#which is why i once wrote a novel allegedly about detectives in love but in reality about 100kish of family/friendship character analysis

[advestager]

I feel like saying Josuke doesn't have any daddy issues whatsoever isn't entirely fair (I've seen some fic and comics go further into how he and his mom might have been treated due to the circumstances of his birth that were pretty compelling) but people who act like he grew up without any father figure are definitely off base imo. Every single adaptation and extra material have always had a focus on his close relationship with his grandpa for a reason!

see, that's precisely the thing. it is literally impossible to be a grown up human without having internalised some sort of illogical Feeling about oneself or the world – but fandom as a whole tends to just assign arbitrary ones to characters based on stereotypes rather than what they actually are like.

i do think josuke feels some sort of way about his lack of a father growing up, but that's as inevitable as joseph himself (or giorno, or jolyne, or even jonathan) having feelings about his own dad, and yet somehow jorge's absence does not get brought up despite joseph and josuke's fairly similar upbringings. the fact is that most of western fandom tends to view the JJBA characters through a (white, usa-centric) lens that simply does not lend itself to a fair or accurate reading when most of the cast is either POC or from an entirely different cultural background. that's why i'm so resistant to label josuke as having 'daddy issues'; the term means something entirely different to me than it seems to do to most of the fandom, based on all the fic, comics, and discussions i've seen (and had) about the topic. it's not exactly like the organised crime aspect of VA, but it fills me with a similar kind of frustration. i don't think one needs a degree in cultural studies or history or whatnot to enjoy a silly series about people punching each other with slutty soul-ghosts, but it's exhausting to see the same thoughtless, very specifically westernised takes being regurgitated over and over as Absolute Truth until the characters are so flanderised they seem nothing as much as a caricature of their original versions. i love transformative works as much as any other fan creator, but i also happen to like the source material. it is infinitely more interesting to me to think about what kind of relationship josuke might have to his heritage as a mixed-race person, or his identity as the son of a single mother or the obviously cherished and spoilt child of a family such as his own (especially in a place and period like canon's late-90s/early 00's japan), than to hear yet another iteration of 'haha, josuke has daddy issues' where the person saying it has no intention of analysing that premise beyond the puddle-depth obvious.

at barely sixteen years old, even as interested in high-end fashion (and as very much part of a working class family who could definitely use the nest egg) as he is, josuke's immediate reaction to being told his missing father is incredibly rich and wants to take care of him is to say that it's not necessary, and he's fine as he is. sixteen. i worked as a teacher with kids as young as a year old and people as old as mid-seventies; that kind of ease of mind is one-in-a-million and not something you'll find on someone who fits fandom's definition of 'daddy issues'. he's not angry at joseph, he's not grasping for money, he hardly even wants to find out more about the missing part of his origins. his only thought is to wish he wouldn't be the reason other people were hurt, and to protect his mother once there is a risk she might find out and be distressed about it. his entire morality system is (from what i remember of canon) mostly based around the question What Would Grandpa Do?, with some leeway allowed for the temper he clearly got from tomoko and for the fact that he is, again, a big and slightly spoilt sixteen year old.

so yeah. it might not sound fair to say he doesn't have daddy issues, but i don't think the terms fandom's operating under are fair to start with, so i'd rather recuse myself (and my interpretation of the character) from it all til we're playing the same game. the sandbox's wide and wild, and the block and mute buttons are there for a reason, so i'll just stay in my corner writing about higashikatas wielding their feelings like sledgehammers til my mum says it's time to go home.

[sanguinarysanguinity]

@possibility221​ said they would enjoy a commentary on the various ACD canon references in my story A Handsome and Generous People, in which Sherlock Holmes is thrown a few centuries into the future and reads the ACD Holmes stories, looking to see if Watson has any insight on how to get back. There is a fair amount of snarkiness about canon along the way.

Most of the ACD stories referenced in “A Handsome and Generous People” are pretty popular, as I wanted the story to be halfway accessible without knowing a great deal about the canon stories. Thus, if you already know the Sherlock Holmes stories moderately well, this may not be that interesting of a commentary? (Although you may take this as an invitation to argue about canon with me, if you like. Your choice.)

Beneath the cut, spoilers for a goodly number of ACD cases, as well as for “A Handsome and Generous People”...

