Mary could have been used to show that your entire purpose in life doesn’t have to be to settle down, find yourself a good man, get married, and have his child. She did not have to desperately crave a normal life.
Molly could have been used to show a woman who fell in love with a man who didn’t love her back, who pined, and then simply got tired of consistently being used and degraded and properly moved on. She did not need to constantly chase after a man who was in no way good for her.
Irene could have been used to show a woman and a man simply enjoying each other’s company – no sex, no romance – simply two people matching wits and smirking about it and just enjoying the game. She did not need to be the unavailable sex object – I mean, lesbian – that eventually gets seduced by the right man.
I don’t want to get involved in the drama but I just want to say that there were So Many Issues with s4 and 99% of them have nothing to do with johnlock, so please don’t reduce the entire argument to that just because you don’t ship it.
People have legitimate, reasonable issues with this series that merit discussion and to throw the “you just wanted them to be together” argument in our faces is to ignore all of that in favour of blind faith in the show.
One big reason why complaints by Johnlockers get reduced to their ship is because in all of their complaints about this season, not one of them is about the treatment of the women on the show. In my opinion, it delegitimizes your argument if you’ll complain about everything from Mycroft’s personality changes to the throwaway use of the Garrideb brothers but don’t mention anything about
Mary being killed for genuinely no reason other than to create tension between Sherlock and John
Not actually showing the grief over her death for anyone other than Sherlock and John (I know at the end of the day this show is about these two men but this was a great opportunity to show them that the world they live in doesn’t actually revolve around them by showing the grief of Molly Hooper or Mrs. Hudson.)
Having Mary, never once, mention her child in those stupid fucking DVDs. Everything about her character post-death was to bring Sherlock and John back to being bffs.
What was the point of having Rosie exist at all? Just to make Mary’s death sadder? John barely spent any time with that child and there wasn’t even the casual explanation of “It’s just too hard to look at her. I keep seeing Mary and remembering that I failed her….” blah blah blah psychology and grief.
Molly. Fucking. Hooper. Has done literally everything in the world for both Sherlock and John. Helped save Sherlock’s life. Has been there for him through multiple relapses where he puts his life (again, of the man she canonically loves) at stake for a game/case/experiment. But she’s always there. For John she’s also become a close enough friend to warrant being a godmother to his daughter, and probably is the one to babysit her the most while John does his brooding. And what is she reduced to? A very painful and humiliating scene that was almost a lot worse. Then utterly dismissive and outright shitty comments by Moffat about the emotional impact that scene had on that character.
There was no bridge between the ILY scene and the end of TFP when she prances into 221B, beaming?????
Mummy Holmes was in like two scenes and less than three lines to express the loss, confusion, anger, heartbreak, and betrayal over what happened with Eurus. It was most definitely not enough.
Two of the three villains this season were women.
No Sally. No Anthea. No Irene.
Just Mary (fridged) Molly (devastated) and Mrs. Hudson (practically a walking joke)
Frankly, if the complaints are longer than three paragraphs and don’t include even a mention about Mary or Molly, I straight up won’t read it. Because I feel like that was a major problem in s4. Not the biggest, by any stretch of the imagination, but they absolutely deserve to be acknowledged amongst the complaints.
I appreciate your point @mydarlingsarah (it won’t let me tag you, sry), but these are things that get discussed and complained about in the Johnlock fandom. These things have to be acknowledged, because this season was so misogynistic and still there are people telling me I should “stop whining about two fictional character not making out on screen”. Of course I’m dissapointed because I have been queerbaited, but what I find far more distressing is the answer of some people to my valid critique. As if we should accept everything TPTB do and support them no matter what just because we are in a fandom. There has to be critique! So I agree with all of your points of the horrible treatment of women in the show except for one: that we Johnlockers would get reduced to our ship because we wouldn’t voice that criticism. Many beside me did. And all too often there are responses we should stop whining. Sometimes remarks that we should accept that Sherl0lly is canon…? And while I accept other ships (I 100% think Sherlock is portrayed as a gay man, but they left it ambiguous, so think what you wanna think) I am shocked by the way a few Sherl0lly shippers ignore the bad treatment of Molly just to see their ship as canon. Don’t get me started on how the Mary’s story arc was reduced to… whatever the hell that was. I have voiced serious complaints about s4 besides the queerbaiting: – The horrible misogyny. My points were mostly about Mary and Molly but your arguments are very good. – The way they portrayed the violent outburst of John towards Sherlock. It was accepted because of Sherlock’s behaviour and never resolved. It showed that you should accept violence if you think you deserve it and that is such a horribly wrong and destructive message. Actually this was shown again by Sherlock forgiving Eurus. You do not have to accept and forgive the violence that was directed towards you to be conaidered “a good man”. It just made me sick. – The fact that they had explicitely queer villains without explicitely queer heros to balance it out. If just the bad people in your story are queer (oh btw, they actually connetcted Eurus’ queerness to rape.. nice touch) the message you send is pretty clear. – The way they portrayed mentall illness. Just what exactly did they want to show through Eurus? I don’t understand her character the slightest… what illness should she have to get mental superpowers? Why would she get imprisoned like a mad women in the victorian era? Sure, show mentally ill people as something dangerous and inhuman, what could possibly go wrong?
