1) There are endless, ENDLESS things that could go wrong with a CBS drama about Sherlock Holmes with Lucy Liu as Rule 63 Dr. Watson. From all the things that usually plague female characters and, especially, WoC characters in western entertainment to the show just being plain shitty.
2) None of these things is how now there won’t be pandering queer subtext. Literally none of them. Not a single one of them.
3) And I, personally, refuse to worry about any of these things until we know more than the fact that Joan Watson exists and is played by Lucy Liu.
4) Holmes and Watson should, indeed, very probably be the same gender and as such I am completely open to complaints about the egregious casting mistake that has been made here, and I am totally down with all campaigns to recast Holmes as Indira Varma or someone else but mostly Indira Varma.
5) Casting a WoC as Watson is not an “attempt” to be more progressive than all the White Dude Watson/White Dude Holmes adaptations brimming with never, ever, ever, ever to be fulfilled queer subtext. It just straight up is more progressive.
6) The show not starring two white dudes does not actually preclude it from having queer subtext or, GASP, actual queer content. Contrary to what fandom would have you believe, queerness does, in fact, still exist even when it is not solely concerning two white dudes.
7) There is a chance that homophobia motivated the decision to make Dr. Watson a woman so that the show could easily avoid having to deal with homoerotic subtext common to Sherlock and other narratives primarily focused on male homosocial relationships. However, given the widespread willingness to shamelessly tease queerness with regard to such relationships, the success this tactic has met with in terms of drawing and establishing dedicated audiences, and the fact that major networks don’t actually, here in reality, go out of their way to make iconic dude characters into ladies (and non-white ladies at that) so as to up the lady to dude ratio in their shows, I sincerely doubt it.
8) Even if said decision was made for homophobic reasons the end result is still markedly less homophobic than the show/creators/network constantly pandering and then screaming BUT NO HOMO.
9) Because no one involved in this is even fucking PRETENDING that Watson and Holmes would have actually been gay had Bland White Dude X been cast as Watson, they did not actually remove a queer couple and replace it with a straight one.
10) So stop concerntrolling. And also shut up.
I said it in the tags of another post but I’ll go ahead and put it in the text of this one: Elementary/Sherlock fandom - or at least the segments of you that are concern trolling about this? There’s something really, really gross about claiming that an alleged desire for actual LGBT representation is underpinning the hand-wringing re: “Oh, no! A girl!Watson?” when what’s really going on is fretfulness that something might get in the way of a potential slashy subtext. Slashy subtext =/= actual queer representation. Queer representation would be actual queer text. If you (general, concern trolling Elementary/Sherlock fandom ‘you’) just want your slashy subtext to be unimpeded, say so. That’s a hell of a lot less disingenuous than pretending that your outrage that CBS didn’t cast White Male Actor #2 as Watson has anything to do with actual social justice.
