I was wondering, if, IF they did a complete 180 in S5 and made Johnlock canon either by erasing all of S4 or actually have them work through their issues, would any of you who have rejected S4 and the show go back to it? Would you ship it again?
I guess the last part is me asking myself because as it stands now, I can’t ship Johnlock anymore in this adapation. And I don’t have an answer to this at the moment. I’m really not sure I want to invest my heart into this show again.
@twocandles I never stopped shipping it, because I’ve just sort of taken the characters and done what I want with them Post-S4, and all my fannish engagement has been with fan-created works along the same vein. Sometimes that means a fix-it. Sometimes that means ignoring all or some of S4. I’m pretty flexible, other than the fact that I personally can’t interact with content that accepts TFP in any way.
But then, I also shipped it before BBC Sherlock, because I had loved the Granada series and the ACD canon first, before I ever saw BBC Sherlock. I’ve always shipped it. I always will. Plus, I liked what Martin and Ben did with their versions of John and Sherlock, I liked the idea of plopping them down in modern day London, and meeting them early on, giving them a chance to grow into the men they would later become (which disappointingly the show dropped the ball on, imo). So I still like to play with the BBC characterisations in a limited and adapted way.
As for the show itself, there is nothing that could bring me back. I feel like the writers have made it clear that they always saw the idea of John and Sherlock being an actual couple as nothing more than a tease or a joke they would play to until they couldn’t play to it anymore (which they later admitted they possibly took too far). In fact, Mark Gatiss had been outright stating they had no intention of going there since Mumbai ComiCon in Dec. 2015, and reiterated that point here during a Tumblr Q&A just before S4 aired.
In the end, I think it was clear that they decided to go the TPLoSH route, of pining gay man, hopelessly in love with an indifferent, and straight ‘friend’, which doesn’t interest me, and which I feel runs in direct contradiction to the way the story had been presented all the way up to TAB, as well as the way the actors had been interpreting the characters’ relationship in earlier seasons.
Finally, there was the way Moffat and Gatiss treated their young queer and/or female fans, and the way the BBC chose to market the show, knowing it was never going there, as well as the way they treated people who complained about the queerbaiting, or general loss of writing/production quality post-S4.
In short, I don’t trust the writers or producers at all anymore, and don’t want them to ever get another cent of my money. So no, I would not go back to watching or loving any new seasons of the show, no matter what they do with it. At this point it would just feel like they were back-peddling in response to fan outrage in an attempt to make a few more bucks. But, really the whole thing is sort of a moot point anyway, as I don’t think that the writers have any interest in or the intention to write any more seasons (they’re moving on to Dracula), not to mention that I think it would be a very hard sell to their very busy and successful leads, after the mediocre critical reception of S4.
So, if you can find a way to make John and Sherlock your own and keep shipping them that way, then I wish you all the joy in that, and if you can’t, if you just want to wash your hands of the pairing forever because it’s too painful, I can understand that too.
I continue to ship them, because I’ve always shipped them, and I’ve made my peace with how I want to engage with the content in the BBC adaptation. It works for me, and I imagine I will continue to engage with fan-created content set in that universe for as long as fans are creating it. But I’m leaving those involved with the creation of the show itself behind me.
I can’t imagine a season 5 that would make me want to watch again (and I don’t think there’ll be one.) There was very little in season 4 I liked and nothing at all I loved. The characterisation of both Sherlock and John strayedtoo far from what I fell in love with in the first seasons. So I’m here for fan content – be it ignoring season 4 or fixing it, as some fantastic fic writers have been able to do.
Thank you so much to everyone who has commented here! I’m probably forgetting people: @very-grumpy-bisexual @lediona25 @readingfanficsblog@elskudani @inthenameofunrequitedfeels (ah yes, thanks tumblr for being useless)
I hadn’t even thought about it much when I yelled this question into the void but @sussexbound you bring up so many important points. One of the biggest is that I also can’t support Mofftiss anymore. These two arrogant bastards are so full of themselves but then show a complete lack of respect for parts of their fanbase, I never want to see their poison again. I’m still pondering whether I want to yell about them constantly to warn others or just ignore them entirely but that constant level of negativity might not exactly be good for me.
I did realise though that whenever I’ve abandoned a show in the past, no matter what the reason, I usually didn’t go back to it. And in this case I’m actually thinking of selling my merch, which I haven’t even done with the other things I’ve lost interest in, so it’s definitely a very bad case. And I am looking forward to the third Ritchie Holmes movie, if that is still happening but I also need to force myself not to get my hopes up too high. Some of the old adaptations/shows have a special place in my heart but I also feel like I need a very big break away from Sherlock Holmes adaptations in general, Mofftiss have put a complete damper on my enjoyment of the entire franchise that I haven’t been able to shake off yet.
I don’t think I’ll ever enjoy Johnlock again in this version, even if S5 happens and isn’t a complete mess. The damage has been too severe. I do assume that no Johnlock will ever happen in this show and while I’m sure it’s vaguely possible to still ship them in a future series for myself I think that’s not happening. It sucks that I can’t even enjoy fanworks anymore but it’s probably better that way, I wouldn’t have been able to move on otherwise.
