I’m focusing on my love of canon. Canon is incredibly rich. And I love canon Holmes so much. He’s such a good person, and there is so much I can do with him and Watson (also a gem of a fellow).
ONCE MORE UNTO THE BREACH, DEAR FRIENDS, ONCE MORE
this is gorgeous and i hurt
What a blast from the past! I haven’t seen this post in a while. This is THE post that made me join the fandom. (If anyone was wondering. It’s truly a fandom relic…for me at least).
so here’s the thing. sometime in 30, maybe 40 years, there will be a wildly successful sherlock holmes adaptation in which sherlock and john are gay/bi and in a relationship. it won’t be the first one that does it – they’ll have been queer in every adapatation for decades, to the point where people in their teens and twenties don’t even realise there was a time when they weren’t.
so this show, it will be successful, and it will have a huge fandom, and its fans will start looking into the original stories and into previous adaptations. of course they’ll watch the more recent ones
first, which they probably watched as kids. and they’ll read the acd stories and discuss the homophobia at the time and oscar wilde and all the things we’re talking about, but there will probably be widespread consensus by then that acd always intended them to be read as lovers.
so when they’re done with their weekly watchalongs of the more recent sherlock holmes adaptations, they’ll turn to the classics. they’ll watch granada first, because its fame will have endured, and they’ll see jeremy brett and david burke/edward hardwicke making eyes at each other and smiling and standing just a tad too close and, like us, they’ll see that they intended to play them as lovers, husbands. then they’ll watch rathbone, perhaps, though they’ve been warned of the characterisations. and then they’ll start digging out some of the more obscure things. someone will find howard holmes, and they’ll watch that marvellous domesticity in black and white, they’ll find livanov and solomin and be delighted at the touchy-feely russian husbands, and maybe if they’re really scraping the barrel they’ll watch the dinosaur thing or young sherlock holmes or the endlessly distressing seven percent solution.
and then one day someone will come into the chat or whatever their equivalent will be with this rare thing they’ve unearthed, this hartswood adaptation, some thing the bbc commissioned in the early 2000s, and they’ll be super excited because hey, that’s relatively recent as these things go, “how come we haven’t heard of it? and weren’t these actors pretty big names in their day?
my nan has a picture of martin freeman in her kitchen.”
and a few of you who are young now will be there, fandom elders by then, and like with rathbone, you’ll warn them: it’s het. it’s weird. it’s…. but they won’t listen. “how bad can it be? we made it through the dinosaur one and the veggie tales cartoon, how much worse can this really be?” they’ll say. and they’ll start watching, and like with howard and granada, they’ll be delighted. “look at those glances! those touches! that standing just a tad too close! totally married! we’ve found a treasure here, the first explicitly gay adaptation! i can’t believe we’ve never heard of this before!”
and then they’ll get to series 4. and then they’ll realise that was it. that was the end. and they’ll be shocked, and confused. “but i thought the 2010s were more progressive than this? didn’t they have gay marriage and quite a few out trans and gay politicians?” and you will sigh, and you will tell them what it was like, living through this. and you’ll dig out a link to the wikipedia site for an archaic term that they’ve never heard of: “queerbaiting”. and they’ll read it in horror and maybe write a paper about this reprehensible practice for their social studies or media course. and as some of the worst and most recent perpetrators of this awful thing, they’ll name mark gahtiss and stephen moffatt.
because that’s how they will be remembered. as ignominious footnotes or not at all.
Just because the writers turned out to be assholes doesnt mean i didn’t actually see that love story though???
