#Holmesian Speculation

[anne-adler]

S2 E1 1:21:38 - Playing the game

So imagine this: the only woman to outsmart Sherlock in the canon lost the Game. Now even she coud win the game.

Holmesian Speculation (also known as The Sherlockian game, the Holmesian game, the Great Game or simply the Game) is the practice of expanding upon the original Sherlock Holmes stories by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle by imagining a backstory, history, family or other information for Holmes and Watson, often attempting to resolve anomalies and clarify implied details about Sherlock Holmes and Dr. Watson. (x)

[jujupepi]

A Pre-History of Fanfiction V: Fandom Drama, More Zines, and Conclusion

Part I

Part II

Part III

Part IV

Sources

Chapter 5: Other Zines 

Zines existed out of the K/S bubble, of course. Our old friend Sherlock Holmes laid claim to many staple pages often crossing over with the Doctor, Lovecraft’s monsters, and Count Dracula like in the pages of the SH-SF Fanthology edited by Ruth Berman. Zines like the Holmesian Federation edited by Signe Landon and written by Dana Martin Batory, Ruth Berman, John C. Bunnel, and Tina Rhea explored Holmes’ world in both fiction and non-fiction. When Lord of the Rings was republished in paperback in the 60s, zines like Bernie Zuber’s Mytholore explored Tolkein and other fantasy works. 

Duh duh duh DUN DA DUN DUN DA DUN. The premier of Star Wars in 1977 inspired many zines. B. Clark published the first Star Wars fanzine, Skywalker in 1978. Others included Empire Stars by JJ Adamson and the Mos Eisley Chronicle by Doborah Rubin. The first sexual SW content appeared in the pages of Guardian #3 edited by Linda Deneroff and Cynthia Levine. Han/Luke slash filled the pages of zine to the point where the director of the Official Star Wars Fan Club sent Guardian and other publications a letter that demanded that they stop publishing porn along with a series of guidelines for zines. 

Another fandom that comes up quite a lot in zine culture is Blake’s 7, a British SF tv show that shared many producers, writers, editors, and actors with Doctor Who (I guess that’s true of most British shows). The fandom was huge, especially for one that is not super active today. The creator, writers, and actors were uniquely involved in the fandom. The creator, Terry Nation, told zine editor Carl Hiles that he didn’t want Blakes 7 fanworks to appear in any zine that weren’t solely dedicated to Blakes. It wasn’t all negative, Nation also supplied a very kind introduction to a fanfiction titled Reflections in a Shattered Glass by Joe Nazzaro. Actor Gareth Thomas read a fan poem by Mary G T Weber out loud at a con, embracing her after. 

Blake’s 7 was not without its troubles though. The fandom split in the late 80s when a fan revealed to Blake actor Paul Darrow the names of three fans slash producing fans, a writer, editor, and artist, who were operating under pseudonyms. Darrow sent a letter to these fans demanding them to stop publishing anything involving ‘his character or his likeness’. This caused a rift in the fandom between those who supported Darrow and those supporting the three targeted fans. (Fanlore - The Blake’s 7 War) It is speculated that Darrow was using slash as a scapegoat to obfuscate criticism he was receiving for participating in for-profit cons. This is a common theme in fandom, the disconnect between fans and those that make the show. For example, Jensen Ackles of Supernatural fame has made it clear that he does not like to answer questions about shipping his character with Castiel. 

Slash became such a huge part of fandom that zine dedicated entirely to slash without a home fandom appeared in the 80s. One such zine was Dyad edited by Divya Blacque. Dyad used a far reaching amount of derivative works including Man from Uncle, Simon and Simon, Quantum Leap, Startsky and Hutch, Lethal Weapon 2, and China Beach. Slash developed its own genre conventions and language. In this case, not only is the author decentralized but the derivative work is as well. This marks another evolution of fandom from where organizing around a particular work or works is most important to where engaging in fannish behaviors is central. 

Conclusions and Findings 

For a time in the 80s and 90s, zines coexisted with online fan forums like alt.tv.x files.creative and The Aquiter Files for Blake’s 7. However, the ease, accessibility, and ubiquity of the internet won out and have pushed zines to the fringes of fandom. That is not to say that zines do not exist but they are most certainly not the main medium of fanfiction today. 

So much has changed since the days of Gulliver and Pamela. 

Fanfiction now exists on online archives like AO3 and fandom discourse lurks on Tumblr, available to a wider amount of people than a zine would ever be able to service. Fanfiction has increased in popularity and visibility in the past two decades. Fic has even transformed into multi-media franchises like EL James’ 50 Shades of Gray and Cassandra Clare’s The Mortal Instruments. The increasing acceptance of LQBTQ+ people has made the secrecy around slash all but obsolete. 

Though there are endless problems within fandom and fandom behavior, I want to encourage you all to keep engaging with communities you love whether that be centered around a fictional work, a hobby, or anything else that piques your fancy. Keep putting your art and your words out there, you don’t need a middleman or a gatekeeper or a publisher to give you permission. Your little tumblr blog might set a precedence if you let it. 

This is not an overarching explanation of fandom and is limited to a few works, places, and time periods. If you want to know more, I’ll link my sources in other post

I would like to give a very special thank you to Fanlore, a spectacular and far-reaching wiki with thousands of pages of amazing rabbit holes. I would also like to thank those fans that wrote their own histories like Mickela Ecks and Writer’s University, Jenna Sinclair, Alec Nevala-Lee, and Gloria Comandini. Though I used academic journals, these personal histories were the most elucidating.  

[bakerstreetbabble]

Rex Stout: "Watson Was a Woman?"

[The article below is my second full-length article to be published on I Hear of Sherlock Everywhere.  Enjoy!]

"an experience of women which extends over many nations and three separate continents..." [SIGN] 

In all the recent debates among Sherlockians over the CBS program Elementary, one will often find vehement disagreement over the decision of the show's creator's decision to cast Lucy Liu as "Joan Watson." They will say that it destroys the all-male dynamic of Holmes and Watson's relationship, they will worry that it will develop into a romantic relationship, they will say "It's simply not Holmesian!" All the while, the assumption seems to be that the idea of casting Watson as a female role is a new (and perhaps dangerous or ill advised) idea. As we'll see, that simply is not the case.

Let us consider an article published in The Saturday Review of Literature, March 1, 1941, written by a certain Rex Stout, creator of another famous detective, Nero Wolfe. The article, based on a speech Stout had given to the Baker Street Irregulars earlier that year, was entitled "Watson Was a Woman." Stout, apparently with tongue implanted firmly in cheek, opens his article thusly: You will forgive me for refusing to join in your commemorative toast, "The Second Mrs. Watson," when you learn it was a matter of conscience. I could not bring myself to connive at the perpetuation of a hoax. Not only was there never a second Mrs. Watson; there was not even a first Mrs. Watson. Furthermore, there was no Doctor Watson. Please keep your chairs. "Please keep your chairs," indeed. To address a gathering of Sherlockians, opening with the words "there was no Doctor Watson" seems to be a potentially disastrous idea. Remember, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle had only died about a decade before Stout dared to give his speech and publish his article. I can only imagine the outrage that must have taken place among some of the Sherlockians who first read or heard these words!

It gets better, though. Mr. Stout goes on to quote from one of Watson's earliest impressions of Holmes, in A Study in Scarlet: ...he had invariably breakfasted and gone out before I rose in the morning." Aha! A clue... Stout continues:

I was indescribably shocked. How had so patent a clue escaped so many millions of readers through the years? That was, that could only be, a woman speaking of a man. Read it over. The true authentic speech of a wife telling of her husband's-- but wait. I was not indulging in idle speculation, but seeking evidence to establish a fact. It was unquestionably a woman speaking of a man, yes, but whether a wife of a husband, or a mistress of a lover, . . . I admit I blushed. So here we have it! Not nearly as coy as the creators of Elementary would be seventy years later, Rex Stout presents the theory that Watson was a woman, and not just any woman: either the wife or mistress of Sherlock Holmes! "My blushes, Watson!" (I can almost hear the great detective saying it...)