So I have a lot of opinions about this, shocking right?
First of all, I never stopped shipping Johnlock, even in this version. I honestly just ignore S4 exists at all. And the fandom has ALWAYS written this show better than Mofftiss have. The fandom wrote better resolutions to the pool showdown. The fandom wrote better resolutions to the fall. The fandom wrote better resolutions to Mary shooting Sherlock and the end of S3. And the fandom has been doing their best to make something out of the trash heap that was S4. I really personally just can’t enjoy post S4 fics. I don’t like Rosie, I don’t like the resolution of what they did with Mary, I don’t like anything that happened in TLD. I don’t like Churros.
Now onto the real question. Would I watch S5? Will I be happy if Johnlock happens then? Here’s some possible ideas of how S5 could go down and how I feel about them.
1. They continue as they are. Everything we saw happened just like we saw it. John and Sherlock continue on as friends. John is raising his daughter. John doesn’t live in 221B. They solve crimes. John still has his ring on and mourns his awful dead wife. Maybe they’ll even still have AA narrate and send her dumb fucking videos? God that sounds awful. I’m not interested, thanks. Even if they decided to go the johnlock route after all that, it would be so hallow, it would feel so cheap.
2. The whole E/M/P thing, it’s all a coma or a dream. It starts from ASiP or after the fall or after the shooting, whatever. I can see why people cling to this idea so strongly, Wouldn’t that be nice if we could go back and erase everything and have a fresh start and all the bullshit in S3 and 4 weren’t what they seemed. I just don’t believe it’s possible. What are they going to do? Cake Ben and Martin in makeup to hide their age? CGI their faces to make them look years younger? Other than the fact that I hate the whole “it was all a dream” plot line, it’s just bad and lazy writing to make a whole season fake. And for what? Just so you could have your moments of shock or surprise just to erase it all later? Again, no thanks.
3. Then there’s the unreliable narrator theory. That things are not what they seems in S4 and didn’t actually happen or not the way we think they did. Now, while I actually LIKE this theory….in well, theory, I again sadly just don’t see this actually happening. I don’t think it’s doable either. And honestly, how awful S4 was to sit through would not make this worth it for me. I think it makes for great fic though.
And then my own personal dream situation #4. Mofftiss are both fired and shamed for their awful writing. The show is given to people who actually care about the characters and a coherent plot and we forget S4 ever happened and someone new makes everything right. I just love Ben and Martin as these characters so much, it’s hard to let them go.
NOW to be 100% honest I don’t think there is any way to redeem this show. John Watson is my favorite character. I will NEVER forgive Mofftiss for what they did. TLD was an utter pile of crap and they should be ashamed of themselves for not only what they did with John but how they treated Sherlock as well. I don’t think there is any coming back from their mess. I’m not interested in anymore of Mofftiss crap. I will not be watching anything else they write or are show runners of. They can go fuck themselves.
And to agree with @sussexbound I can also never forgive Mofftiss for how they treated fans. They are two arrogant douchebags who don’t deserve the fans they have. BBC can also go straight to hell for how they baited the fans with their adds and their bbc three tumblr (I don’t give two fucks if it was just a fan of the show having fun, it was irresponsible the BBC should have NEVER let that go on). BBC Sherlock will hopefully be a lesson to others of how NOT to do things in the future.
BUT I’m such a huge supporter and fan of the fic writers and the artist who are doing things right. Thank jebus for you all. I still ship Johnlock. I still love these characters. Honestly the show has been an utter mess since S3 and the fandom has always had to clean up Mofftiss messes with their dumb plots and poor writing. I think I’ll always love John and Sherlock and I’m not going to let Mofftiss ruin something I love. They can kiss my ass.
Raise your hand if you’ve adopted a unappreciated character that the writers clearly didn’t love and decided to love them with all your heart because they deserve more than what they fucking got in canon.
Did you mean: all of the characters in BBC Sherlock
There’s some great replies to that thread about John “choosing Mary” and whether it holds up to scrutiny or represents a inherent contradiction in the narrative.
As an aside, for me the Mary arc drives home for me that ACD dispatching Mary was a mark of realizing (even if out of something we might less generously call laziness or a lack of imagination) that he had created such a tight formula with his protagonists that Mary was a disruption that was easier doing away with than having to constantly accommodate.
It was easy for Moffat and Gatiss to characterize this as sexist and then “fix” it. But that remains for me itself not half as cut n dried as one might think.
I’ll not rehash old territory but: Moffat and Gatiss didn’t pick up on a very appealing feature of the stories – some seriously kick ass women clients and their parts in a series of gothic horrors. Who for their time were daily fighting to survive independently in a system built to ensure they didn’t have independence. There are some truly heroic women despite their victimization. COPP remains for me a marvel in this respect – I still feel a thrill of admiration every time she chooses to take the position even though she knows something weird is afoot. She has courage. She is not fearless. But she acts anyway. And she’s not the only one.
