"Fandom," or a generally obsessive community surrounding a particular TV show/movie/book/etc., is a cultural movement not unique to Millennials. However, with thanks to the internet and other forms of mass communication that have come about in the 21st century, connecting with larger groups of people who share your same interest has become much easier than attending after-school anime club meetings. Now, hyper-fans have taken to blogging about their interests on platforms like Tumblr, using these sites to meet other hyper-fans with whom they can discuss, gush over, and sometimes theorize about their fandoms.
According to Fandometrics, a blog dedicated to ranking Tumblr's fandoms by popularity, one of the most discussed TV shows at any given time is BBC's "Sherlock," an in-process recreation of the Arthur Conan Doyle characters, reset in the modern day. The show has a supremely dedicated following on Tumblr; at one point, the user @sherlock had over 100,000 followers. But even beyond mere numbers, the show's fandom is impressive in the quality (and quantity) of analyses, often called "meta," they produce about double meanings in character dialogue, the importance of certain background characters, promotional pictures for new seasons, and so forth — all concerning the writers’ intentions for the relationship between Sherlock and John.
Of course, Conan Doyle — a Victorian writer who helped Oscar Wilde start his "Picture of Dorian Gray," which would later be used in court as proof of Wilde’s homosexuality — simply wrote Holmes and Watson as partners in crime and the very best of friends. Holmes says "my dear Watson" a handful of times in the original canon, but Conan Doyle ultimately concludes the series with the characters as just friends. As for the BBC, the eventual depth of Sherlock and John's relationship is still up in the air.
Tumblr's "Sherlock" fandom exists by means of fans who strongly believe the writers intend for Sherlock and John to get together romantically. In fact, this belief so popular that it’s nearly impossible to be present in the "Sherlock" fandom and believe anything else. Most people who disagree stop blogging about "Sherlock" on Tumblr altogether. In the show's current arc, Sherlock and John are still just friends, but a theory dubbed TJLC, or "The Johnlock Conspiracy," has taken the fandom by storm. In essence, the theory claims that in the BBC version of Conan Doyle's stories, a romance between Sherlock and John is endgame. In support of this, fans have written countless essays and recorded podcasts, in some instances tens of thousands of words or multiple hours long. And for what, to prove a point? Not entirely. Through Tumblr, TJLC has evolved from a mere theory to a cultural phenomenon: the phenomenon of an overwhelming number of fans overwhelmingly wanting two characters to kiss.
The explanation for this is simple: We no longer live in the Victorian days of Conan Doyle, and openly non-heterosexual characters grace pop culture regularly. But it’s always a "token gay friend" in the theater club or some other stereotype mistakenly exploited for the purposes of being inclusive. What "Sherlock," having given no explicit indication of a relationship between Sherlock and John for its current three seasons and counting, promises is the opportunity for a TV show to have gay leading roles who are actual characters before they're gay characters. TJLC gives people real hope that the writers will take this opportunity and run, making it a show about a detective who solves crimes and then simply comes home to his boyfriend after work.
In this way, "The Johnlock Conspiracy" could be renamed "The Representation Conspiracy," claiming that a presentation of commonly LGBTQ+ people represented on television is end game for the media industry. The realization of TJLC would pave the way for these future TV shows (and possibly movies, books, and other media formats) to be about gay people, not about people being gay. If it takes the phenomenon of a bunch of diehard "Sherlock" fandom bloggers furiously typing at their computers to get the ball rolling, so be it.
