…has actually helped with Cold Song. I’ve been able to beautifully clarify some things that were previously giving me trouble. Mostly existentialist stuff, but important to the overall fic.
I came across a rec site that featured my fic. They called it a…
My personal impression of some of this is not the same but some very good points, worth thinking about.
I liked Mary, but other than that I think Eldritch is pretty much spot-on.
(Mary is going to become a problem next season, though, no matter how they decide to resolve it. Although I do sort of like the idea of John’s massive trauma at losing his wife. I’m awful like that.)
I’d always thought Sherlock’s intelligence was probably enough trauma to explain him, and Eldritch is, differences in individual experiences aside, pretty much totally right about that. A lot of that was me, too, growing up. Just being able to see what you can see, and having to put up with the way people act like idiots and never even seem to notice the damage they’re doing to themselves and everything around them, and then having them treat YOU like crap because you’re the one refusing to buy into it, or even just because you’re different and that confuses them… I was never amoral, but I could see, some days, how easy it’d be for me to make that choice if I wanted. I got very, very good at a very young age at dissociating and compartmentalizing emotion from logic. They used to call me Spock. (I kinda liked that bit.)
And all that is plain as day in Sherlock, in his contempt for the general run of humanity and his sense that being different (having the guts to be different, having the strength to survive it) is something worthwhile for its own sake.
But Mycroft…Eldritch is so totally right. They love each other, in amidst the tension, but Mycroft is protective in a way that mostly takes the form of telling Sherlock how he should feel and what he shouldn’t do, and Sherlock is always resentful and wary, and we see more and more things like how, even in Sherlock’s head, Mycroft is distractingly strident and domineering in trying to force Sherlock’s viewpoint around to what he thinks is right.
And as Sherlock chooses, more and more, to lean away from all the things Mycroft taught him about how he shouldn’t care and shouldn’t feel, we begin to see where all those choices happened and where they started. And mostly, they start with things Mycroft tells him.
And it’s how it works, so often, with siblings. They don’t mean to hurt each other, but they’re kids, and no matter how much they want to look after each other, they don’t have the life experience to know what somebody else really needs.
Especially if they’re an arrogant little cuss who thinks that being able to see is as good as having experience.
(I also love Molly. I think she IS sweet, but being sweet and awkward doesn’t mean you can’t also be kinky and angry and frustrated at the world around you.)
Reblogging because PrettyArbitrary is pretty awesome.
I wanted to like Mary, but we were dropped into her story at such a late point that we didn’t get to see the character development she demands. We are supposed to think she loves John as intensely as Sherlock, but we have nothing to tell us how or why. We got to see the build-up between Sherlock and John. We know because we saw. I can’t just take Mary’s word for it. She really needed a few more episodes before HLV was dropped on us. Then I would have loved her.
Ultimately, we find out that she does not love John like Sherlock does. Sherlock lets him go.
No, she doesn’t love John the way Sherlock does. And that’s why I like her. 😀
Sherlock will try to save John even if it means condemning himself and losing John (although the irony is that losing Sherlock doesn’t do much toward saving John at all, but Sherlock was away for two years so he didn’t see that).
Mary, who was there to see that, is willing to kill Sherlock anyway in order to protect herself.
Mary may well love John with the ferocity of a lioness, but her love is selfish and flawed. Which makes her beautifully, magnificently and deliberately untrustworthy.
And she could, of course, turn out to be a turncoat after all. The lack of seeing Mary, as you pointed out, leaves us with an uncertainty that seems to leave that open as a possibility.
So that’s what I like about her, really: we can’t entirely trust her, and we’re not really supposed to.