Kitty in the illustrious client is another personal favorite. These women feature throughout the short stories – SOLI and SPEC too: you are a woman, you know something is wrong and have reason to fear for your safety or even your life and you choose to walk back into the “lion’s den” despite your fear. For these women the danger of the domestic realm is a key element in the gothic sensibility of the canon.
The women in Mofftiss collective imagination are there all right but to my mind there is a quintessential “Gibson girl” spunk missing that ACD for all his era-conforming faults captures so brilliantly and often with incredible economy.
I remain resolute that they made a massive error in trying to redeem Mary. They didn’t earn it.
And I know this will probably make me a huge outlier but the more time passes the more I find their evolving backstory for Mrs Hudson ridiculous. Their version of her shifts from being a truth teller into something she doesn’t need to be and with all the subtlety of a sledgehammer. The idea that ACD didn’t think Mrs H. had the capacity for bravery is ridiculous- had they not read EMPT? She becomes in BBC Sherlock then a parody. Her best lines are when she is pointing out the emotionally obvious. Why is her ability to care and forgive and always speak her own mind not enough? She’s like a mirror to Norbury. And alongside Mary and Eurus I can’t help but think they really just don’t get something about writing women. (A charge often made about Moffat I have in the past resisted.)
I love the canon because its 2 protagonists are amazing. The stories don’t need more heroes. But they are there. Women bucking against a system. Surviving.
In a contemporary setting so many of the women get pushed into extremes rather than sharing that same basic resilience. Molly in TAB is a shining but perhaps (because it’s set back in ACD’s era) telling exception to the rule. It was a stroke of genius to have her disguise herself as a man to reach her potential.
By having in Eurus their actual “Moriarty” [big bad] be a woman, Mary had then, I presume, in their mind to be a mere decoy villain, along too with Moriarty. (Despite him being such a cleverly drawn character that far exceeds his canon incarnation.)
Had they not created Eurus they could have followed through with Villian!Mary. And I stand by my longstanding pun:
John Watson was literally “sleeping with the enemy” and didn’t know it.
And that is where the perils faced by the canon heroines and the gothic aesthetic of fear become ripe for mining:
His domestic world away from 221b was primed for the deep gothic terror of the canon: you are not safe in the house that circumstances have made your home. You are trapped by circumstance in the place you *should* be safest. That is the scariest thing to Sherlock Holmes of canon. [See his incredible speech in COPP. TLDR: At least in the darkened foggy alleys of London someone might hear you scream.]
And in that “home” you will slowly realize something is wrong. The particular uncanny sensation of “unheimlich” is all through the canon. The veiled “sister” in SHOS or the absolute horrifying terror of DEVI, which is the terror captured in SPEC turned up to ninety.
What a missed opportunity. For John to slowly sense something is wrong but not understand why but separated from Sherlock realize he is isolated. For he and Sherlock to keep secrets from each other. For the audience to know Mary is dangerous and for there to be a cat and mouse game. To make John the Violet Hunter who despite fear walks into danger – a quality they share. THAT was the twist I wanted.
The Empty Hearse appeared it would deliver it and immediately snatched it away.
She was the domestic facade. What an incredibly clever piece of symbolism. But they didn’t follow through. They didn’t let John’s bravery run its course, only his loyalty to her which turns out to apparently not be misplaced at all. Confusing characterization of a man who doesn’t like his wife one minute and lifts her up as he one who taught him who he is is the next aside, why does that feel like a betrayal of canon and its women heroines?
Because in the world of ACD the home you find yourself in can be just as, if not more, scary than meeting a lunatic psychopath in an asylum. What thrills the reader is the idea that you are a prisoner in your own home and don’t realize the windows are locked not to keep out predators but to so as to keep you in until it’s all too late.
They missed one of the most deliciously satisfying threads of the canon. That deep unsettling and incredibly Victorian threat: that the truly ghastly is hidden in something as innocuous as some simple modifications to the ventilation. Or to put it in modern parlance: the call is coming from inside the house.
They had John right there with her and they missed it.
And so too lost is that Villain!Mary could have been meted justice by her own machinations (like being bitten by your own snake. Or mauled by your dog. Or attacked with oil of vitriol. Or trapped by the closing of a heavy stone trap door to a cellar.) What a thoroughly wasted opportunity.
God, you paint such a beautifully chilling picture of a suffocating, perilous chamber drama. This could have been so good if they’d just stuck to what they had set up – and what ACD had provided them with: an intense, intimate triangle. Even Lady Di has said that three make a marriage a bit crowded – so, there’s your suspense and tension. But instead of exploiting this menage a trois, they branched out with Eurus, Moriarty, Sherlock’s back story, Victor… it really got too crowded to keep up the excitement.
I had a nonny ask me a question last night – how do you
write a good Omegaverse story, and I gave as good an off-the-cuff answer as I could.
It’s a good question, and one of course that applies to all writing, and I
think it deserves a longer answer. How do you write a good story?
I think good stories start by asking the question “what if .
