When journalists and fans gathered in London last month for an advance screening of the first episode of Sherlock’s third season, show creators Steven Moffat and Mark Gatiss joined costars Benedict Cumberbatch and Martin Freeman for a Q&A. The moderator handed them a popular Sherlock/John slash fan-fiction story she’d found online and, after assuring everyone that it wasn’t racy, encouraged them to read from it. Of course, it was racy, and things came to a sudden halt the moment the actors stumbled upon the first X-rated paragraph.

The press went nuts. The author was mortified. Reporters at the screening recounted everyone’s palpable discomfort, and one paraphrased Cumberbatch dismissing fanfic as works of absurd fantasy. The entire affair was regrettable.

“That was a moment when the boundaries [between fans and creators] broke down with really unfortunate results,” says Lynn S. Zubernis, a professor at West Chester University in Pennsylvania who, with Katherine Larsen, wrote Fangasm: Supernatural Fangirls, a book about the pair’s experiences in fandom.

Since the book’s publication in October, the two writers have vaulted to the forefront of the growing study of fan culture: How it has evolved, what purpose it serves, and what its growing profile means for the millions of people whose fervor for certain cultural properties borders on terrifying. The incident in London, they say, was more than uncomfortable — it was quite telling. Regardless of how much influence fans may appear to wield or how close the fans and creators may seem to be in the era of Twitter and meet-and-greets, there is still a chasm between the people who make shows and the people who ardently love them.

And it’s a chasm that can sometimes make fan service feel like condescension.

Sherlock’s Eternal Tease

Spoilers for series 3, episode 1 of Sherlock follow.

The long-awaited return of Sherlock, which premiered in the United States earlier this week on PBS, was full of Easter eggs for fans. The most prominent was a cut-away scene in which Sherlock and his rival Moriarty nearly kiss; it was a scenario imagined by a minor character, a meta-fangirl of sorts, about what might have happened when Sherlock supposedly threw himself from a hospital roof, seemingly to his death, in the final scene of last season.

The episode made the show seem chummier than ever with its fans, but Zubernis and Larsen say Sherlock’s onscreen acknowledgment of fandom is little more than lip service.

“There’s a real difference between a fan-producer relationship where you see fundamental changes made or actual things happening in the show that are because of fandom, and fan service,” says Larsen, who teaches English at George Washington University. “They were never going to allow that kiss actually happen, but they were like, ‘Oh, yeah, we know that you’re talking about this online, so here, we’ll dangle this carrot in front of you.’”

That tease is made all the more frustrating by the unique way that Sherlock engenders such adoration. As a British serial, its three seasons contain just three 90-minute episodes each, and each hiatus lasts two years. That’s a long time for fans to build communities based on their mutual longing.

“It’s not like a show that has a 22-episode run where they’re filming new episodes as the fans are weighing in and saying, ‘We can’t stand this character, we hate this story arc,’” says Larsen. “They’ve filmed everything before we ever get a chance to say, ‘We don’t like the way this was filmed; I don’t think you should go down that road.’ There’s nothing we can do about it at this point.”

Complicating the fandom/creator dynamic even more, Moffat has on many, many occasions derided his shows’ ardent fans as nerdy and dismissed their criticism of his portrayals of women and sexuality, particularly the homoerotic subtext of the Sherlock/Watson relationship. “He’s been doing it since practically the first scene of the first season,” Larsen says of the show’s gay jokes. “He was doing it before there were fans of the show to do it for him. He did it in the first episode.” When the fandom isn’t there yet, is it teasing—or just trolling?

Do Fans Expect Too Much?

Increasingly, showrunners and networks maintain communication with fans because, particularly in an age where complaints are so easily visible on social media, there’s a practical advantage in knowing how fans feel. Awareness of a dedicated fandom builds dedicated viewership and long-term success, as the show Supernatural has demonstrated during the past decade.

Moffat’s fraught relationship with his fandom is doubly strange when you consider that Sherlock is itself fan-fiction, adapted from Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s original turn-of-the-century series. In fact, those stories were themselves influenced by fans, who, distraught by Doyle’s killing of Holmes in “The Final Problem” in 1893, successfully convinced him to revive their hero.

Instances like that, or Charles Dickens’ revision of Great Expectations’ ending after a public outcry, Larsen says, “are fan-producer relationships where there’s an actual action on the part of the producer that changes the outcome—as opposed to a nice relationship that’s collegial and everyone enjoys talking and chatting, but it’s not going to turn into action on the producer’s part.” The latter is still what the BBC and Moffat have with Sherlock.

Of course, the tangible effect of fandom is hardly restricted to Doyles and Dickenses past. In 1968, fans organized a grassroots letter-writing campaign that saved Star Trek from obscurity; much more recently, Jericho fans ran a hilarious peanut campaign to keep their beloved show on the air in 2007. Still, Larsen and Zubernis say it’s important to understand the circumstances under which fans ever see their influence playing out in the life of their show.

“The letter-writing campaign and the peanut campaign and those things were [instances in which] fans and the creative people were on the same side, the people who created the show, write the show, joining the fans against the powers that be,” says Zubernis. “That’s a different kind of influence than trying to tell the creative team which direction to go.”

Larsen agrees. “There’s a danger of overestimating the impact fans have on creators,” she says. “If you’re a writer, you’re not going to cede authority to a fan.”

Business Never Personal

The conversations Zubernis and Larsen have been having with the press, with showrunners, and with fans themselves are coming, they say, at a time when giving fans what they want—or at least creating a relationship in which producers give fans what they think they want—has become a massive, incredibly lucrative business.

“It’s profitable for [the producers], which is why things like Comic-Con have gotten out of hand,” says Larsen. “It’s become this big selling festival of consumerism: ‘Come buy our products, we’ll give you sneak peeks, things to take home with you.’ It’s not because they’re so into the fans. They’re into the fans’ buying power.”

Nevertheless, it’s becoming harder to fake it; Larsen and Zubernis say producers need to start treading more lightly when it comes to superficial titillation, because fans are quick to smell a rat. “That kind of affectionate, ‘nod-nod, wink-wink’ fan service that shows started to do a while ago has been done for so long that it causes a rift sometimes between fans and producers,” says Zubernis. “People now are like, ‘You know, if you’re gonna tease us, where’s the follow-through? Why wouldn’t you follow through? Is this [gay joke] homophobia, is this [joke about female characters] misogyny?’ People are starting to question that a little more.”

As friendly as that fan-creator relationship may seem, it’s actually a delicate thing. And in the end, Zubernis and Larsen say, it’s mostly artifice. “[The relationship] seems a lot more reciprocal and closer than it is, which is an artifact of the way social media, especially Twitter, makes fans feel,” says Zubernis. “I always stay on Twitter when a Supernatural episode is airing, and the actors and the writers and directors are usually on [Twitter], and I see what it does to fans when somebody answers their tweet. There’s a need, I think, to feel like, ‘They’re listening to me; I’m important.’ That’s a normal psychological response, but it’s not actually true; it’s wishful thinking. It’s a constructed intimacy that’s not really intimate at all.”

And there have been few better examples of that than the unfortunate fan-fiction incident in London: At the end of the day, fandoms are still often joke fodder. “I think it was a really good indication of where the power still lies,” says Larsen. “If anyone is going to get hurt in the fan-producer relationship, it’s going to be the fan.”