[ SECRET POST #2577 ]

[case]

⌈ Secret Post #2577 ⌋

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

01.


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02.
[Theresa Lopez-Fitzgerald-Crane, from the soap opera Passions]


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03.
[BBC Sherlock]


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04.
[Nobunaga the Fool]


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05.
[Carrie Fisher as Princess Leia from Star Wars]


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06.
[The Quick and the Dead]


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07.
[Nathan Fillion]


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08.
[Warehouse 13]


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09.


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10.


















Notes:

Secrets Left to Post: 02 pages, 030 secrets from Secret Submission Post #368.
Secrets Not Posted: [ 0 - broken links ], [ 0 - not!secrets ], [ 0 - not!fandom ], [ 0 - too big ], [ 0 - repeat ].
Current Secret Submissions Post: here.
Suggestions, comments, and concerns should go here.

Comments

[intrigueing]

First of all, let me put aside my initial reaction to this secret to the end of my comment, in order to reply to this secret:

It depends on how you define "important."

See, Mary was obviously vastly more important than Irene from an in-universe perspective. She caused Watson to temporarily relegate Holmes and his cases to second on his list of priorities, which is sort of a big deal. This, plus Watson moving out of Baker Street to be with her rather than Holmes, meant that Holmes could no longer just assume Watson would follow him of his own volition. Holmes had to actively seek Watson out, ask him to come on cases, and in effect, admit openly that he liked Watson's company so much he would go through inconvenience and delay in order to get it, rather than replace it. This all definitely wrought a bigger change in the status quo of the stories than Irene ever did. Mary, therefore, is far more important than Irene as a "real" person, as someone who influenced the fabric of the stories and the world Holmes and Watson inhabit.

On the other hand, Mary doesn't have much symbolic importance of her own. Irene has a vast amount of symbolic importance to the narrative, especially (though not exclusively) from an out-of-universe perspective. She's the woman who beat Sherlock Holmes, managing to not only outsmart him, but to do so by turning his own methods back on him (disguise and reasoning from actions to motivations), to do so by exploiting his weakness (namely, his sexism), and to make him admit that he was beaten and admit that she had the moral high ground over him. She doesn't really have to be important -- she could have been as throwaway as the three nameless men who beat Holmes -- but she's important because Holmes ascribes importance to her, and Watson recognizes and immortalizes the importance Holmes ascribes to her in the form of a story, giving her vast importance as a fictional character despite the fact that she doesn't shake up the status quo much at all apart from causing Holmes to become less sexist.

Now allow me to come back to my initial impression of this secret: this way of thinking is, in a word, foul. This habit of putting all the women in a story through arbitrary gladiatorial combat against each other for absolutely no reason other than the fact that they are female -- not because they conflict with each other as characters or people -- is disgusting and disrespectful and mean-spirited. And this kind of insidious, devaluing, zero-sum double-binding way of defining female characters is far, far more harmful than any number of negative stereotypes, because stereotypes can be recognized and discredited, but this way of thinking is unconscious and taken for granted and comes in a thousand different forms -- I'm sure, OP, that you didn't even think about the implications of framing female characters in this manner when you wrote this secret, which just proves my point.

[(Anonymous)]

this is a good comment and you should feel good.

[tweedisgood]

*Applauds*