Don’t you just love how it’s Friday evening and the BBC is totally not going to look at whatever we’re doing on tumblr. And they’re also 100% going to ignore us on twitter.
If you want to bury specific news, you have to release them on a friday evening. (pr people say)
So far I have these people wanting to assist/offer help. If you are not on the list can you just add your url, until we organise it’s one way to keep track of names.
An idea – we can put up a standalone site with designated admins/volunteers to help organize information/submissions specifically relevant to the following areas (WIP – please feel free to suggest/edit):
Operation Norbury(op-norbury.org – I’ve put this domain on-hold for 4 days just in case):
Our Mission
Holmes/Watson since 1887 – Queer reading in ACD canon – Homosexuality in Victorian literature
Queerbaiting in BBC Sherlock – Romantic Tropes used in Sherlock – Queer Coding in Film applied in Sherlock – Examining BBC/Heartwood Marketing Tactics (including Creator quotes) – Meta Collections: (this is where we need to be very specific – how did the narrative/filmmaking techniques/marketing lead fans to believe the eventual culmination of Sherlock/John’s romance – links to resources in the sections above)
Op-Ed
I’m not a web-developer but willing to help setting up a basic WordPress site and assign admins/volunteers to add contents. The site can live on and expand as necessary. Regardless of what happens to the show itself, this will be a great resource for fans of Holmes/Watson, past/present/future. A lot of the materials above already exist, we just need to make them more concise and applicable in serving this particular purpose. We are all intelligent adults, I’m confident we can show the world what we are made of.
Thoughts?
Love it!!!! I will willingly volunteer as an admin. It would be an easy link for people to understand what occurred, excellent idea.
oh great! I just posted about something similiar! (I had more the backend office in mind as a blog, but of course we need a front office as well)
TFP was a shitty episode that resolved none of the plot points it should have, everyone was completely OOC, the quality was nothing more than a trash horror movie, every single canon reference Moftiss put in there was an abomination against the works of Arthur Conan Doyle, and furthermore-
I guess, it would be best to create a tumblr blog to at least collect all ideas about protests etc. and maybe later – when we know how – to also coordinate or initiate specific actions. (As we all have people blocked, it probably would also be good to have a blog open for anyone to follow)
I have operationNorbury and operation-norbury saved for the moment. If anybody wants to set something up, please let me know. Or what would be the best way to moderate a blog with a handful of people? And who would be interested in participating?
just brainstorming here. let me know, if you have any ideas.
If we have a blog, plus the website @darlingtonsubstitution suggested, we could be both a blog for this fandom and a web site for others to find the information. It’s a great idea.
sherlock flirts with john, winks at him. john asks if he’s single, is happy that he is. sherlock is flattered to be asked out but declines
sherlock asks john out on a date. sherlock crashes his date.
sherlock and john fight like a couple. mrs hudson points this out. sally tells john to not hang around sherlock but concedes that he probably won’t heed her advice because ‘opposites attract’. moriarty says that sherlock does have a heart, he kidnaps john the person he knows sherlock cares about. john offers to die to save sherlock.
john’s girlfriend dumps him because she’s jealous of sherlock. she says john is sherlock’s boyfriend, john does not deny this. irene tells john he and sherlock are a couple, john smiles and does not deny this.
john acts like sherlock’s wife in front of the press. the newspapers call john gay in the context of being sherlock’s constant companion. moriarty talks about people that sherlock loves. sherlock immediately says only one name: john.
sherlock says that he will be reunited with john by jumping out of a cake like a stripper at a bachelor party. sherlock thinks that without him john has no life and expects him to still be living at their old flat. by the end of the episode john meets the press with sherlock acting like his doting spouse just like at the beginning of TRF
sherlock drops everything to write his best man speech and plan john’s wedding. sherlock makes a very long speech about how wonderful john is and talks about all the great times they’ve had together. sherlock says john is obsessed with him and that his blog is romantic. john spontaneously gets up during the speech to hug sherlock, everyone claps like they’re the couple who just got married. sherlock’s very prominent role in john’s wedding continues as sherlock plays the violin for john and mary’s first dance. sherlock writes a special waltz for them to dance to. sherlock teaches john how to waltz.
sherlock relapses into hard drug use after john’s wedding and subsequent absence from his life. john dreams about sherlock coming to take him away. john wakes up and answers his door hoping that sherlock is coming to see him. mary is angry that john thinks sherlock is so important that everybody (kate) must know who he is. mary is angry that john thinks it’s been a long time since he saw sherlock, it’s been only a month. sherlock is dying until he remembers that john is in danger and then wills his hear to start beating again. sherlock kills magnussen to ensure john’s safety.
mary is jealous that john is always with sherlock so she decides to go to baker st as a client as it’s the only way she will get to see her husband. nonetheless john soon leaves her again to go off with sherlock. when sherlock tells john that mary is in danger john is not concerned and dismisses the issue. john attempts to have a romantic conversation with mary, sherlock inserts himself into it as if he were john’s love interest.
