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While I know that this says, ‘information is power’, I’ve always seen this scene as John arriving at a point where he has, ‘the power to change’, i.e. the power to leave Mary and be with Sherlock.  And I just noticed the price for the book is £18.95.  That makes me so happy.  

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(waits)

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I like both

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Stuck in the Waltz

So guess who’s finally got her lazy ass up and installed ps (aka the best christmas present ever!) 

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I just love how John doesn't even blink in that first gif. It's day TWO of them knowing each other.

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No, Sherlock always replies, to everything. He’s Mr. Punchline. He will outlive God trying to have the last word.

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So the Valley of Fear starts with Holmes receiving a cipher message (by the way his domesticity with Watson is incredibly adorable they are both just SHINING with affection) from one of Moriarty’s lackeys. Holmes expects to receive the key next, but instead he gets a message from the same person telling him that he’s been found out by Moriarty and it’s more than his life is worth to send the key. He recommends that Holmes forget about the message and the key and drop the whole thing.

BUT Holmes reckons he and Watson can figure out what the key is, if they apply themselves, and they do! The key is a page from an almanac. But the first time they try what they believe is the key, the message is just nonsense. Holmes realizes that they need last year’s almanac, since it’s only the seventh of January and remarks, “We are before our time, Watson and suffer the usual penalties.” WOW!!!!

The case that follows is FASCINATING coming on the heels of this exchange, but I love this even on its own. This man secretly sending coded messages with the intent of decoding them for his audience later on has his hand stayed by the threat of violence from an insidious, unstoppable, but seemingly legal and above board force. BUT his audience with cunning and ingenuity and TEAMWORK is able to discover the cipher (being first held back by being a little too modern for their own good!) and read the message.

A. I love Doyle B. Sherlock Holmes is gay C. Doyle hopes we are able to decipher that, though he fears for his life to tell us plainly himself

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All of this is so important. Sherlock understands his own emotions quite clearly, but he feels that they can be overwhelming, and he fears heartbreak and loss. I think a lot of people forget, or perhaps don't realize, that this is why Moriarty's threat at the pool ("I will burn the heart out of you") terrifies Sherlock so much and has such an immense impact on his actions in S2. Moriarty demonstrated then and there that he'd be willing to hurt John to get to Sherlock, and Sherlock knows that if anything happened to John, it would devastate him. And this threat from Moriarty is why Sherlock never tells John that he's in love with him in S2, even after he overhears John reveal his own feelings at Battersea. It's not because Sherlock doesn't understand his own emotions and doesn't realize that he's in love with John. It's because he's terrified that if he does tell John and they become a couple, it will only put John in greater danger from Moriarty.

We spend so much time reading fanfic and theorizing this show that we forget who Sherlock Holmes really is.  He’s a man who picks on others’ sex lives as a way to joke around and fit in.  He’s a man who - contrary to what he’d want everyone to believe - actually has friends he cares deeply about.  He’s a man who knows he’s physically attractive.  He’s a man who laughs deep and long, who hugs and kisses his landlady, who spends his life helping people and asking no payment in return.  He’s a genius with a lot of baggage but he loves and feels deeper than most people do, which is why he thinks he needs to squash his emotions so often.  He’s threatened by his sentiment because it IS a large, overbearing part of himself.  He knows this, which is why he overcompensates by parading around as a sociopath who doesn’t understand sentiment at all so no one will ask him about it.  Sherlock is the man who urged everyone at the wedding to cheer up because he made them unreasonably sad and didn’t want to see them cry.  He’s the man who almost started crying along with a client who cried talking about her date that didn’t properly end things with her.  He’s the man who held a client’s hand and offered comforting support as she explained the loss of the love of her life.  He’s the man who urged a gay woman to come out of the closet to her family because love and happiness are what matter in the end.  He isn’t afraid to touch John, kiss Molly’s cheek, or receive hugs.  When John hugs him during his best man speech, Sherlock acts as if it’s the most normal thing in the world.  He even keeps talking to the crowd while John’s arms are still around him! He was comfortable enough to carry on with John’s arm around him.  Affection isn’t something scarce and foreign to Sherlock, and it certainly doesn’t frighten him.  He’s afraid of pain, heartbreak, loss, death - the things Moriarty spit at him in his mind palace - which are common with getting too close to someone.  Sherlock is a man with impulses and a porn preference, with friends and feelings.  Sherlock is not a cold, calculating machine.  Sherlock is not a brain without a heart.  Sherlock is an ordinary man.  

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NO BUT THIS IS SO

INTIMATE

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the subtlety of a truck crashing against a wall

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"We met next day as he had arranged, and inspected the rooms at No. 221B, Baker Street, of which he had spoken at our meeting. They consisted of a couple of comfortable bed-rooms and a single large airy sitting-room, cheerfully furnished, and illuminated by two broad windows."

