Polyphony on Tumblr: Reading the hate blog as pastiche

Abstract

Tumblr accounts dedicated to criticizing or mocking a text and fandom pose an interpretive challenge. Far from a straightforward display of antifandom, what we find here is a comic pastiche of fragments enabled by the postmodern flatness of the medium. With reference to a group of blogs positioned as antithetical to BBC's Sherlock (2010–), I suggest we can read these pastiches as critique without authority—as a polyphonic surface that undermines both claims to discursive dominance and the dominance of mass media cultural icons.