[ SECRET POST #2335 ]

[case]

⌈ Secret Post #2335 ⌋

Warning: Some secrets are NOT worksafe and may contain SPOILERS.

01.


__________________________________________________



02.


__________________________________________________



03.


__________________________________________________



04.


__________________________________________________



05.


__________________________________________________



06.


__________________________________________________



07.


__________________________________________________



08.


__________________________________________________



09.


__________________________________________________



10.


__________________________________________________



11.


__________________________________________________



12.


__________________________________________________



13.


__________________________________________________



14.


__________________________________________________



15.


__________________________________________________




















Notes:

Secrets Left to Post: 04 pages, 095 secrets from Secret Submission Post #334.
Secrets Not Posted: [ 0 - broken links ], [ 0 - not!secrets ], [ 1 - not!fandom ], [ 0 - too big ], [ 0 - repeat ].
Current Secret Submissions Post: here.
Suggestions, comments, and concerns should go here.

Comments

[fscom]

02. http://25.media.tumblr.com/6ef1d3b6e3208c148b59449a5aec3fe8/tumblr_mna1tsr8aH1rq2vv5o1_500.png

[(Anonymous)]

*nods*

[fenm]

How is this even a secret? Don't a lot of people feel this way?

And yes. YES YES YES. Dear God.

[(Anonymous)]

I don't know if people in general feel this way, but it is a bit odd in the context of this community, because I think everyone who talks about Sherlock Holmes on f!s agrees with this, and usually agrees with it pretty strongly.

But that doesn't make it any less true.

[fenm]

And even among those who like her as a love interest, I can't think of a situation where I've seen them get upset at those who don't want her to be.

[ladysugarquill]

I think most adaptations pushed her in the place of a love interest - even BBC Sherkock, which most book-fans adore.

[(Anonymous)]

I don't know if it's different for anyone else but nearly every person I've met irl isn't aware that Irene is not his canon love interest and look downright bemused when I explain that she was married(or getting married) to another guy in the book and neither her or Holmes had any kind of romantic feelings towards each other, he respected her but that's it. I'm not even a Sherlock Holmes buff and it annoys me that the romance storyline keeps cropping up in modern SH adaptations.

[dreemyweird]

YES PLEASE DO IT. I'm so much for this. I feel like the only adaptations that do not have Irene being in love with Holmes are the literal ones (such as Granada and the Russian Holmes), and even then there are still hints of all sorts.

Writers, stahp. Holmes had no canon love interest, why change his character for the sake of The Rule of Whatever? And why change Irene? If anything, this oversimplifies their relationship.

[intrigueing]

THIS. Jesus fucking Christ. Didn't ACD go out of his way on the very first page of A Scandal in Bohemia to stress the fact that Irene did not win Holmes' respect through making him ~fall in love~, but instead won his respect solely by her intellect, which (especially at the time it was written) was an intentional subversion of typical female character roles?

[fenm]

Yep, The fourth sentence in the story is:

"It was not that he felt any emotion akin to love for Irene Adler."

That's not ambiguous. AT ALL.

And if you wanna argue against it on the grounds of "Watson wrote that, he could be wrong", well, 99% of the stories are written from Watson's POV; if you're going to dismiss this, you have to dismiss most of canon.

[(Anonymous)]

It's interesting you bring that up because in most cases that I've seen, Irene DOES win Sherlock's respect because of her intellect, the falling in love is left sort of up in the air and more of a "maybe? if Sherlock wasn't all about MYSTERIES AND PUZZLES".

[ladysugarquill]

I must confess I've shipped her and Holmes since I was 10, but it's truethat's not the place of her character in the story.

[kallanda_lee]

Because that ever stopped shippers...

[fenm]

The OP isn't talking to shippers, they're talking to the professional writers who keep making her a love interest, even in adaptions that are supposed to be "faithful" to canon [coughsherlockcough].

[cloud_riven]

It's one of those things that make me wonder why book canon is so hard to follow for a character that appears in only one story. It also makes me side eye since it seems being female on similar footing to makes her an automatic love interes for Holmes. Similar to the tendency in cape comics where super heroines get heroic lovers for romantic arcs, while a male hero has "regular" folk (eg: gwen stacy, Lois lane, carol ferris even before sapphiring, etc.). Is there so little tptb know what to do with Adler?

Also, I got no beef with shipping it. I just wish it were portrayed more often as Holmes pursuing her, or the one hopelessly pining :u

[fenm]

Yeah that's part of what bugs me about it; it seems like writers (and most of the ones who've written Holmes are male) don't seem to know what to do with a female character except "make her a love interest!"

[(Anonymous)]

I wish the Sherlock adaptations would back off on the romance aspect, too. Especially when it's rarely done well. :(

[(Anonymous)]

The love interest angle is hilarious when you consider that, in the story, Holmes and Adler physically cross paths a grand total of three times and each time one of them is in disguise and the other doesn't know it until after the fact, and the second time is actually Irene's wedding. Holmes is impressed by her and grumpy at being outsmarted (although LOL at how all she actually has to do once she sees through his disguise and figures out his plan is to get the fuck out of Dodge ASAP) but there is no indication she is or will ever be pining after him. Also, she appears in one early story and is never mentioned again.

[fenm]

She is mentioned a few times, actually, but it's like 4 times in 50+ stories.

[(Anonymous)]

I think the most faithful adaptation of Irene might be the one in the Wishbone version.

[(Anonymous)]

I laugh, but it's 100% true: it captured the fact that she wasn't nearly as fascinated by him as he was by her, and that in the end all she wanted to do was get away and marry her own guy that she loved. And she beat him, fair and square, without being nearly as morally grey as other Irenes have been.

[ariakas]

One of the phrases they seem really hung up on in the modern versions is this notion that she is "The Woman" to Sherlock. Since it is (in their interpretation) intended to be a signifier of profound respect, they automatically assume that a dude professing profound respect for a woman has got to be in love with her, and arrggggghhhhh....

Moffat's 'but what's your problem - he does love her, so really, she wins in the end!' is a perfect example of catastrophically missing the point. I suppose the notion that of a woman defeating a man purely through intellect seems less ground-breaking and unsexy these days, but when you look at how female characters are actually portrayed versus how it seems they ought to be in our more egalitarian paradigm, it is still depressingly groundbreaking to have one do so.

Writer dudes? I've outsmarted many men in my life without fluttering my eyelashes. I get that this is fantasy for you, and that's how you'd like to think you were outsmarted, but it really probably wasn't. The average IQ of the average man and woman are virtually identical, so women almost certainly outsmart men as often as the reverse happens in real life all the time without needing to resort to "wiles". This isn't a pushup contest.

[(Anonymous)]

Neither is Watson, but that won't stop people.

[(Anonymous)]

Thank you for saying this. I feel like it's fine for Sherlock/Watson to happen but nothing beyond that. I rather have Sherlock happily working and not in a relationship.

[(Anonymous)]

This has always bugged me. Part of what makes Sherlock interesting is how he is detached from the normal world, including romance. That's why we have Watson - to put Holmes into a more human context and bring out his warmer side. If anything, if it wasn't for him getting married early in the books, it's Watson who should deal with the Love Interest front.