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Johnlock fan fiction on Achieve Of Our Own (AO3) and the potential threats

Fan fiction is a remarkable form of fandom culture. It is the phenomenon that fans are started to become the prosumer, both the producer and consumer (Ritzer, 2014), and present their enthusiasm to the story and the character. It could be consider as prosumption phenomenon itself. Fan fiction is the text that reader can consume and respond to, and could inspire more fan fiction based on it (Banerjee, 2015). It is the catalyst of the creation of other transformative fan works, such as fan arts and fan videos.

As the digital involution creates more probabilities and opportunities, several online fan fiction media thrives. Online fan fiction can be shared and posted on different media platforms. For example, website (eg. AO3, Tumblr), social platforms (a Chinese social App ‘Weblog’, Instagram) and reading Apps (a Chinese App ‘Jing Jiang’).

Achieve Of Our Own (AO3), is one of the biggest fan fiction website. There are incredibly over 136 thousand fan fictions tagged Sherlock Holmes & related fandoms (BBC version) on AO3, while ‘Johnlock’ fictions, the stories about the romantic relationship between John Watson and Sherlock Holmes, ranked first by 20 thousands works (Sherlock Holmes & John Watson - Works | Archive of Our Own, 2014)! However, the characteristic of online fan fiction and sexual orientation embedded in could cause several concerns.

- False expectation

One of the concerns is this might cause criticism due to a false expectation of the LGBTQIA+ viewers toward the original television series. Fan fiction could be one of the most significant ways of bringing diverse representation in a mass media culture, when in the most text in 21st century, sexual minorities, racial and gender are given insufficient exposure. As Johnlock fan fiction depicts the two character as two gay man, considerable part of LGBTQIA+ viewers would be attracted by the romantic text (or subtext). They would consider this queer couple as a representation (Frenk, 2018) of them and expect to see this relationship to be presented on the television series. Considerable LGBTQIA+ viewers predict this will be developed officially in season four (the season after John lost his wife), however, this prediction didn’t come true. This result these audience displayed negative emotions, ranging from confusion to intense disappointment. Steven, the show co-creator also claimed that ‘People want to fantasize about it. It’s fine. But it’s not in the show,’(quoted by Roxy Simons, Mail Online, 2019).

Extreme actions towards the actors would be caused due to the effect of Johnlock fan fiction. Martin Freeman, the actor of ‘John Watson’ in the television serials ‘Sherlock Holmes’, claimed that he was struggled by serval death threats he revived on Tweeter due to ‘John Watson’ married a woman (Meadows, 2013). Meanwhile, the actress of ‘Marry Watson’, the wife of ‘John Watson’, also received vicious comments and messages. Freeman criticized those Johnlock fans are not the fans of the show, but are the ‘fans of a show going on their heads’. He added that he hope the audience can split the show with fan fiction, and don’t unleashed their anger towards any of the actors (Meadows, 2013).

- Sexualized text

Minor texts are highly sexualized and free accessed. For an example, there are 21.9% Johnlock texts on AO3 (achieve of our own) website are tagged as ‘explicit: only suitable for adults’ (Miranda, 2017, pp.8), while 112 texts among them has tag ‘underage’,’rape’ and ‘violence’ simultaneously (Sherlock Holmes & John Watson - Works | Archive of Our Own, 2014). As a positive aspect, those tags allows the Johnlock fans to find the text they suitable to more easily, and are able to avoid content that could be potentially harmful. The rating could also gives an indication of how much violence or sexual content will be present in the fiction, while “Archive Warnings” in AO3 allow the identification of particularly triggering content. For instance, major character death or rape, and therefore, readers can search for what they feel comfortable with, which shows consideration towards the community undergoes mental health concerns. However, the website does not strict the access of the underaged users to explicate contents, this would cause the improper imitation of the underaged reader. Considerable teenage girls started become Johnlock fans by sexualized fan fiction and developed by started to write their own Johnlock texts.

Filters on AO3 about ‘Sherlock Holmes & John Watson’ (Sherlock Holmes & John Watson - Works | Archive of Our Own, 2014)

Some Johnlock fan fiction would cause a fault choosing due to improper tags. The tag adding on AO3 is not compulsory, authors can add the tags they want or even don’t add any tags (Miranda, 2017, pp.14). This would be problematic that the readers cannot make an accurate choice as not every sexual or violence text is tagged with corresponding warnings. This would increase the threat that underaged population and other population who feel uncomfortable with certain actions would exposed to those texts with out intention.

- Lack of authority protection

There are lack of authority protection of the fan fiction writers. As fanfiction is published mainly in online communities, fanfiction authors usually use pseudonyms and obfuscatory usernames in order to to maintain anonymity (Banerjee, 2015). This would result to a lack of solidify identity that their readers could refer to. Combing with the free access of the texts, the authors’ rights are hard to preserve due to plagiarism and imposters.

Although there are several concerns of Johnlock fan fiction, as previously stated, it is a creative fan culture and would reflect their own representation of the writers. Through the digitalization, the boundaries of consuming fan fiction and produce fan fiction have both become lower. The readers are able to respond to the constituents of a text directly and give advise to creators, and finally form a small group, or they can even start their own texts.

“They're fans, but they're not silent, couchbound consumers of media. The culture talks to them, and they talk back to the culture in its own language”—Lev Grossman (Lev, 2011)