. .” After watching S4, Sherlock fans might ask “What if Mary faked her death?”
or “What if all of TFP was really John hallucinating in a fever dream, and then
he wakes up?” I think some good Omegaverse questions might have started with “What
if men had to have babies?” or “What if men were considered the weaker sex?” Once
you’ve asked a question that challenges the status quo, you’re off and running
with a story.
Everything you write needs to rotate around your “what if”
question. What kind of people need to inhabit the world of this “what if?” Even
if you are using established characters from a fandom like John and Sherlock,
you have to ask yourself, what is THIS John and Sherlock like? How did this
world or scenario shape and crack them? If you are creating a new world, you
have to ask how is it different, and also the same to our world? Creating some
ground rules helps a lot. Some authors like
to keep a file on their world, a fact cheat sheet they can refer to. If you are
writing a SF or fantasy or Omegaverse fic, what are the basic rules that make
up this world? Jot them down for future reference.
Next, you need a good conflict. What is getting in the way
of your character’s finding peace and fulfillment? What is blocking them from getting
where they need to be and how do they get there? A popular way of writing
stories is in three acts, the set up, the crisis, and the wrap up. Often
writers will build the tension, having character face a few minor problems
before the biggie, and then they are on to the resolve and the ending. How did
the big problem or the crisis change things? Are the characters different? Is
the situation different? Each story will answer this their own way.
Then you need your details, the small things that make this
story come alive. When people give advice for writing and say “write what you
know” I don’t think they mean just write stories about your day job, and
waiting in traffic, and going to the grocery store. They mean bring your
thoughts, and feelings, and experiences to this story and breathe life into so
it feels like things happening to real people in the real world. If your
character is remembering their childhood, remember YOUR childhood. Put the
smell of your gran’s apple pie, or that mean kid who made you afraid to go to
lunch, or the realization that you were probably never going to actually BE a
famous rockstar one day into your story.
Also, it’s fine to write about things you know nothing about.
Learning weird new stuff for a fic is part of the fun in writing I think. I’m
old. There wasn’t even an internet when I was in school. Now we have so much
fabulous information at our fingertips. Some will say don’t use Wikipedia, it’s
often wrong, but I would hazard to say that for fanfic, close enough is close
enough. Put a note in your fic that this probably isn’t an accurate
representation of neurosurgery or the British law system. You can always update later if more accurate
info comes your way.
Don’t be afraid to write crap your first go around. When you
write, you have at least two hats you need to wear – the creator and the
editor, and they are very different jobs. Many talk about writing not a first
draft, but a zero draft when they first start a story. Write the worst thing
you possibly can that just gets you started. When you aren’t sure of a fact or
a name or whatever, leave brackets in your story (fancy breed of dog) or (city
in the south of Wales) to be filled in later when you start editing. Your beginning
draft doesn’t have to be or do anything beyond just existing. It’s a beginning.
You build from there.
Don’t give up, and keep going. No one runs a marathon their
first day. It takes days and days of stretching and training and smaller runs
before someone works up to big race. So it is with writing. Write your
drabbles, and your awkward poetry, and your half-baked ideas, and keep going. With
practice, it all gets easier and your writing gets better.
To expand on my previous rant, I have always boiled down the 3 different writer’s styles into 3 different kinds of johnlock subtext
(which I guess we can now just call queerbaiting). Note: I am not including deep meta analysis about things like drink code or phone=heart metaphor or mirror characters, I just mean basic things that we can be certain the writers are utterly aware of.
Mark Gatiss tends more towards including what he refers to as a “”joke”” where Everyone Thinks They Are Gay, you know, for the laughs. This is the main thing you will see in his scripts that lend themselves to a Johnlock reading. There are occasional exceptions to this, “with your cheek bones…” But for the most part his scripts are pretty sparse on Johnlock content other than the “lol they might be gay” nonsense he likes to throw in. He thinks this means he’s funny.
Steven Moffat prefers to write in homoerotic subtext and ‘quid pro quo’ type scenes that have a surface reading of the dialogue regarding whatever drama is happening at the moment, and cleverly (I guess), a queer reading beneath that straight people may ignore if they choose. I am quite certain that he is perfectly aware, for example, that in ASIP John is (1) trying to find out what his new bro is all about and is asking innocent questions, and (2, but only sub-textually) hitting on Sherlock. The 1st option is so normal an assumption for most viewers that you really only see the second option if you’re looking for it. All of his best johnlock scenes are like this. All of them. He knows that, and he thinks this means he’s clever.
Stephen Thompson doesn’t so much write subtext as he writes them as an old married couple. He just takes John and Sherlock, imagines that they have been married for 150 years, and then goes to fucking town. I have no idea what to make of that, honestly. I suppose he thinks it makes him the ultimate johnlock shipper, but they kicked him off the show so who knows.
In Twilight, Bella has absolutely no qualities that make her interesting as a character. She’s shown to have very little personality, in the books or onscreen, and is only made “interesting” (a relative term here) via the inclusion of her sparkly, abusive boyfriend. It feeds into the harmful mentality of adolescent girls that you need a significant other in order to find fulfillment, particularly if he’s significantly older and likes to watch you sleep. Yikes.
