I was casually skimming the Globe and Mail at work yesterday, when I saw a tagline that had “Sherlock Holmes” and “mommy porn” in the same sentence. I needed to read whatever caused that. Frankly, I was also a little surprised that the universe hadn’t been ripped asunder by such a contrast of ideas.
What I found was this article. What a horrid, horrid thing. If you don’t want to read it, the idea is that some jerkoff is plugging sex scenes into classic literature. Yeah, take a moment to digest that, and then come join me in finding and lynching this dude and whoever is funding him.
This is wrong wrong wrong wrong wrong. And the worst part is that the article’s author defends this abhorrent practice. He justifies it by suggesting that all throughout history we’ve re-writeen stories to better suit our needs. Yes, Disney retooled The Little Mermaid so that kids could enjoy it. They did that because the original is a horrifying and gruesome story. They pretty much changed it entirely. They made it accessible. What Total E-Bound is doing here would be like if Disney had just stuck a song and dance number into the original Little Mermaid. Shoehorning something into a piece of work that it doesn’t belong in is not something to be championed. Nevermind the fact that this butthole is turning Sherlock Holmes gay. Stop changing established characters! It’s not that I even have an issue with gayness in general, it’s just if I’m reading a Sherlock Holmes story and he starts spankin’ it to thoughts of Watson, I’m going to stop reading Sherlock Holmes.
The light at the end of the tunnel is that the article’s author suggests that it’s okay because fan fiction has been doing it for decades. Well, I guess then that these books will just be discredited and the “author” of the sex content derided. I’m sorry, but nobody takes fan fiction seriously, and everybody makes fun of fan fiction writers (with the possible exception of other fanfic writers). Did you just completely miss the internet?
If you want to sell classic literature to a new audience, market it to that audience. Don’t smut it up in hopes of enticing the lowest common denominator. I’ve never read Jane Eyre, but Sherlock Holmes stories are intelligent and exciting enough to stand on their own. The series didn’t need homoerotic fantasies to become a classic, it damn well doesn’t need them to maintain that status.
Also, anyone who uses the term “mommy porn” without any hint of irony or sarcasm needs to be smacked. Hard.
(It does delight me to some extent that The Wife is even more pissed off about this than I am. Being that she’s a huge bookworm, I shouldn’t have been surprised.)