And yet I would be very careful not to call any of these films fan fiction (an argument I discuss in more detail here). But even if Sherlock is not fan fiction, it still can be read and analyzed usefully within the AU conversations we repeatedly hold within the fan community. AUs are immensely popular in many fandoms and their respective qualities are often the subject of debate. The principal danger of writing AUs is writers relying too heavily on clichés so that their characters often retain little more than their names and looks. Since the aspects that make the character recognizable to the reader are often the very elements that the media uses to create an easy shorthand, these same characterizations also tend to become overused and clichéd when they are the only thing connecting the AU character to his original counterpart. In Sherlock Holmes fiction, such easy shorthands include Holmes’ hat, coat, and pipe, all three of which appear, for example, at the end of Young Sherlock Holmes (1985), thus both signaling an obvious—if simplistic—connection to adult Holmes and giving background for his owning these objects.

Moving a story in time (in the case of Sherlock from the 1880s to 2010) requires certain adjustments and complicates the easily recognizable shorthands. The show has interestingly chosen to keep certain aspects while updating others. And in general, it is the updated elements that make Sherlock the successful AU that it is, whereas those points that mimic the original too closely and those that strike the viewer as anachronistic are the weakest elements. Translating Holmes’ brilliant deductions about John Watson from the pocket watch in The Sign of Four to his smart phone works beautifully. Having Holmes whip dead bodies to understand bruising patterns doesn’t. In a review of the first episode, Thingswithwings imagines a Holmes who is a fully translated and contemporary version: “I want him playing Queen on the violin, I want him making the obvious Princess Bride reference when offered a choice between two pills” (source).

In the end, while individual plot points, objects, and places are important for fans to recognize, the most successful approach seems to come about when the writer extrapolates the character’s underlying identity, exploring those aspects that remain the same in the new setting, and how they will manifest. It might seem important to have Holmes look somewhat similar to the way we’ve always seen him, but given his disinterest in cultural expectations, his brilliant idiosyncrasy might just as easily (and more evocatively) have been translated into subcultural hobbies or interests. But I continue to hope that Sherlock can walk that line successfully between making empty alluding gestures and getting to the heart of who Sherlock and Watson are—by themselves and to one another.

Of course, there is much to recommend a text-intrinsic definition, most of all that it’d be easier if we could create a taxonomy in which every text belonged to a given genre regardless of contextual information. The most obvious choice in defining fan fiction as a genre is to characterize it by its derivative/transformative character. After all, that is a generally accepted definition of fan fiction: fiction that expands/comments on/criticizes existing media texts. Creating a taxonomy that relies on the transformative process, however, expands the category to near uselessness. We suddenly need to include postmodern retellings, from Wide Sargasso Sea to The Hours, but also Biblical and mythological transformative works, from Paradise Lost to Ulysses. In short, given the intertextuality of literature generally and the central role of certain canonical Western texts specifically, much of the Western canon would suddenly fall under fan fiction.

While this problem could be circumvented by defining fan fiction as only those texts who are intertextual with commercial and copyrighted media texts, this definition is likewise flawed insofar as it relies on the fairly arbitrary copyright laws that often have more to do with protection of copyright owners than literary or genre categories. Moreover, such a definition would exclude large swaths of fan fiction that are, for the most part accepted as fan fiction by most, including historical Real People Fiction (RPF), Bible and mythological fan fiction, as well as fan fiction transforming Shakespeare and Austen and everyone who’s fallen out of copyright. In fact, one of the larger and more community building challenges in fandom has been the yearly Rare Fandom Yuletide Challenge, which includes all of these categories and others that might easily not fall under this more narrow definition.

Yuletide, however, indicates what for me is the central quality that distinguishes a fan-created Lizzie who runs off with Mr. Darcy against her parents’ will from Bridget Jones’ Diary or even Pride and Prejudice and Zombies. I’d suggest that fan fiction exists within a fan community for its creation, distribution, and reception. As such, the two commercial Austen transformations cannot be fan works insofar as they are not culturally situated within a fan community: while they are clearly in intertextual dialogue with the source text, they are not so with one another or a community of fans and their interpretations. Fan fiction, on the other hand, is both–though depending on text and writer to varying degrees. But in the end, it is the writers’ decision to situate their story within the complex network of other transformative works and thus making it fan fiction: by labeling it as fan fiction; by following the shared paratextual apparatus of headers; or by submitting it to a fan fiction archive. Fan is as fan does, and the cultural context of a fan work indeed ultimately determines whether we are reading a New York Times bestseller, a tie-in novel, or a fan work—even if they do not differ in contents, quality, or reliance on the source text.