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This video is brought to you by Curiositystream. Get access to Curiositystream and my streaming service Nebula, and watch my Nebula exclusive video Debater Theater, at curiositystream dot com slash sarah z. So if you were on Tumblr, or really any part of the internet between the years of 2012 and 2014, known by historians as the Pre-Dashcon era, you’ve probably heard the phrase Johnlock, referring to people who want Blueberry Cornetto’s Sherlock and Martin Freeman’s John Watson to date. And you probably saw gifs from Sherlock or fanart or people putting up posters like “I Believe In Sherlock Holmes.” That was me. I was those people. But anyway, if you were online you probably saw Sherlock related content pop up sometimes. And most of it probably seemed innocent and fine and normal, as normal as Tumblr related fan obsessions could be at the time. But there’s also a nonzero chance that you saw the formation of one of the most elaborate, wild and ultimately inconsequential conspiracies floating around on the internet. Something so out there and yet so widely believed by a fanbase. Something that, even now, is taboo to talk about:The Johnlock Conspiracy. On the surface, this seems very easy to explain and understand: people liked to ship Sherlock Holmes and John Watson together. I mean, that’s nothing revolutionary. People were doing that before the BBC show even came into existence. And yet… there was something about *this* series, something about the fanbase, that made this grow into something way bigger and way more buckwild. Doxxing, death threats, the Trump inauguration, hypnosis, Russian leaks, secret unreleased episodes, and Toplock. So how did we get here? How did something like “Sherlock Holmes but in modern day” lead to something so… this? Sherlock was a show that ran on the BBC from 2010 to 2017, focusing largely on the dynamic between a modern-day Sherlock Holmes and his partner John Watson. The show explored a mix of crime and mystery content, as well as the personal lives and relationships of its two main characters. And from around 2012 to 2014, this show DOMINATED Tumblr. Gifs of it were everywhere, it was one of the biggest fandoms to come out of the pre-dashcon era, and the term “Reichenfeels” was practically an accepted medical condition on Tumblr at the time. The show is… I mean, it was worshipped as one of the greatest shows of all time by its fandom for a while, and very few things are ever going to actually live up to that. Like the majority of fandoms at the time, the fans less so liked what the show actually was, and moreso liked the version of it they could create for themselves by picking around the parts that were enjoyable and ignoring the parts that weren’t. Scenes and episodes that were of more mediocre quality- *cough* theblindbanker *cough* were rarely spoken about by fans at all, and gifs and analysis mostly centred around the same like, seven or eight scenes out of 15 hours of content. Much like how the Onceler fandom focused all their attention on a single character they found hot and only made content about that one guy, the Sherlock fandom was less about the whole show and more about those few scenes that were giffable, and fans kind of… reverse-engineered their own idea of what they wanted the whole show to be based on that. Now, one thing that’s worth mentioning here is that BBC Sherlock was a miniseries. The show’s seasons- or, they call them series- each consisted of three hour and a half-long episodes, which is just… not a lot of content? This is worsened by the fact that the show takes a fairly long time to release seasons. Around the time Sherlock was getting extremely popular on Tumblr, the show had released two seasons, so six episodes total. And the ending of Season 2 was… sort of a cliffhanger? Uh. Spoiler warning, I guess, in case anyone in 2020 cares about getting spoiled for BBC Sherlock. In the final episode of Series 2, titled The Reichenbach Fall and released in 2012, series villain Jim Moriarty blackmails our main character Sherlock into jumping off a roof to his death by threatening the lives of the people who matter to him, especially John Watson. It’s revealed at the very end of the episode that John is grieving, but Sherlock- unbeknownst to him- is still alive. I imagine virtually everyone watching this video has gotten invested in a show that’s gone on breaks for a while, and is therefore familiar with the mental state that I like to call “Hiatus Brain”- essentially, when fans are far enough into a hiatus that they begin to make outlandish conspiracy theories and ferociously focus on minor details. There was a full two year gap between that finale and the release of the much-hyped third season, so the Sherlock fandom was on near-permanent Hiatus Brain at all times. Memes like “we NEED Season 3” were common in response to Sherlock posts of the more buckwild variety, and a significant amount of theorizing was dedicated to the main question of “how did Sherlock fake his own death?”. I will talk more about the whole death-faking thing when I talk about the third season, but for now the most important thing to talk about is the fact that fans were already used to obsessively studying things like the Reichenbach death scene for the smallest details and overanalyzing every possible frame on the show to try to come up with a coherent narrative for how this death-faking happened. And the showrunners would actively egg fans on, with comments like “you guys are doing great, but there’s one crucial detail you’re all missing”. In effect, the show very much framed this as a mystery that could and would be solved with the information that fans were given, and this fan atmosphere thus became one that actively encouraged Hiatus Brain and intense theorizing and analysis. Was it actually a good show? ...It depends on your opinion. There were a lot of problems with it, and YouTuber Hbomberguy made a particularly long takedown of a lot of those issues. That being said, there was enough there to like that a substantial chunk of tumblr could find *something* about it that drew them in, and they could simply ignore the stuff that didn’t work for them. This could be as simple as just not talking about episodes and characters they didn’t find interesting, or making alternate universes so wildly distinct from the content of the actual show that it bore almost no resemblance to Sherlock and was essentially a fandom of its own. In any case, the main draw of Sherlock for the vast majority- but not all- of its young fans in the early 2010s was the relationship between John Watson and Sherlock Holmes. Also, full disclosure here: while I was never into the Johnlock Conspiracy, I *was* a 14 year old tumblr girl in 2012, and I was indeed a member of the Sherlock fandom and shipped these two characters. My *real* favourite ship had no connection to John or Sherlock and would take a lot of time to explain and was yet another example of fandom taking the tiniest slivers of content and turning it into its own thing, but suffice it to say uhhh, happy belated birthday Andrew Scott. I experienced the height of Johnlock, the formation of the Johnlock Conspiracy, and the epic way in which it fell apart in real-time, and let me tell you: it’s a lot. What started as a simple fan theory became a tale of intense fandom drama, fake ARGs, convention bannings, and meltdowns. The ending of Sherlock and the subsequent fallout was so intense that when I announced I was making this video, some former Sherlock fans expressed that they still didn’t feel like they were given enough time to grieve. Because of a TV finale. So… what on earth happened? Well, for starters, let’s talk about Johnlock. -this is what johnlock was So, as previously mentioned, the show focused pretty intently on the relationship between the two characters, and this much is evidenced by the unaired pilot, which contains a lot of wistful stares and jokes about the two being gay. Now, to clarify, Sherlock and John were not portrayed as being actually gay on the show, but the show did frequently both hint and make jokes about the prospect. The very first episode contains a scene where John mistakes Sherlock’s invitation for a date, and Sherlock very clearly makes a point to clarify that he’s not attracted to women- he doesn’t comment on whether he’s attracted to men. People often take this as confirmation that he’s either gay, as*xual, or both. They’re also often frequently mistaken for a couple and make regular references to the fact that people think they’re together. One of John’s girlfriends breaks up with him and makes reference to the fact that Sherlock is more of a partner to John than she is. And perhaps the most explicit reference to the two dating on the show, as well as one of the worst handled ones, comes from the introduction of the character Irene Adler in Season 2. Irene is a character in the books who is adapted… interestingly for the show. This video isn’t intended to be a critique of Sherlock so much as an exploration of a specific sliver of its fandom, but there were some Choices made here. For the purposes of this video, the most important thing to know is that she’s a lesbian. At one point, she’s having a conversation about Sherlock with John, and she says: “For anyone out there who still cares, I’m not actually gay” “Well, I am. Look at us both.” The implication here being that regardless of their respective s*xual orientations, they both have some degree of intense feelings for Sherlock. Once again, this isn’t a critique video but it really was a hell of a choice to specifically establish your character as a lesbian and then have Sherlock be so special and amazing that she falls for him anyway. Cause yknow, “you just need to find the One Perfect Man who will fix you” isn’t already a prevailing stereotype facing lesbians. But anyway. The implication here, offensive as it may be, is that attraction to Sherlock can supersede one’s s*xual orientation, and that that’s the case for both Irene Adler and John Watson. A lot of people were pretty hopeful that this relationship would indeed develop into something romantic, and this hope was further intensified by the fact that of the two main creators of the show, one was actually gay and the other had written a same-gender romance into Doctor Who of two Victorian wives solving crimes together that was also likely based on Sherlock Holmes. The co-writers also mentioned the 1970 movie The Private Life of Sherlock Holmes as being one of their biggest inspirations and favourite Sherlock-related media, and… Sherlock is pretty heavily implied to be gay in that movie. Point being: there are a lot of shows where there are two male characters who share a bond that is only ever described as platonic, and Tumblr fans decide to say “f*ck that” and interpret them as a couple anyway. Sherlock is not one of those