Tyger Tyger Burning Bright

I'm going to preface this by saying it is genuinely impressive that the BBC Sherlock fandom or at least a part of it has done so much with Sebastian Moran, it is impressive that he's become considered such a major character in that that thousands of fanworks exist for him or for 'mormor' in that universe and I've even seen some very confused other BBC Sherlock fans asking essentially who the hell is Sebastian Moran and convinced that they've somehow missed something significant somewhere because they don't understand where this Moran came from or how he came to be considered a major character alongside [Jim] Moriarty so often. Some of them seriously seemed to think he must have actually been in the show somewhere and they just missed it, and it is so impressive that some of the fans achieved that kind of 'official status' almost for a character who didn't appear in the show and who was apparently just demeaned and treated as if he didn't matter at all by the show's creators. Also I talked a little in my meta essay The Mythology of Moriarty and Moran about how Moriarty can be viewed as a sort of trickster figure, and I do feel as if a fandom effectively bringing this other character (non-existent in that particular universe) into being to the extent it has led some people to believe he was an actual character in the show, or else it has left a lot of people being very confused about where on earth this guy came from and wondering if there's something wrong with their memory, feels like a very in-character thing for a trickster to do, something that is very fitting for someone connected to Moriarty. It's also just quite funny really that this has happened.

However...

While I think the majority of the fans of that take on Moran do understand where Moran came from and more or less how he came to be in that fandom, there is still a tendency for some of the fans to over-exaggerate the part that that fandom has played in Moran's creation. I have seen some BBC Sherlock fans in the past congratulating themselves and the other BBC Sherlock Moran fans or 'mormor' shippers for inventing Moran - literally inventing him, as if they think he is an original character entirely created from scratch. I can't prove that people ever said anything like this because this was invariably in Tumblr posts by people I didn't know or have any interaction with and those posts have long since either been deleted or got lost in the mists of time, but I know I saw this happen more than once over the years. And there are still even now people talking about how the BBC Sherlock fandom created Moran and erasing other takes on him, erasing the influence of other versions and other adaptations, and erasing fans of other incarnations too in the process really, whether they mean to do this or not.

There is this very annoying tendency for BBC Sherlock still to take over, perhaps less so nowadays with characters such as Holmes and Watson or with pairings like Holmes/Watson but still when it comes to Moran and when it comes to shipping him with anyone, especially with Moriarty but also probably with anyone else too. Not only is the majority of fan-created content for Moran or for Moriarty/Moran (or Moran/most other characters even) for BBC Sherlock, still a lot of Moran fans seem to assume or act as if Moran is only a BBC Sherlock character, or that the ship name refers solely to BBC Sherlock, that it's only a BBC Sherlock pairing. It's still too often treated like not only the most popular or most common version but as if it's the only one that exists or the default, which does seem a little ironic given that Moran doesn't canonically exist in the show.

Just recently my attention was drawn to someone's comment saying "Speaking as someone who was once heavily into BBC Sherlock (whose fandom nearly invented Sebastian Moran to be Jim Moriarty's right hand, despite only being mentioned once in the books and never in the series...)". But this is simply not true! Moran is a character from the Sherlock Holmes canon, he was created by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle and was the main antagonist in The Empty House. He was also referred to with further details added about him in The Valley of Fear and was mentioned in a couple more canonical stories. He was explicitly called Moriarty's friend and "bosom friend" canonically and he also worked as Moriarty's "chief of staff" and was described as the 'first link in Moriarty's chain' amongst other things. There were also multiple details in the canon that suggested he was the 'mirror' character or the narrative foil to Dr John Watson even if Conan Doyle never really expanded on this idea himself. It does feel rather insulting firstly to Arthur Conan Doyle for people to act like they did so much with Moran while claiming (wrongly) that effectively all Conan Doyle did was put in this single 'mention'. Even if Conan Doyle didn't really care about Moran, he created him, he made him an antagonist in one of the stories, he found him interesting enough apparently also to bring him up in another story and further mention him a couple more times. He also created the basis of much of what has been done with Moran both in pastiches/adaptations and in the fandom more generally, with elements such as Moran's devotion to Moriarty or Moran's father Augustus for example. None of this would have happened without Conan Doyle so to act as if Moran is largely (or even sometimes, totally) a BBC Sherlock fandom creation does seem insulting to Conan Doyle to me.