Examples:
Bella is welcomed to school by a friendly, extroverted girl and given a place to sit amongst her and her friends. Despite this girl’s kindness, Bella shrugs her off as a stereotypical shallow cheerleader, and spends her time staring wistfully at the guy across the cafeteria from them. Once Edward becomes her official boyfriend, she immediately loses interest in her new friends as her life shifts its orbit to revolve completely around him.
How to avoid her:
Female characters are allowed to have lives outside of their significant others. They’re allowed to have friends, quirks, hobbies, and interests. Give them some.
The best fictional relationships are based off of characters who compliment each other, not one character who revolves around the other. Make sure your female character’s life does not centralize around her significant other.
Strong female characters don’t look down on other girls, even if they are outgoing cheerleaders. Being pasty and introverted doesn’t make you a better person, y’all – if it did, I’d be a decorated hero by now.
Give them aspirations besides getting an obsessive, much-older boyfriend. In fact, don’t give them an obsessive, much-older boyfriend at all – if you do want them to have a significant other, give them one who cares about their interests and accepts that they have lives and goals outside of them.
2. The Molly Hooper (i.e. the starry-eyed punching bag)
Who she is:
Like most things about BBC’s Sherlock, Molly was an amazing concept that went progressively downhill. I used to love her quiet tenacity and emotional intelligence, and was sure that with her strong basis as a character, she would overcome her infatuation with the titular Sherlock and find self-fulfillment. Nope!
Examples:
She remained stubbornly infatuated over the course of five years with an ambiguously gay man who, en large, treated her badly, leading to her public humiliation with zero pertinence to the plot or resolution. Moreover, her infatuation with Sherlock quickly usurped almost all of her other characteristics, leading her to an increasingly immature characterization that was difficult to relate to.
How to avoid her:
By all means, please write female characters who are quiet, kind, and unassuming (a female character does not, contrary to popular belief, need to be rambunctious, callous, or violent to be “strong”) but remember than none of these traits need to make the character a pushover. Let them stand their ground.
Similarly, attraction to men (or anyone, for that matter) does not invalidate a female character’s strength. Just be sure she values herself more than their attention.
As I said earlier, don’t be afraid to make characters who are gentle and soft-spoken, but be wary of making them “childlike,” or giving them an infantile, emotionally characterization.
My best advice for writing gentle, soft-spoken, unassuming women would actually to look to male characters in the media fitting this description; since male characters are rarely infantilized as much as women are by popular media, you’ll get a much better idea of what a well-rounded character looks like.
3. The Irene Adler (i.e. the defanged badass)
Who she is:
Yup, another one of the BBC Sherlock women, among whom only Mrs. Hudson seemed to come through with her dignity and characterization intact. In the books, Irene and Sherlock have absolutely zero romantic connotations, only bonded via Sherlock’s irritation and respect with her substantial intelligence. In the show, it’s a different story entirely.
Examples:
Irene is a badass character who’s turned into a teary-eyed Damsel in Distress via her uncontrollable love for the show’s male lead. It doesn’t help matters that she’s a self-proclaimed lesbian who falls in love with a man, which, unless you’re a woman who loves women yourself and writing about a character realizing she’s bi/pansexual, I would recommend against doing under any circumstances. She ends up being defeated and subsequently rescued by Sherlock – a far cry from her defeat of him in the books.
How to avoid her:
If you’re writing a badass female character, allowher to actually be badass, and allow her to actually show it throughout your work as opposed to just hearing other characters say it. And one punch or kick isn’t enough, either: I want to see this chick jump out of planes.
That said, “badass” does not equal emotionally callous. It doesn’t bother me that Moffat showed Irene having feelings for someone else, what bothers me is how he went about it.
When writing a character who’s shown to be attracted to more than one gender, just say she’s bisexual. Pansexual. Whatever, just don’t call her straight/gay depending on the situation she’s in. Jesus.
4. The Becky (i.e. the comedic rapist)
Who she is:
Most people who know me can vouch for my adoration of Supernatural, but it definitely has its problems: it’s not as diverse as it could be, its treatment of women is subpar, and yes, there is some thinly veiled sexual violence: all three of its leading characters have dealt with it at one point of another (Dean is routinely groped by female demons, a virginal Castiel was sexually taken advantage of by a disguised reaper, and the whole concept of sex under demonic possession is iffy to say the least.) It’s rarely ever addressed afterwards, and is commonly used for comedic fodder. Possibly the most quintessential example of this is Becky.
Examples:
Becky abducts Sam, ties him to the bed, and kisses him against his will. She then drugs him, albeit with a love potion, and is implied to have had sex with him under its influence.
How to avoid her:
Male rape isn’t funny, y’all. Media still takes rape against women a lot more seriously than rape against men, particularly female-on-male rape, and I can assure you its not.
Educate yourself on statistics for male sexual assault: approximately thirty-eight percent of sexual violence survivors are male, for example, and approximately one in sixteen male college students has reported to have experienced sexual assault.