shows. Time and time again, the show has made multiple explicit references to the notion that these two characters have feelings for one another, enough for fans to pick up on it and be like “okay, so everyone on the show thinks they’re dating, and there’s explicitly a scene in the show implying that the fact that John isn’t gay doesn’t matter. This is a viable ship.” The community wanting Sherlock and John to get together quickly comprised the significant majority of Sherlock fans on Tumblr- even now, when you search “Sherlock” on Archive of Our Own, one of the world’s biggest fanfiction websites, you’ll see that Johnlock was nearly SIX times as popular as the second most popular ship. (Which, to be fair, comprised two characters who literally never interacted for three seasons of the show’s history, so you can see how barren the Sherlock shipping landscape was outside the context of Johnlock.) Suffice it to say that Johnlock was extremely popular, and the pairing didn’t come out of nowhere. With that said, though… there were a lot of reasons to believe this was a case of queerbaiting and not a case of setting up a legitimate romantic relationship for the ending of the show. If you don’t know what queerbaiting is, I made a whole video about it ages ago here, but the gist of it is that queerbaiting is a very deliberate process where showrunners set up a possible gay love story in order to get fans and notoriety and really heavily push on the whole “will-they-or-won’t-they” thing, while never actually intending to deliver. It’s essentially a money-making scheme to get shows more attention, and you can see it in things like the initial trailer for Riverdale featuring a Betty and Veronica kiss to draw up press and speculation, or Dean on Supernatural making obscure gay bar references that make fans think “wait… is he?”. So, what was this evidence that showrunners Steven Moffat and Mark Gatiss, often shortened to Moftiss, had no intention of ever delivering on a relationship between those two? Well, one of these is the first episode of Season 3, which we’ll touch on a little bit later but that is probably the most explicitly mean-spirited that they get about their own fans. But there’s also stuff like Steven Moffat’s history of making offensive comments about gay and bis*xual people, the fact that the aforementioned crime-solving couple on Doctor Who… doesn’t really act like a couple, and the Doctor actually ends up kissing one of them before she ever gets to kiss her wife on screen- yeah, Moffat has a thing for having his lesbian characters interact romantically with men-, the fact that both showrunners had said in multiple interviews that it wasn’t going to happen, and the fact that most of the time, John and Sherlock being treated as a couple is played more for a “no homo” joke than as a legitimate possibility. But it’s worth mentioning that the vast majority of the Sherlock fandom at the time was not that familiar with the term “queerbaiting”. A Google Trends search for the term finds that it wasn’t really in use at all until around 2012/2013, and that even then, it wasn’t a common phrase and it only REALLY spiked in 2014, which was around the time the fandom started to decline anyway. And the vast majority of Sherlock fans on Tumblr were pretty young teenagers who, regardless of whether they knew the term queerbaiting or not, had probably never actually experienced a TV show doing that before. I mean, Supernatural was still in its heyday, and it was still unclear whether their queerbaited ship was ever going to become a thing (spoiler: it didn’t), and Doctor Who, the final part of the SuperWhoLock holy trinity, for all its faults, did have, y’know, actual gay people in it. There was even a serious post going around claiming Steven Moffat couldn’t be homophobic because he created the pans*xual Doctor Who character Jack Harkness (spoiler: no he didn’t). All in all, there was ample evidence that the show was hinting and referencing the possibility of John and Sherlock getting together, but there was also ample evidence that this was treated like more of a joke than actual foreshadowing. But for a subset of mostly young fans who either weren’t familiar with those cues or didn’t care, Johnlock was ample ground for shipping content. At this point I should clarify that there are two subsections of the Johnlock fandom here. And for the inception of the show’s fandom, everyone involved mostly fit under Category 1. These were people who liked Johnlock, thought they made a good couple, and were invested in the pair’s romantic relationship. But of course, liking a ship doesn’t necessarily have to come with the belief that those two people are Going to get together- just that it would be cool if they did. That’s why Jack Frost slash Elsa was a thing. Fans knew that ship was never going to reach harbour, but they still liked the idea of, I dunno, heteros*xuality and ice powers, and would draw art and make gifs relating to it. But as the show’s third season, slated to be released in early 2014, finally began to approach, another sub-category of Johnlock fans was created. This was a community known as The Johnlock Conspiracy, or TJLC for short. TJLC fans not only liked Johnlock and wanted the pair to get together, but they went a step further: they believed that Johnlock was *going* to happen, and that Moftiss had planted its seeds from the start. The “conspiracy” was based around finding evidence that Johnlock was endgame, that it was *always* intended to be endgame, and for them being endgame having been hinted from the very beginning. The tag began as a semi-joking, semi-serious concept brought up in a groupchat by three friends. I won’t use their real names as some of these people are still active online, but luckily, there are already ready-made pseudonyms for all of them. The three friends called their friend group “The Powerpuff Girls”, and often called each other by Powerpuff-themed nicknames and tagged each other in Powerpuff art. There was Blossom, an attorney in her 30s, former Glee fan, and big Johnlock shipper- her name is probably going to end up coming up the most out of anyone here, so remember that she exists. There was also Bubbles, a close friend of Blossom’s and one of the original coiners of the name TJLC. And finally, there was Buttercup, the third Powerpuff Girl and member of Blossom’s social circle. Now, the Powerpuff Girls weren’t the first people to theorize that John and Sherlock would be endgame, but they were the first to coin the fandom’s name, and the three of them began posting about the theory both on their own personal blogs and on a joint TJLC-themed blog. They weren’t necessarily the *biggest* names in the fandom- there were a couple other people who made long theory posts and videos that were as, if not more, popular in the fandom, but because of their early associations creating the tag, as well as some other stuff we’ll go into later, the Powerpuff Girls and especially Blossom were definitely big name fans in the community and had a lot of TJLC-related clout and followers. They also had a group of acquaintances who weren’t quite in the inner circle, but interacted with them a lot and would defend them if any controversy came up, including a former member of Cassandra Claire’s Harry Potter fanfiction inner circle. Which for people who don’t know who she is or only know of her through her books is probably just an interesting tidbit, and for people who do know her history, your stomachs are probably sinking a little here. But I’m getting ahead of myself. The TJLC name was mostly made in response to Season 3’s trailers, and once Season 3 started airing, the theories quickly skyrocketed in popularity. This is interesting to me, because remember how I said the first episode of Season 3 is probably about as mean-spirited as the show gets when it comes to its fans? Yeah, so here’s the deal with that. So as I previously mentioned, because of the two-year hiatus between seasons and the fact that the season ended on a big cliffhanger slash mystery that Mofftis regularly encouraged their fans to solve, a lot of the fan analysis at that point was focused on this big question of “how did Sherlock survive the fall?” The Reichenbach Fall mystery really set the stage for what the environment of the Sherlock fandom was going to look like from then on: one surrounded by intense mysteries and theorycrafting, and clinging to every small detail as the possible smoking gun for solving the show’s mysteries. The hype for Season 3 was incredible- keep in mind, this was still the pre-Dashcon era. I remember, I was 15 at the time and we were coming back from a trip when the episode aired, so I couldn’t watch it live. I was at the airport and I had like, PutIocker open, and I was desperately waiting for the sh*tty airport wifi to load up the whole thing so that I could close my parents’ laptop and watch it on the flight. So I ended up watching this vastly hyped episode on a tiny laptop screen mid-flight while being terrified that at any point the episode would just freeze. And the whole time I was just so desperate to get online so I could read other people’s reactions. Because the show and showrunners had gone to great detail to establish that the Reichenbach Fall mystery was 1, something that fans *could* solve given that they had all the relevant information to do so, and 2, something that fans were *encouraged* to solve, it was really exciting to get to see how they explained the mystery. I’d read so many theories, and even made some of my own, so I wanted to see how they were going to explain it and which theories would be confirmed. “And then I didn’t”. So rather than actually ever give a definitive answer on this very very big important plot point, they decided to introduce this fanclub group called The Empty Hearse. They spend all of their time theorizing about exactly how Sherlock survived his fall, from jokes about elaborate stuff like magician Derren Brown being involved to jokes about fans who think various characters have romantic feelings for one another. There’s one scene parodying people who think Sherlock Holmes and Molly Hooper would get together, and another that’s far more played for laughs making fun of Sherlock and Moriarty shippers. Because thinking people are gay is funny. One of the members of this fanclub is Anderson, a character who has been the butt of the show’s jokes for its entire run, and is regularly mocked and simply treated as shorthand for ‘unlikable idiot’. Like, even before this episode, ‘you’re such an Anderson’ was a common insult that Sherlock fans would say to each other. He’s like the Jerry or the Mr. Collins of the show. The fanclub here is definitely being directly made fun of in their appearances. And then when the show finally seems to lock down an actual explanation, they instead go for a cute little “wink” towards the audience and imply that