I had even attempted re-reading A Study in Scarlet... my refreshed memory of what a terrible novel it was.

A Study in Scarlet (STUD), the first of the sixty Sherlock Holmes stories, has a strange narrative structure: right smack in the middle of the novel there is a five-chapter-long flashback to decades earlier on a different continent with characters we’ve never heard of. (The first time I read Scarlet, I thought there had been a printer’s error whereby pages from some random other novel had gotten bound into the middle of the book. It doesn’t help at all that the chapter numbering starts over again with the flashback.) Even worse, that extended flashback is an old-fashioned Western store, and just fyi, whenever Doyle tries to write Americans it gets pretty painful. Fic authors love making fun of STUD for that random gawdawful Mormon section, and I’m no exception.

Wt’sn’s assessment of the novel might be a bit strong -- I personally enjoy the first half of STUD, and STUD was popular enough to get the whole Sherlock Holmes phenomenon started. But it amuses me to imagine that Wt’sn is one of those people who has never managed to make it through the Mormon section of STUD. :-)

The imp in me could not resist: I told him about a place that I had an eye on, one that I thought would suit us right down to the ground.

Wt’sn is quoting Watson and Holmes's first meeting. Watson writes in STUD:

Sherlock Holmes seemed delighted at the idea of sharing his rooms with me. “I have my eye on a suite in Baker Street,” he said, “which would suit us down to the ground.”

“Watson was a terrible liar,” he said. “You’ll be comforted to know I have never once been tempted to poison a fellow lodger.”

In STUD, Stamford introduces Watson to Holmes, but he isn’t prepared to vouch for Holmes’ character. Stamford says:

“I could imagine his [Holmes] giving a friend a little pinch of the latest vegetable alkaloid, not out of malevolence, you understand, but simply out of a spirit of inquiry in order to have an accurate idea of the effects.”

Some authors and adaptations use that line as evidence that Holmes definitely would cold-bloodedly and without consent poison or injure someone for science. For myself, I have never been convinced by that reading, mostly because the convo is raw speculation by a man who admits to not knowing Holmes well. Also, it’s clear over the body of the canon that Watson isn’t above fibbing about Holmes’ character in the early pages of a story for the sake of heightening dramatic tension later.

“You already know Watson was an incorrigible liar. You’ve read the one with the snake, haven’t you?”

In “The Speckled Band” (SPEC), Watson claims that a snake did several things that snakes don’t actually do. (Drink milk, hear a whistle, climb a rope...) The usual theories explaining this is that Watson is a) stupid, b) sloppy, or c) a liar, but there are also a few authors who assert that Holmes messed the case up without realizing it. (I recommend “...Could Fill A Book” by @plaidadder, who sends Holmes back for a second go at SPEC.)

For myself, I generally prefer to presume that Watson was a liar rather than sloppy or stupid, mostly because the narrative possibilities are better in that direction. (Why did he choose to tell that particular lie, and in that particular way?) Whatever the reasons, the impossibilities like that milk-drinking, rope-climbing snake pop up all over canon. The snake is perhaps the most well-known of them, which is why I used it here. “The Creeping Man” is another excellent example of Watson making shit up and attempting to pass it off as truth (albeit a much less well-known example). But we’ll get to Creeping Man soon enough...

“His dates are a disgrace. Always have been.“

You know, I’m not even gonna try to give you a list of all the dates in canon that are out-of-whack. It’s legendary in the fandom, and even Doyle himself admitted that they were a disaster. The man couldn’t even get the internal dates within individual stories right (see the so-called eight weeks between April and October in The Red-Headed League), never mind his failing to cross-reference his dates from one story to the next.

If you spend much time messing around with canon, you either blow off the dating inconsistencies or you build stories around them. I have an unfortunate tendency to roll them into my stories, which is why you occasionally run into a passage like this coming one, sorry. I tried to keep it as brief as I could.

“You fell in 1893?” I asked, consulting my notes... “Dr Watson wrote it was 1891.”

For some unknown reason, Sherlock Holmes in the 23rd Century sets Reichenbach in 1893, whereas “The Final Problem” puts it on May 4, 1891. Yeah, I dunno. But like I said, I tend to roll these things into the story...

“In 1908 Dr Watson published a case of that description including the detail you just gave me, set in March of 1892, titled ‘Wisteria Lodge.’”