Mr. Stout finds more proof in Watson's statement about Holmes's prowess on the violin: ". . . his powers upon the violin . . . at my request he has played me some of Mendelssohn's Lieder. . ." He writes: "Imagine a man asking another man to play him some of Mendelssohn's Lieder on a violin!" Stout goes on to develop his theory of Watson as the wife of Sherlock Holmes. He finds particularly interesting Watson's role as a "reformist wife," in his attempts to break Holmes of his cocaine addiction.

Further on is possibly the most incredible (or the most ridiculous, depending on your point of view) bit of deduction in the entire article. In an almost acrobatic feat of acrostics, Rex (I don't think he'd mind me calling him "Rex") arranges eleven of the adventures in the canon in the following order:

Illustrious Client Red-headed League Engineer's Thumb Norwood Builder Empty House

Wisteria Lodge Abbey Grange Twisted Lip Study in Scarlet Orange Pips Noble Bachelor

IRENE WATSON! All he has to do after this bit of legerdemain is to connect the name "Irene Watson" with the classic description of Irene Adler as "the woman," and his case is complete.

Towards the end of the article, Stout admits: 

"All this is very sketchy... I am now collecting material for a fuller treatment of the subject, a complete demonstration of the evidence and the inevitable conclusion." Presumably no further treatment of the theory was forthcoming, and one has to wonder if the whole thing, speech and subsequent article, was just a little fun at his fellow Sherlockians' expense.

It's plain to see, then, that the idea of Watson as a woman is hardly a novel one; inflammatory for some Sherlockians, certainly, but not new. It's no secret that Watson has appeared in many different guises over the years: old man, young man, doddering, comical, and intelligent. Indeed, in the world of film and TV adaptations, Watson has been presented as a woman in 1971's They Might Be Giants (Dr. Mildred Watson becomes the companion of Justin Playfair, a man who thinks he is Sherlock Holmes), and as a robot in the animated series Sherlock Holmes in the 22nd Century (a robot companion programmed to believe his is the original Dr. Watson). To borrow from Ecclesiastes,"there is nothing new under the sun."

[You can read the Rex Stout article in its entirety here, or if you'd prefer a PDF of the article as it appeared in The Saturday Review of Literature in March of 1941, here for the first two pages and here for the final page.]

[variousqueerthings]

us on tumblr like: the most important thing actually is that daniel did nothing wrong in the karate kid part three and he needs to stop framing it to himself and others as if he did

[garkgatiss]

Hi, hope you're doing good ! I was wondering, do you think Redbear is a dog, the young Victor Trevor or is it just a metaphor of Sherlock childhood trauma ? I've read many meta but no one seem to stick to the same conclusion.

imo Redbeard is a metaphor, and it won't ultimately matter and maybe won't even be clarified in S5 what Redbeard "actually" is.

From Yorke:

At its best the Rubber Ducky moment can be a strong and powerful dramatic device, but at its worst it can lead to overblown melodrama, speechifying and cliche. (Quint’s speech about the shark attack on the USS Indianapolis in Jaws steers a very fine line between the two.) David Mamet scathingly refers to it as the ‘death of my kitten’ speech — that point in a play, usually three-quarters of the way through, when the writer interrupts the action with a pretty monologue. It often begins: ‘When I was young I had a kitten…’

The British playwright Simon Stephens noted the same ‘tendency in apprentice playwrights to write about ancient family secrets which are revealed “four-fifths through the play, often in a drunken confessional speech”’. Like Mamet, he’s dismissive, describing it as ‘theatrically inert’. Orson Welles himself referred to ‘Rosebud’ as ‘dime-book Freud’. Arguably the revelation of off-screen trauma works when it informs the current storyline and creates an active goal, as in Thelma & Louise. For a compelling modern spin, it’s possible to view The Social Network as one long argument between the characters as to what the Rubber Ducky moment actually is. It works less well when it’s back-story. But should it happen at all?

Mamet insists writers resist: ‘When the film turns narrative rather than dramatic, when it stands in for the viewer’s imagination, the viewer’s interest is lost … The garbage of exposition, backstory, narrative, and characterization spot-welds the reader into interest in what is happening now. It literally stops the show.’ He’s ridiculing, rightly, the culture of over-explanation that litters bad narrative and pushes the audience away, refusing to treat them intelligently enough to add 2 plus 2 themselves.

Mamet points out, as E. M. Forster did before him, that our only interest should be in what happens next. We know, after twenty-three films, almost nothing about James Bond’s background. We don’t need to — he’s pure character; we know who he is. The less back-story a character has, the more readily an audience is able to identify with them — the more we can see they’re like us and not like someone else. We may want to know more, but it’s the not knowing that keeps us watching. It allows us to fully experience the journey ourselves and actively join in the process in which a character pursues their goal, their flaw is subsumed into their facade, their need into their want, and the goal of all drama is achieved — a rich, complex, three-dimensional character appears in front of our eyes.

The multiple absurd identities of Redbeard in the show stand in for the hundred-plus years of debate over why Sherlock Holmes is the way he is, why he abhors sentiment, when the glaringly obvious answer is that he appears to abhor sentiment because he's a gay man in Victorian England, but of course no Holmesian wants to acknowledge this so they go around making asinine speculations about dead childhood pets or whatever instead.

I think the reason everyone comes to a different conclusion re: Redbeard is that the answer simply does not matter. It has no greater consequences in the story beyond answering its own question. The only way it would plausibly even come up is if they explicitly tell us that Redbeard is a metaphor in the process of Sherlock understanding and embracing his love for John, in other words "the revelation of off-screen trauma works when it informs the current storyline and creates an active goal".

[transsherlockpropaganda]

Holmestice

Hi! I'm not sure whether anyone other than @mousedetective in this fandom is aware of the Holmestice gift exchange, so I wanted to introduce you all to it. Holmestice is an anonymous fanwork gift exchange for all parts of the Holmesian fandom and all (or no) pairings. The community is excellent and some truly incredible works come out of it.

Below the cut is an explainer from the moderators of the community.

The post explaining how to sign up is here: https://holmestice.dreamwidth.org/601920.html

And here is an example of a sign up (mine, in fact): https://holmestice.dreamwidth.org/602221.html

It would be lovely to see some more diversity in the mix! If you have any questions, please do shoot me a message.

Holmestice is a twice-yearly digital fanworks exchange for the Sherlock Holmes multiverse. The name derives from the fact that the schedule for the exchange revolves around the Summer and Winter solstices. All versions of Sherlock Holmes media are welcome (movies, television shows, books, comics, radio dramas, etc.). All characters, pairings, and ratings are welcome. All media types that can be exchanged digitally (fic, art, vids, podfic, graphics) are also welcome. The exchange is modeled on a "Secret Santa" style exchange. Participants sign up by offering to create works of specific media types in specific Sherlock Holmes universes with specific characters and/or pairings, ratings, and genres. Along with their "offer" participants will also make a similar list of "requests" for the gift they will receive. Requests and offers should be fairly general – they serve as guidelines for a broad category of works you would enjoy making or receiving, rather than the commission of one precise work. You are welcome and encouraged to provide additional prompts and specifics in your request, in case the person assigned to create for you wants more ideas to explore, but your gift-maker is only required to match a fandom, pairing/characters, rating, and genre, and to likewise abide by your listed "do not wants" (if provided). After sign-ups are closed, the moderators match requests and offers, assigning every participant a specific person to make a gift for. Care is taken during the matching period to ensure that participants are matched on topics, 'verses, pairings, and characters that they offered, but creators are encouraged to find further inspiration in their match's signup. Stories and podfics are required to be a minimum 1,000 words in length with length/quantity requirements also set for videos and graphics. All works are required to undergo an editing process (i.e. a "beta read"). Authorship of the works should be kept secret from other participants. When complete, participants submit their works to the AO3 collection or directly to the moderators. Moderators gradually publish the works to the community between the first day of the month of Holmestice (June and December) and the 15th. When all works have been published, the community is welcome to speculate and guess who made what work. Authorship is not revealed until the solstice (the 20th or 21st, depending). The exchange mods want to ensure that participation in the exchange is available to as many people as possible. Although we primarily host on Dreamwidth and Archive of Our Own, we can accommodate participants who do not have accounts with either service. If you are new to fandom exchanges and have more questions, please contact us, we are more than happy to help! holmesticemods@gmail.com

[bartramcat]

Quick Takes on CSI: Leave Out All the Rest and Say Uncle

More early morning CSI watching.