Sherlock could actually be lying, that he’s making this all up, with Anderson crying hysterically trying to figure out exactly how Sherlock did it. Because f*ck you for caring about the mystery we told you to care about. It’s one of the meanest, most petty fan responses I’ve seen in a TV series from any creator. It really presents a change in how Sherlock has to be perceived: because at this point on, it’s clear that nothing in this really matters. You can theorize, you can analyze as much as you want, but in the end it’s not going to mean anything because the mystery doesn’t actually matter in this mystery series. Also to twist the knife in even further, there’s just this extended scene where Watson yells about how he’s not gay over and over very angrily, as if the idea he could even be thought of as gay is just so absurd and repulsive. The fanclub is framed as crazy and obsessive targets of the show’s mockery, as is the prospect that John might be gay. And to further really sink in the fact that the show doesn’t think John and Sherlock will be a thing, they also introduce John’s new fiancé Mary, played by the actor’s real life wife at the time. Now, you’d think for most of the fans, this would be the part where they’d realize “oh sh*t, the show’s creators do not like us and are repeatedly making fun of us. Maybe Johnlock isn’t going to happen and Moftiss are Bad, Actually”. Though I still liked the *idea* of the pairing, this was definitely the episode that quashed any notion that they’d ever actually get together for me. But somehow, the ‘Sherlock theorists are crazy and dumb and John being gay is a joke and by the way he is engaged to a woman’ content didn’t make fans turn away from the prospect of a Johnlock endgame. Much like how a doomsday cult’s predictions not coming true often just makes them believe even harder, fans doubled down. Indeed, it was only *after* the release of Season 3’s first two episodes that the tag began to blow up. The very first post in the Johnlock Conspiracy tag was made on January 7th, two days after the release of the episode where John and Mary get married and Sherlock is sad about it. And from there arose a massive plethora of TJLC-related content and various, often conflicting, theories, in a formation thematically akin to the Cambrian Explosion. And explosion it was. So here’s what the community was like, for the most part. [screaming] In all seriousness, for as much as you can make fun of the Sherlock community, and TJLCers in particular, for the most part, the community was… fine? Like yeah, like most fandoms, those involved were often very passionate and zealous about the show and the ship in particular. But for a group of people who believed that Sherlock was a mystery that needed to be solved, or just really wanted to see a queer relationship on a big budget BBC series, then yeah, of course you’re going to spend time analyzing your favourite show. I mean, it’s not as strange as someone, say, making a four hour video dissecting Twin Peaks. So anyway someone made 40 hours of videos talking about The Johnlock Conspiracy. The channel is unfortunately no longer up, however, at its height, it hosted a plethora of videos, fifty of which were dedicated to TJLC Explained, a series breaking down the Johnlock Conspiracy. Videos could vary in length from ten minutes to two hours, depending on the subject covered. I know, who would watch an hour-long video covering The Johnlock Conspiracy, right? The vids would mostly consist of the youtuber, Carly, playing long clips from the series and then hopping in with some form of commentary about how this totally proved the Johnlock endgame because, well, obviously it does. She would also go into analysis of the original stories, Mofftiss media appearances, anything that could be pointed as evidence in the long run. Some of these seemed like reasonable and valid interpretations. Some were… probably stretches, to be generous. According to one person who emailed, an argument from one of the videos was that a shot of Sherlock holding a glass plate in front of his face and turning it was representative of a… job with rims. Carly would continue making these videos up until the premiere of season 4, when, well… Ragnalock happened. But I’ll get to that later. This channel is worth mentioning not because the content of the videos are really that notable - from what I could watch of them, the videos themselves are… fine, even if they’re focused on a conspiracy that never ended up being true. But what makes these so notable is Based on the feedback received when we asked for former TJLCers to share their stories, this was the gateway drug that got most of them into the idea. It’s a good example of how TJLC style content is gonna look as a whole: analytical, comprehensive, and long. Very very long. A lot of them pointed to the aforementioned cues in the first two seasons referencing the two of them possibly being a couple as evidence that TJLC was real, along with some spicy new content that came out in the show’s third season. For example, this one scene at the end of the Season 3 finale featured the two of them saying their final goodbyes after Sherlock was supposedly going to disappear for a long, long time to fight crime, and… it really, really feels like an aborted love confession if that’s what you’re looking for. There are these wistful gazes, Sherlock goes on about how there’s something he had always meant to say but never did, it’s all emotional… and then Sherlock makes a joke instead. For people who’ve already caught on that the show is queerbaiting and actively, repeatedly making fun of its fans, you’re like “oh, that was all a big joke, huh.”. But if you don’t believe that, or are taking the show’s content at face value, it very much looks like Sherlock was about to make a love confession and then chickened out. It’s worth mentioning that although people like the Powerpuff Girls and all the big names in theorycrafting were adults in their late 20s and early 30s- some like Blossom were also heteros*xual- nearly every person who reached out via email stated that they were queer and were teenagers at the time of the show’s release, meaning this was largely a group of hopeful young people who wanted representation and weren’t yet disillusioned with TV’s everything. And as previously mentioned, this meant a lot of earnest analysis of all kinds of content to do with the show. The showrunners really cared and were creating a fun mystery for the audience to solve, and *everything* was a clue. So many of the most popular TJLC users and theories relied on hardcore, heavy duty analysis on anything Sherlock fans could get their hands on. And if you’re a Tumblr user waiting for series 4 to come out, all you have at your disposal is nine hour and a half long episodes of TV, really the sky was the limit for anything at this point and if I tried to explain every possible bit of evidence presented I would be here all day. But let’s do a greatest hits: Because of a reference to the phrase “an elephant in the room” in one episode, plus common usage of elephants in the set design, a lot of people interpreted the elephants as meaning… something? I guess that John’s attraction to Sherlock was an obvious elephant in the room. In reality, the set designer claimed he just really liked elephants. There was a brief conspiracy theory that either Steven Moffat or Mark Gatiss was secretly writing fanfiction on AO3 under the alias Dale Pike. Theories that the show creators would post on secret accounts was actually pretty common, especially in the aftermath of season 4. Tea is gay. I cannot stress this enough. Tea is gay and food is s*x and phone is love. No, I cannot explain these to you. (By the way, if you want tea that’s gay and respects women, you can get one of these mugs at the link in my description). If someone involved in the show says that they don’t plan on making Johnlock canon, then they’re just playing four dimensional chess in the ARG and trying to get you off of their trail. The existence of Sherlock’s “mind palace” meant that there was an entire branch of theories just based around [x] thing in [x] episode actually didn’t happen and just took place entirely within Sherlock’s head. Like Joker but a different type of sociopath. Oh and then there’s M Theory. That one is wild. Here, let me give you an abridged summation of it. I can go on forever about these. I’ve barely scratched the surface, really. But I guess the point I’m trying to make here is that a lot of these theories and posts were, while some silly and absurd, mostly harmless fan speculation made by people who just really really wanted to see their ship canonized. Real talk: after witnessing how few sh*ts Moftiss gave about actually explaining the big Season 2 mystery they set up, I think it’s a valid claim that a lot of these people put way more thought into the show’s supposed clues and thematic elements than the showrunners did. I mean, most of the evidence was massively reaching, but at least they were engaging with the things the showrunners put into the show? Hell, some of them like looking at the usage of elephants or bis*xual lighting is just actual film analysis. But the main difference is that unlike analysis as a form of reflection, this was analysis as a form of prediction. It was about finding the subtext and themes and hints and clues to prove that this was definitively the way the series was going to go. And like with any fanbase, a hyper obsession for proving that you’re right can lead to some… dark places. So with the preface in mind that most of the people involved in the conspiracy were totally fine, totally normal and totally okay people just trying to find evidence to support their ship, with something that inspired as much passion as Johnlock did, it was inevitable for that passion to lead to toxicity. This could sometimes be relatively basic, like something as simple as arguments over what was the one true ship. This would mostly play out in heated hate posts over the show’s women, Mary in particular. After all, she was John Watson’s wife and if John and Mary are together then John and Sherlock can’t be together so clearly we do not like her and she is the worst. Mary is later revealed to have a dark past and, though framed as someone who genuinely cares for John, revealed to be somewhat villainous, but 1. fans’ vitriolic despisement of her character existed way before this reveal, and a lot of it involved violent hatred for Mary before she was even announced to be on the show. Like, she was originally a book character, and there would be posts as far back as 2012 saying ‘if Mary ever gets put on the show she’ll be the worst and I hope she gets killed off!’