The BBC Sherlock fandom invented a version of Moran specifically to fit in that universe, that's all. It is impressive, but it's not at all as comments like that suggest: they did not invent Moran, they did not invent him being Moriarty's 'right hand' and he absolutely definitely was not only "mentioned once in the books". Some of the fans have also acted similarly about 'mormor' too, or the shipping of Moran with Moriarty, as if the BBC Sherlock fandom was the first to ever consider the idea of shipping the pairing or as if BBC Sherlock is the only version to inspire fanworks for the pairing, which is also totally false. One of the biggest influences on people creating Moriarty/Moran content was undoubtedly Sherlock Holmes: A Game of Shadows (which came out at around the same time as much of BBC Sherlock did), but other fanworks existed for Moran or for Moriarty/Moran before that, and before BBC Sherlock as well, and more has still been created for other universes even more recently too. Even I wrote Moriarty/Moran content before A Game of Shadows came out and before the pairing ever really became a properly established thing in the BBC Sherlock fandom and I wasn't even particularly a Moriarty/Moran shipper then, I just loved Moran and fell hard for him the first time I read the canon and Moriarty/Moran was one of the most obvious relationships involving him.

This acting as if the BBC Sherlock fandom is the only real version or the default does also tend to erase anyone else, any of the fans who like Moran (and Moriarty for that matter) in other versions, including the canon, and especially those not in the BBC Sherlock fandom at all; the fans who just loved Moran and never had anything to do with the BBC Sherlock fandom's 'invention' of 'their' Moran; the fans who create anything about Moran or Moriarty/Moran completely separately or independently from the BBC Sherlock fans. Often we and what we create gets largely ignored or forgotten about, even while we seem to get lumped in with the BBC Sherlock fans and shippers and assumed to be a part of that fandom. Probably plenty of people who like other versions of Moran do also like the BBC Sherlock fandom take on him, and that's fine! But it's not true of all of us and it's so, so frustrating to be constantly either ignored or erased while being wrongly assumed to be a part of a fandom I'm not and to have it assumed that I'm referring to an incarnation of the character I'm not referring to every time I say anything about Moran or about 'mormor'. 

I am not a BBC Sherlock fan, I am not a part of the BBC Sherlock fandom and have never had anything to do with creating anything for Moran or for Moriarty/Moran in that fandom. I've never even consumed the majority of the BBC Sherlock Moran or 'mormor' content, because I don't like the character of Moriarty in the show and I also know that take on the pairing is mostly going to be very different to the takes on the characters and the pairing that I like. Yet people still assume I'm referring to this BBC Sherlock fandom take on Moran when I talk about him, they still assume I'm referring to 'BBC mormor' in many of my posts about Moriarty/Moran. Then when I create proper content, fanfiction, meta, occasionally fanart, for them, things which are more obviously not anything to do with the BBC Sherlock material, it gets largely ignored, even at the same time other people seem to still expect me to be interested in the BBC Sherlock Moran and 'mormor' content. It's disappointing, not just how people like me and our content get ignored or erased but also how the canon and other versions that have done good things with the characters gets erased as well.

I fell in love with Moran just from the canon, literally just from what Arthur Conan Doyle wrote about him. Moran in AGoS then further added to many of my ideas about him and maybe in some ways made me love him even more fiercely, but he was my favourite canonical character even before that. AGoS did also turn me into a diehard Moriarty/Moran shipper and made me also look in much more depth into the canonical material about Moriarty as well, but my initial and overall love for him and them and that pairing came from the canon. It has never had anything to do with BBC Sherlock or even largely to do with any other adaptation. But I think to some extent because of the unfortunate fact that, as a minor character and with Moriarty/Moran being a 'rarepair', older content for him and them has been fairly thin on the ground anyway and then much of what was created has got lost over time, posted on websites that no longer exist, or it's been deleted as people move on to new interests, or it was material that never even got digitised because it predated computers perhaps, so many people have just forgotten that other versions of them exist and that other fans outside of the BBC Sherlock fandom had to have existed in the past and indeed still exist now. And it is just sad how that's happened and how it keeps happening. 

ETA: after writing this I spent a long time going through the works and authors on AO3 and I am definitely one of the people who has written the most Sebastian Moran and Moriarty/Moran works (for any/all universes) in fact quite possibly I am the person who has written the most, at least for content on there. Yet still people act like or assume Moran and Moriarty/Moran is just a BBC Sherlock thing. And I'm not asking people to automatically love my work or anything but I am asking them to please at least stop erasing anything beyond the BBC fandom, not just my work but the work of multiple other people too; please stop forgetting that Moran is not just a BBC Sherlock fandom thing and please stop making it sound as if the BBC Sherlock fans invented Moran or invented him being close to Moriarty or the concept of shipping him with Moriarty, or as if the BBC Sherlock fans are the only people who have ever loved the character or pairing.

