Boton

The problem for me is that making Sherlock a product of trauma removes a lot of his agency. I like the idea that he is fundamentally the person he wants to be. I don't mind little traumas, like finding out he had a difficult time in uni because he didn't know when to keep his deductions to himself. However, I like to think he has sculpted those experiences into a personality he enjoys, even if it is sometimes abrasive and socially unacceptable. Once we get into repressed memories and invented memories and trauma at a young age, you are correct that we are dealing with mental illness. It calls into question everything about Sherlock, and it also calls into question everything about his relationships with others. I said elsewhere that I question how his relationship with John will progress now that John isn't just a proxy for Victor. But I also question things like how he would deal with romantic relationships and sex and other ways of getting close to people now that the barrier that Mycroft clumsily errected is gone. I don't really want a mentally ill Holmes in this universe, and so I'm leaning toward ignoring S4 most of the time too.

It seems to me that people tend to mentally combine several somewhat related phenomena, and then apply their feelings about one of those phenomena to all the rest as well. Incest (in the sense of having babies with a close relative) can have unfortunate results, therefore parent/child matches are not a good idea. Parents and their children tend to have a certain age difference But you can't follow that line of reasoning backwards, because it's not the age difference that's the problem, it's the genetic similarity. Harrison Ford may be your father's age, but he is not your father. Neither is Jeri Ryan your father's daughter. Adults having sex with minors isn't a good idea, for any number of reasons. When you're a young adult, it's therefore both illogical and immoral to have sex with someone who's even ten or twenty years younger than you. Once you're middle-aged or older, however, a person twenty or more years younger than you is an adult, so there's no logical reason to apply the term "dirty old wo/man." Of course, parents and their young children do quite reasonably have those attitudes, and it's very difficult to shed an ingrained attitude that you've had for decades, possibly for your entire life, even when there's no longer any logical reason to maintain it. So it's understandable even if it's not logical. Agree with all of this. I hadn't really taken my reaction all the way to thinking that "crush on man my dad's age = brush with incest" or anything like that, but there was a moment that I felt like having a crush on a man (or really, a collection of his characters) my father's age sort of implied I was checking out Dad's friends. That felt weird. (Although, hey, he actually occasionally has a hot friend, so there's that....) I was amused by Dad's crush on Jeri Ryan. Dad has always appreciated pretty women in all contexts, although he is the consummate gentleman in his interactions. Very old school in his manners, but you always know (or *I* always know) that he's noticed the pretty women half or more of his age, which at this point means that he's looking at women in their 40s with an appreciative eye.

I'm with you, Toby. That makes total sense.

Yeah, the gif is pretty interesting there. Good find! I guess Eurus could have been carrying the gun (which I suppose she could have conned off one of the guards at the same time she escaped Sherrinford) to see if Sherlock would save her. The whole Eurus arc seems to be her trying to see if Sherlock would save her and show her to be important to him. A bottle of pills may not accomplish the same thing. But yes, your laptop cord example, too, is a good reason why a purse that size would not necessarily divulge the presence of a gun just by weight. The weight would have to be concentrated in one spot and move as a unit, but that same effect would happen with a laptop cord bundled up. So, all we can really conclude from the scene is not that Sherlock is brilliant at deductions, but that he doesn't know women *at all,* because there is no such thing as a purse "too heavy for its size." :-)

That is exactly what they did on House, and I loved it once I realized that Stacy was the Irene character. She was a lawyer dating House, and therefore she understood exactly what her legal rights were as his power of attorney or temporary medical guardian or whatever she was, and she made the treatment decision that left him alive but lame. So, on a very personal level, she "beat" him (although not maliciously), and they dropped the scandal angle entirely.

Rewatched this last night. Just realized that in the scene where Sherlock (mentally? physically?) weighs Faith's purse and concludes she has a gun in it, there is no way with the size of purse she was carrying and the size of gun he retrieved from it that he would know she was carrying from the weight alone. I have make-up bags that weigh more than that gun. :)

You are right; they couldn't find the well. Let me amend this to ask what the h--- kind of property this is, anyway? It is supposed to be an ancestral home, and yet the parents don't know where/if there's a well on the property, and they allow a funky Halloween-style graveyard for the kids to play in? I also don't like the idea that Sherlock's personality is all/mostly reaction to trauma. He is supposed to be born for greatness; that's why we love him. I don't want this all to be a mental disorder of some sort. So, can anyone square the fact that Mycroft says that "everything you are is because of Redbeard" or whatever, and the fact that in TAB, Sherlock says "no one made me; I made me"?

