Steven Moffat on twisting his words about gay representation to suit Johnlock conspiracy theorists (from With an Accent interview):
“What is irksome is what I am talking
about is quite a serious thing, a serious question, seriously answered
by both myself and Bryan Fuller who managed to answer much more quickly
than I did. I was talking about the representation of minorities in
science fiction shows and in popular culture. Using the example of
talking about gay characters and how you present them. I was actually
largely talking about Doctor Who, ’cause Doctor Who addresses children. And I was talking about how do you handle gay characters in a fiction like Doctor Who
when you are addressing very directly, children. You don’t want it to
be campaigning. You don’t want to be table thumping about it. You don’t
want to essentially tell children that there’s something to campaign
about. You want to say this is absolutely fine and normal. There is no
question to answer. You want to walk right past it, in a way. You don’t
want to… If you say, as sometimes other kinds of literature or movies
might, we forgive you for being gay. You’re just saying you’re gay and
it doesn’t matter. There’s no issue.”“That’s what I was talking about.
Was not talking, I was very much specifically not talking about…”
continued Moffat, clearly passionate about the topic, and frustrated at
the way his words have been twisted, “It is infuriating frankly, to be
talking about a serious subject and to have Twitter run around and say
oh that means Sherlock is gay. Very explicitly it does not. We are taking a serious subject and trivializing it beyond endurance.”[…] “I was talking about representation, as
was Bryan, in quite a serious way. What they did was scale back that
conversation and make it about something extremely silly. And that’s not
helping anyone. I cared a lot about what I said on that panel. I meant
it. And I don’t like it being reinterpreted as something else. [We’re]
not telling anyone what to think. Mark isn’t saying other people can’t
write that version of John and Sherlock getting together. We’re not.
We’re not engaging in a clever conspiracy to write something under the
radar, we’re just writing the show we’re writing.”I clarified, at this point in the conversation, “That’s not the story you’re telling.”
“Yeah, that’s it,” Moffat responds.
“But they can. They can. Once we hand the show to them, it’s theirs and
we’re finished with it. They can do what they like.”
…I don’t know what to make of this, not in the slightest, beyond “I suppose that puts that Johnlock Conspiracy thing to rest” and “whilst I’m not qualified to talk about what counts as ‘good’ representation of gay characters, he…really isn’t either?”