Now it just feels like the wirter died and never finished it, or went through a suden conversion where they dont like their work anymore, or they got suddenly fired and someone new came in to make some new episodes that no longer feel like canon
It just feels like the show never got renewed for a 4th season so the plotline of pining-sherlock, closeted-john, evil-mary and secretly-alive moriarty just never got to close due to outside influence
I don’t AT ALL feel like ‘they were never going to get together’, ‘you misread it’ or ‘that wasnt the creators intent’
Because honestly i usually don’t give much of a shit about the writer of a story unless im interested in their other work, which i’m decidedly not interested in now.
like
I still read a bunch of ACD stories and saw love there
I still read a million fics and saw love
i still watched TPLOSH and saw love
like
Just because BBC Sherlock is DEAD doesnt mean Sherlock and John dont love eachother?
it just means i never get to SEE it
Which is awful
but we’ve all loved a show that died too early, or who fired its writers
So lets do what fandom has ALWAYS done
Finish the story ourselves
(((i think we just need a new tag))))
THIS. SO MUCH.
We weren’t blind, we listened and we heard right, and it’s up to us to write and paint and draw and blog and imagine the REAL ending to the story.
Exactly!
And dear, write down my words:
In the coming one hundred years, and I’m being pessimistic with the timing, someone’s going to do a new adaptation of ACD’s Sherlock Holmes, and you are going to see, with your own eyes, johnlock being canon in a big screen. It won’t be an art inside the fandom of an interpretation of the canon, that has it’s value, but it isn’t recognize. And believe me, the chances of the people involved with this project being old tjlcers, or johnlockers, aren’t low.
fhjkfj whenever we bond over something so incredibly specific i kinda think about how wild it will be 15-20+ years from now to have these memories and like.. there will be random ppl in the world who will have the exact same memories i have about such specific lil niche events? this is emo, but
Okay so– my mom (who is a pretty big BBC Sherlock fan even though she tries to stay low-key about it) is in China right now for work purposes and she happened upon a BBC Sherlock cafe and I just??
What –
I’m–
Holy shit?? She sent me so many photos of the place and I am in LITERAL agony
LOTS more under the cut because ho boy….there is a lot.
I’ve seen several posts finger-wagging and castigating adults who “encouraged teenagers” to believe in TJLC.
As an adult, let me speak to this. I haven’t talked about “TJLC” specifically much on my blog, because I’m less about the C and more about reading the show as a love story, and hoping for that story to become canon.
I’m old enough that I never quite let my guard down enough to believe wholeheartedly. But I hoped, oh yes, I hoped.
And for you to tell me that hoping is a bad idea, and scold me for hoping along with other people? To tell me that it was wrong to believe change could happen, or to believe in the beautiful love story I saw? Is a much sadder commentary on your state of mind than mine.
I’m not going to accept shame or scolding for hoping or believing, or for hating the final mess of an episode of what was such a big part of my life. (And as @consultingcaitlin said so well, it’s not just about johnlock. The ep was terrible completely separate from that).
And let me add: I am a better person for having hoped, and for having shared that hope with friends. It has actually changed my life, no joke, and freed me to become my actual self, and not the self I was resigned to living within the constraints of “normal.” Finding hope in middle age is a thing I hope you can experience too.
I know Martin did an excellent job, no question. But Benedict gave us the most ethereal, multifaceted, mercurial Sherlock who fell hard for his army doctor. Every nuance of that love, in all it’s joy and agony was displayed in Sherlock’s eyes, on his face and in his delivery of the dialogue. It was a heartbreaking journey into true love. A partnership of great actors. It hooked millions of viewers into this show. We all know true love when we see it.
Ever since my tfp rewatch, I’ve been developing a sneaking suspicion that it might turn out to be one of my favourite pieces of media ever. I am not kidding about that.
This is a direct result of my decision, sometime yesterday, to try applying the mind bungalow keycode to the episode, a la @the-7-percent-solution: Eurus is John’s repressed desire; the episode is John’s tab, etc., etc. It works so beautifully, shot for shot, the whole thing becomes a complex machine ticking its way toward one conclusion: John is desperate for Sherlock to save him, in every possible sense of that verb.
But it isn’t only the fact that tfp works so wonderfully in this reading that makes me love it so much: it’s that you have to dig through the rubble of the text itself to find this beauty. I’ve been struck, since yesterday, with the way that mofftiss
somehow
managed to make a thing that is so ugly on the surface, so repellent, so grotesque, nonsensical, ridiculous, that the primary response to it will be to look away, hate it, and never reconsider it.