Moreover, be aware that forty-six percent of all instances of male rape have a female perpetrator.
In other words, treat themes of sexual assault against men as seriously as you would treat themes of sexual assault against women.
5. The Movie Hermione (i.e. the flawless superhuman)
Who she is:
Okay, in and of herself, Movie Hermione is amazing: she’s beautiful, intelligent, and heroic, as well as possibly the most useful character of the franchise. She only bothers me in context of the fact that she takes away everything I loved most about Book Hermoine, and everything I loved about Book Ron, too.
Examples:
Book Hermione was beautiful, but not conventionally: she had big, poofy curls, big teeth, and didn’t put a lot of effort into maintaining her appearance. Movie Hermione looks effortlessly flawless, all the time. Book Hermione was intelligent, but also loud, abrasive, and unintentionally annoying when talking about her interests (which meant a lot to me, because as a kid on the Asperger’s spectrum, I frequently was/am that way myself – it was nice to see a character struggling with the same traits). She was also allowed to have flaws, such as struggling to keep up with academia, and being terrified of failure.
Movie Hermione also took all of Ron’s redeeming qualities, and everything that made him compliment her as a couple: his street smarts used to compliment her academic intelligence, for example, staying calm while she panicked in the Philosopher’s Stone when they were being overcome with vines. He also stood up for her in the books against Snape, as opposed to the jerkish “he’s right, you know.”
How to avoid her:
Allow your female characters to have flaws, as much so as any well-rounded male character. Just be sure to counterbalance them with a suitable amount of redeeming qualities. This will make your female character well-rounded, dynamic, and easy to get invested in.
There’s no reason for your female characters to always look perfect. Sure, they can be stunningly gorgeous (particularly if their appearance is important to them), but it’s physical imperfections that make characters fun to imagine: Harry’s scar and wild hair, for example. Female characters are no different.
If you’re writing a female character to have an eventual love interest, allow their personalities to compliment one another. Allow the love interest to have qualities that the female character is lacking, so that they can compliment one another and have better chemistry.
Basically, write your female characters as people.
God willing, I will be publishing essays like this approximately every Friday, so be sure to follow my blog and stay tuned for future writing advice and observations!
Moffat and Gatiss are clearly unable to separate their affection for Amanda Abbington from the character she plays.
As much as I hate to think about it, I think this is what it came down to. I think they prioritized wanting to give their buddy a cool role over the integrity of the show.
It just so happened that it fell at right about the time they needed to pull the great No Homo…so it served multiple ends.
I still have nefarious thoughts concerning all of this. Something is sooo fishy.
I think part of the problem is that Moftiss really aren’t “planning ahead” types of writers. They said in an interview that they honestly had no idea how they were going to bring Sherlock back after TRF but they liked the drama of it so they just did it and figured “eh, we’ll solve that later.”
Eurus, to me, feels a lot like that. Maybe they were thinking “oh, we should tease the Sherrinford thing and then have it turn out the Holmes brothers have a sister! That would be a cool twist!” but then they had to pretend they were foreshadowing it the whole time and that’s how Mycroft’s weak “I’ve been dropping subliminal code words” got rammed into canon. And yeah, S4E3 was a really well-done stand-alone episode – but as a culmination of four seasons of drama, it just didn’t live up to the hype. (Either the hype Moftiss deliberately generated for S4 or the expected hype of “something’s gotta give” from the character arcs in the rest of the show).
I feel like they never did fully commit to the character of Mary. They didn’t want her to be too passive (which I applaud – ACD wasn’t big on 3-dimensional female characters) but they didn’t want her to have a cliche bad guy betrayal, so instead they got this weird mix where she’s an assassin who lies to John in what I’d consider a totally unforgivable way, but John and Sherlock both wave that aside because, what, baby? Momentum? And then she’s this great addition to their team, except when she’s not, and then she has the most cliched death ever despite that fact that hello, she’s got an infant at home, does she really not care enough about her daughter to have a sense of self-preservation? And through some hand-waving we’re supposed to believe that Mycroft – who obsessively has eyes on his little brother even when there’s no reason to – hasn’t at LEAST had a background check done and thought hey, this woman’s backstory is a little weird, maybe I should kidnap her and interrogate her a bit?
I love the show because I love the characters, but there’s a reason so many of my fics end up in some nebulous “Sherlock and John are living together and All That Weird Stuff hasn’t happened” time frame. I just can’t reconcile the plot with the way the characters were developed and how they’d act in those situations.
I completely agree that a big issue with the show is it’s just not planned out very far ahead and a lot of things are thrown in for the “cool” factor. (One of the biggest: “if we make it so Sherlock almost dies, we can do this cool Mind Palace sequence!” But they didn’t realize fans would then think Mary was more of a villain than if she had say, shot him in the arm or just tried to talk to him instead.) Luckily for me I’ve never been much interested in over-arching plots–I like the show for its witty dialogue and character interactions.