I know there remains the big mystery around whether or not Grissom was asking Heather to stay for sex at the end of LOATR. I remain convinced that sex was not at all in the equation, at least from his point of view.

It is one of the most tried and tired tropes in fiction: the heartbroken man seeking solace in the arms of another woman. (And, generally, that momentary weakness comes back to cause problems later, but that's soap opera.)

From the time Sara leaves at the end of The Happy Place, we see Grissom struggling to stay focused. He admits as much to Patricia Alwick in Art Imitates Life; she advised him to talk to someone soon. Grissom's problem is that the only person he can talk to about the loss of Warrick is Sara, and he has lost her too. We learn in Let it Bleed that not only is Sara gone but that he has no idea where she is. Still, he remains closed-mouthed about his feelings. Catherine voices her frustrations to Doc Robbins in LOATR that she knows Grissom is deeply troubled but he won't talk to her. (I think we can assume she has tried, and he has shut her down.)

The case gives him the excuse, and he ends up on Heather's doorstep. The conversational exposition tells us that Heather is completely aware that Sara and Grissom are a couple. How and when she became aware of this relationship remains shrouded in mystery, whether as early as The Pirates of the Third Reich or off camera in The Good, The Bad and the Dominatrix, or if she gleaned it from the papers at the time of Sara's kidnapping. It's also clear he is unaware of her life choices after he brought her granddaughter to her, so we can probably assume any contact between them has been minimal or non existent.

Now I may be jumping off the ledge here, but I've always read Heather as being sexually curious about Grissom, and I think a large part of that is because he is one of the few men who did not seen her in purely sexual terms. As a result, their scenes contain a degree of sexual tension.

I think it's entirely possible that when Grissom asked her to stay that for one brief moment she may have thought he wanted to have sex with her, but I also strongly believe she quickly realized that he simply didn't want to be alone. Even in Heather's guest room he undoubtedly still had Sara's video replaying in his head. And that is the thing: up until he received that, he had never allowed the possibility that he might never see Sara again. He always clung to the hope she would come back to him.

Heather the master reader undoubtedly would have realized that no matter where he was that Grissom's emotional essence was still haunted by Sara. That he never said the relationship was over because he was still in love with her and wanted to be with her. And that is why I have always believed that, finally, Grissom talked to someone about his inner turmoil, and that person was Heather.

What the upshot might have been is purely speculative, but I believe his night at Heather's gave him a modicum of clarity. In the following episode, we see a Grissom who is beginning to view his job as a job and not the all-consuming vocation it has always been.

(As an aside, I think the show was intentionally trading on ambiguity at the end of LOATR. While everyone knew that Billy was leaving, the show took great pains to keep his endgame under wraps. By keeping their options open by neither confirming nor denying that Grissom may have turned to Heather now that it was over with Sara, they left open the possibility that it might be Heather's doorstep he turned up on at the end of One to Go. From purely a plot perspective, I view Heather as the perennial Red Herring vis-a-vis GSR, whether an intentional Holmesian nod or not I cannot say.)

I need to watch Say Uncle a little more closely, but my overwhelming sense watching it was how Sara-like Grissom was in the episode. He became emotionally involved with the young boy in this episode in ways we often saw him caution Sara against.

In no other episode that I can think of do we see him placing the welfare of a principal in an investigation above everything else. He chews out Riley for interviewing him without an advocate, and he nearly comes to blows with the doctor using him as a guinea pig.

There is a scene in the hospital where Grissom is in the doorway looking in on the boy; whether an intentional analogy or not, my immediate thought was of him watching Sara with Pam Adler in Too Tough to Die.

For the first time in his life, following the evidence takes him to a place he doesn't want to go, and he voices his regret to Brass.

Grissom has spent the majority of his life believing that the largest part of who he is is inexorably connected to his ability to maintain his emotional distance from the evidence. It is empirical truth, the only truth he can believe in.

It's another example of analogous storytelling. While there is not one mention of Sara in the episode, Grissom's eternal conflict between his head and his heart is. Herein is the first indication that his heart just might win out...

[thessalian]

Thess vs Challenges

Nudged my way through a bit more of Horizon Zero Dawn tonight. I would have done more, and I would have done sooner, but @true0neutral has been seriously enjoying watching me play through this (he hasn’t got this far yet but cares not one whit for spoilers so he’s as happy for the tactical heads-ups as anything else) so I’ve been waiting until he’s available to screenshare via Discord. Still, got through The Big Reveal (more to Aloy than to me, frankly, but y’know), and once again I am in fucking awe of this damn game.

It’s funny, in a way. Every time there’s a thing about video games, all the Real Gamers (TM) talk about challenge. How a game has to be a challenge to really be a game. The issue that I have is ... who are they to decide what a challenge is? Because for me, a good story is an equally good challenge, if you’re telling it right - full of pauses for speculation and maybe running down the wrong threads but piecing the story together, correctly or not, like some kind of Holmesian detective of the narrative itself. That’s a challenge. A good story challenges how one looks at the world by looking at the world (whether it resembles ours or not) in a different way.

Horizon Zero Dawn? It challenges so much, worldview-wise. It challenges everything. It asks such hard questions, and doesn’t even entirely try to give answers. “This is one way,” it says. It shows the good. It shows the bad. It shows the horrifyingly ugly, and the heartachingly beautiful. It shows how humanity might deal with hopelessness. What it would give for a future, even one they could no longer be part of, beyond having their work mean that there could be one. It shows the hard choices in an impossible (but all too plausible) situation, and how and why people made the choices. Some you wanted to hug. Some you wanted to punch. But good or bad, sad or bittersweetly joyous, it all challenged the emotions on levels most games can’t touch. Not on the personal “I love my companion NPCs” level - that’s weirdly easy, just out of sheer constant contact. This is making you love and / or hate (usually love to hate) people who died so long ago and you only know from snippets of corrupted data logs and the occasional hologram.

This whole game gives a player so much to think about, in ways that fit so seamlessly into the action - whether it’s a snippet of corrupted data file or just the level design in and of itself, it always gives something to explore in more ways than just “something new to kill”. Yes, it lets you hunt rocket-launcher-mounted mechanical tyrannosaurs, but it also lets you explore so many concepts and emotional states that not many games will focus on to this degree.

I’m all for going after a mechanical challenge if that’s what you like. But story mode on a game like this is a challenge of a whole different kind, and it’s not one you can turn down in a setting - you only unlock that one if you ignore half the game. And I’m sure one can do that, if they want to speed-run straight through it, but ... it’d be hard. I like that. I like that it’s a challenge to avoid the challenge that the narrative presents to the mind and emotions.

All this to say? I’m still waiting on @true0neutral being able to watch me finish this game, and I’m happy to do it, but hot damn.

[archiveacademics]

Histories and the first Spotlight

Earlier this week I looked at what the definition of fanfic is. It’s a topic of endless debate and one I will doubtless return to again and again over the course of this study. But for today I’d like to do a little look back at the history of fanfic and, more broadly, of fandom itself.

“First there was “Star Trek,” the original series, whose viewers—many of them women in stem fields—organized conventions and created self-published journals (a.k.a. fanzines) with fiction about its characters, a small but notorious slice of which included sexy doings between Kirk and Spock. Or: first there were fans of science-fiction novels and magazines who held conventions and traded self-published journals as early as the nineteen-thirties. Or: first there was Sherlock Holmes, whose devotees, hooked by serial publication, pushed for more stories, formed clubs, and wrote their own. Or: first came Virgil’s Aeneid. Or: first, the Janeites. Or: first there was you, and your friends, age ten, making up adventures in which Chewbacca met Addy Walker, and writing them down.”

So opens “The Promise and Potential of Fan Fiction” by Stephanie Burt, which, if you didn’t read it when I linked to it in the last post you really should. The history of fanfic, if we wanted to be really broad, could go all the way to the ancient Greeks writing plays based on The Iliad and The Odyssey which are based on oral stories of a real war that (probably) happened around 1180 BCE. 