I'm officially writing my own modern day(ish) Moriarty/Moran story (novel? Possibly) potentially for publication, I guess the only way to make me actually like modern day stuff for them is to (as always) do it myself so I can see characters I actually still recognise. I started off by writing a modern day fic with them meeting which is still the starting point for this but I'm revising that and expanding on it massively and I actually have most of a plot mapped out? Which is weird because mostly I cannot do plot.
It does seem to be turning out to be significantly darker than most of the stuff I've ever written for them though. Moran in particular is... definitely going through some shit in it.
It also has a weird amount of Holmes and Watson (and probably Holmes/Watson) content in too (weird for me anyway considering how much the fandom made me hate the pairing, but I've become rather fond of them in this already). Also Mycroft, which is also weird cos he is a character who rarely interests me that much. It's also made me oddly interested in the Moran and Watson relationship, particularly with the idea that they were lovers in Afghanistan (it is kind of fucked that Afghanistan still fits in the modern day) and Watson genuinely cares about Moran and wants to save him and help him adjust to a 'normal' life and deal with his trauma and then he gets faced with the realisation that Moran is always going to be his dark mirror and ultimately an antagonist and he's always going to choose the Professor over the 'normal' life and his friendship with Watson. 

And even in the modern day I'm still giving Moran a horse in this.

I saw someone describing 'mormor' as a relationship with "unhealthy violent obsession" and this very effectively demonstrates how we are clearly never talking about the same pairing despite the pairing I love (unfortunately) sharing the same names (sort of) with that pairing.
Yet people still seem to expect me to view them as interchangeable and want to read BBC Sherlock stuff

Should I put that the fairly significant age difference between Jared Harris and Paul Anderson on top of Moriarty being quite upper class while Moran appears to be working class in AGoS may have been deliberately trying to suggest that the more privileged Moriarty was 'exploiting' Moran in more ways than one? (I mean... this was an era of shit like the 'Cleveland Street scandal' and all the stuff about 'telegraph boys being exploited by older usually aristocratic men'). I am tempted to put that. 
I'm not saying any 'intimate' relationship between them is actually dubious - Moran is clearly way over the age of consent and even if he's unable to actually leave Moriarty's employment he seems perfectly capable of standing up to Moriarty in that regard and I think the elements which appear to deliberately parallel the Holmes and Watson relationship do emphasise that the relationship between Moriarty and Moran is a very genuine one - but it does really feel like the decision to make Moriarty more 'aristocratic' than he is canonically while making Moran far more working class when canonically he probably comes from a background of way more privilege than Moriarty, while also making Moran noticeably younger than Moriarty... put that on top of Moriarty never being shown to have a wife or any kind of female 'love interest' and this being set within only 2 years of the Cleveland Street scandal (I never actually realised til now that was SO close to that, which is very interesting for this film and for the canon too)... I think they were deliberately insinuating something there. 

 A very random little crossover (Moriarty and Moran with my original fiction) piece I suddenly had an urge to write yesterday.

Title: The Green Man
Characters/pairings: Sebastian Moran/James Moriarty. Original male character
Rating: teen
Contents/warnings: nothing really
Summary: Moran is somewhat disconcerted by the arrival of a figure from Moriarty's past.
Notes: The context for this is it's a crossover with my original vampire fiction. Moriarty is a powerful vampire, as is Augustus Moran. Sebastian Moran as his son should be half-vampire but would seem not to be, though he's probably repressing a lot. The man who goes by many names (in this case March) is one of my original characters.

Posted on AO3

I'm forever thinking about how ACD created this character he referred to as the friend of Moriarty, who he also referred to as his "bosom friend", who was never said to have a wife or female 'love interest' much like Moriarty in fact, who had unspecified rumours about him that forced him to leave his former job much like Moriarty in fact, who was paid by Moriarty what in its modern equivalent is something like half a million pounds a year for doing apparently not actually very much, who was protected from any suspicion of wrongdoing by Moriarty to the extent that when this known brilliant marksman and hunter played cards with a guy who was inexplicably shot shortly afterwards nobody not the police not Watson not anyone who knew him suspected him, who spent three years pursuing Holmes to try to murder him even though he would seem to gain nothing from doing this except personal satisfaction, who was supposedly a cold blooded killer and yet was 'beside himself with emotion' when he thought he was finally going to kill the man who killed/tried to kill Moriarty, and almost everyone goes 'wow Moran and Moriarty sure do hate each other and one of them probably Moran is guaranteed to murder the other'

 I've realised that if I do do this vampire thing with Moriarty and Moran in it I could put in that other idea for the scene where Moriarty and Moran first meet in which Moran spends a fair portion of that first meeting naked, partly because he's just had sex and partly because if some stranger walks in on him just after he's had sex Moran is not opposed to using his nakedness to try to get the measure of this guy.