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The Season 3 John Watson Look was quite something

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Rosie Watson

I don’t see much talk about Rosie, which is understandable since she has so little screen time. However, a child is a pretty important part of anyone’s life. And I’m in a child psychology class right now, so this sort of stuff is on my mind. I often see her appear in fanfiction, usually inaccurately, which is understandable because writing children is hard. This post is going to talk about her development at the end of the show (about 18 months old), what her development would be like at 2 years old (a common age for her in fanfiction), and how Mary’s death might have affected her.

Physical Development

By 18 months old, the physical development of most babies is pretty well developed. They’re almost definitely going to be walking by this time, maybe still a little unsteadily, but most can get around pretty well without much assistance at 18 months. By two years old, most children can climb stairs, run, and jump. Other than growing bigger, their physical development is starting to come to a close. Fine motor skills are still developing at this age; gross motor skills are going to be more well developed. A common test used is stacking blocks. At 18 months, they can generally only stack about 3, but by 2 years, babies can usually stack 5 blocks. Their peripheral and color vision is basically completely developed by 2 years, and their eyes, unless there is something wrong with them, will probably be close to 20/20 vision. They have well developed depth perception and perceptual constancy (the idea that an object viewed from a different distance or a different angle is still the same object). By 18 months, their hearing is well developed, and babies of this age can locate the sources of sounds just as well as adults can. 

Cognitive Development

Jean Piaget came up with 6 stages for cognitive development in babies. By 18 months, Rosie would be in either stage 5 (12-18 months) or stage 6 (18-24 months). By this age, Rosie would be quite inquisitive about the world. Babies at this age are described as ‘miniature scientists’: they are exploring and trying to figure out how things work, often getting into things they shouldn’t. And since they can move around pretty well by this age, they’re able to get into a lot of things. They will be engaging in trial and error behaviors in order to accomplish something, though at 18, the baby might be able to start mentally representing some objects and able to manipulate them in their head and figure it out that way. The example Piaget gives is an experiment he did on his own kids. At (I think) 18 months, he gave his daughter a stick that she wanted to pull into her crib. She was able to get it into her crib only by repeated trial and error of repeatedly turning the stick until it was able to fit through the bars. He repeated this experiment with a different kid when they were about 24 months old, and they were able to sit there and think about it for a moment before turning the stick and pulling it into the crib because they were able to mentally manipulate the stick. Object permanence is fully established around 12 months, so Rosie at this age would fully grasp it and go after objects that have left her view or been hidden. Deferred imitation (the ability to repeat an observed action after a waiting period) is also well established by 12 months - children are able to repeat actions seen 4 weeks prior. So it would be easy for Rosie to repeat the actions of others at 18 months, definitely by 2 years. This is because memory starts solidifying around 12 months. Toddlers 1-3 years old require 12-14 hours of sleep each day.

Language

I think this is the biggest mistake I see when it comes to writing really young children. Your 2 year old will not be speaking complete sentences. At 18 months, babies only have a vocabulary of about 50 words (though, they can understand far more words than this - probably twice as many words). Between 18 and 22 months, babies have a vocabulary explosion, going from 50 words to about 300. About 75% of the words gained during this time are nouns. What is common at this age is overextension, which is use of words in situations where meaning is extended. This usually happens with function or form. For example, if a baby is shown a small dog and told that is a ‘doggie’ and then shown a cow and told that is a ‘cow’, they child might think anything bigger than the small dog is a cow, even if its actually a dog. So medium to large dogs, sheep, horses, moose, and cows might all get called cows. By extension, anything about the size of the dog, or maybe even smaller, might get called ‘doggie’. Or, maybe the baby has a toy train that it calls a ‘choo-choo’. The baby might end up calling anything with wheels a ‘choo-coo’. At 18-24 months, babies will be using 2 word sentences. However, they do seem to understand syntax pretty well at this age - if they want you to sit in a chair, they will tell you ‘sit chair’, not ‘chair sit’. At this age, they will be using Telegraphic Speech, which are brief expressions that contain the meaning of the sentence but only essential words are used. Adults use this in their everyday life, such as if we text someone ‘home Tuesday’ instead of ‘I will be home on Tuesday’.  If you want to go the route of showing Rosie as some sort of genius baby (or any baby of this age, for that matter), then you might have a baby using 3 word sentences with a vocabulary of 500 words. That would be a very smart baby. However, it’s almost impossible to tell how smart someone will be at this age. Baby’s brains are still developing, and even the smartest babies will have an upper limit on what they are capable of at this age. Most IQ tests can’t really start accurately predicting future intelligence until about 5 or 6. Even the tests that have been designed for babies 2 and younger are really only useful for telling if there’s some sort of cognitive impairment, not if the baby is exceptionally smart for its age. Even the ones that excel at the tests at that age might end up with only average intelligence. If you want Rosie to be a genius, it likely won’t really start showing until she is a little older.