And still the only answer the BBC complaints team sent was about queerbaiting. It was terribly disrespectful. And still I see people being smug about this. And still I see people saying that the ones complaining are embarassing. That they’d put shame on fandom.
This is not a problem of Johnlockers not reacting to the misogyny. This is a problem of people reducing the criticism of Johnlockers to their dissapointment of being queerbaited.
It makes me so angry that Mark took the trouble to send a poem to the Guardian because his show was compared to James Bond but he won’t bother answering heart-broken fans, instead just blocking us like he’s swatting away a bunch of mosquitoes
male author vs. predominantly female authors
Yeah. This baffles me.
Probably he realizes that the James Bond comment/critic was ridiculous and easily dismissed whereas the heartbroken fans after TFP have valid points.
I’m afraid, it might be exactly the other way around. In the male author he sees his social and intellectual equal. In the female authors he sees nothing he wants to be bothered with. They’re female, they’re fans – boths facets that he seems to associate with “no my equals”.
“being mary watson was the only life worth living” the fact that this is an actual line makes me furious
I remember when TAB came out and several people on my dash were less than happy with the message of the episode. Sure, it used a fantastic tale of murder suicide to talk about the beginning of the feminist movement and the lack of value ACD placed of female characters. That sounds good right? The show runners touted it as a feminist episode. Except our main characters remain male.
John is deliberately a period-appropriate sexist.
The main dialogue explaining everything comes from Sherlock and Mycroft. Mycroft states that we must let the women win. Why thank you Mycroft you will allow it? Is that a royal ‘we’ or do you speak for all men? You are too kind. Cue my fucking curtsy. The whole thing smacks of classic British Imperialism’s idea of moral justice. The white men will bring us freedom, culture, and justice. The ending reveal with Sherlock was Mansplaining at it’s finest.
Every great cause has martyrs; every war has suicide missions – and make no mistake, this is war. One half of the human race at war with the other.
The invisible army hovering at our elbow, attending to our homes, raising our children, ignored, patronized, disregarded, not allowed so much as a vote.
… but an army nonetheless, ready to rise up in the best of causes, to put right an injustice as old as humanity itself. So, you see, Watson, Mycroft was right. This is a war we must lose.
Thanks Sherlock for letting us know.
For some TJLC fans the only reason this episode was acceptable was as a metaphor for the modern LGBT agenda. It’s okay that Mofftiss were so clueless to womens’ right to star in their own narrative if it was overlooked in their quest to make a statement about modern civil rights. A tiny miss-step in their endless exuberance.
Except if it isn’t a story about LGBT representation then all the times the female character’s were used as tools of the male narrative become unforgivable to people who felt they were fans of the show. The show they thought they were watching isn’t there. It isn’t just about the lack of LGBT representation it’s also about the unforgivable use of female characters. As Moffat explains about Molly in the last episode,
“I can’t see why you’d have to play that out. She forgives him, of course, and our newly grown-up Sherlock is more careful with her feelings in the future. In the end of that scene, she’s a bit wounded by it all, but he’s absolutely devastated. He smashes up the coffin, he’s in pieces, he’s more upset than she is, and that’s a huge step in Sherlock’s development.
“The question is: Did Sherlock survive that scene? She probably had a drink and went and shagged someone, I dunno. Molly was fine.”
In short her feelings aren’t as real, as deep, or as important as Sherlock’s. They never were. Nothing new. Just as Leia once comforted Luke about one dead guy he just met, it seems as far as popular fiction is concerned, we haven’t moved forward since the late 70′s.
Sherlock Fandom Archive 