An Awesome Story

I have a confession: I read fanfic. Is that even a confession-worthy declaration anymore? Regardless, the story I’m going to share today is a fanfiction story. It’s not just any fanfiction story, though; it is a masterpiece of digital integration and meta-storytelling. It is called The Theory of Narrative Causality.

Firstly, this fanfic is over a decade old, which is forever in internet years. Secondly, I haven’t read it in about a decade and I don’t remember the specifics. Looking at the master post, there do seem to be some NC-17 bits, so access at your own risk.

The story is very meta. It’s a fanfiction using the characters from the 2010 BBC series Sherlock. However, it recasts them as “normal” people who are fans of the original Sherlock Holmes stories of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle. Then it plops them squarely in Livejournal-era fandom and has them all participate in a Big Bang event. Sherlock is an artist who is paired with John, an author, and the two of them create a story/art collaboration that winds up being a fanwork version of BBC Sherlock itself. The characters literally create the story from which they originated.

But that’s not even the best part. Thanks to some coding magic I will never understand, the story is formatted exactly like a series of online interactions. There are scenes that are recreated comment sections, for example, and you can actually interact with the comment page elements. It is absolutely delightful because you can tick the ticky boxes!

(Caveat: I haven’t gone through and checked if all those elements are still functional a decade later. I wish this had been posted to AO3, but that would be the world’s most insane work skin, so I don’t blame the author for not doing that.)

I’m not going to say this is my favourite story ever, since I don’t really have a favourite story, but I did immensely enjoy it back in the day, and given its digital elements, I thought it was quite fitting to share here.

As for why I like it, the digital elements aren’t the only thing. I like stories that are self-aware and comment on themselves. I like retellings because you can add an angle/reading to the original story, like “What does it say about and/or do to the central theme of this story if we change or enhance this one element?” Something along the lines of modern retellings of fairy tales, for example. 

This story has a lot of that. Since the characters are already known to the audience, their behaviour in this different setting is both predictable and not. When they repeat lines from the series, it’s a cute reference, but when they deviate from expected actions, the reader has to ask why, ask how the particulars of this version of the story affected them and made them different. 

Also, this whole story is basically a love letter to fandom, which is one of the great loves of my life, so that’s also a point in its favour.

I’ve written all of this and realized that I haven’t referenced the readings/teachings of this module at all, so let me add that now. This story is, at its heart, a love story. It is very universal and relatable, which was one of the rules of storytelling from Pixar, even though it didn’t make it into the actual article about Pixar writing rules, which makes citing it awkward. You root for the characters to get what they want while they struggle with it all. And it’s very satisfying when they succeed.