But we’re not going to do that, because, as Jill Bearup explains in the first of her “History of Fanfic” vlogs, The Aeneid and Iphigenia at Aulis and Trojan Women were not technically fanfic, but derivative works. As I discussed before, fanfic is about intent*.

To find the true beginnings of fanfic, you need to only go as far back as the eighteenth century.

“...popular authors such as Daniel Defoe started protesting that his work was being "kidnapped" and bowdlerised by amateur writers who reduced the value of his creations with inferior impersonations,” writes Ewan Morrison in an article entitled “In the Beginning, there was fan fiction: from the four gospels to Fifty Shades.”

1913 saw the publication of Old Friends and New Fancies – an Imaginary Sequel to the Novels of Jane Austen by Sybil Brinton, the first piece of published Janeite fanfic. (Janeite, of course, being the name of Jane Austen fans at the time. Much like Swifties or Beliebers today.)

I myself own a book called Mr. Darcy, Vampyre, and though I’ve yet to read it (my shelf is over full, you might say) I’m sure it’s delightful.

From the Janeites of the eighteenth century we move forward to the Sherlock fans of the nineteenth. This genteel group of readers was so dedicated to Sherlock Holmes that they managed to raise him from the dead. Well, they annoyed Sir Arthur Conan Doyle so much he raised Sherlock from the dead. 

From there, the literary club of the Baker Street Irregulars was established in the 1930s and they are still alive and active to this day. Apparently, there’s a lot to discuss, as “Conan Doyle generally wrote the Holmes stories quickly and with a minimal amount of editing, and as a result the canon contains a huge number of mistakes and inconsistencies. It was from these that the practice of "Holmesian speculation" arose, which consists of pointing out discrepancies in the canon and devising (sometimes reasonable, sometimes extremely outlandish) explanations for them.” (Fanlore.org)

From Sherlock and the Irregulars we move to the modern era, and what you could potentially call the birth of modern fandom. That’s right folks, it’s time for some Star Trek.

“The shape of those [early 2000s] fandoms, in turn, was due to those that migrated out of meatspace onto the brand new baby internet, which of course owed their structure to the zine-based fandoms of the ‘70s and ‘80s. All of which can be traced back to – you guessed it – Star Trek.

Star Trek: The Original Series is often looked to as the origin of modern fandom, and many of the networks and communities those fans established continue to influence fan interactions to this day, as does the example they set in using fandom as a means of social awareness and political action.”

In “None of This is New: An Oral History of Fanfiction” Jordan West discusses why you shouldn’t be surprised when you draw the card “Harry Potter erotica” in Cards Against Humanity and gives a quick overview of the history of fanfic. However, West argues that writing such as Shakespeare and The Aeneid count as fanfic which, by this blog’s definition, they don’t.

So I guess what I’m trying to say is that everyone has their own ideas of what fanfic is and where it really began. I’m sticking with the Janeites as my point of ignition. 

Now that’s settled (insofar as anything on the internet is every “settled”) let’s move on to this week’s Spotlight. Every week, I plan on putting a platform, a person, or a particular story in the spotlight to show off the practical side of these academic headaches I’m giving myself. (I’ve gone back and forth on the definition of fanfic at least fifteen times since I posted the first blog post, much less when I was writing the damn thing.)

This week’s Spotlight is on two of the earlier homes of fanfic: LiveJournal and Fanfiction.net. 

LiveJournal was created in 1999 by American programmer Brad Fitzpatrick as a mixed blog/social media site.  It was purchased in 2006 by Six Apart and then sold in 2007 to SUP Media, a Russian media company. (Wikipedia.com)

“LiveJournal encourages communal interaction and personal expression by offering a user-friendly interface and a deeply customizable journal. The service's individuality stems from the way highly dedicated users utilize our simple tools, along with the instinct for individual expression, to create new venues for online socializing.

Because of LiveJournal's unique combination of platform and social media, LiveJournal has a unique personality in different parts of the world. In fact every national community in every country is unique in its own way. Where a user in the United States might focus their attention on communities dedicated to topics from the popular to the esoteric, users in the U.K. may tend to rally around entertainment-related issues. In Russia LiveJournal makes up the vast majority of the blogosphere, hosting over 80 of the top 100 Russian blogs. In Singapore LiveJournal revolves around collaboratively purchasing overseas goods. And that's just for starters.” (LiveJournal.com)

Fanfiction.net was created in 1998 by Los Angeles programmer Xing Li. The largest archive of fanfic on the internet, fanfiction.net comes in second in popularity to Archive of our Own**. It has over 12 million users and hosts stories in over 40 languages. Unlike LiveJournal, fanfiction.net is not a social networking site, but a site specifically dedicated to fanfic. Users can choose from a number of categories for their work and they can rate their work as well. The site also hosts forums for fans and writers alike, and registered users can apply to be beta readers. (Wikipedia.com)

I have never had a LiveJournal (I’m honestly not even sure if I’m capitalizing that right), and if I did have a ff.net account I had to have been, like, 12 when it was created and 13 when it was last opened. Still, these are two of the earliest archives of massive amounts of fanfic from hundreds of different fandoms (just check out this list of book fandoms that have stories written about them of ff.net. And that’s just the book category!) 

A history of fanfic is always going to be a little bit messy around the edges, in part because the definition of fanfic is so personal and changeable. All I can hope is that you’ve learned something new today while reading this. If so, I’ll count that as a win.

*And as I haven’t discussed yet, it’s also about copyright and ideas of authorship. Again, this is a topic you’ll have to look forward to.

**AO3 will be the subject of a future spotlight, don’t you worry.

[theshadowmenlounge]

John Devil Expanded Universe

John Devil Expanded Universe 

I want to talk here a bit about my personal plans for expanding on the John Devil universe in future writings.  

Spoilers for what happened in John Devil will abound.

First to clarify I agree with Brian Stableford’s interpretation of what happened, Henri Belcamp and Tom Brown are the same person.  His timeline in the back of his translation is also very helpful.  I can’t overstate how much I recommend everyone buy it and read it.

Next I want to state that while my fictional universe in very much inspired conceptually by the Wold Newton Universe concept (particularly the French WNU) it's not ultimately compatible with the WNU proper.

One reason is because I write my fiction assuming my interpretation of Biblical Chronology to be true, as a Six Day Young Earth Creationist, so that leaves no room for things like Conan The Barbarian or the proper Cthulhu Mythos.

Another is because I don't like the explaining talented people by saying their ancestors were affected by a meteorite to begin with.  Though the idea of meteorites playing important roles in history is interesting to me. As well as in genealogies.

In both of those cases nothing I write for TOTS will contradict the WNU proper.   Avoiding the events of 1795 should be easy enough, the closest historical period I might want to address is the Conspiracy of the Equals in 1796-97.  And since any stories written for that won't be set sooner than the English Revolution or at the least the Mayflower, anything said about Biblical history or the age of the Universe is free to be taken as merely that character's opinion.  And I will write characters who don’t share my personal opinions.

But one remaining major deviation from the proper WNU that won't exactly be avoidable is that I want to throw out the traditional WNU genealogy for Sherlock and Mycroft Holmes in exchange for making them descendants of Gregory Temple.   I have decided against my initial instinct of having it be through Richard Thompson II, and instead will speculate that naturally Richard Thompson and Suzanne Temple had other children.  Mainly I want to give them a daughter who will become a detective herself but won't work for the police because of Victorian Sexism.  She'll do battle with Sir Williams and his mistress named Moriarty during 1840-43.  And she'll be Bisexual and eventually marry a Country Squire named Siger Holmes and give birth to Sherlock in 1854.  She may also have some sexual tension with Moriarty.

Moriarty is depicted directly very little in Doyle's canon, allowing a lot of room for interpretation of his character.  In the first Rathbone film he's essentially the prototype of Gene Hackman's Lex Luthor, on BBC's Sherlock he has a Joker quality to him, and in the RDJ films he's essentially a Victorian Post-Crisis Luthor.  But it's not as common to depict him as a villain with an arguably good motivation, or as a character who at least started that way and lost sight of it as the power corrupted him.

