Friday, March 25, 2016

A Study in Sherlockians

Many of you know that I decided to do my paper on fandoms and how fandoms can reach a larger pool of those who are different, through websites such as Tumblr and Pinterest, to find likeminded individuals and acceptance. I narrowed this broad topic down to just the Sherlock fandom and included specific categories of people that the Sherlock fandom helps. The categories I have right now include: the LGBTQ community, developmental issues (such as Asperger’s and ADHD), those who get bullied, and those who value intellect. I picked these categories because the Sherlock fandom deals with these issues either with speculation on character relationships, speculation on whether or not Sherlock has a developmental disorder (which is why he has such a problem trying to connect with others), speculation on if Sherlock would’ve been bullied as a child because of his genius, and valuing intellect first and foremost (which is sort of like the unspoken Sherlockian motto). These issues that help relate the characters to people in real life have prompted the fandom to take comments on such issues very seriously and have prompted them to fight to help those in need of support on many of these topics.

The reason for that first paragraph, which is basically an introductory paragraph, is because I was wondering if any of you guys had any more ideas on categories I could use. I am looking for topics that are controversial enough issues that many Sherlockians have banded together to agree on it or help fight back in some way. I need major issues like this so that I can show the support that Sherlockians give each other, but I can’t think of any more categories. So what do you guys think? Can you give me more categories/issues/topics? Or do you think that the four I have are enough?

4 comments:

  1. I think the four should cover enough to write the paper. Each of those subjects are going to give you a substantial amount to write about. I honestly think you may want to start by focusing on one group because each of these categories are quite vast.

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  2. I think that the categories you already have are pretty strong. The ideas are also broad so they give you a lot to work with. I think you'll be okay if you stick with the four categories you have now, maybe focus on one single aspect of each and how the fandom helps.

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  3. I think if you wanted to you could go into antisocial or asocial behaviors and how they're portrayed in the show itself and compare it to other media. As a point of clarification, antisocial is actively avoiding social situations out of a genuine dislike or hate for people. Asocial is when a person doesn't actively avoid social situations and actually likes people, but prefers to be alone a majority of the time. From my understanding of the show, Sherlock is more antisocial than asocial but I think he doesn't hate people he hates how he can't seem to relate to them well.

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  4. I think you have a lot of information, expecially for this paper. Also I like how you are going about this. I think it would be a very good read.

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