. And 2, even if she were a villain, none of the other actors who played villains on the show received this level of vitriol or real-life harassment, so it’s clearly not actually about that. Because this went as far as sending death threats to Mary’s actress, Amanda Abbigton, just for the act of… playing a character on a show. Like this was before she was even a vocal TERF, so this is even more not good. This type of vitriol also extended to Lucy Liu who had the audacity to… play a character on a show. Not even on Sherlock but on Elementary, another TV show exploring the idea of Sherlock Holmes in the modern day. Liu played Joan Watson, a genderbent rendition of John who works alongside this universe’s version of Sherlock. Of course because this version of Watson was a woman, it meant any romance plot done between the two leads would be less meaningful as it wouldn’t be a gay relationship, unlike Sherlock, which at this point fans were still convinced would be canon. Despite the fact that the show Elementary in no way prevents BBC Sherlock from existing, fans would repeatedly spam Elementary-related tags, tweet angry and often very racist comments at Lucy Liu, and generally express a lot of rage at the fact that another studio dared to make a modern adaptation of a 130-year old story in the public domain. This wasn’t… *only* TJLC fans who hated Elementary; it was a broad strain within the entirety of the Sherlock fandom. But it was especially pronounced in that community, and it’s something multiple emails from former fans brought up. Again with not just being a TJLC thing, but many fans in general were also very racist to the characters of colour on both Sherlock and Elementary, and it’s not helped that the like, two women of colour on Sherlock were written in very stereotyped and pernicious ways. Another common trend in these circles was how support for TJLC could lead down a pipeline for acephobia. As said earlier, another common interpretation for Sherlock as a character was that he was as*xual, due to his seeming lack of interest in anyone either s*xually or romantically. Whether or not this is canon or intended or a valid interpretation doesn’t really matter, though, because some people saw interpretations of Sherlock as ace as an attack on Johnlock. I mean, after all, if Sherlock is ace, then how can he be in a relationship with John, huh? And this is a whole rabbit hole situation. You start by explaining how Sherlock clearly isn’t ace and then, oops, you say that being as*xual is invalid or nonexistent. Which, for the record, being as*xual is valid as hell. Anger over different interpretations of Sherlock also would culminate in weirdly s*xual ways. It wasn’t enough to ship Johnlock; you had to believe Johnlock was endgame. And then it wasn’t enough to believe Johnlock was endgame; you had to believe that Sherlock was totally a bottom. Like there were a whole subset of people who were mad about fanwork that portrays Toplock, aka Sherlock being a top. They would see this as Sherlock being mischaracterized as a “dark f*ck prince,” whatever that means, and problematic overall. This fandom drama wasn’t helped by the fact that in March 2015, after TJLC begun to take over various Sherlock tags, tumblr user Ben-C coined the term “TJLR”, or “The Johnlock Refutation”, and began to share a bunch of long analytical meta posts about why Johnlock was never going to happen. It’s… hard to find TJLR posts, mostly because all these fandoms tend to have an annoying habit of posting in each other’s tags so it’s mostly just TJLC fans in there, but the TJLR group tended to consist mostly of people who felt Johnlock was a bad ship for a variety of reasons. Not only would Johnlock never become canon, but it also *shouldn’t*. It did comprise some people who just liked Johnlock but disliked the tinfoil hatting and the way TJLC dominated Sherlock discussions, but for the most part this made up the “anti-Johnlock” crowd. Angry, often vitriolic arguments happened between TJLC proponents and TJLR proponents, and they often delved into personal attacks and generally harmful behaviour. But like this is all in the general sense of things. To get to the heart of what went wrong here, you can’t just look at TJLC as a whole. No, you have to focus on the prominent users, the head honchos, the big name fans. Remember the Powerpuff Girls I mentioned earlier? Part of why they became so notable in the fandom wasn’t just because of their follower count but the sheer amount of controversies they stirred up. Let’s talk about Blossom, for a moment. The Toplock stuff? That was her, for starters. Blossom took the self described role of “fandom mom” and dedicated herself to policing the type of content other people made in order to “protect” those around her and punish those who did wrong in her eyes. You can see this in how she acted in other fandoms. As previously stated, Blossom was formerly involved in the Glee fandom and was equally infamous there as well. She was an avid Sam and Kurt shipper, reblogging posts implying people who didn’t ship them were just “straight girls who just wanted to see two cute guys making out”. However in her own words, Blossom was quoted by multiple people as having said that she “always loved glee but it didn't fall off the obsession cliff until i scented boykissing on the wind.” I went back on the web archive, and it doesn't let you onto the forum unless you have a glee account, and the forum doesn't exist any more, so I can't 100% confirm that she said that on this forum, but multiple people did have her saying that exact quote and posted a link to it, so eh. This part is actually confirmed: She would also tag posts with #SAMGINA IS HORRIFYING, Samgina being a catch all ship name for Sam and any female character on the show. Again, by the way, Blossom is heteros*xual. And also 30. There was a lot of angry fandom content that was clearly just frustrated queer teenagers who wanted to be represented and were mad at people trying to dash their hope or whatever. This was very much not that. The Powerpuff Girls, and Blossom in particular, didn’t just rail against content that they deemed problematic, but any post they could find that was either about not shipping Johnlock, shipping Johnlock but not agreeing with TJLC, or shipping Johnlock and agreeing with TJLC but doing it in the Wrong Way. For example, one Johnlock shipper and theory writer made a post talking about death of the author and how it can be harmful to ascribe the show’s entire meaning to just what the showrunners were intending. It’s not an angry rant; it’s not telling people to stop shipping Johnlock or making any claims about freedom of speech or attacking people- it’s pretty polite, if pretentious, musing about how TJLC is the opposite of death of the author. Blossom found this post and responded with this incredible rant. this is quite literally the stupidest, pettiest load of pedantic drivel directed to killing the fun and happiness of kids enjoying themselves on the internet that i’ve ever read in my life, and it’s particularly egregious because the vast majority of these kids don’t have the experience, background, or confidence to recognize and discard this for the trash it is because you’ve dressed it up in fancy words and literary references and reeeal subtly achievement-dropped your advanced degree. i’m sorry to tell you, however, that there are other adults with graduate degrees in this fandom who are more than capable of seeing through your bitter, vindictive, condescending bullsh*t. as if it weren’t clear enough on a quick read through of this ludicrous post, we’ve clearly already divined that you are totally filled to the brim with crap based on the fact that you apparently think freedom of speech means everyone on earth is allowed to say and do whatever they want with absolutely no consequences. if you’d like a little education in what it actually means, nearly everyone who studies constitutional law at the graduate level has achieved a comprehensive grasp on the concept in the course of their study. most of us tend to take those tenets for granted. Yikes. Like, the post didn't even mention freedom of speech or half the things she was talking about? What? Oh yeah, she was also a lawyer and on top of bringing this up at every possible opportunity, also apparently posted her full name and private information on a forum to prove she was actually an attorney. I did a bit of digging, and yes, she’s an actual civil rights attorney. So I can sleep safely knowing that if I ever need to go to court to protect my rights, I’ll be represented by a competent thinker with solid analytical skills. The Powerpuff Girls’ propensity for getting into drama exceeded the scope of online-only behaviour and into the real world, including getting involved with two separate fan conventions with the intent to get into arguments with people there that they didn’t like. I’m not going to mention the names or identifying details of any of these cons, largely because some of them are still annual events and most of the people involved don’t want me to. So, the three drama-related cons will just be referred to as TeaIsGayCon, FoodIss*xCon, and PhoneIsLoveCon. These conventions happened between early- and mid-2015, so around the height of TJLC and well into when the TJLC anti-fandom began to take hold. According to a con attendee who emailed me about TeaIsGayCon, The Powerpuff Girls strongly disliked a few big name fans who were well-known for writing Toplock content. It’s worth mentioning that one of Blossom’s friends, who we’ll call Toby, emailed me to specify that these people weren’t just writing Toplock, but also fanfictions focusing on what he viewed as abhorrent subject matter. I again don’t want to go into the personal details of any of these people, but regardless of the truth of this statement, it’s notable that despite framing their hatred of these fans as a righteous moral quest against their darker works, the Powerpuff Girls just coincidentally only happened to direct this level of attention and vitriol towards fans who coincidentally just happened to have petty fandom opinions they disagreed with, like whether Sherlock is a top. I mean, if you’re gonna go after Sherlock fans who write ‘dark’ stuff like Sherlock being a top/Dark f*ck Prince, there are… far darker ships like Sherlock/Moriarty. Also, there are people involved in TJLC who’ve written works that are both thematically dark and often problematic in other ways, like, y’know, straight people aggressively fetishizing gay people, and Blossom & co never really went after those people. Despite dark and problematic works being written by all kinds of members of the fandom, they only targeted the people who didn’t ship Johnlock in the exact same way they did. So Blossom’s behaviour could have been a moral desire to chase out fans she viewed as writing dangerous and harmful works… or, more likely, it was petty fandom drama with a righteous-sounding excuse. So a bunch of creators hosted a couple of panels at TeaIsGayCon talking about their writing. Some of these were the