For me, it was the fact that they seemed to go out of their way to make sure that Holmes and Watson had no chemistry whatsoever: not friendship, not romance, nothing. Or at least I could never see it. And that seemed a waste of two very good actors.

Thank you, thank you for this explanation. This really helps me a lot. This whole concept is both new and difficult for me. You are right; what I feel for my husband is not friendship, regardless of whether or not we are physically intimate at any one point. I always sort of cringe when people say "I'm marrying my best friend." I know what they mean, and it is a sweet sentiment, but I most emphatically did not marry my best friend; I married someone I felt romantic love for, and you are quite right that this is different. My husband once said, "I use you as a best friend," which seemed accurate to me: we press one another into service in situations that require a best friend, but the relationship is something else entirely. Thank you again. I have a much better understanding!

I've watched Kinsey and read up on the scale. The lower the number, the more hetero one is, ja? I'm a '0' too, then. Not familiar with the 'cis-gender' term, though. 'Demi-sexual' is also new to me. I've just recently wrapped my head around 'Non-binary'. My closest male friend is gay and when he used to live next door to me, we'd sit on either one of our respective porches and scope the talent walking by. He usually could find something to appreciate far more easily than I, but if you saw where I live, you'd understand why my standards aren't quite that democratic. Gay men make really good girlfriends for hetero women because they get where we are coming from vis. dude appreciation and they generally enjoy shopping and antiquing and other pursuits the gals are into. My friend grew up in the country, and there wasn't a lot of money growing up, so he got very self-sufficient at traditionally masculine pursuits like hunting, hanging drywall and using power tools. At his house, if it wasn't DIY, it didn't get done. His family's affectionate nickname for him is 'Martha Black & Decker' because I'd wager there are very few other men on the planet that might spend the afternoon hanging drywall and installing plumbing on a bathroom remodel and chase that with an evening of coloring Easter Eggs according to instructions in Martha Stewart Living. (Naturally he has a subscription.) Coloring the Easter Eggs while baked on some really ace ganja was his own little touch. We never discussed Kinsey as such. I suppose he'd be a '6', though when he was young and confused, he did date girls in high school. His significant relationships have been with men and in fact at the age of 41, he's found a life partner and I'm invited to their wedding next summer. While watching an episode of 'Orange is the New Black', or pondering the highly unlikely yet *possible* scenario in which I am stranded on a desert island with only another female for company, I pose the question to myself--under these conditions, could I have lesbian encounters? The conclusion I have come to is, no, I really don't think I could, even if my fellow strandee on the island became a very dear friend. That bell is just not rung for me, even though I can see how other women who consider themselves straight might make a detour in those situations. Guess that makes me a Kinsey 0 cis-gender too . .? My understanding (and someone else please chime in if I’m wrong or miss the nuance): The Kinsey scale is 0 to 5, with 0 being completely heterosexual and 5 being completely homosexual. A 1, then, would be someone almost always attracted to the opposite gender but who might find exceptions. A 4 is the same, with the person primarily homosexual. “Cis-gender” just means that you identify as the gender they said you were at birth. I was identified as a girl after a look at my genitals at birth, and mentally I agree I’m female, so I’m cis. It is kind of a way to shorthand the opposite of trans. Demisexual, if I understand right, is the case in which a person experiences sexual attraction but only after adding the intellectual or emotional component. For me, I would not actually sleep with someone I didn’t have a bond with, but I’m quite capable of arousal on sight, so I’ve seen that called primary sexual attraction. I have also seen heteroromantic and homoromantic used, which I think is where your desert island scenario comes in for me. If I had to, I could form a kind of pair bond with another female, but I experience no desire to touch a female in a sexual way. This concept, which I admit I’m not fully up on, seems a lot like best friendship to me, but I may be missing a nuance here. Sent from my iPad using Tapatalk

I have always assumed that Sherlock did receive some therapy; we weren't that backwards in 1982, after all. (For reference, supposedly the band Tears for Fears, who had some of their biggest hits in 1985, got their name from the title of the book one of them saw in a child psychologist's office.) My question is what kind of therapist allows a child Sherlock's age to not just actively repress a memory, but substitute a different memory on top of it. We aren't talking about dredging up the memory years later and deciding to let sleeping dogs (sorry....) lie as far as coping mechanisms go. The child was in the midst of actively dealing with his grief by deciding Redbeard was a dog instead of his nickname for his best friend who died horribly at his sister's hands, and his sister soon thereafter also disappeared. And, apparently no one cared enough about this whole thing to get poor Victor's bones out of the well or to help Sherlock cope with the idea that he had a sister who was sick and who had to go away where they could help her. I know I said "shitty parenting" above, but I've always kind of imagined that the whole mess sort of broke Mummy Holmes for a while, and Dad was left with a mess and only Mycroft to help him sort it out. I figure Mycroft tried to step into the Mummy role because Dad was still sane, and that was the genesis of Sherlock's snark when Mycroft made the innocuous tea-pouring comment, "I'll be mother." ("There's an entire childhood in a nutshell.")

