of the Opera, or Dr. Jekyll/Mr. Hyde, or even literal ghosts and zombies and other things that don't fit within the estabished Canon universe, other than in the sense that these other characters were created in similar time periods. And these are the least cracky of pastiches I can think of at this moment.
Even with that question of published fanfic in there, I would say that I think Holmes fandom is moving towards the transformational, especially with the 09 movie fans flooding the Internet. I think that in some ways, in the past, fandom was primarily held in the hands of whoever could join the BSI and other large organizations, which, in my experience, aren't really into a queer interpretation of the text. But now we have 09 movie fans mixing with Canon-only fans mixing with fans who grew up with Granada!Holmes and Russian!Holmes, and we're all coming out of the woodwork, as it were, with the release of the new film- even if people didn't like it and thought of it as blasphemy, they're interacting with people who loved it, and I think that's blurring the lines between the "authority" and the people.
... I have no idea if ANY of that was coherent at all.
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branchandroot
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Date: 2010-05-15 04:01 am (UTC)What I DO remember from fanworks of that age were that, for one, I couldn't find many on-line. I presume that they largely had found other niches before I hopped on-line, but yeah, when I started reading over at ff.net, there were only 28 stories in the archive. And of those 28, I remember a LOT of them being modern reworkings of the stories, often with a female Watson and male Holmes.
(Interesting, that Holmes was always the one who remained male, when Watson was reworked as female- I wonder what that means? Was it an effort to keep the hero/protagonist of the tale a masculine figure? Because, reading the stories now, Watson always pegs me as the one who fits more within the male stereotype, while Holmes is the one who transgresses...)
Thinking about it now, actually, I think the fact that people so often reworked the stories in order to create a female Watson is quite telling about how people wanted to understand that dynamic in the Canon, but because of a heteronormative gaze, someone had to become female. Hmm. Simultaneously, I think it could also be very telling in the sense that we often think of the most important relationship being a romantic one, and so the idea of a platonic relationship being the most important in Canon was odd, and so when these authors reworked it for modern settings they reworked it for the assumption that a romantic relationship takes primacy.
And I will confess- I wrote five novel length modern AUs with a male Holmes and a female Watson, and as an adult who actually knows something about queerness now (I lived in a very isolated, conservative area and never even heard of homosexuality until I was 14), I think I very much saw a queer relationship between Holmes and Watson but, since I didn't think it was possible to have a romantic relationship between members of the same sex, I felt that I had to switch to a female Watson in order to convey the sort of relationship Holmes and Watson had in a modern context.
Of the slash I did see and actually remember from later, I do remember it often being the We're Not Gay trope. At the very least, Holmes had often never been with anyone else, male or female, and no one had ever interested him, except for Watson. And for Watson, Holmes was the only male he had been interested in. I'm not sure- is that still pretty common? I'm actually not too aware of the new stories that sprung from the 09 film.
As for the Affirmational versus Transformational question, I'm really intrigued about how that also ties in with published fanfic. Because we still have that Voice of Authority, but then I look at some of the sheer CRACK that's been published, and the lines blur for me a bit. Because I associate crack fic with the transformational aspects of fandom, where we do whatever we want and put the characters in new situations that, yeah, would never have worked if we stuck with creating new versions of Canon. I think we can see a clear split between works that attempt to imitate and mimic Watson's writing style and focus on the case and deductive element, versus works that set Holmes and Watson against Dracula, which is one of the most popular pastiche tropes around, or the Phantom of the Opera, or Dr. Jekyll/Mr. Hyde, or even literal ghosts and zombies and other things that don't fit within the estabished Canon universe, other than in the sense that these other characters were created in similar time periods. And these are the least cracky of pastiches I can think of at this moment.
Even with that question of published fanfic in there, I would say that I think Holmes fandom is moving towards the transformational, especially with the 09 movie fans flooding the Internet. I think that in some ways, in the past, fandom was primarily held in the hands of whoever could join the BSI and other large organizations, which, in my experience, aren't really into a queer interpretation of the text. But now we have 09 movie fans mixing with Canon-only fans mixing with fans who grew up with Granada!Holmes and Russian!Holmes, and we're all coming out of the woodwork, as it were, with the release of the new film- even if people didn't like it and thought of it as blasphemy, they're interacting with people who loved it, and I think that's blurring the lines between the "authority" and the people.
... I have no idea if ANY of that was coherent at all.