aforementioned Toplock shippers, and some of these were people who were big names in the fandom before TJLC existed. One of these was a panel specifically about TJLC that involved both shippers and non-shippers. According to multiple people who were on the panel and those who attended it, the discussion stayed pretty reasonable, and there was no intense arguing or anything too crazy going on. The main organizer even said that while she didn’t think Moftiss was going in that direction, she loved the idea of the ship and thought people’s theories were really cool. The most controversial it got was when one of the audience members jokingly brought up the idea of saying ‘TJLP’ instead, standing for ‘the Johnlock possibility’, and then the conversation moved on. Or, well, it moved on for some people. After the panel happened, rumours quickly began to spread about the panel and about the people who ran it. People who didn’t go claimed that there was an argument about a ‘new movement’ in the fandom called TJLP, or that the panel was all about telling the fandom that they needed to change their name. By the next day, people online were arguing about how this convention totally had an anti-TJLC panel all about hating the ship and how those haters were trying to change TJLC’s name. TJLC fans started making angry vague posts about the mere prospect that the panel might include people who disagreed with them. You had posts by people like Buttercup claiming the non-TJLC panelists were just bitter and sad that no one cared about their fanfictions any more and that’s why they were ATTACKING TJLC fans by PUBLICLY DISAGREEING WITH IT, as well as people telling the non-TJLC panelists that they were harming queer kids and to kiss their ass. This “controversy” basically permanently put a number of creators on the sh*t list of the Powerpuff Girls and the more drama-filled sections of the TJLC fandom at large. The Powerpuff Girls weren’t actually *at* the TeaIsGayCon panel, or else they would have totally obliterated the anti-TJLCers with facts and logic, and that wasn’t a mistake they were going to make next time. This quickly boiled into the PowerPuff Girls making public plans to crash some of these creators’ panels- namely, the Toplockers, at the later FoodIss*xCon and get into drama. Blossom made multiple posts on her tumblr prior to the convention alleging that she wanted to go to both TeaIsGayCon and FoodIss*xCon and get into fights with people there, so y’know. The full details of Blossom’s involvement with the panels at FoodIss*xCon are fairly graphic and, I’m told, still pretty traumatic for the people who were there, so the specific details of what exactly was said and done, the names and likeness of the people involved, and any panel footage are going to be omitted. Please do not go and try to seek the victims out, because though I got some people willing to talk to me about details and some not, they’ve all been very clear about the fact that they don’t want anything to do with TJLC any more. Very simply put, the Powerpuff Girls started arguments, grilled panelists on deeply intimate personal details of their lives, filmed people’s very very sensitive information and put it online to mock them, and ultimately ended up getting banned from FoodIss*xCon. I’m actually not positive whether all the Powerpuff Girls were banned from the convention or just Blossom, but my understanding from reading old posts is that it was all of them. It’s worth mentioning that Buttercup actually emailed me to note that everyone’s badges included a stipulation that they consented to being filmed, but 1, that doesn’t necessarily translate to consent to having a panel posted online, and 2… that was before the Powerpuff Girls started grilling panelists about very intimate and triggering life events. Like, yeah, most folks would have been cool with people filming a light fandom discussion and putting it online, but they couldn’t have known in advance that someone was going to come to their panels, ask them about traumatic sh*t in their lives, and then post it online. To act like they consented to that is… disingenuous at best. And, three, just because you legally can do something doesn't mean that it's the kind thing to do, or that it's the wise thing to do, or that it's what you should do. Just... be an adult and use your judgment. People who have attended the convention since have been very adamant about the fact that since the Powerpuff Girls’ being banned, the convention has run really smoothly and has been a very positive experience for the people who still go. So y’know, that’s telling. Again, this was all framed after the fact as a righteous moral quest against dark fanfiction, but again… the Powerpuff Girls only ever did this to people who disagreed with their Johnlock opinions, so make of that what you will. Though they didn’t attend PhoneIsLoveCon, and this is easily the *least* egregious con-related incident to do with the Powerpuff Girls, another Sherlock convention was held just two weeks later, this one actually featuring Mofftiss in attendance. Two TJLC fans ended up actually meeting the showrunners and asking Moffat about the theory, and in their words, “HIS EXPRESSION CHANGED COMPLETELY AND HE JUST MANAGED TO SAY “YEAH””. This post ended up becoming a big point of contention, with proponents like the PowerPuff girls using it as evidence that TJLC was going to happen, and TJLR people aggressively mocking the post, claiming TJLC-ers were reading into things too much, and arguing against the ethics of bringing up ships with show creators. There being no actual footage of this exchange and just being based on the firsthand account of two fans, it’s really hard to say what Steven Moffat’s actual reaction was to their question. I guess we’ll never know since he won’t answer my phone calls. You’ll note that when I’m talking about drama in the TJLC fandom, the vast majority of it seems to revolve around a clique of like, five people at most. And while- again- there was large scale drama that a lot of TJLC people were engaged in, like hatred of Mary and harassing her actor and racist attacks on Lucy Liu, a large percentage of the inter-fandom drama and toxicity did indeed come from the Powerpuff Girls and their acquaintances. I didn’t mention Blossom’s name anywhere in my tweets or calls for emails, yet when I put out a call for people to talk about their experiences, more than ten people independently brought her up, including both people who liked TJLC at the time and people who disagreed with it. Some people described the intense popularity she had at the time as a “cult of personality”- there were people drawing fanart of her, including this piece of work depicting her as an actual CATHOLIC SAINT. Y'know, ironically. Fun fact: after someone made a post on another website talking about her and posting this drawing, she submitted a DMCA takedown to try and get the entire website taken down. Because lawyer! Whether or not the fandom surrounding the Powerpuff Girls was a “cult” was another big point of contention in my emails- again, I didn’t use that word in my call for emails, but I had multiple people independently message me to tell me either yes, Blossom’s fandom was cultlike or no, Blossom’s fandom was not cultlike. The fact that there’s even a discrepancy there is telling, but from what I can find… while I wouldn’t compare her behaviour to something as egregious as a cult, per se, she definitely had a very vocal set of defenders, most of whom had nasty histories themselves, who were not allowed to criticize her in any way lest they be ousted and were often set on TJLC naysayers. This isn’t directly related to TJLC, but it is telling of what Blossom’s whole deal was, so I’ll also add that Blossom was super white, and that at one point she took a DNA test, found out she was 0.2% black, and made a joke that she would get racially persecuted because of that. Then made a bunch of jokes about being Wakandan and posted a bunch of dressup games of black people with captions like “that’s what my soul looks like… I want this skin tone”. Civil rights lawyer! Some of these behaviours put off a lot of people, including folks who were otherwise supportive of TJLC. In 2016, that fan I mentioned earlier who made a pretty benign post lightly critiquing TJLC and was met with an angry rant by Blossom ended up typing up a long post about leaving the fandom because of the harassment she received, including from Blossom, and several people in my emails explicitly mentioned that while they’d liked the theory, Blossom’s behaviour ultimately pushed them to distance themselves from the fandom. Now, to be clear, while the Powerpuff Girls, and especially Blossom, were very big name fans in TJLC, they were not the only popular figures in the fandom, and not the ones making the *most* content for TJLC. In fact, besides running the TJLC blog and sharing memes and other people’s theories, the Powerpuff Girls didn’t actually make much original content at all. Blossom used to write gratuitous Glee fanfiction, but didn’t write or draw much for Sherlock, and most of the Powerpuff Girls’ following came more from their personalities than from the actual content they made. So they were not the only big names, and most certainly not the biggest content producers in the fandom. On top of Carly’s TJLC explained series, there were a few blogs posting long detailed meta theories who were the ones making the most content, and some of the most popular content, with decidedly less drama attached to their names. One of these is the no longer extant blog loudest-subtext-in-television, who wrote a f*ckton of metas including the aforementioned 80,000 word M-Theory, detailing a complex narrative of how a whole bunch of the characters on the show with M-names are interconnected. LSiT did get involved in some of the arguments online pertaining to the fake "anti-TJLC panel" at TeaIsGayCon, but generally stayed a lot more drama-free than someone like, say, the PPG. Another was Tumblr user Inevitably-Johnlocked, who wrote out a lot of thoughtful meta and actually reached out to me via email with a lot of helpful links to old theories. There was also “deducing BBC sherlock”, another blog that no longer exists but posted a lot of complicated theories, like analysis of Sherlock’s mind palace in Season 3. Unlike some of the more hardcore TJLCers, Deducing BBC Sherlock stated that they weren’t positive that Johnlock was actually Moftiss’ intention, but that they found this analysis interesting anyway. So that is to say, the TJLC fandom was clearly marred with some uniquely sh*tty behaviour, including this 30 year old Rachel Dolezal-esque lawyer egging on a bunch of queer teenagers into getting baited and getting into fights with people about their fanfiction being problematic while saying stuff like “i scented boykissing on the wind.” Allegedly. To act like this wasn’t