In the history of storytelling, this is a very weird achievement. The storytelling me wants to sit down and pull it apart, and try to figure out how it was done. (I suspect the real answer to that question involved a lot of giggling and possibly a few dares, alongside, one hopes, some serious talk about the symbolic network the episode meticulously creates on a subtextual level. But, who knows?)
My point is, I hated tfp so much on first viewing that I returned my theatre tickets. (Still don’t regret that–I’m not making any predictions with this reading, and if the whole thing goes to pieces in the coming weeks, and they leave us with the cliffhanger of textual mess / subtextually dying John, well, that’s not something I want to support with actual dollars, however I might admire it as a singular piece of storytelling.) I could never have imagined that I would pull such a hardcore 180 when, yesterday, I sat down, and went through the episode carefully, beat by beat. (I would never have given it another look if it weren’t for this fandom. So grateful for you all.)
My suggestion is, if you can at all stomach it, give the episode another look, and see how the mind bungalow keycode reading works for you.
I’ll close this already too-long post with some thoughts on what re-reading and reinterpretation can do, and why I’m motivated to promote this particular reading (besides that it’s just, you know, neat). I’m not fully tin hatting, although I want tin hattery to be true, and I’m super excited by the possibilities. I started the rewatch from the point of view that tfp did not sit well with me, and the idea that my experience of it certainly couldn’t get worse with a second viewing. I wanted to see if there was indeed anything to the idea that the episode might make some kind of sense. In other words, I wanted to see if I could make myself happier about it.
This from another iteration of the tfp rewatch post, in response to someone who said that they wished the mind bungalow reading were “true:”
Here is my entire point. It doesn’t have to be true. It just has to work.
An interpretation of a literary text has value insofar as it creates meaning and is consistent with that text. This one does, and is, to a shocking degree. I’m quite pleased with it.
Other readings (like the one I had yesterday, that the show is confusing trash), can also create meaning, and be consistent with the text. Fortunately we get to decide which one we like better. We can let ourselves be persuaded by the stronger reading, or, heck, the one that makes us happy.
The really important thing here is to take it for what it’s worth, and use it if you want, to help you reframe the episode for yourself. That’s what I did today, and it helped a lot. That’s how you become an empowered member of the audience.
I love this. I’ve been pondering the rewatch… I haven’t yet. But this makes me want to.
And… look it always was this intricate thing, and I enjoy that kind of thing. Regular tv bores me now. I got nothing to lose, and a lot to gain.
S4 is a tutorial on how NOT to continue SHERLOCK. Maybe that’s the point.
TFP is the only Sherlock’s episode I haven’t re-watched. Even the slightly strange and swiss-cheesed Six Thatchers had that “privilege”! This new reading, that has been gaining weight this week, may be the only reason that I’ll be able to do it.
(Irony: whether this episode is John Watson’s delirium or not, TFP will be for me, either way, the product of a dying brain. :-P)
I think it’s wonderful how due to this fandom’s incredible capability to decipher and find the beauty in Sherlock episodes that TFP for me has turned from the worst, most horrifying and nonsensical episode ever into the most precious and heart-breakingly clever thing in a matter of days. Even if there is no fourth episode, whenever I re-watch TFP i’ll always watch it with this reading in mind.
Reblobbing for the people who weren’t up in the middle of the night, and to gather this thread together with this comment by @rowanthestrange:
Honestly, with the ‘emotional context’ that this is John, it’s doesn’t just make sense, it is genius. Once you explain it it’s so simple.And it’s not instinctual – I meta’d the idea that this was all in John’s head after TLD, but somehow, on watching TFP I doubted it, even though it made more sense not less. It really showed to me the effect our community can have, and that if we hadn’t powered through it, we wouldn’t have this excellent reading.I don’t know about anyone else, but I needed…
A small press company is interested in publishing Whatever Remains…when I finish it in about five to six years. It may happen, guys! My version is well on its way to being as canon as any other Sherlock Holmes pastiche. ❤
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