@thatsmyotterteacozy said: I would include: “Mrs. Hudson and Angelo, two long term friends of Sherlock both assume John and Sherlock are romantically together when they meet John. They don’t believe John when he claims otherwise.”
totally. there are so many more, eh? like, just on my dash right now was a gifset of john and sherlock at buckingham palace where john’s like *looks at sherlock’s crotch* ‘are you wearing any pants?’ like uhm. this is just there, there’s no meta to be had, there’s no subtext
“You ought to remember, Sherlock, I was a soldier! I drilled people.”
“You were a dentist!”
“I had bad days.”
“I always hear ‘drill me in the face’ when you’re talking”
“Somebody loves you. If I had to punch that face I’d avoid your nose and teeth too, but no sane dentist would miss the opportunity to get a new patient”
“Can we not do this this time?”
“Do what?”
“You, being all mysterious with your jawbones…”
Army Dentist John Watson pulling rank in Baskerville:
“Ever heard of a check-up? Drill Sergeant John Watson, 5th Northumberland Fusiliers. Now open wide. That’s an order, Corporal.”
“Major, please. John Watson, 3 years in Afghanistan,
veteran of Kandahar, Helmand and the London bloody Smile Clinic. Now LET
ME EXAMINE THIS MOUTH.”
A Study in Periodontology
The Blind Dentist
The Great Claim
A Scandal in Pannonia
The Canine of Baskerville
The Rootcanal Fall
The Empty mouth
The sign of three lost teeth
His last tooth
I am crying @drinkcodeconfirmed I was thinking of The Empty Mouth too asfasfhagdagh! Loving His Last Tooth too. Here’s mine:
The Empty Mouth
The Sign of Teeth
His Last Crown
…which of course means I have to do this:
and let’s not forget the famous quote from The Abominable Bridge:
I’m an army dentist, which means I can punch out every tooth in your mouth WHILE NAMING THEM!
Mary ruined their show. like completely ruined the ending, ruined the dynamic, ruined everything. wow, still not over it. what a huge fucking mistake that was lmao
It’s always a mistake to heavily feature Mary. ACD only added her in because he felt he had to, and then promptly tried to ignore her. Granada Holmes chose to not include her at all. Ritchie Holmes has her as a source of tension between Holmes and Watson in the first film, and then quickly separates her from the pair once the action gets going, only bringing her back to Watson’s side at the very end.
Unless they were planning on having Mary become the villain (which HLV seemed to suggest they were), they never should have had her feature so heavily.
I really hate that I feel this way, but I agree.
I like Mary, the character. I like writing her in fic, I think Amanda’s performance was consistently great. But I have hated her role in the show since she was first introduced and I think the writers did a very, very poor job handling her character arc.
We were supposed to love her. Then we were supposed to hate her. Then we were supposed to question her loyalties and wonder if she was evil – but that was never really resolved. We were shown that she and John were not in a very happy marriage, but then asked to believe that she was the love of his life, and then ultimately a total self-sacrificing hero. If this arc had unfolded over many, many episodes, maybe it would have worked out. But it went over like whiplash. From episode to episode I didn’t know what to think. And then she was given the high honor of closing out the show?
At that point, I felt like Mary had been a tool to manipulate my emotions, to cause drama and trigger different plot points. She didn’t feel real – she felt very deliberately designed and invented. I also felt like she had been shoved in my face: “now we have a trio! you’ll LOVE it!” well – I’m sorry. I hated it. I’m a childhood fan of Holmes and Watson. It’s not that I don’t like female characters, God no, I’m all for adding women to any story. It’s just that the Holmes-Watson dynamic is unique and I don’t want anyone to fuck with it. And I can’t believe the writers would be so tone-deaf to that.
I agree with everyone here. I like Amanda, and think she is telegenic and an extremely competent actor but she was wedged like a stake between John and Sherlock. It’s interesting how John and Sherlock, as a unit, are just wonderful with the other female characters like Irene, Molly and Mrs Hudson, but Holmes and Watson simply ceased to exist once Mary was introduced as the wife. Apart from her being yet another genius in this odd universe, she stifled the genuine warmth John and Sherlock had in the first two series. Her story and character development by series four bordered on preposterous – what mother of a young baby, unless she is seriously disturbed, throws herself randomly before a bullet? Ghost Mary was even worse. IF she had to be there, I think it would have been far more effective if she didn’t speak, just hung around eerily in the background. I hated her closing speech. I can’t understand why this minor character ended up with such a pivotal role, or why she got to give the last work, and claim John and Sherlock as hers.
Mary’s appearance really ruined the balance of the show, and I think bewildered even athecasual audience, who were attached to the friendship John and Sherlock shared. All of their banter, loyalty and genuine love dissolved when Mary turned up.
I loved Ghost!Mary, because she was John talking to himself and making himself heal the rift with Sherlock.
PostMortemVideo!Mary was obnoxious, though.
All of this ^
all of the above
She could have been fantastic if she’s turned out to be Moriarty. Talk about a cool twist on the canon! But instead, they royally fucked it up and she was just lame. And she was in WAY too much of the show.
