Professor of Sherlockology and Advanced Snape Studies

It's been so long since I've been immersed in a fandom and really read fanfic. I think it might have been since 2015 since I really read fanfic and just immersed myself in it. Maybe I misremember. I have read fic for academic purposes and that's not the same. And mostly that fic has not be slash or romance. Or if it has been, the romance is not what drew me to it. 

I was reminded of my change in fic reading habits by a recent email thread thread that mentioned Reapersun. Those of you from Sherlock fandom will know that name. I actually bought a copy of WRECK, the graphic novel by Reapersun, back in the day. I went looking for it, and looking through it brought back so many feelings that I'm not sure I want to revisit. I was so heavily into Johnlock post series 2 and around the time I moved to Sweden in 2012. I got so heavily into Podcasting and Setlock and reading fanfic in 2013. When series 3 aired in 2014, I was a wreck. I remember crying in heartbreak for days after watching The Sign of Three. I turned to both Johnlock fic and meta in a kind of desperation to find comfort and an alternate interpretation. I somehow found a series of beautiful Aurthur/Eames Inception fic, even though I have still never seen the movie Inception. 

Other things happened in my life and in fandom (the toxicity of the Johnlock conspiracy really killed a lot of joy) that led me to move away from Johnlock fanfic as a source of comfort or pleasure. 

Being reminded of how much WRECK moved me was bittersweet. A part of me misses that feeling. But a part of me doesn't want to lose myself in something like that again.

But also, I don't know if those feelings, that sentimentality for love and sex exist in me anymore. I'm afraid to find out that they have been depleted and are not coming back, and the thought of this fills me with an overwhelming grief that I don't want to experience in full.

A recent article highlighting differences between BBC Sherlock and Elementary was just featured on ONTD, which generated a lot of discussion by ONTD's fans of Elementary, highlighting what they liked about that show and found lacking in Sherlock. You can read (*Note: Spoilers for Elementary*) the full comments here, which reveal a very different interpretation of the characters and storylines  (and the fandom) in Sherlock than I share. But they do point out things I have heard in favor of Elementary, which addresses things many have found lacking in the BBC series.

I am curious to watch Elementary when it finally becomes available for me to view online here in Sweden. It sounds interesting, and I wonder if it will hook me the same way Sherlock has done. All the positive things I keep hearing about it also made me wonder if it's catching on as a huge fandom phenomenon and if the Elementary fandom will soon be outstripping the Sherlock fandom in its generation of fanfiction, cosplay and fanart.  Thus, in the interest of science, I decided to do a little research on this. I decided to investigate whether there was a difference in the number of fan works posted to Ao3 for each show after the first 9 months. I picked 9 months because Elementary's first episode aired in the US about 9 months ago (September 27, 2012).

It was a bit tricky searching for Sherlock BBC fanworks because people don't always use the same tag for the show, so I decided for the sake of consistency to take a conservative approach and only searched the tag "Sherlock TV" for BBC Sherlock related fanworks and "Elementary TV" for Elementary related fanworks. This is at best a first stab, and any suggestions on how to refine my methodology for the next go round would be appreciated. Here's what I found:

	Sherlock	Elementary
First Airdate	July 25, 2010 in UK	September 27, 2012 in US
First Fanwork on Ao3	The Perils of Urban Warfare by phantomjam July 27, 2010	a thousand roads by Medie March 4, 2012 (prior to first airdate)
Fanworks on Ao3 after 9 mos	1988 (as of April 30, 2011)	514 (as of June, 30, 2013)
Total Fanworks on Ao3 as of July 7, 2013	33,661	525

Created with the HTML Table Generator

I find this an interesting snapshot. After the first 9 months, there were more than three times as many fanworks under the Sherlock TV tag than the Elementary TV tag. There are no doubt a lot of factors at play here including the fact that Sherlock's far fewer episodes and longer wait time mean fans have more time on their hands to create whereas Elementary fans have more episodes to look forward to each week. It could also suggest that Sherlock fans felt they needed to fix something about the show that Elementary fans do not (as suggested by the writers of the article above). Or it could mean that there is something about Sherlock that generated a lot of enthusiasm in its viewership that resulted in the creation of creativeworks. It could be that Elementary fans may be more likely to engage in different fannish practices that aren't archived on Ao3.

I am going to continue to dig around a little more because this is relevant to my interest in uncovering stories on fandom (and fangirls in particular) for my documentary. This was a spur of the moment thing brought on by reading that article. Your own thoughts and advice and checks on my methodology are welcome.