But since his name as well as his right hand man Moran's is Irish, and he works with an Irish revolutionary group in The Valley of Fear.  I feel, it makes sense to see him as someone carrying on the mission of Fergus O'Breanne from Les Mysteries de Londres.  (Note, in The Vampire of New Orleans I had originally mentioned the IRA but the editors choose to replace that with a more generic reference to Irish Freedom fighters, which I fully understand.  If I'd known then what I do now I'd have used the name of the group in TVoF).

So my genealogy for Moriarty begins with Sarah O'Brien (who I usually default to calling Sarah O'Neil because that's who we meet her as). After the end of John Devil she married Frederick Bohem and births an heir for him, but he dies after not very long.  She then returns to The Gentlemen of The Night now being reorganized by The Colonel.  She has an affair with Fergus O'Breanne (who she'd met before) long before he establishes himself as the Marquis of Rio-Santo, and they have a daughter born legally under their Moriarty alias.  That daughter later has three sons, a Colonel, a Professor and a Station Manager, in my canon only the Colonel is forenamed James.  It is only the Professor who is fathered by Sir Williams.

I'm not fond of the Moriarty is Nemo theory, Robur and Moriarty I could maybe see as the same if it'd chronologically fit, but not Nemo.  Nemo I view as a son Henri Belcamp had with a princess in India while he was preparing that part of his plan.

Henri tells an elaborate story about how he met Percy Balcomb in Australia which we know is made up since Percy was really an Alias of Henri.  But maybe some aspects of that story were based on how he met Fergus O'Breanne since we know he too was in Australia for a while and visited Napoleon about the same time Henri did.  I think Fergus was a part of Henri's plan off screen, perhaps as a commander in the Navy that Henri wanted Robert Surrisy to lead.  I also suspect that between leaving Australia and reaching St Helena they visited the Il Padre Diogni in Corsica.

There is a Walter Brown on the high council of The Gentlemen of The Night during the 1830s, as well as a Peter Wood who could be a relative of Mr Wood  (according to Frank Morlock's translation of the Stage Play version at least).  Could he be a son "Tom Brown" had as a result of some random affair? It's more common than you might expect for a child born out of Wedlock to still wind up with their Father's Surname.  On the Mr Wood subject a James Wood also factors into Rocambole’s later adventures in London. I can't think of any fictional Characters last named Davy right now, but that would be interesting to look into. Same as Palmer, cause 2 other identities Henry went by were James Davy and George Palmer.

But Henri's only marriage was technically under the Identity of Percy Balcomb to Jeanne Herbert. If she conceived a child during their brief time together in July he/she wouldn't have been born until 1818. The now in the Public Domain 1919 film The Master Mystery starring Harry Houdini features a Herbert Balcom, who runs a Company in the United States that makes advanced Technology, and he turns out to be a Super-Villain of sorts. People often changed in some small way their Surname when they immigrated to the U.S. So, could Herbert Balcom be a descendent of Percy Balcomb and Jeanne Herbert?  I think it's likely. Let's leave what happened during and after the events of John Devil and consider the background.

One CoolFrencComics genealogy suggests that the House of Belcame descends from Riene de Kergariou of Paul Feval's Fee Des Greves.  Given the similarity in name and the common connection to Brittany, I think placing her in the ancestry of the Kergaz family from the Rocambole novels would be a more natural conclusion.   A lot of John Devil characters were alive at the time of the French Revolution, which is interesting in light of my French Revolution Shared Cinematic Universe (FRCU) idea I suggested elsewhere.  They all seem to be in London mostly during that time however, Armand De Belcamp went there after being exiled.  Much of the drama of the Scarlet Pimpernel was in London at this time also, so there could be crossover potential there.

The desire to compare Gregory Temple to Sherlock Holmes is hindered mostly by that in John Devil we see the end of his career mainly, already old and past his prime.  During the French Revolution he’s already began his career, we could have Helen Brown as his Irene Adler and Mr. Wood leading the Gentlemen of The Night.

I would course seek to tie this into my own evolving theories about the roles Secret Societies played during this history.  Which I discuss on my Conspiracy History Facts blog.

[ti-bae-rius]

Long post at link but genuinely one of the most interesting holmesian theory I’ve seen on here maybe ever but definitely since speculations about the SM letters

Posted my first new meta in ages recently: A Double Visit to the Optician.

Topics include the Sherlock escape room, Doyle’s The Golden Pince-Nez and related mirroring in Sherlock, John and Sherlock’s uncertain fates in S4, and the mysterious women in red.

[isitandwonder]

The Final Problem is bad and boring and here is why

I had to rewatch TFP yesterday (IN GERMAN!) with a bunch of friends. I hadn’t watched it after it aired in January, and it had developed into some kind of uber-evil episode for me. Because it ruined the whole show for me. Because it didn’t make any sense. I remembered it as tense and brutal. But, you know what - it isn’t. It’s just really, really boring and very badly done.

Because:

Do yourself a favour and watch the Why Sherlock is Garbage video. Watch the whole of it, especially the first hour. Because there he explains why Mofftiss are really bad writers for television. One point in their favour I see over and over again is that Mofftiss couldn’t suddenly have forgotten how to write good telly, therefore Sherlock, especially S4, and especially TFP, must have a deeper meaning, are fake, a social experiment, whatever. Just: NO! This argument crashes - because they are really bad writers. They are very good at coming over as clever for a while - but in the end it’s revealed that there is nothing behind all the suspense they are building, that all their arcs lead nowhere, that nothing means anything or has any consequences. The guy explains this by analysing DW and Jekyll - and you find all of this in Sherlock as well. Like, they constantly up the ante - but with no plan or goal in mind, just for the sake of it. Or that the most important moments of the stories happen off screen. Or that they don’t follow the basic rule of show, don’t tell. Or that they never explore their characters’ motivations. We never learn why people do anything on this show. I will talk about this later. Those are basic writing skills! And they just throw them overboard. Which is not a very good idea.

Me, spewing an angry rant, below the cut. 

Let me explain this with Sherlock S4 and TFP: Why should anyone watch this episode? We start off with a little, helpless girl on a plane. Her life is threatened. She gets a spooky phonecall from the dead uber-villain. OK, that’s a setup. I’m sure I’ll see how Sherlock saves this little girl. But, hahaha, stupid me, of course I won’t, because this is a Mofftiss show. There is no plane, no girl, and Moriarty is dead and never was the big baddy anyway! So, why should I ever want to watch this episode again? I, as a viewer, was led on by the frame narrative! And I could have know. They really rub it gleefully in. Because after this dramatic setup, I am at Mycroft’s house. There are bleeding paintings and killer-clowns. That doesn’t make sense, but it gives the episode some suspense. Only to be again revealed that it was all just a hoax. OK, up until now I have watched like 10 minutes of narrative that have absolutely no meaning at all for the whole show. Sherlock even knew before that he had a sister, he didn’t even need Mycroft to tell him this... It’s all noise and surprise and rug pull after rug pull - but with no substance, no meaning. And that is boring!

Because a story needs conflict and motivation. But what motivates Sherlock and John to play their charade on Mycroft? No idea. And why would Sherlock Holmes want to save this little girl on a plane. He doesn’t know her! Because the male hero always saves the little child? But not Sherlock! Remember TGG, the little kid on the phone with the Van Buren deduction. Sherlock has 10 seconds, and wastes 9,5 on wanking about how clever he is. He doesn’t care for the child, it’s all about the puzzle and how clever he is. He even explains that he doesn’t care for other people, or not in the sense that he pities them or is empathic to their suffering. He cares by helping them in other ways, by solving the riddles. For example, Sherlock would explain to the girl how to land this plane or get help. That’s when Eurus has to intervene, cutting the phone line. See? Even the frame narrative that should keep you hooked and explain why Sherlock does what he does is lacking! It doesn’t work with the characters you have introduced and portrayed over the cause of years. Oh, I get it, Sherlock cares now - CHARACTER DEVELOPMENT! But I don’t see it, I’m just told that this happened. Perhaps as John kicked the shit out of him in the morgue, thereby kind of lobotomising Sherlock Holmes. Again, why choose this frame narrative at all? No idea. Why doesn’t Eurus take John as a hostage? That would have been interesting - not a little girl I don’t know in a plane that doesn’t exist. There could have been great interaction between John, Eurus and Sherlock! Anatgonising conflict. Sherlock choosing between his sister and his best friend in a way that would have interested me as a viewer because I got rather invested in Sherlock and John over the years (not into the sister though). You could even have ended this whith a hug for Eurus, after Sherlock had freed John by being clever. He could have forgiven her like this - for something that really mattered. Sorry, but the death of random strangers or the crashing of mind planes just doesn’t move me as would have a threat to John Watson.

