2012·The social era
SuperWhoLock
A crossover between three television series that never crossed over, built entirely by their fans on Tumblr.
You might remember it as GIF fic, Supernatural Doctor Who Sherlock crossover
A trend people joined in with
- SourceNo single original
- MediaNot held by ViralWorld
What this was
Supernatural, Doctor Who and Sherlock share almost no canonical connection. Their fans built one anyway: art, fiction, cosplay, and a form largely native to Tumblr called the GIF fic — a short narrative told in sequenced animated GIFs, with dialogue in the captions, assembled from three different shows' footage.
It first appeared in 2012, during the social era.
It is the defining artefact of Tumblr at its height, and the clearest example of a fandom producing a text that has no author and no source. The GIF fic in particular is a genuinely novel narrative form invented by an audience rather than an industry, and it exists because Tumblr's interface made sequenced images the natural unit of a post.
SuperWhoLock dominated Tumblr into the mid-2010s and then declined abruptly, which is itself instructive about how fast a platform's centre of gravity moves. Media scholars have since studied it as a case of fans combining fandoms rather than texts, and the fandom's largely young, female and LGBTQ composition is central to most serious accounts of it.
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Related
Nothing related yet. Relationships are recorded where evidence supports them, not inferred from similarity.
Behind the recordWhere it came from
There is no original to identify: this spread through many separate posts at once rather than from a first one. ViralWorld holds no copy of it either — what it was, when it spread and what people called it is the record.
Nothing here is claimed to be the first version of this, because research established there was not one — it appeared in many places at once.
Not established. This index only names a creator where the evidence supports it.
- What happens
- Supernatural, Doctor Who and Sherlock share almost no canonical connection. Their fans built one anyway: art, fiction, cosplay, and a form largely native to Tumblr called the GIF fic — a short narrative told in sequenced animated GIFs, with dialogue in the captions, assembled from three different shows' footage.