Mary’s Death

Mary dies sometime between Rosie being about 6 months (when she throws the rattle at Sherlock) and 18 months (the end of TFP). We’ll just say 12 months for easy numbers. By this age, Rosie would have developed very strong attachments to her caregivers. Obviously John and Mary are her caregivers, but the scene where Rosie throws the rattle at Sherlock shows that Rosie has formed a strong attachment with Sherlock; 6 months is about the age where fear of strangers begins, and Rosie shows absolutely no discomfort with Sherlock, so he’s been around enough for the previous months to have a strong attachment with him. When Molly tells Sherlock that John doesn’t want to see him anymore at the end of T6T, we’re going to say that Rosie is about 12 months. This is about the time when fear of strangers starts declining, but if Rosie wasn’t pretty comfortable with Molly, she would be fussy at being taken away from her father, so it’s a pretty safe bet that Molly has also been pretty involved with taking care of Rosie. So, that’s 4 primary caregivers total. Some might think that, because Rosie is so young, Mary’s death wouldn’t affect her. And Rosie isn’t likely to remember Mary or that she died. However, babies are utterly dependent on those that take care of them. Consequently, they form very strong attachments to those that take care of them. As anyone who has been around a baby can tell you, they get upset when the person that takes care of them disappears and isn’t around to offer them safety and comfort. By 12, Rosie would have formed a very strong attachment with Mary; even with her other caregivers being around, she still would have noticed Mary’s absence and been affected by it. However, her other caregivers weren’t around. John tells Sherlock that he doesn’t want Sherlock around any more, and then Sherlock goes “off his tits” with drugs for a while. John is having to deal with his wife being dead and the anger he feels towards his friend over that. It’s shown that he’s not doing too well. He’s probably still Rosie’s primary caregiver, but he almost definitely wouldn’t be as involved as he was simply because he’s so emotionally distraught. Meaning that the person who was probably least involved with Rosie prior to Mary’s death (Molly) might have ended up becoming the main caregiver for Rosie for a little while there. She went from 4 to 1 and a half caregivers, more or less. And that would definitely have affected her.  The most obvious way would be in her attachment style. Babies form different attachments to their caregivers, partially dependent on the baby’s own temperament, but usually dependent a lot more on the kind of care they receive. Most babies have secure attachment. Securely attached babies will show mild distress at a caregiver’s departure and will want to interact with the caregiver upon their return. However, they are easily comforted by the caregiver and go back to being happy and content pretty soon after being comforted. They use their caregiver as a secure base to explore the world around them. As long as the caregiver is close by, and giving positive signals as the baby is exploring if the baby becomes uncertain, they will remain content and explore just about everything they can. Securely attached babies are happier and more sociable with strangers, more cooperative with parents, get along better with peers, are better at problem solving, and having higher attention spans and lower impulsive behaviors. Contrast that with insecure attachment. There are actually 3 different types of insecure attachments, but I’m not going to go into them because this post is long enough as it is, and the individual types isn’t really important. There are some consistencies. Insecurely attached babies will be more emotionally distressed and less easily comforted by caregiver’s departure. They may initially show confusion or be dazed and disoriented with the caregiver first leaves. They may show contradictory behavior when the caregiver returns, alternating between pulling the caregiver close and pushing them away (though, there is one form of insecure attachment where the baby basically just … doesn’t care about the caregiver. They show the least distress out of all babies when the caregiver leaves and basically ignores them when the caregiver returns).  Rosie would most likely start out as a securely attached baby. She is surrounded by a lot of people that love her and engage with her and take very good care of her. Sherlock would absolutely encourage exploration and curiosity within Rosie. however, attachment styles can change, depending on the caregiving received. I think it likely that, after the events of T6T, her attachment style would change from secure to insecure. The good news is, that also means it can change back, from insecure to secure. Even though we see Sherlock and John interacting with her will at the end of TFP, she would likely still be insecurely attached. It takes time for anyone to get over that sort of thing. If you are writing her at 18-20 months, it would be completely believable to write her as being a bit of a ‘problem baby’, with all the issues that come from insecure attachment. However, by 2 years, she will likely have gone back to a secure attachment style, likely with no lasting consequences of what happened during season 4. Babies display a wonderful ability to bounce back from all sorts of harsh conditions they go through at a young age, showing almost no problems later in life as long as they are given the chance to have a better situation and improve.

I hope this helps anyone looking to write about Rosie or any babies about 18 to 24 months of age. 

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Also: John saying "I always hear ‘punch me in the face’ when you’re speaking, but it’s usually subtext" right before he punches Sherlock in the face = subtext becoming text

And then the rug is pulled - it’s like you’ve been warning them for ages. ‘You aren’t paying any attention but we are going to pull this rug.’ So when you fall over you’ve got to think, ‘I was told and I didn’t listen.’  (x)