a part of TJLC would be unfair to its victims, and frankly, simply dishonest. However, that’s not to say that harassment was the primary goal of the majority of these fans, and there definitely were corners of the fandom that simply kept to themselves and wrote really intense fan theories. By the end of 2016, as more and more people started to drop off from the fandom for various reasons, a lot of this drama died off. And then, y’know. Season 4 of Sherlock came out. Hoo boy. June 28, 1914. Archduke Franz Ferdinand is assassinated in Sarajevo, kickstarting the first World War. November 22, 1963. On what should’ve been a normal parade route through Dallas, then President John F. Kennedy is shot by a sniper in the old red museum. January 15, 2017. The season 4 finale of Sherlock airs. What do these things have in common? They’re all some of the greatest tragedies to happen in modern history and have branched out the most complicated conspiracy theories out there. To say that the finale of Sherlock caused outrage would be… an understatement. Like remember when Game of Thrones ended badly? And suddenly everyone turned on the most popular show in the world and wondered why they spent all that time watching it? Yeah, imagine that but you’re also a LGBTQ teenager desperately hoping that the finale would bring the representation you want. You start to question why you even cared in the first place. All that time, effort and hope- friendships formed, tens of thousands of words of complex theories written and read, all predicated on the idea that this show was run by showrunners who cared about you and were setting up a mystery that they wanted you to solve, all that emotional energy- were placed into this idea that you’ll finally get to see the outcome you want and it just… doesn’t happen. There was a lot of stuff that happened here so let me try to break it down as best as I can. Part 1: Shock and Disbelief So the day before the episode officially aired, the series finale The Final Problem was leaked via a Russian website. This would be very bad for any episode of any big budget show, and especially bad for what was the highly anticipated series finale. And this wasn’t helped by the show’s official Twitter account acknowledging the leak and telling people not to watch it. Which meant of course people went to go watch it. And when they did, they were… confused. Not only was Johnlock not canon, but this series ending episode was just… bad. Like Sherlock had this secret sister who apparently set up Jigsaw style traps? And the scoring was just kind of sh*tty, and it just looked cheaply made overall, and there was this whole stupid subplot about how Sherlock’s childhood dog, which he was sad about losing in earlier seasons, was actually his dead childhood friend who his evil sister murdered by pushing him into a well and just leaving him there and Sherlock just repressed all of it and apparently no one ever looked for him or found him or realized what happened and his sister was just living in this prison that used to be made of glass but didn’t have glass walls and somehow Sherlock, the guy who knows the difference between hundreds of types of dust, didn’t notice that her prison cell had NO WALLS so she could just leave whenever she wanted and there was this weird unearned angsty love scene with Molly and I promise I don’t have any repressed rage about this episode left inside me and this is just cold calculated media criticism and WHY DID SHE FILM RANDOM REACTION CLIPS OF MORIARTY TO PLAY IN THE MIDDLE OF HER JIGSAW GAMES. Um. It wasn’t a very good episode. I didn’t like it. Most people didn’t like it, actually. The leaked episode was quickly shared around Tumblr and fans were outraged. All this wait for this? This was it? There had to be something else. This couldn’t be it. This lead to... Part 2: Denial So you’re a Johnlock fan, or just a Sherlock fan. And you now are faced with two realities, one of which you must accept: The final episode, hell, the final SEASON of Sherlock, as well as all the time you devoted to it, was bad and a waste. This isn’t the final episode and the final season will be good actually. A lot of fans took the second one. Firstly, they started speculating that the episode was fake and leaked on purpose. I mean, everyone knows that the more showrunners draw attention to the fact that there was a leak, the more people are going to go and watch that episode. Surely the showrunners knew that too. Why would they draw so much attention to the leak… unless they *wanted* people to find it? What if this episode, released a day before the actual finale, was just shoddily slapped together with the ultimate intention of throwing people off Sherlock’s tracks? Now, obviously the idea that the BBC would spend this much time and money on a prank that would last a day at most and only get seen by a few thousand Tumblr users is absurd, but the episode looked a lot more cheaply produced than normal, and Mofftis *did* have a history of filming fake scenes to throw fans off their tracks. Maybe this was just a large-scale version of that. A day later, the episode aired as planned, and was decidedly not fake. Fans were outraged to discover that the sh*tty Saw-style content, bad writing, and general lack of Johnlock was the real, actual finale. … Or was it? Speculation of another, secret episode actually arose as early as episode 2 of season 4. There’s a part where Sherlock mentions that there “must be something comforting about the number three. People always give up after three…” In the episode, this is meant to just be a reference to there being a fourth hidden recording device in the room. But remember, Johnlock is an ARG, so this is clearly a reference to the fact that there’s going to be a secret episode. When the finale had its premiere at the BFI, Moffatt was asked about the existence of a secret fourth episode and he pretty definitively denied the idea, saying: But wait! What was that last part? The lost special? Why that also happened to be the title of another Arthur Conan Doyle story, which many people believe to also be about Sherlock Holmes. So when the finale aired and wasn’t good, people started wondering if maybe this meant the *real* season ending would come later, and immediately started theorycrafting. The first possible “retcon” suggested was only a few days after the finale ended. On January 20th, the BBC was planning to air the presidential inauguration in Picadilly Circus, and fans started to speculate that the inauguration would actually be Sherlock. Apparently when you shared a post about the Picadilly Circus renovations, a Sherlock-themed image would pop up on the screen. I can’t confirm if this actually happened, because all I have now are screenshots, but three separate people did email me about the inauguration theory, so it definitely got at least some traction at the time. Some people basically believed that fictional villain Moriarty was going to hack the screens during the inauguration and would play the secret episode of Sherlock instead. Shockingly, he uh… didn’t. But one minor setback wasn’t going to completely rule out the idea of the lost special. I mean, a lot of people felt like the show was hinting at it, with clues like Sherlock saying “people give up after three” and Moffat saying “we are not going to make a lost special”. Inauguration aside, the atmosphere was still decidedly conspiratorial. So with that in mind, the apple seeds were already there for fans, planted and ready to grow into a full yard of trees. Which is how the show Apple Tree Yard enters the picture. Apple Tree Yard was a BBC miniseries that aired on January 22nd, 2017, a week after the Sherlock finale aired, becoming the show that replaced it during that time slot. I could go into detail about the show itself: Its plot and its characters and critical reception but honestly none of that really matters because there’s only one thing people were interested in: was Apple Tree Yard real? Or was it just a fake title for the upcoming secret episode? For starters, it was taking over Sherlock’s timeslot. I mean, would the BBC really follow up their big hit series with some show nobody had heard of called Apple Tree Yard? And then fans started digging deeper. Both shows took place in London. The actors appearing in the show were named BEN Chaplin and Emily WATSON. You know, like John Watson and Benadryl Counterfeit. The wallpaper in John Watson’s baby’s room was an apple tree. The set designer for Sherlock, who also liked elephants, once said wallpaper was an important part of set design. One of the actors listed on the series’ iMDB page was named Richard Rycroft and he was apparently playing a character named MP, which is clearly a reference to Mycroft and Members of Parliament. Plus this shot in the trailer of Apple Tree Yard of the main character riding a train looks very similar to this shot of Watson in Sherlock riding a train. And just to make it even better, when was Apple Tree Yard premiering? January 22nd. 1/22. 122B? Holy sh*t. British people, that was a joke. I know you say your dates differently than in Canada. Please don't yell at me. Just go eat some beans on toast. Of course this is all ignoring the very easy to find fact that Apple Tree Yard is based on a book and I highly doubt the BBC would acquire the rights to adapt a book just so that they could trick people into not realizing it’s actually a fourth episode of Sherlock. But Sherlock is an ARG, and the showrunners promised a final season that was like nothing we’d seen before, so surely it was possible. People who believed in this theory were holding onto any last bit of hope that they possibly could that there was going to be something more. That there was going to be that great big triumphant episode where it’s revealed that all the stuff people didn’t like in season 4 was just part of Sherlock’s mind palace and that Mary was actually the big bad all along and John and Sherlock kiss and probably still jump out an exploding window or something. But then January 22nd came and Apple Tree Yard… just turned out to be a drama series called Apple Tree Yard. Fans lost their sh*t. For some, this was the end. For others, it was just the beginning. Apple Tree Yard was just part of a larger conspiracy. Remember the elephants and how important they were? The location where the elephant appeared in that episode was 29 Ryder Lane. Shakespeare's Sonnet 29 is about Shakespeare being depressed and finding solace in a gay relationship. January 29th is the day that Holmes and Watson met in Sherlock. This was it, y’all. January 29th. The secret Sherlock episode will air. On January 29th, the secret episode of Sherlock did not air. So that would be it, right? Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me twice, shame on me, right? Well like a certain detective would say, there must be something comforting about the number three. So around this time, another theory begins popping up, one involving stage magician Derren Brown. The idea is that Derren, who had appeared in a previous Sherlock episode, had been hired by the show’s staff to place subliminal messages into episodes of Sherlock as part of the ARG. These subliminal messages were slowly hypnotizing fans into learning how to make deductions about the show. This came with the idea that Steve Thompson, a writer who worked on seasons 1 through 3 of Sherlock, didn’t actually exist and was just a made up alias for Derren Brown. I mean, Steve Thompson wrote The Reichenbach Fall, which is so important for the series and for this ARG and why would Mofftiss would allow anyone besides them to write such an important episode. Additionally very few photos of Steve Thompson exist and if you google his name, you get a lot of generic Steve Thompsons rather than him. It could be just because he has a really common name and doesn’t like the spotlight, but no. Clearly Mofftiss made up a third writer so that they could instead hire Derren Brown to mass hypnotize their audience. I don’t know if this needs to be stated but, that whole theory ended up going nowhere. On January 31st a website called “thelostspecial.com” pops up. There’s some initial hesitation from fans as to whether or not this is real because at this point it’s been two weeks since the finale aired and two false alarms. But remember: Johnlock is an ARG, so there were still a sizable amount of people holding out hope, following the site, waiting to see where it would lead. The site was filled with lots of things guaranteed to get fans’ minds flowing. There was a Shakespeare quote, references to elephants and coffee, a random picture of Moriarty, random dots that people thought were a QR code, a bunch of random numbers and words, and a sentence that said “Mary Morstan, who?” It’s all really expertly crafted and designed to tick all the boxes for anyone still invested in this mystery. People quickly started to believe that if they solved the ARG, Mofftis would release the episode as a reward. So where did this all lead? Nowhere. On February 13th, the owner of thelostspecial.com just… stopped. They posted a statement on the website saying that the site was fan made and they were coming clean primarily because they were bored. The stuff that was designed to bait Johnlockers? It was put there to bait Johnlockers. Stuff that wasn’t obvious allusions to popular theories were just chosen and placed randomly in the hopes that people would find meaning in it or come up with elaborate explanations. Apparently at some point other fans got involved in this too and started messaging people to add even more speculation to the fandom. This entire thing was just someone being bored and deciding to spend that time f*cking with people. After this, speculation about a secret episode basically died down. There are still some people who believe it, but that number grows less as time goes on. At the time of this video, it is currently October 2020, nearly four years after Sherlock’s finale and we still haven’t seen any secret episode or season or even any news of a proper follow up. So with fans’ hopes dashed, most moved on to the next stage. Part 3: Guilt This would imply that the Powerpuff Girls and other big name fans felt any guilt for leading their followers to believe all of this and all the terrible things they did to others. They do not. However, a lot of fans did start to feel genuine sadness and despair as it started to gradually sink in that not only were their theories off-base, but the creators they were sure would tell a revolutionary queer love story not only didn’t care about them, but actively felt disdain for them. Even though some of this was honestly apparent from the start of Season 3, the frenzied nature of The Johnlock Conspiracy meant that ‘Moftiss thinks Sherlock fans are a big joke’ really didn’t set in until it became clear Sherlock really was just going to end like that. A lot of people who emailed talked about feeling genuine despair and like they were being made fun of- it’s easy to characterize these people as stupid fangirls who were just sad their ship didn’t become canon, but for a lot of these fans, who were again mostly queer teenagers, it felt as though the show they thought was laughing with them was actually laughing at them. And like, yeah, the frenzied attempts to justify how a secret episode was totally really for sure going to happen were absurd, and clearly betrayed a lack of knowledge about how TV production works. But when you remember that like 80% of the people sharing those posts were like 15 and being ringled into thinking this is how the world works by a bunch of adults who they followed and looked up to for years, you’re kind of like… yeah, the revelation that this was all made up is going to hurt, a lot. Part 4: Anger and Bargaining One of the things about being hurt is that sadness can be overtaken by anger very very quickly. And if you were someone who was heavily invested in Sherlock and Johnlock then you had a lot to be angry about. And that anger was going to be directed in a lot of places, starting off first and foremost with the creators themselves. At this point, you had spent years following Mofftiss and their work and thinking they were doing this grand big story arc and then they didn’t. And not only did they not do it, they made fun of you for even thinking it was a possibility. It was like a switch was flipped. Mofftiss had faced criticism before, specifically Moffat, but as soon as it became clear that Johnlock wasn’t ever going to be canon and that all of this was queerbaiting, suddenly Mofftiss went from being everyone’s cool god dads to being prime enemy number one. Suddenly Mark Gatiss, who fans thought would make the canon gay relationship because, well, he’s gay was accused of being homophobic for not including it after so many teases. Some people even claimed he was actually straight. And Moffat… that’s a whole other can of worms. Fans set up support blogs and encouraged one another to submit complaints to the BBC about the queerbaiting on Sherlock, even writing sample letters for fans to copy and send along. Nothing really came of these complaints, but overall, fans were pissed, and they wanted to see accountability. And this backlash extended to the show itself as well. The series finale really killed the show - not just in the sense that it was over, but in the sense that any real enthusiasm or support for the series just seemed to die overnight. People who were once obsessed and dedicated their whole life to the series just stopped caring. A good bit of people couldn’t even bring themselves to rewatch it anymore, as once it was clear exactly where the endgame was, a lot of the bad writing decisions were suddenly not parts of an ARG but just bad writing decisions. For example, the Mind Palace theories suggesting that a lot of the things on the show actually took place inside Sherlock’s mind used numerous logical inconsistencies on the show as evidence that it wasn’t taking place on Earth. For example, this deleted theory by Deducing BBC Sherlock pointed out that this scene was probably a mind palace, because the characters both inexplicably changed clothes, there were a bunch of laptops in the scene when we know Sherlock and John only own two and Sherlock was eating despite the fact that the show had earlier established that he doesn’t eat while he works. In their own words, “all three of these go unexplained”. The show was supposed to be clever. These logical inconsistencies were supposed to be there for a reason. They were supposed to explain something. Divorced from the fact that none of this was true, though, it was like a fog lifted. If this wasn’t taking place in Sherlock’s mind palace, the show’s logical inconsistencies were just sh*tty writing. The show wasn’t nearly as clever as fans spent years believing it was, and that realization soured a lot of people on Sherlock. The fans took Moftiss’ mistakes on good faith, and they evidently shouldn’t have. But for a lot of people, Mofftiss wasn’t the real enemy. They tried to tell people time and time again this wasn’t going to happen. They warned everybody. But one tumblr post can phrase this better than I ever can: “"I do hope the LGBT teens who were tricked into believing in TJLC realize who their enemy really is and eat Blossom.” Indeed, although a lot of hurt TJLC fans redirected their anger back to Mofftiss and the queerbaiting the show engaged in, a lot of fans: both on Tumblr at the time and disillusioned former fans in my emails, started to realize that they were being manipulated by the big name fans on Tumblr at the time. The tiny clues and breadcrumbs suggesting TJLC was real were just getting smaller and smaller and hard to believe, and people like Blossom kept on egging people on, insisting from the start that this ship was real and was going to happen. And when it finally didn’t, a lot of people were like, “wait a minute, it was kind of f*cked up of you to give us that false hope.” This is furthered by the fact that despite all her antics, Blossom is an actual lawyer. She’s not stupid. It’s very possible that after a while, Blossom didn’t actually believe TJLC was going to happen and kept pushing for a bunch of teenagers to continue believing it for that sweet sweet Tumblr clout. Now, maybe she did actually still believe in TJLC. I don’t know her, so I really can’t say one way or another. But my point is, “The Powerpuff Girls were manipulating us” quickly became a popular sentiment among the fandom. Not quite as popular as “it’s all Moftiss’ fault”, but still popular. In the words of one Tumblr user, “When the creators of a show promise you in the clearest terms they can muster that they are not going to make your ship canon, and you keep counter-promising the impossible anyways, that’s not on the creators any more. That’s on you. And the LGBT kids who listened to you deserve to hear you admit that just as much as they deserve to hear Moffat and Gatiss apologize for the gay jokes.” All in all though, regardless of whether former fans blamed Mofftis, the big name fans, themselves, or some combination thereof, it’s clear that there was a lot of hurt and anger there to process. So what did people… do with all that? Part 5: Depression, Loneliness and Reflection So that’s it. You’ve cried and you’ve screamed and you’re conspiracy theoried your way through four seasons of Sherlock. Now you’re left with the part of the puzzle you have to deal with: what comes next? For a lot of people, it was a total isolation from the community. A large amount of the notable accounts from this era just totally shut their accounts down and left the fandom forever. A large part of them tried to downplay any involvement or belief in Johnlock or any real attachment to the show at all. A general consensus among the people