And that brings me to how Mofftiss portray Sherlock Holmes. This is also retrieved from the above cited video. The original stories are not about Holmes and Watson. They tell them, they are in it - but they are about the mysteries, the crimes, the adventures. There is not even a frame that holds them together other than these two character always being in them. There is no overreaching arc. You can start at any point reading them. The correct order is even up for debate. But they are not about Holmes and Watson. What gets the reader hooked are mere glimpses at their relationship. That gets us speculating. Doyle knew that he shouldn’t expose too much. That would have shattered the mystery surrounding Holmes. The reader likes to feel cleverer than the great detective. That’s why, for example, it is so rewarding to read about Holmes and Adler. Holmes says he doesn’t like women - and then he gets beaten by a woman. It is always nice to see the underdog win. That’s why SCAN is such a good story. And ASiB isn’t in the end. Because the cool guy wins. Where is the story there, the motivation, the conflict? Why should I care?

The problem of BBC Sherlock is that it is all about Sherlock. During S1 and S2, there are at least some cases, we get an arch-enemy, some motivation, conflict, we meet Sherlock and John and watch them solve crimes together and become friends That’s ok, it’s funny, sometimes thrilling, sometimes sad, it promises something (how did Sherlock survive?), gives us drama - and it looks good. But From S3 onwards it’s just Sherlock - and a bit John. What motivates him, what drives him, his trauma... there are no real cases anymore and the few cases we see are all tied in with Sherlock and John (Mary!) - they are only told to show us what happens with Sherlock, what made him,  how he changes (or does he? Looking at the traincar scene or the scene after John saves him from Culverton). Sherlock gets explained. Which is not necessary, at least it doesn’t happen in the original stories, where we are left to speculate, but one can do it - Holmesians try it since the stories were first published. But if you do that, and do it over at least three series and five years - THEN YOU SIMPLY CAN’T TELL YOUR AUDIENCE THAT IT DOESN’T MATTER WHO YOU ARE IN THE END. If the whole purpose of the series was to explain Sherlock - then why let it end with this monologue? Just - NO! Again, the audience was led on. We were told and shown that this is about Sherlock, the human being. Only to be laughed at in the end... because it doesn’t matter. All that matters is THE LEGEND! Fuck off!

Nothing matters on this show! Why does Eurus do what she does? No idea. Oh, she mad. Why should I get invested in this character? I don’t know her. She’s not even canon. The characters that are canon - the Garridebs, or Victor Trevor - on the other hand don’t matter at all. I see more of Redbeard the dog than of Victor the boy. Therefore, I’m invetsed in the dog - that never existed, again I was played, because I got invested in a psychic dog. But why should I care for Victor? I don’t even see him properly. If I wasn’t familiar with canon, I wouldn’t even know who the fuck this boy should be. Sherlock tells me he has no friends, he has only John - oh, that was a lie as well, haha, and I thought John was special, but he wasn’t, he was just filling in for dogboy. This kind of storytelling errodes your whole narrative - a narrative I got rather invested in but that in the end didn’t matter at all.

Why does Moriarty do what he does? No idea either. Because of Eurus? But why the great game then, why wanting Sherlock to jump, if he knew that his sister was after him? Why did Eurus come after Sherlock only now, not five years earlier? No idea. Oh, of course, because Mofftiss didn’t know she existed when they wrote the first 2 series! God, this is sooo bad!

As TFP progresses, I’m told how evil and crazy Eurus is. I see her kill people - but I don’t really care, because there is no reason why she does it and I don’t know those people either. It’s just random violence - and therefore boring.

Anothere thing that makes TFP really bad and boring is that there are too many people in it. It could have been much more intense if Sherlock went alone to Sherrinford to confront his sister. It could have been a nightmarish chamber play between an exceptional actor and a very versatile actress , facing off. But Mofftiss didn’t trust their own story. Therefore, John and Mycroft accompany Sherlock - and this is at least one person too many. Sherlock and John would have been good - Sherlock needs a sounding board, they could have been in this together, their relationship could have grown, they could have bonded again, especially after the events of TST and TLD - oh, but no, because no homo! They need a chaperone. Therefore Mycroft - because Gatiss wrote the episode with Moffat. But this leads to John just bumbling along, looking like a tired old pancake. That is his whole narrative function in this story. Because Gatiss gave all the good lines to himself. John isn’t needed - and that blatantly shows.

It could have been intense if Sherlock really had been forced to shoot John - especially after the hug. It could have been intense if Sherlock had been forced to kill his brother. But, again, this scene goes nowhere, because Sherlock chooses the only logical way out - which he could have chosen even back with the rifle - and tries to kill himself - again (boring). Why write such a scene in the first place? And why is Mycroft suddenly with them? Filling in for Mary? He’s totally OOC. And in the end - he just vanishes, because at Musgrave, there are just Sherlock and John! So why write Mycroft in Sherrinford? He’s not needed there. It could have just been Sherlock and John. Gatiss did castrate John Watson! (Maybe he thought that standing next to these two superstars would make him hot and sexy as well?)

BTW - soldiers? Sherlock Holmes isn’t and never was a soldier! Soldiers are very masculine men following orders. Sherlock Holmes never was very masculine - he was bohemian! He doesn’t solve mysteries by violence, he does it mostly by thinking. And he is his own world, a law unto himself - he doesn’t follow orders! Why, again and again, tell us they are soldiers in Sherrinford? Oh, no homo, they are such tough guys - fuck off!

I will never forgive them what they did to the Musgrave Ritual. It is one of my favourite stories. You learn a bit about Holmes’ past. It is very clever. I loved the riddle. And it has meaning - it’s about what really is important in life - loyalty, not wealth. It’s even about class conflict. Nothing of it made it into TFP. The story is reduced to some random words on screen - no mystery, no riddle. Not important! Instead, we get Sherlock suddenly in his coat. Why? Because Benedict, dashing about between graves in a moonlit night, his greatcoat billowing behind him, looks amazing. It does! But it’s look over substance again - and that is boring.

Oh, and then they again prepare a rug pull, the climax - John in the well, the water rising. But suddenly, Sherlock has to hug his sister first, so John has to wait with drowning. AND THEN WE DON’T EVEN SEE HOW HE IS SAVED FROM THE FUCKING WELL! That ist exactly what the video guy laments: The really important bits happen off screen and are not shown. Why should I watch this? Because Sherlock forgives his sister - a character I don’t know, who has no motivation?

If a show needs people writing 20k of meta regarding a scene, explaining that it meant the total opposite of what I saw with my own eyes on screen - then this is not very good storytelling (and I say this as a person who did write those 20k metas).

It is boring. It is bad! In the end, they couldn’t lie to all the people all the time. Their shortcomings as storytellers finally came to light. This was what they thought the best they’ve ever written. I can’t believe I fell for it.

I really hope they don’t do Raffles next. Because I know what will happen.

I remember how I first watched ASiP. As my husband asked me how it was, I told him I wasn’t sure if it was really good or really bad. I had never seen anything like it. I had to watch it again. And again. And again. I was fascinated. I was hooked. Not with TFP. I will never watch that again. Ever.

[hellzyeahthewebwieldingavenger]

for everyone who had a problem [with bad continuity], there's someone who didn't give a f. continuity within a run, story arc or issue is something to be concerned about. continuity over a decades long franchise amongst ever changing creative teams and cultural shifts? not so much. it's to be expected and sometimes it's a conscious choice to ignore it look at the original sherlock holmes series; same writer and a bunch of continuity fluff ups. to the point where readers developed something called "holmesian speculation" where they would come up with head canon-ish explanations for these inconsistencies and holes (sounds familiar...hmmm...no prizes?). read the LoTR trilogy straight after the hobbit and you'll see course and character adjustments made by tolkein. the entire black library imprint embraces continuity inconsistencies as part of the charm of their publishing. i'm binge re-watching buffy and angel and it becomes obvious in one sitting that they were making things up on the fly and dropping established rules and characterisations as better ideas formed. continuity is more of a fan hang up than anything else.