As for Mary herself, I was a very casual fan (casual enough that the show made almost no impression on me–it was just there in the background) until she showed up, and then s3 blew me away with its….witty dialogue and character interactions, which I found worked much better when there were three characters on the screen playing off each other, rather than just John and Sherlock. This is even true for some of TFP–there are some nice moments between Sherlock, John and Mycroft that wouldn’t have worked with just two of them.
I’m always a fan of things that demonstrate why planning is so important in fiction. Many people hate to do it, but this is why it’s important! We knew they hadn’t planned anything after the pool when they wrote S1, and you can tell they hadn’t planned S3, which required John to be secretive about what the H. in John H. Watson stood for, when they had John casually offer up Hamish as a baby name in S2. Outlining for the win.
As for Mary: I agree that they seemed to have a sense of what they wanted from her, but got tangled up in how to get there, and seem to keep trying to justify something that I don’t think needs more justification (personally).
I think the story works much better if Mary fully intended to kill Sherlock when she shot him in S3, given what we now know about her, the way she sometimes just reacts and does the wrong thing, even though she wants to be a person who does the right thing. Her judgment is TERRIBLE, and I think that’s sort of the point. Or, it makes sense to me if that were the point!
It would make sense to me that Sherlock took that fateful step in S3 and ceased to be a friend in that moment. He became Generic Threat That Must Be Eliminated. The moment she felt he threatened her, their fun friendship ceased to be a factor and her instincts took over. She meant him to die, and he did die, because she’s efficient and deadly. She remains a cocked gun even when she doesn’t want to be one anymore.
I’m sorry that everyone’s still so invested in her being a villain. I liked the rug pull of her not being a villain in the story, personally. I thought she was going to be a big bad after S3 too, but when she turned out to just have terrible instincts that ruined her relationships (like shooting Sherlock and then threatening him, and vanishing on John at exactly the wrong time), I kind of liked what that made her. A bad guy who aims for goodness and fails over and over again.
I liked that they put me in John’s shoes: distrusting, kind of angry with her, frustrated with the situation, stuck pretending everything’s okay, but uncertain if this is really going to work (or should work!). I think it makes John that much more understandable and sympathetic in his own failings and anger towards Mary in the end.
But I don’t think we need to go back and redeem Mary in S3. I don’t know why they’re retreating to that. It’s way more interesting if Sherlock forgives her for actually killing him. That’s an insane thing to forgive, but that’s Sherlock for you.
This is in haste because I’m very interested in this thread but I don’t have a lot of time, but:
I agree that you can see that this show was not planned very far in advance. However, you CAN put together a coherent plot even if you have not outlined it all ahead of time. I don’t necessarily recommend this method to others; but I do a LOT of plotting, and most of the time, when I get started, I don’t really know how it’s all going to fit together. I have actually been thinking about why it is that I hate Moffat’s Plot Twists so much when I am so enamored of them in the writing of other people, and it comes down not so much to the lack of advance planning as the refusal to commit.
See, you CAN develop a plot on the fly–a serially published narrative really makes that almost necessary–BUT, at some point in the arc, usually around the midpoint, you need to stop introducing things and start working on tying all the things you’ve already introduced together. No matter how disparate these things may appear to be to you, they CAN be tied together if you do the work of figuring out, at the midpoint, how all your plot lines relate to each other and which piece each will contribute to the ultimate solution.
I think what ivyblossom is talking about with Mary as a character in the post just above this one is an example of Moffat and Gatiss’s reluctance to commit. I disagree with ivyblossom’s interpretation of Mary, but what she says makes total sense: to have Mary OWN the shooting AS an attempt to kill Sherlock, and then deal with that in the aftermath, would be in every way a stronger choice than this “she was saving my life by trying to kill me” bullshit. That’s an attempt to *avoid* commitment by having it both ways: you get the drama of the betrayal, but then you get the reassurance that Mary hasn’t actually betrayed anyone. But this authorial CYA ends up making nonsense out of the shooting and, over time, out of Mary’s entire character arc.
Similarly, the fact that they didn’t know, when they made TRF, how they were going to get out of it is not an excuse. Doyle didn’t know how he was going to get Holmes out of it when he wrote “Final Problem.” Hundreds, if not thousands of fans figured out how to craft a logical explanation without any advance planning based just on what we were given in the episode. They didn’t give us a straightforward explanation because, IMHO, they were afraid to. Instead, they embedded their explanation in the middle of a bizarre and displaced conversation with Anderson, who then rejects it, so that their explanation becomes deniable as a trick or a hallucination of Anderson’s if people don’t like it.
With an arc, you want the second half to be the development and resolution of things you introduced in the first half. That way, as the arc goes on, it means more and more to the reader because you keep gaining new perspectives on things that you already thought you understood. But instead of building on what they’ve already got, what Moffat and Gatiss have historically done is evacuate it and then start again. That’s definitely what happened in Series 4, where instead of really dealing with the issues that would normally arise after the events of “His Last Vow,” Mycroft retcons it, Sherlock and Mary become best friends, and the resolution of Mary’s arc is driven by people we’ve never met and events we never knew about. And when you evacuate your narrative instead of developing it, what happens is that as it goes on, it starts to mean less and less.