Oh, yes, I do remember Miss Hudson from Elementary! I only watched three seasons, and then it lost my interest. I understand your perspective here. I'm a Kinsey 0 cis-gender female who experiences primary sexual attraction, so a lot of the tags on fan fics I've actually had to look up, like "demisexual" and "asexual" as it applies to human beings and not to a form of reproduction. I have, however, had the fortune of knowing several transgender folks in my classes, and many of them have very interesting journeys that really make it clear that Caitlyn Jenner is nuts far more because of her proximity to the Kardashian family than anything else. I look forward to the bugged underpants story. I must admit, I have a certain fascination for imagining Sherlock Holmes in his BVDs (or out of them) as well. :D

Yeah, I'm afraid I'm going to have to go with "shitty parenting" as the explanation, as much as I'd like to love the Holmes parents. Yes, it was in TFP. Mycroft explains that Rudi initially took charge of the Eurus situation, and later Mycroft took over.

Forget the bugged underwear, Hikari. This is the fanfic I want you to write. :)

No, I understand what you mean, Herlock. I think I do, anyway. In many ways, the Holmes-Watson relationship is special because it is quintessentially male. In fact, due to its Victorian origins, it may be even more male/masculine than anything we can really produce today, since in that era men and women operated in very different spheres. From that perspective, I think the idea of an all-female rendering of Sherlock Holmes is a horrible idea, because the world is full of female friendship stories, and we are relatively short of ones that celebrate male friendship in the way Sherlock Holmes does. But on the other hand, I'm excited to try it, because I like seeing what you can change about the original and still have a recognizable Sherlock Holmes story. We have tried making it modern or putting the characters in different career or moving them to different countries, all with greater or lesser success. I'm interested to see what a Japanese female incarnation will look like. Maybe it will fall flat for me, but I'm going to give it a go.

If only we didn't have that complication of "Sherlock's always been the adult," we could almost pretend that Moftiss were setting up the S4 Victor-Eurus arc all along. Victor's death arrested Sherlock in a state of perpetual emotional childhood, and he's learned to "put on the clothes" of adulthood to make himself accepted but has never gotten over the (well-earned) fear that at any moment someone might swoop in and take his best friend away. So what was Mummy Holmes on about, anyway?

Oh, this looks good! Wonder if we are getting it simultaneously on Hulu? If so, it might tip the scales for me subscribing.

First, yeah, it's a deal. I'd love to write that fan fic. And I must read the one with the bugged undies! I'm an only child; my dad is the oldest of two, with a nine year gap between him and his sister. Between the two of us, we are very good at always being the "little adult," always trying to fix every problem by ourselves with our own resources. It doesn't surprise me at all that Mycroft worked his way into a position where he doesn't ask for help so much as he commands assets. We always take the brunt of the responsibility on our shoulders. I identify with Mycroft a lot, including his ridiculous belief that he can somehow control his brother's emotions; I've done similar things (not as dramatic) believing that if I just kept tight enough control over everything, I could spare everyone pain and disappointment. Recognizing loneliness has been a challenge for me too, just as it has Mycroft. What constitutes "lonely" when you are an only child? On the one hand, you have all the attention from your parents you could ever desire, but on the other, you know how to scale every game and toy you ever encounter down to something that can be played alone (or with a parent). That's not a complaint; I really enjoyed being an only, but I feel like I know where Mycroft is coming from a lot of the time.