CBR poster Boots

Friendly reminder this fool got paid to write for TV soap operas and Netflix series.

My God...those scripts never had a chance.

It’s a lazy, lame, bad writer excusing his and his colleague’s works to make their lives easier.

P.S. Writing standards have improved over time and Tolkein had great big appendixes that existed in order to reconcile differences between LOTR and the Hobbit

[adventureofthedancinggirl]

Balzac and Homosexuality in A Case of Identity

“As to the letters...they are very commonplace. Absolutely no clue in them to Mr. Angel, save that he quotes Balzac once.”

An annotation in the Klinger edition says, “Why Holmes found Windibank’s quotation of Balzac interesting is unknown...Perhaps Holmes sensed a hidden ‘French connection’ in Angel’s life.”

Wrong. I think Holmes picked up on the Balzac reference for a completely different reason: a personal interest in gay literature.

Honoré de Balzac (1799-1850) was one of the first western writers to openly portray homosexual characters in literature. One article notes that “Balzac’s interest in homosexuality, so appreciated by Oscar Wilde, was part of his interest in everything, and of his ambition to incorporate all human experience into his work.” [x]

Turns out Balzac was incredibly forward-thinking for his time. Also, the fact that Oscar Wilde admired his writing is rather telling. 

Another article [x] gives a good introduction into homosexuality in Balzac’s novels. Here are some of the main points: 

In three of his most popular novels, an important part of the plot centers around the main character, Vautrin’s love for young, handsome men. 

Here is just one passage from Illusions Perdues (Lost Illusions): “He had his abundant, silky fair hair waved and perfumed, so that it streamed down in glistening curls. On his brow shone the audacity which he drew from the sense of his own worth and the future which lay before him. His woman’s hands were carefully manicured, his almond-shaped finger-nails pink and well-shaped. His white, rounded chin offered a gleaming contrast to his black satin collar. Never did a more attractive-looking young man step down from the ‘mountain’ of the Latin quarter. [He was] handsome as a Greek god.”

There is reference to “the third sex” which implies an identity deviant in respect to sexuality and gender. (This does not refer to Vautrin himself, however, and some speculate that Balzac’s description of Vautrin as hyper-masculine was a rebuttal to the idea that same-sex attraction is automatically linked to effeminacy. )

Balzac’s own sexuality can’t be proved definitively but is often speculated about because of his claim at the start of Pere Goriot (in which the character Eugene is based on Balzac as a young man) that “this drama is not fictional, it’s not a novel. All is true.”

I’m noticing a pattern with this (and other) annotated versions of Holmesian canon: editors will discuss all sorts or crazy theories or discussions (ie: the dressing gown debate) but they don’t like to mention things that support a gay reading of canon. Too often they shove heterosexual readings down our throat instead. To be fair, Klinger’s annotation also mentions that critics attacked Balzac’s work for being “exemplary of the shockingly immoral fiction imported from France.” This combined with a vague recollection about Balzac from world literature class led me to dig deeper but even if he was intentionally leaving breadcrumbs, Klinger still dances around the topic so much that only people who are looking very closely will see.

We shouldn’t need annotations for annotations. 

tl;dr: Holmes is familiar with Balzac’s writing because he has a personal interest in gay literature. The editor of this edition can’t bring himself to put this connection in print but instead offers a feeble possibility of why Holmes was interested in Balzac.

Also, now I feel like I need to read Balzac.

[silverbulletofthefbi]

((More thoughts, specifically what we know of Rum and my current thoughts.))

Rum

Rum is given multiple identifiers and pieces of information, both in-universe and out.

An inconsistent description: a strong man, an elderly man, and a feminine man. These inconsistencies are something Ai notes on and, given Shuichi’s comments to his team, what with not describing Rum at all, it’s likely he’s also only heard the inconsistent descriptions as well.

Consistency with all the descriptions is that Rum is a man and that he’s missing an eye. 

The consistency of the former point matches the codename rules for the Organization. Men are given hard liquor names (Gin, Vodka, whiskeys) while women are given wines (Sherry, Vermouth, Chianti). Though there is a precedent of getting a cocktail as a codename (Kir), they presumably follow the same basic rule based on the main alcohol in the cocktail. 

Rum is the second in command of the Org., the right hand to the boss.

Rum is the perpetrator of Kohji and Amanda’s murders. He screwed things up for Kohji’s murder, since Kohji was able to leave a dying message that pointed to Rum.

Rum, despite the all-caps of Hidemi’s message to Shuichi leading to fan speculation, is only one person according to Aoyama.

Despite how Inspector Yamato could easily fit all three descriptions, being strong, using a crutch to move around, and long hair, Aoyama has confirmed he’s not Rum.

For now, we’re operating on incomplete information of who Rum could be, though there is currently a pool of suspects. Hopefully Rum will have appeared in a reasonable amount of time in the arc as himself, unlike Bourbon.

What I want to know

Was Rum also Asaca or not?

How the three descriptions tie together.

What caused Rum to lose an eye.

The details of Rum’s actions during the case 17 years ago/more details of the timeline of events.

Suspects and likelihood

(Note: I mean characters who are presented as suspects so far, due to their presence and Conan and Subaru’s speculation. Note that the alcohol codename rule is ignored for the time being, which would otherwise instantly eliminate Mary and Wakasa by default.)

Mary Sera- It would be a Shyamalan bad twist if she ended up being Rum. Rum is an Organization member in good standing, meaning Rum would not have been poisoned by APTX. Mary, meanwhile, has been poisoned (meaning she’s someone the Organization wanted dead). It also makes no sense for her to be worried about the Org. coming in to deal with a reminder of the Kohji case. (Were she Rum, they wouldn’t need to since she’s on-site and she wouldn’t be in any danger anyway.) They also still don’t know of the poison’s unintended effects, which they would quickly learn if Mary was Rum but somehow got poisoned anyway.

Wakasa Rumi- Unlikely. The Organization has deliberately attempted to hide and obscure anything associating Asaka and Rum. Her name is a few letters away from Kohji’s dying message. She’s also sitting back and observing Conan, which is something the Org. hasn’t quite caught on to yet. Gin’s dialogue implies the Org. is suspicious of Kogoro, but she narrowed things down rather quickly to it being Conan. She is unable to see out of her right eye. She’s also rather good at fighting, as evidenced by her encounters with multiple criminals. Wakasa also has a great detective-like thinking style, given her hints to Conan, but Vermouth considers the best investigator in the Org. is Bourbon, not Rum.

Inspector Kuroda- Possible, but I’m not so fond of the idea and think he might be a red herring at the moment. The main issues with Kuroda being Rum are due to him not at all being close to being “effeminate” and due to his looking up the case with Rum and Asaca. The question I’m left with is thus- is he anti-Org. and digging at the case himself, or is he Rum digging at loose threads? He otherwise has some pretty major flags on him, being strong and elderly, missing his right eye, waking up from a coma and looking nothing like he did in the past, and Yamato’s comments about him looking like a crime boss. (Dialogue can hide the truth, such as Subaru being the “red man” and almost nobody immediately going “oh shit, it’s Akai in disguise” because of the context.)

Iori (that creepy butler guy)- Uncertain. He strikes me as very, very strange. We do not know his strength, but his eyes the way they are could be seen as elderly and his hair is long and curly, so some could say he’s effeminate. He also has a notable trait that I’ve noted while working- serving staff and similar types are often entirely ignored by everyone else. His ability to sneak around is suspect, as is his use of the pseudonym Shinichi Wada (an early localization of Watson’s name; something only a Holmesian like Conan or Subaru would pick up), his immediate reaction to the situation of that case... All of it’s very suspicious. However, he’s also mostly tied to the Osakan plotlines, since he’s the butler of a weird stalker girl who has a thing for Heiji. The main problem, though, is that he’s 30, assuming it’s correct. He would have been 13 when Kohji and Amanda were murdered. The only way this could work would be if he were groomed from childhood like Sherry. We do not know for certain about his eyes, though some speculate he’s got a false one based on his glasses’ shine in his disguise.