This was not immediately obvious on Sherlock for a few reasons: one, the introduction of Moriarty does sort of provide the first series with a coherent plot arc which builds on what has already been introduced, and to some extend that arc extends to encompass TRF. Two, the production values, which continue to astonish me even though I’m SUPER fed up with the writing, created so many layers of meaning in the filmic text that they camouflaged, for a long time, the disposability of the plotting. So it isn’t really that they didn’t plan far enough in advance. It’s that they never really committed to the resolution phase, either in the individual series arcs or in the arc of the show as a whole. To me, that’s emblematic of a general refusal of sincerity that characterizes almost every aspect of Sherlock except for the actors’ performances. THERE you have commitment aplenty, and that’s what really gives the show its gravitational pull.
rebooting for @plaidadder‘s excellent addition. This in particular interests me:
what Moffat and Gatiss have historically done is evacuate it and then start again.
I agree re: commitment. I think it likely that they were trying to please too many people all at once. Or, again, the difficulty of too many cooks in the kitchen and no one strong editorial voice to keep things under control.
When all is said and done and the dust has settled after
series 4, I’m still left scratching my head over the character of Mary Morstan.
She just doesn’t make any sense to me.
If they made her a sniper, why wasn’t she a sniper connected
with Moriarty? That just made so much sense. WHY would a random ex-assassin
have been randomly working as a nurse in some clinic that John happened to be
working at by random coincidence. IF she
were the sniper assigned by Moriarty to
kill John it would have made so much more sense for why she was in John’s life
to begin with.
Why did Mary not recognize Sherlock when he showed up at the
restaurant? If she was a super smart spy type, she would want as much information
on John as possible when he entered her life. Either she was placed there to
watch John, or she stumbled on John but in either case, she would have Googled
what his ex looked like. Being completely surprised by Sherlock and not knowing
who he was would HAVE to be an act, and not a genuine response, and acting
surprised when she wasn’t would NEED to have a reason behind it.
WHY did Mary shoot Sherlock in series 3? It made no sense
and I kept waiting for some explanation – Moriarty was putting the pressure on
her to kill Sherlock, she was using him as leverage against Mycroft … something. In the moment that Sherlock
surprised her, it made NO sense for her to shoot him. He was clearly an ally on
her side. She left Magnussen completely functional with yet MORE dirt on her.
It never made sense & they never explained it.
Why did Sherlock force his heart back to life because his
inner Moriarty told him John was in danger with “that wife” around? If Mary is
an ex-assassin gone good and is protecting John then he’s really not in any more
danger than he would be hanging around Sherlock.
Why was Mary suddenly Sherlock’s best friend in S4 when she
shot him for no reason and then threatened him in the hospital if he told John?
(And then later of course drugged him to run off and do secret spy shit on the sly.)
Why did Sherlock seem to prefer Mary to John in S4 as a working companion? Why
would he ever have reached a level to trust her?
Why would Mary have really jumped in front of a bullet to
kill herself in that dopey aquarium scene? If she could jump like that, she
could have just pushed Sherlock out of the way. It was a senseless sacrifice
that made no sense.
To say that Mary is a sympathetic character that the
audience is supposed to like is a bizarre whiplashy way of covering up all the
inconsistencies and frankly huge gaping holes that seem to make up her
character. They did a bad job of writing Mary and nothing anyone says at
Sherlocked USA is going to change my mind on that.
It seems that Mary is the writers favorite character or something. However, as far as I’m concerned the show I loved finished some time before they even thought of S4. Sorry about that. Agree that nothing they did with the character made sense which was why, since S3, people, most of who seem much more intelligent and inventive than the actual writers, spent so long trying to make it make sense. But I’d like to know why they did it. Why did they invent her to start with? Why? Also, why did they think fans like me would love her? To me they had a good thing and simply ruined it.
Reblogging for last comment.
All I’m hearing through the din of Sherlocked chatter is that Mofftiss are mediocre writers. Blaming the continuity errors and poorer quality of shots on a low budget is one thing. But when the plot of an entire season and the characters in it make no sense whatsoever…that’s a tad bit more than the budget. That’s the backbone of the whole show, the writing. If the writing sucks everything else crumbles with it. Even with amazing award winning actors.
Mark Gatiss and Steven Moffat agree that the primary appeal of the Sherlock Holmes stories is the relationship between Holmes and Watson
They’ve said this since the beginning and have been doing so for years
They believe their adaptation is faithful to the original stories in this way
There is only one moment in the entirety of the original canon in which readers are allowed to see the true nature of this relationship in The Adventure of the Three Garridebs, a moment which they’ve spoken highly of on several occasions
This moment has not happened in BBC Sherlock and they have actually rewritten scenes to avoid the John-is-in-danger Garridebs setup
You don’t have to ship Johnlock to know that the reference to this story in The Final Problem goes against everything they’ve said in the past and built their show around
References listed in chronological order below the cut because there are a lot:
Sherlock Fandom Archive 