I agree with both being called dorks in their school days, but I wonder if Mycroft let it roll off his back so easily when he was younger. To me, "goldfish" is an extreme thing to say about other people, no matter your intelligence level, and I wonder if there is a hint of defensiveness there: other people are no more important than goldfish, so I don't have to consider their opinions of me. I think Mycroft was well on his way to constructing a shell where he dressed correctly, spoke correctly, and looked down upon others, and the defense worked for him. He tried to make it work for Sherlock, because clearly, he tried to shield Sherlock from every emotion, but Sherlock is a much more emotional or perhaps impulsive person, and he is always about to stumble into the potholes that Mycroft would avoid. Think about the Victor/Redbeard killing. Sherlock was what? Five? So Mycroft was 12. Mycroft was old enough to try to put some sort of intellectual framework around what he saw happen, but the part that impressed him so much was not necessarily that his sister was a psychopath (which came out over time), but that his little brother had a mental breakdown over the loss of his best friend. With his parents having their hands full with two mentally ill children, Mycroft was probably left alone more than he should have been to process this, and he determined that if Sherlock had not had a friend, he wouldn't have been hurt. This squared nicely with what Mycroft was probably learning from the bullies at school, so he decided all "normal" people were beneath him and his siblings and set out to try to teach Sherlock to simply avoid any interactions with people that could lead to friendship or attachment. But it came more naturally to Mycroft to cut people out, probably in part because he was an only child for the first 7 years of life, and I can tell you that being an only for any period of time can really change your perspective on people. Or, you know, that whole thing could be fan fiction I'm writing for myself. But I like the theory.

Er ... um.... me? Han's too cocky for my taste, I've always been Luke's girl. Well, I wouldn't kick Luke out of the Falcon for eating crackers in bed either. ;) But I think the Han crush is really some combination of crushing on Han and Indiana Jones at the same time, so it sort of becomes a "Harrison Ford's characters" crush. This is how I feel about it too. How can you crush on an actor when you can’t possibly know if their interviews really reflect the actual person and not just what they want you to believe? Don’t get me wrong, there are actors that I appreciate the pretty aesthetics but I still don’t have a crush on them. The actors inevitably disappoint me, because almost by definition if you are attention-seeking enough to want to be on TV or in movies, we have different values and interests in life. Stage actors seem just slightly different, and I have looked admiringly at one or two who would prefer to work with a smaller audience like that. But I'm with gerry: it doesn't seem to stop me from looking at an actor and appreciating the good looks. I just don't want to hear most of them talk. Or, usually, see them dress themselves. Or hear anything about their political opinions. Just look pretty and read the script, please. :P

I’m not sure Elementary is a fair comparison to Sherlock considering that Irene Adler was Moriarty’s alter ego and both characters played by one actress. I did find it interesting but that was a pretty unique potrayal. I thought Rachel McAdams was awful as Irene Adler in the Sherlock movie but I’m biased because I don’t think she’s a good actress. Yeah, I agree Elementary is not a one-to-one comparison among Irenes, but I like the idea that they took "the woman who beat you" to the nth degree and just made Irene into Sherlock's actual enemy. I thought that was clever, since the original Irene really didn't have all that much to flesh out why she was supposed to be so intriguing; most of what we seem to come back to is mostly fan speculation. Plus I would watch Natalie Dormer do just about anything; she's like a master class in sexuality. I agree about Rachel McAdams; her Irene left me kind of flat. I also didn't like the portrayal of Irene in the Russian Sherlock Holmes, who seemed very juvenile. It doesn't look like Mystery Queen is going to wind up with an Irene character, but I must admit I kind of lost steam watching that and need to get back to it.

So far, I've liked all of the takes on Irene Adler I've seen in the modern-era Holmes series I've seen. I like this one, I like Irene in Elementary (at least as far as I watched, which was about 3 seasons/series), and I liked the one in House. I thought all of them captured an element the original, although none of them got all of her. That seems fair.

I honestly don't know. You would have had to ask me before series 2. Because now that this Irene Adler exists, she's THE Irene for me and I can't (or won't) imagine her any different. I like her. I was surprised when I first found out how much flak Mr Moffat got for the way he wrote her. I agree with this, too. I like her, and I thought making her as she is was clever. Then, I even met people in RL who stopped watching the show at the point that she came along because they were offended at her line of work. That really surprised me.

I have had a crush on Harrison Ford for 40 years, since the first time I saw him in Star Wars. A couple of years ago, I realized he was my Dad's age, and, um....that feels really weird. Then again, I was talking to Dad about this, and he has a crush on Jeri Ryan (Seven of Nine from Star Trek), who is my age. I suppose as long as we keep the inter-generational crushes confined to our sci-fi, we're OK.

I actually have completely gotten over my BC crush, which is nice. I'm too old to have celebrity crushes. :-) However, I do still have a mad crush on Sherlock Holmes! ;)