Tuesday May 07, 2024

Season 2 Episode 4: Sitcoms and story arcs

Does it matter if the show is more episodic vs narrative for how the ending is perceived by the fandom? How much does a show have to set up in earlier seasons to earn its payoff at the end? Let’s talk about TJLC, or The JohnLock Conspiracy in BBC’s Sherlock fandom, and the Chekov’s gun that was the premise for How I Met Your Mother.

Spoiler Warnings! Want to avoid all spoilers? Use these timestamps to skip them completely:

How I met your mother: 8:51-11:50

Sherlock: 17:25-19:07

**CLARIFICATION**

First, in the previous episode I said that Banana Fish has the highest percentage of works tagged fix it. Although Toast did their best to pull a representative sample, we still can’t say Banana Fish is definitively the top show in this metric. There could well be other fandoms with even higher percentage, but that weren’t captured in that review.

Second, I misspoke and implied that tag wranglers on AO3 add tags to works. That’s not accurate. Wranglers organize tags and sometimes create metatags that can be used to search or filter for subtags, but it’s only authors who can add tags to their own works.

Sorry for the confusion!

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Have thoughts on TV endings? I want to hear them!

https://docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1FAIpQLSeuaL485NpQ3iqinVjq7GUAoId0gPqKU26LpQCntngiGhVHgQ/viewform

Thanks to the voices you heard in this episode (in order of appearance):

Mike Fisher: @fishstandsup

Casey Mendoza: @CaseyMdoza

Matt Kelly: https://www.linkedin.com/in/saintmort/

Elizabeth Minkel: @elizabethminkel

Georgia Carroll: @fansumption

Rob Benedict: @RobBenedict