who emailed to give their perspective is that after season 4, a lot of them just… gave up. This is something that a lot of people had a lot of strong feelings about, something that had dominated their personality and their view on ships and critical theory and representation. And now even the community didn’t even really feel like a community anymore. All the conspiracy theories and infighting and lies and drama meant there was really no sense sticking around. This period seems like a dark time for a lot of people, as they had to really come to terms as what it meant to be so heavily invested in a series, so heavily invested in a community, so heavily invested in an idea. It was a period of intense reflection that caused a lot of people to leave feeling some sense of shame for even participating or humouring the idea. The Sherlock fandom would never truly recover from this point. It still exists, mind you, but nowhere near the height of what it used to be. Those who are still around in the Johnlock Conspiracy tend to be true devotees still holding out hope for a season 5 or some secretly filmed final episode or they tend to be casual and chill and just really enjoy this pairing. According to one of the former big name fans, the very small still existing sliver of the TJLC community tend to be very bitter towards people who no longer believe, calling them ex-fans and maintaining, to this day, that Mofftis are still constructing a big, complex mystery, and it just hasn’t been revealed yet. But overall, the Sherlock fandom, and especially the TJLC fandom, is more or less dead. This is where I would put a title card for the final two stages of grief, Reconstruction and Acceptance but honestly that just… hasn’t happened? I mean it has for some former members of the community, sure. They learned to just deal with the show being the show and found their friends from the community they wanted to stick with and be around. But in general people haven’t come to accept what happened here. Even now, almost four years later, there’s still a lot of anger and hurt and sadness, either towards the show or the creators or the fanbase. Maybe there will be a day where Sherlock fans can look back fondly at the series and their experience in it. Perhaps there will be a day where Sherlock will come back alive. But for now, the series is still dead on the ground below St. Bartholomew’s, with no sign of a return. The Johnlock Conspiracy, much like a lot of real-world conspiracies, found its greatest strength only *after* Season 3 where it became apparent that fans were being made fun of, and that’s probably because fans weren’t yet ready to drop it. They weren’t ready to accept that something they loved and devoted time to was unkind to them, and was never going to be what they wanted it to be. It’s for this reason that this conspiracy, and I suspect many other conspiracies as well, aren’t actually weakened by either a lack of evidence supporting them or evidence directly contradicting them. See Dan Olson’s Flat Earth video. Overall, TJLC was honestly part fan conspiracy and part coping mechanism. While most of the people involved were a bunch of young people who just desperately wanted a show they loved to love them back, TJLC was also full of its harmful parts. A lot of people who messaged me wanted to specify that yes, there was harassment, but really it was no worse than any other fandom and this kind of drama and harmful behaviour happens in every fandom. A lot of fans also wanted to emphasize that many TJLC fans were harassed themselves, sometimes by people who didn’t like the ship and other times by anti-SJW types who thought they were ruining Sherlock with their lack of heteros*xuality. And from what I can find, this is true as well. With that said, as much as I sympathize with their desire to look back fondly on their friends and experiences, a lot of the stuff that happened in TJLC is at the very least worse on average than many other fandoms of a similar size, and that’s largely owed to a few big names who got in early. The way people like the Powerpuff Girls and their respective orbiters (many of whom have emailed me) treated others was unacceptable, and it’s worth mentioning that it was specifically through fandoms and online social capital that they were empowered to act like this in the first place. Not everyone in the fandom was complicit in their behaviour, and a lot of fans did indeed either disavow or just steer clear from them, but the fact that they were able to get that popular in the first place is telling too. At the same time, though, a lot of folks involved really did just want their story to be told, and simply desperately wanted Sherlock to be the kind of show that it never was, and never was going to be. So whose fault was it? Mofftis, the big name fans, or everyone who believed it? Honestly, I think it’s some combination of the first two and a bit of the third, but there’s a reason that this specifically happened for Sherlock and not for some other show. Some of these people did migrate to other fandoms like It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia, but those theories only ever took off so massively within the fanbase for Sherlock. And that’s because Sherlock in particular is a show that the writers have repeatedly asserted is both very clever and very participatory. The writers really, really wanted the fans to believe that every detail, even every inconsistency, that was placed into the show was there for a reason. They’d constantly comment in interviews about how clever their show was, about how there was all this secret symbolism in things like the Victorian Christmas special that was super deliberate and that you had to be really analytical to get, and generally promote fans aggressively speculating and tinhatting about their show. They also *did* include a lot of online mystery stuff that never made it onto the show, so you can see where it's coming from. For example, the showrunners maintained fake blogs for both John and Sherlock, and this mysterious and possibly villainous user called “theimprobableone” kept commenting on Sherlock’s posts. It was a genuine Sherlock-related mystery outside the scope of the show, and ones that fans eagerly anticipated seeing on the big screen. And then, much like with the Reichenbach Fall mystery, they not only never delivered, but mocked fans for caring about their mysteries at all. They put hints in the show alluding to John Watson having romantic feelings for Sherlock, and then mocked fans for seeing gay subtext in the show. They said in interviews that they put hints in the show about how Sherlock survived the fall, and then mocked fans for obsessively trying to solve it. They set up theimprobableone and then never explained or addressed it on screen. They said in interviews that the Victorian Christmas special was filled with this profound symbolism, and then never delivered on any of that. So on one hand, yes, the fans should have seen this coming, but on the other, this atmosphere of “this show is oh so clever and if you can’t see it, it’s because you're not clever enough” was one that deliberately and actively encouraged pattern-seeking and theorizing. In some ways, a lot of these theories- while many are bad- are more elaborate and sometimes better written than the actual ending of the show. Some of these theories were nuts, but a lot of these theories, like the Mind Palace stuff, were attempts to take Moffat and Gatiss’s claims that the show was clever on good faith, and make sense of the bad writing and logical inconsistencies that crop up throughout the show. And it’s hard to blame people for caring about mysteries the show kept telling them to care about. At the same time though, one of the things that they *were* actually explicit about is that they didn’t intend to make Sherlock and John a couple. And although they did deliberately create an “interactive mystery” air about their show, most of the queer references on the series, with a couple exceptions, were treated as jokes. And to be honest, most of the big name fans with large followings were old enough to recognize that, even if many of the average fans weren’t. Now, I do think a lot of the older big name fans genuinely did believe in TJLC. Though I’m more skeptical about people like Blossom, I don’t think most of the meta writers sought to manipulate a bunch of young people for clout. I mean, if you wanted a big following, you could just make slime tutorials or something. I’m not going to set some arbitrary rule that if you’re under 20 it’s okay for you to believe in it but if you’re over 20 you’re clearly an evil manipulator knowingly lying to queer fans. That being said, I think there was a certain point… let’s say, after the 3rd or 4th secret Sherlock episode false alarm, where it’s kind of irresponsible to definitively promise a bunch of 14 year olds who follow you that they’re going to get their representation in the end, when you really have no way of knowing whether that’s true or not. And while a lot of big name fans were responsible and encouraged others to err on the side of skepticism, you did have a few people continuing to build up false hope for these kids in a way that, based on my emails, was still really hurtful to them to this day. Ultimately, TJLC is a microcosm of what can happen when some of the best parts of fandom- collective interpretation, analysis, close community- and some of the worst parts of fandom- infighting, cults of personality, stan culture- are all taken to a particular extreme. It’s a cautionary tale of queerbaiting, of false hope, and how prevalent groupthink in fandom spaces can be. Overall, for those who had a positive experience within the fandom and just wanted to share their theories with like-minded people, I hope that those folks can find a better show, one that’s both amenable to complex theorycrafting but also one that will actually deliver on the stuff they’re looking to find. And for people who used the fandom as a vehicle to gain clout and harass people over petty fandom sh*t, I hope them and BBC Sherlock will be very happy together. If you’re still interested in Sherlock but want to cleanse your brain of anything with the words Moffat or Powerpuff in it, my sponsor Curiositystream has lots of documentaries about Sherlock Holmes, as well as science, nature, technology, and lots of other cool topics. If you want to watch a lot of cool educational and entertaining content and support me and lots of other educational creators, the good news is that Curiositystream has partnered with Nebula to help me make exclusive content only available on Nebula! Nebula is a collaborative platform by me and many other creators like Lindsay Ellis, Kat Blaque, Tierzoo, and many others where you can stream high quality content, some of which you can only find on Nebula. 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