According to the two Reichenbach stories, “The Final Problem” and “The Empty House,” Holmes was fake-dead from May 1891 to sometime in 1894. And yet in “Wisteria Lodge,” Holmes and Watson randomly have lunch together in Baker Street in March of 1892. I’m admittedly kind of obsessed with that particular weirdness; more sensible fans shrug and move on.

“The Cox and Company despatch box,” I whispered, reverent.

In the opening lines of “The Problem of Thor Bridge,” Watson writes:

Somewhere in the vaults of the bank of Cox and Co., at Charing Cross, there is a travel-worn and battered tin dispatch box with my name, John H. Watson, M. D., Late Indian Army, painted upon the lid. It is crammed with papers, nearly all of which are records of cases...

People who write case-fic, whether as professionals or amateurs, love to reference that dispatch box. “The box has been found! Here is a case from it!” Even the movies sometimes go there: The Private Life of Sherlock Holmes begins with Watson’s heir being called to Cox and Company to witness the unsealing of the fabled dispatch box.

I personally am not a fan of the dispatch box as a narrative device: I know what my folder of unpublished stories looks like, and it’s much closer to the open-ended, low-context mess depicted in Circadienne’s Primary Sources than the complete, polished, and fully-contextualized stories that allegedly keep bursting forth from that legendary dispatch box. 

“The Musgrave Ritual.”

“The Musgrave Ritual” (MUSG) is pretty much exactly as I describe it: it’s about a treasure map that most people inexplicably fail to recognize is a treasure map. Usually you just have to roll with things like that while reading the canon stories, but here I decided to add it to the list of lies Watson told.

“The abominable Mrs Ricoletti, for god’s sake!”

Watson loved to tease us with cases that he never mentions again; the abominable Mrs Ricoletti is one that he dangled in front of us in MUSG. Yes, I’m doing here pretty much what Watson did: suggesting there’s a good story behind that, and then refusing to tell you about it. :-P

“You are theorising ahead of the facts,” I said...

Wt’sn is paraphrasing Holmes back at himself:

“It is a capital mistake to theorize before you have all the evidence.” (Study in Scarlet)

“It is a capital mistake to theorize before one has data.” (Scandal in Bohemia)

“I had,” said he, “come to an entirely erroneous conclusion which shows, my dear Watson, how dangerous it always is to reason from insufficient data.” (Speckled Band)

“The temptation to form premature theories upon insufficient data is the bane of our profession.” (The Valley of Fear)

“Still, it is an error to argue in front of your data.” (Wisteria Lodge)

Wt’sn claims to not have read the stories, but given how often Holmes says this kind of thing in canon, I think we can presume that Holmes has kept right on saying it during his years in the 23rd century.

btw, I wrote this story in four days, start-to-finish, and I had no time to look up the actual canon quotes. I was surprised and a little embarrassed to discover while looking the quotes up just now that Holmes usually says “data” and never “facts.” OH WELL.

It was painful to watch Holmes read ‘The Final Problem,’ but ‘The Empty House’ was worse...

Respectively, the story where Holmes fakes his death, and the story where he reveals to Watson that he was alive all along.

...despite my fears that ‘The Dying Detective’ would reignite charges of Dr Watson’s mendacity, Holmes snickered from one end to the other like a schoolboy.

“The Dying Detective” is the one where Holmes fakes a mortal illness, sends for Watson, refuses to let Watson treat him, holds Watson hostage, makes Watson hide behind his bed and then forgets about him, and is generally a manipulative unfeeling asshole from one end of the story to the other. There are a number of stories in which Holmes lies to manipulate Watson (The Hound of the Baskervilles and “The Retired Colourman” both spring to mind), but Dying Detective is nothing but lies and manipulations, and a particularly cruel instance of it, to boot.

Whether Holmes is giggling because Holmes is just so much of a dick as to pull shit like that and laugh about it later (which is what Watson says he did in the similar part of Retired Colourman), or because Dying Detective references a private joke between him and Watson, is reader’s choice.

“He claimed that he was only— He likened himself to my cocaine!”

