Fanfiction Fridays: Let’s Draw Sherlock’s Culture Challenge

from the Let’s Draw Sherlock Tumblr

We’ve got something a little different for your Fanfiction Fridays today–time to enjoy a bit of visual media! The fantastic Let’s Draw Sherlock Tumblr runs an art challenge every month, and for July it was a culture swap challenge. As they defined it:

Your challenge is to bring Sherlock Holmes into YOUR OWN CULTURE. You can use the existing character designs of any Sherlock, or, you can create designs all your own. Your interpretation can use any time period in your culture (so if you are British, you just have to use a time period that Holmes hasn’t been commonly set in). If you are a citizen of a country but your parents were born somewhere else, you’re free to use that culture as well, as long as you are very familiar with it. However just because you have ancestry in another country doesn’t mean you should use it; I (reapersun) have Polish blood, for example, but I’ve never been to Poland and know next to nothing about it, so it would be very inappropriate for me to try and create something Polish. We’re also going to leave it to you to define “culture”; most of us would define it by ethnicity or family or how we grew up, but we know there are other kinds of cultures that could be just as interesting.

In my opinion, this challenge was incredibly fascinating and not at all racist or inappropriate (as the moderators had been concerned it might be). Most of the participants even took the time to write a little something about their culture and their rationale for why they had chosen to draw what they had drawn, so the entries were highly educational (and hilarious, because, as people are wont to do, they often ragged on their own culture as much as they extolled it). Catch some of my favorites after the jump.

by gimmesherlock, who’s Peruvian-American

by ihatepizzas, who’s from Vietnam

And the non-country-based depictions of culture were just as fun:

Sherlock in academia, by argyle4eva

Sherlock as a Baptist in a Lutheran church, by dedicatedfollwer467 (I thought it particularly apropos for this blog…)

If you enjoyed these, there are lots more lovely ones for you to check out here!