ABOUT
So who’s writing/drawing/etc. this stuff?
Is 221B Baker Towers a Sherlock AU?
How do I post my fic or other fanwork to AO3?
221B Baker Towers is a modern-day interpretation of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes. It originated in a set of Tumblr posts by @sophistory, here and here:
So that whole ‘The Indian Sherlock’ thing got me brooding over the shitfit some parts of fandom tend to throw at the prospect of a Holmes and/or Watson that aren’t British - and how by ‘British’, they in fact mean ‘a very narrow idea of ~Britishness~ that includes the following attributes: white, English, and coded as upper to upper-middle class’.
And how, if you don’t think that’s true, you should try to imagine fandom’s reaction if the next big Holmes adaptation to come along had Holmes and Watson as British, yeah - young black British men, living case to case on a council estate in a dodgy area of London. How fandom would react if Sherlock Holmes didn’t employ street kids and homeless people like trained animals to do his bidding, but instead was part of that invisible underclass; if instead of having his eccentricities tolerated~ by Scotland Yard on account of being the Great White Genius, Sherlock Holmes, BME, school dropout, and sometime addict, was regarded by the police as practically a criminal already, one more thug, one more junkie, one more dealer in the making. If he had to choose between buying the week’s groceries or palming a twenty to a bored constable for the chance to spend five minutes on a crime scene, in the hope that whoever’s under enough pressure to deal with crime rates in the neighbourhood will pay him enough for a perp to feed himself and Watson for a month or two. If the greatest threat to his safety were police brutality, or the prospect of being done for a snitch; if his arch enemy weren’t Moriarty, but the systemic poverty and inequality that has him helping out his oppressors just to get by, and that makes the other side of the law look more tempting to someone with his skills every day.
And then I realised that I want this adaptation LIKE BURNING, that I have already headcast Holmes and Watson as John Boyega and Leeon Jones, and that from now on whenever I watch Sherlock I will be imagining this instead and crying softly deep within my soul.
The response was overwhelmingly positive, many people began reblogging the posts or sending in asks with further theories about what this universe might look like, how the stories of this new Sherlock Holmes might play out, where different characters might fit and who might play them, and so on - and so, 221B Baker Towers was born.
So who’s writing/drawing/etc. this stuff?
221B Baker Towers (221B - or, indeed, Baker Towers - for short) is an open universe. That means that anyone and everyone is welcome to play in it, to poke around, to pick up ideas and run with them, and to produce whatever their heart desires. There is no one set ‘canon’; many people have wildly divergent ideas about characters, plots, and other elements of the 221B universe, and seeing the many different directions that people can take the concept, and the discussions that can grow out of these ideas, is one of the best things about 221B.
This blog is not the centre of 221B fandom. 221B, like fandom itself, is about busting open the doors to canon and diffusing authorship and ownership - many voices, instead of one. Accordingly the heart of 221B fandom is the #221b baker towers tag here on Tumblr, which is where the lion’s share of the fun happens. This blog is simply a way to index the various contents of that tag in a way that makes it easier to go back and find things - and so it’s easier to link newcomers to a single ‘About’ page instead of a whole collection of different Tumblr posts.
Is 221B Baker Towers a Sherlock AU?
221B is not a Sherlock AU, but rather a new imagining of the original Conan Doyle source material. That said, there’s no reason you can’t include elements that echo or deliberately deconstruct Sherlock in some way; if that’s what you feel like doing, go for it! After all, 221B was conceived at least partly in response to certain tropes and problems that Sherlock magnified. If you want to include a Molly Hooper, or a Sally Donovan, or whatever Sherlock-specific plot element, there’s more than enough room for them in the nebulous, shifting ‘canon’ of 221B.
But it’s not, and was never intended to be an AU of the BBC’s version, but rather a new and separate take on the Sherlock Holmes canon - which also means you needn’t feel beholden to Moffatt and Gatiss’ particular vision or universe in any way.
Go for it! There’s no initiation rite, there’s no secret handshake, and you don’t have to know anybody - just tag your post with #221b baker towers and… that’s it!
Eventually (depending on how diligent the admin of this blog is being about her duties), your post will be reblogged/indexed here as well, so it doesn’t disappear into the mists of Tumblr.
If you’ve created something for 221B Baker Towers, you might also consider uploading it to AO3 - as soon as there are 3 or more fics (or other fanworks) listed under '221B Baker Towers’, we become an official, listed fandom there! Check out this tutorial to see how to post your 221B fanworks to AO3.
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