In “The Creeping Man” (CREE), Watson writes:

The relations between us in those latter days were peculiar. He [Holmes] was a man of habits, narrow and concentrated habits, and I had become one of them. As an institution I was like the violin, the shag tobacco, the old black pipe, the index books, and others perhaps less excusable. When it was a case of active work and a comrade was needed upon whose nerve he could place some reliance, my role was obvious. But apart from this I had uses. I was a whetstone for his mind. I stimulated him. He liked to think aloud in my presence. His remarks could hardly be said to be made to me -- many of them would have been as appropriately addressed to his bedstead -- but none the less, having formed the habit, it had become in some way helpful that I should register and interject. If I irritated him by a certain methodical slowness in my mentality, that irritation served only to make his own flame-like intuitions and impressions flash up the more vividly and swiftly. Such was my humble role in our alliance.

For many of us who love Watson, that’s a painful passage. I always read “others perhaps less excusable” as a veiled reference to Holmes’ cocaine addiction, and then when Watson goes on to refer to himself as a stimulant and a habit... Well.

“And the ape-man was frankly a disgrace, I might have been reading Shelley or Stoker.”

CREE again! Creeping Man is a blatant genre change from the rest of canon, in that it is Victorian science-fiction/horror. Creepy shit happens until it is eventually revealed that an elderly professor has been injecting himself with monkey-serum Viagra and turning himself into an ape-man every few days. (No joke. That is the actual "solution.” Monkey-serum Viagra. Shape-shifting into an ape-man and back.) CREE unashamedly borrows from Frankenstein, Dracula, and Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, hence the “Shelley or Stoker” reference.

(ETA: for another view of the monkey-serum thing, see @violsva’s comments here about hormones being a new and exciting thing in 1920s medicine.)

I had enjoyed the jellyfish story, albeit by proxy...

“The Lion’s Mane” (LION) is perhaps the most-reviled story of canon. It’s allegedly written by Holmes (Watson doesn’t appear at all), and Holmes spends the story running around trying to figure out who is murdering swimmers before he belatedly realizes that it’s only a poisonous jellyfish that got itself trapped in the swimming hole. “Behold, the Lion’s Mane!” Holmes shouts, and then crushes the poor thing with a rock.

Yeah, I dunno. The Case-Book is a fucking trip, man. In addition to the jellyfish story, it’s also got the vampire and ape-man stories, both hurt/comfort stories (Watson gets shot in one; Holmes gets the shit beaten out of him in the other), a story in which a lady gets her face eaten off by a circus lion, another with a guy who gets his face melted off with acid... Doyle was fucking tired of writing Sherlock Holmes stories by the time he got to Case-book, and he gave no shits. Also, as Wt’sn suggests in the story, these were all written after WWI, when Doyle was still mourning the horrors of the war, so they run dark.

...the surprisingly racy version of what had happened at ‘Shoscombe Old Place.’

“Shoscombe Old Place” is the second-to-last story in canon. It’s weirdly grotesque in its own right (as is most things in Case-Book), but it has cross-dressing and no murders, which makes it a much better candidate for shenanigans than the horrorshow that is Retired Colourman. 

The illustration showed an elderly gentleman clinging by one arm to an ivy-covered wall, three stories above the ground...

From “The Creeping Man”:

The professor was clearly visible crouching at the foot of the ivy-covered wall. As we watched him he suddenly began with incredible agility to ascend it. From branch to branch he sprang, sure of foot and firm of grasp, climbing apparently in mere joy at his own powers, with no definite object in view. With his dressing-gown flapping on each side of him, he looked like some huge bat glued against the side of his own house, a great square dark patch upon the moonlit wall.

Frederic Dorr Steele’s illustration:

“Come, find a pencil, you must help me work out the dates...”

There are a fuckton of dates in CREE, to the point that Leslie Klinger’s Annotated Holmes has to organize them into two tables at the end of the story. As per usual with Doyle, the dates don’t quite make sense. More hilariously, Watson says this at one point during CREE:

“As to your dates, that is the biggest mystification of all."

Watson isn’t actually lampshading the nonsensical dates there; he’s only asking Holmes to explain his deductions. Nevertheless, the fandom loves to quote that line whenever the issue of Doyle’s self-contradictory dates comes up. BECAUSE APPROPRIATE QUOTE IS APPROPRIATE.

And with that, we settled in to making sense of Dr Watson’s dates.

Because it would take Sherlock Holmes to make sense of Watson’s dates. Certainly no one else has ever managed it. :-D