I’ve been saying for two years that Mary’s introduction into the show was a cancer that ate away at Sherlock and John’s relationship arc, as well as the progressive character development of Sherlock and John. S4 opened with the “Mary is redeemed” shite, continued with John enraged and half-mad, beating Sherlock bloody because MARY, then moved to TFP with John talking to Himself/Mary, his life in tatters, and that ABSURD Mary-‘splainin’ tag at the end.
I will NEVER believe in Mary’s redemption. It’s ridiculous. As is the new dynamic: Two Men and a Baby. What were Moftiss thinking?????????
I can’t even buy into Ghost!Mary all the way. I know it’s John’s projection of her/John speaking to himself. But still, the visual is that Sherlock and John are being triangulated through a woman–which is traditional queer subtext. Even if she had been explicit–which what I was waiting for, bouncing off the couch screaming at the TV for–”John, FFS, you are in love with him,” something like that–but no they didn’t go there–even if that, I still would have been, really? a woman needs to tell him that? *But* I could have dealt with that as a strategy to get heteronormative buy-in, or as a representation of the stereotypical feminine self, and/or also as a sign of John’s repression. But, that didn’t exactly happen, at least not in the text. It’s still subtext. And that whole conversation was textually about women as the romantic ideal.
But the end, Mary claiming them and framing them, that is just unforgivable on so many levels. More so that the ending was again ambiguous subtext, framed by unnecessary heterosexuality.
@myladylyssa, I am in 100% agreement with you there.
“the seemingly dismissal of the fans by the creators is little irritating. You can’t bait the audience and then get mad when they don’t get what they were expecting. There is a reason Sherlock Holmes books and this show are at the center of queer media critique, and there should be a level of respect for that type of decades-long scholarship.”
INDIEWIRE: “we get clichés, queerbaiting and a modern adaptation that manages to feel more staid than the original.“
“The seeds of the idea that the Sherlock and John relationship could develop into a romantic one were steadily planted never to fully flourish. Subtextually the show referred heavily to The Private Life of Sherlock Holmes, a film that both Gatiss and Moffat rate as one of their favourite adaptations of the original stories – Gatiss going so far as to say to The Guardian that the screenplay formed a template for BBC’s Sherlock. In Private Life, Sherlock Holmes is depicted as a closeted gay man desperately, silently in love with John Watson, medicating with cocaine to hide his pain and guilt. Years after the film’s release, director Billy Wilder spoke of his great regret of never making the relationship explicit “I wanted to make Holmes a homosexual …”
(There’s also the issue of queerbaiting; Sherlock has done a tremendous amount of it, continually turning the issue of John and Sherlock’s friendship into a running, insulting gay joke. If that was never going to go anywhere, as both Moffat and Gatiss have repeatedlystated it would not, it’s hard to see it as anything but a homophobic running gag at the expense of actual queer identity — even though Gatiss, an openly gay man, has done his part to give us complicated queer characters before.)
What their relationship has turned into, instead, is an obnoxious and offensive joke throughout the series, with throwaway character quirks played for laughs. It is difficult for the audience to understand why Gatiss, an openly gay man, could write a perfectly complicated relationship that teases and hints at romantic entanglement, but is nothing more than an insulting running gag.
Here´s a link where you can find more examples about the queercoding of the series using typical romantic TV tropes (with pictures):
In Sherlock´s official Youtube account, the presenter uses the expression “the greatest love story never told” when talking in a video about Episode 2 The Lying Detective, at time code: 2 min 54 sec:
We need concise moments of romantic/sexual tropes used
We need queer coded moments
We need the comments of both writers and cast that suggested johnlock
We need Arwel’s winks and clues
We need to have it addressed coherently and systematically
We need a history of previous Holmes/Watson romance
Sorry if anyone feels as if this is too aggressive, but it’s advocacy with free speech. It’s resistance to discrimination. It’s never going to be pretty.
The response needs to go to all the press outlets in countries were the show is shown
Copies to all advocate groups
We need to contact allies
Anger is good, we just need to use it well, not let it burn out into depression or surrender. We have been treated abominably. So anyone who wants to proceed, let’s do it. We can be the monstrous regiment if they force us to be. We have the proof, we have the metas, we have the intelligence and we have staying power. I know this may not be for everyone, but some of us need to do this. It matters.
Yes, an open letter! a short version with maybe links to the extended version.
We also need pr experts, and people who have contact to the media. We need allies with power or a huge following on social media. We need a strategy. We need visibility.
We need to work as a team, essential. Venting anger on Tumblr won’t help us, we need to take this into the main stream press. We need a secure forum set up to plan and strategise. Anyone want to help?
I’ll help in any way I can
I hate to be funny at a time like this, but can we call it “operation Norbury”? It’ll be easier to track on tumblr and easier to discuss.
I like that name. Sums it all up. So fine with me, plus there is also a hashtag on twitter for that name.
Oh yes, there IS a thing I can do: I can translate into German once its done…
I think the first thing we need are lists of allies in the press and someone who is older/more eloquent to supervise drafting a letter
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