Wakita- Also uncertain. Wakita is older and could easily be strong, given his design’s basis, but he’s not particularly effeminate. The whole disciple thing is also questionable, since that’s what Amuro (Bourbon) used to get close to Kogoro. Seems a bit repetitive to use the same shtick within consecutive arcs, even for Gosho. However, his dialogue after Wakasa showing up in the papers makes me think his dialogue isn’t necessarily about her. Kuroda comments about Wakasa on the same page of the manga, so it could easily be an attempt to lead us to think Wakita saw the same article by association. However, he’s talking about a person being “quick-witted,” which wouldn’t apply to the situation the article would’ve been commenting on. He says he recently got an eye injury (the same eye Mary tends to target when fighting). However, Rum’s injury is older, from when Ai was still Sherry, and Mary could not have been shrunken until after Ai’s poisoning and escape.

Like I said before, the information we have thus far is incomplete, hence my apprehension to say anything with certainty about who Rum is. However, Kuroda seems to be a red herring so far.

[gloriascott93]

Side note to The Women's Intuition

A more personal tangent…

I am a huge resistor as some of you know to definitive readings or speculation. Everything comes with an IF.

And more, though I rarely mention it, I loathe binary opposites. Gay vs trash. Especially when applied to characters. DFP vs smol. BAMF!John vs perfect loyal dog John. I can’t stand characters put into binary boxes because it makes them caricatures, not real and this unrelatable. It counters the text.

And binaries so often make for speculative leaps while ignoring data. It draws erroneous conclusions. “Must” should always take a back seat to “might”.

So for me to take such a hard line in a narrative reading of the text is for me not insignificant. It goes against impulse. It doesn’t let the writers hide behind for now a supposed and inferred unreliable narration. It draws a line in the sand I am usually very uncomfortable with.

I have always ALWAYS given these writers a massive benefit of the doubt. Perhaps more than necessary or warranted. Reading, as I do, a narrative end game - displayed by the surface text that the unobservant viewer doesn’t yet see. The rug pull. But also giving the writers latitude in how they play that game. And always knowing I may be wrong. Even though every instinct as a feminist queer Holmesian who knows their history tells me I’m not. Unless I have been royally baited and the text is lying to me and to boot is using women characters to tell that lie.

I am troubled by Moffat’s “doing the dishes” line on Thursday. It’s hugely problematic. It’s demeaning of everyone. Including himself. And yet I don’t need that either, even though in their historical context, it would be entirely congruent with ACD to frame these characters domestically without trivializing them.

And I’ll note that doing the dishes is historically women’s work. Trivialize that, you trivialize women. It’s the text book chicken and egg of misogyny: Women do dishes. Women are therefore trivial. Doing dishes is women’s work, therefore doing dishes must be trivial work. Therefore women are trivial. And should only do trivial work. Stay in the kitchen. Where you belong. Round and round and round it goes. For a momentary outburst it carries an immense historical weight. It is congruent with the reading of homophobia as the bastard child of misogyny. God forgive the man that ends up acting like a woman. Loving like a woman. Stuck at the kitchen sink like a woman. How trivial.

But dishes aside, however, I don’t trivialize this love at all. I see it written as High Romance. A kiss, or sex are not my benchmarks though I am uncomfortable with a desexualised queer reading of the text without very clear justification for it that fits these characters. I read these characters as ultimately epic. Their love story, canonically (a term I refuse to apply to anyone but ACD) as epic and queer. With a canonically textual and highly detailed domestic life to back it up told by an unreliable closeted narrator.

I am struck by the irony that while I don’t feel emotionally hurt at this juncture, others do. They feel driven mad, gaslighted, mistreated - cruelly so. I accept that for what it is. I understand it though I don’t feel that same strong emotional reaction. Perhaps as a queer woman I should.

But it strikes me as highly coincidental that the place I land in speculating on the narrative from a feminist, queer position matches the current fandom anxiety so perfectly. That the women characters are indeed potentially just like the fans. Wrong. And fools for thinking as they do.

And without wishing to seem uncaring, I don’t feel a strong impulse as an older fan to extend a caring hand to teenage fans. Perhaps I should. Mofftiss don’t intimidate me. I admire them but they are not my dads. They are my equals only a few years older than me. Talented, privileged, fortunate and very hard working - but ultimately my equals. They are human and capable of fucking up. As I am. Capable of being churlish or unkind.

I enjoy the fun on here but I am aware that I am nowhere close to being as emotionally invested as some others. I like the debate. The conversation. The analysis. But my happiness or sense of self in no way hangs on this show. This is simply an extension of the grand Sherlockian game from a queer perspective around one adaptation. And I enjoy the exchanges with bright, thoughtful, intelligent people who I literally don’t know - don’t even know their names or they mine - who like the game - the research, the speculation, the debate, the possibility of changing Sherlockian history. I appreciate the exchanges I have on here greatly.

I say all this for a very specific reason. Because that coincidence - that reading of women in the show and the alignment with fandom is not coincidence. Both are examples of an ongoing historic continuity. Of how women are treated in texts and in real life fandoms of texts. This is not me projecting. This is fact. I know categorically that i am not overly emotional. Hysterical. As if emotions are something to be ashamed of! If anything I’m not emotional enough. I find myself concluding a defense of a fandom that I often feel little emotional identity with and from which I feel generationally apart. And I cannot deny that there is something way off base in how others in this fandom are treated. Historically congruent and way off. And I admit I have sided with Mofftiss more often than not.

I am more than up for the debate. I am happy to be proven wrong or shown a way to break the binary opposition I see in the textual narrative. Bring it on. Show me I am wrong. I have never been one on here to shy away from saying oh, I made a mistake or I misread or misunderstood or misremembered. Prove me wrong and I will happily concede the point.

I am very very far from the caricature fan Moffat imagines. I am very very like him in many ways. But as a queer woman I am different from him. And if my read is wrong I want to know why. I want to know why I should let go of my own reading to serve his. Because my reading makes more sense of the text as he has written it. He, not Gatiss, is the extravagantly Romantic writer here.

I don’t know what my benchmark is for TFP. I am open to being surprised. But there is a binary I find in this text that is highly problematic. Because it is more than queerbaiting. It casts women in a very dodgy light unless the narrative follows through to an endgame that proves them right. (Look at TAB for god’s sake. That episode which I loved and was critiqued at the time is so very problematic in not only its treatment of women but of Sherlock himself if the narrative doesn’t deliver a queer endgame.)

I want him to prove me wrong. I really do. Not because my feelings are hurt but because I want this story to be something other than the same old crap women and queer people have put up with for years. I want him to dare to go there. To follow through on the narrative he has written. To have an ending worthy of it. Worthy of all these characters.

Because I want it to be good.

If there is an option C it will have to be a really good one. It will have to be a very compelling read. I have hope. Genuinely. But I am under no illusion that this narrative is on perilous grounds. That this show is potentially going to go way down in my estimations.

And rather than saying, “these writers are so clever” I will have to change course and say, “I was wrong. This really is nothing new. It’s a bit not good.”

And I will potentially then also conclude that how i and so many others read this story - queerly - is actually the *more* clever solution.

I hope I am proved wrong. I hope they surprise the life out of me. I would happily concede the point. I would like the writers, for me, for us all to win this game in the end. I don’t want progress to be on the losing side. And boy do we need some progress in this current climate where progress is under such extreme threat.

A lot hangs on TFP. Inside the narrative and without. But in the end all I want is it to be a little sign of hope in the world. A story of resistance. Of change. Of progress. That the goodies will win. Because they must win. There is no if about that. The alternative is so bleak right now. I want a story where my heroes win and I win too. Where I get to feel just a little bit heroic. I’d like that for Mofftiss too.

There’s nothing trivial about me wanting people like me to be heroic. That’s the power of stories. They don’t have to be real to be true. They change us. They shape profoundly how we view ourselves. There is nothing trivial about it.

And let’s be honest. If all that lay ahead for Sherlock and John was that they spent their days washing dishes and living in peace and solving puzzles in the safety of their own home, with someone who loves them, to grow old with, to walk safely down the street without threat of violence or hate - that’s not nothing. It’s a darn lot more than many women and queer people have gotten or still get. But they’d be lucky to have it. Anyone would.

We will see.