I find it’s getting easier and easier to forget that I have no idea who Mary is, and I have no idea why she’s doing what she’s doing. I’m not inclined to take much about Mary at face value, because everything she does has a question mark on the end of it. She has made a lot of choices, and at this point, we don’t know why she’s done any of it.
One of my favourite parts of The Sign of the Three was when the photographer asks for a photo of the bride and groom and Sherlock clearly thinks, yes, Mary is John’s bride and I am John’s groom, I shall pose now for this picture, the bride and groom, this is perfectly rational and normal
Never forget - this is what John Watson looks like without Sherlock Holmes.
you’re more the sitting-down type. I can tell.
“You’ve got a brother who’s worried about you, but you won’t go to him for help because you don’t approve of him—possibly because he’s an alcoholic, more likely because he recently walked out on his wife.”
Sometimes Sherlock sees things he doesn’t mean to see; in this case, was it John’s future?
In series three John appears to be dancing on the edge of both of the things he judges his sister for: he’s veering towards a drinking problem, and, as Billy points out, he’s contemplating walking out on his wife. He may not approve, but he’s not immune from following the same path as his absent sister.
You know, I was thinking about it…
Sherlock hurt John, and then he apologized, and that apology was accepted. But Sherlock only really earns that forgiveness when he evens the score.
The only way Sherlock could match the suffering he caused John was by getting shot, literally dying, willing himself back to life, shooting a guy in the head, then getting a secret death sentence but keeping the truth of his impending tragic demise from John to avoid hurting him all over again. That’s even.
What’s so great about it is what a commentary it is on John’s pain, 99% of which is off-screen. We get glimpses, but we never really see the whole of it. You could say, oh sure, he was sad. He got over it. But no, you don’t understand: those two years without Sherlock were the equivalent, quite literally, of dying. Twice.
For a second there–
No. Longer than that. For a good long minute, John believes that past tense Sherlock on the screen has just agreed to stop being dead. He believes it. He has a burst of irrational, mad hope that he’s just made a bargain with the dead and he’s going to get Sherlock back.
John’s ready for the black magic. He’s ready for anything.
happierstill replied to your post: I think, in retrospect, one of my favo…
Yes. Sherlock is going to have to do a real apology to John at some point. Tears, begging, the whole nine yards. John’s heart broke when Sherlock jumped. John knew Sherlock could not be trusted with his heart again after that kind of betrayal.
Interesting. I think I disagree with you here. I think Sherlock already got his apology on the train in The Empty Hearse, and I think it was legit. John does forgive him. I think John even trusts him again. I don’t think it’s decision, it’s just how he’s built. John has trust issues he struggles to overcome with everyone else, but he default trusts Sherlock from the moment they meet. I don’t think it’s a choice, I think it’s a compulsion. I think he trusts Sherlock even when he doesn’t want to. Even when he knows he shouldn’t. He trusts Sherlock again way too fast in series 3, not because Sherlock has earned it, but because John can’t help it.
When he discovers that Mary’s being lying to him, it’s Sherlock he feels safe with. Sherlock says, “bring your gun to my parents house for Christmas dinner,” and John is like, “What? That’s CRAZY!” but he does it anyway. For all his caution and cynicism, John trusts in Sherlock the way other people trust in gravity.
But after the Magnussen incident John has every reason in the world to trust Sherlock; he knows Sherlock sacrificed his great self and everything he could have done in his life for John and his family, which I’m sure John can’t begin to fathom.
No, I don’t think there will be any more apologies. They’re not necessary. But there is no apology that can remove the consequences of Sherlock’s behaviour.
My fear is that the real consequence of Sherlock’s behaviour is this: he will make the very logical deduction that he was right in the first place; emotions cloud his judgement and prevent him from doing good work. And he wouldn’t be wrong. Being in love with John is a problem for Sherlock. It makes him sloppy and it blinds him to the obvious. He makes bad choices because of it. So maybe he needs to stare those feelings in the face, acknowledge them, and swallow them. And never let them interfere with his head ever, ever again.
He’s wise enough now to really understand the danger, and not just in the abstract. He might look at John and think, yes, I love you, I’m in love with you, I always will be, but that isn’t the life I’m going to get to have. It’s too dangerous, and it’s too complicated, and I’m married to my work. So I need to be satisfied with the fact that I love you, and you love me, but we’re never going to do this. Because I can’t, and because I choose to solve crimes instead.
It would be horrible. But it the wistful and melancholy understanding it would give him would certainly make him a better detective.
I think, in retrospect, one of my favourite things about series 3 is how we learned that Sherlock’s lie to John about his fake suicide is actually fairly pointless and was just a really bad idea from start to finish.
aura218 asked:
That also has a logic to it! Sherlock wouldn’t care who’s pants Angelo thought Sherlock was aiming to get into, would he! WHO CARES
also free food, who doesn’t like free food man
There’s a story stuffed in the timeline there, there’s definitely is. This one makes sense!
lovestoriesandfairytales asked:
Ha! That seems perfectly reasonable to me. ;)
the-seventh-stranger-deactivate asked:
Most of the people who care about Sherlock say things like that. His brother and his landlady think he’s gay, and Mrs Hudson admits that he’s never been in a relationship to her knowledge, but she makes that assumption more than anyone. Why is that?
I’ve said this before, and I see others have suggested that it’s natural for people to assume someone like Sherlock is gay.
Here’s the thing about that: straight people pretty much never assume someone who hasn’t expressed an explicit attraction to the opposite sex is gay. Unless a man fits the flamboyant, limp-wristed and lisping stereotype of a gay man (which Sherlock is not), straight people will 99.9% of the time not question their core assumption that everyone they meet is straight, and sometimes not even a stereotype will makes them twig. Exhibit A: there were people who were surprised to discover that Liberace was gay.
This is heterosexism and it is rampant. It’s the reason why gay people have to keep coming out their whole lives, forever, every time they meet new people, because in the English-speaking world, people tend to assume that everyone is straight until they are forcibly corrected. That’s the reason why coming out is even a thing. It is intensely boring. Because of this reality, it seems unlikely to me that people like Angelo and Mrs Hudson are making entirely baseless assumptions about Sherlock’s sexual orientation. I mean this isn’t middle school. They would have had some evidence to behave with such certainty, and it would have had to have been some pretty blatant evidence.
tykobrian asked:
Sherlock is not a compulsive liar. What he is, most definitely, is a man with a big ego and low self-esteem. He knows that John thinks he’s dashing and brilliant, as well as charming, dangerous, and sexy with his flipped collars and his cheekbones.
Of course sharp-as-a-tack Mary can see right through Sherlock the way that John can’t; John sees Sherlock through the buttery light of his intense adoration. John expects Sherlock to have an amazing story about how he learned to fold napkins. He can’t conceive of Sherlock as an ordinary man, because to John, Sherlock is always, always extraordinary. Either he’s extraordinarily terrible (”You machine!”) or he’s extraordinarily spectacular (most of the time). An ordinary person learns to fold napkins on youtube. Sherlock Holmes would not be so ordinary!
Sherlock Holmes is indestructible, unflappable, untouchable, and emotionless. He wants to be a high-functioning sociopath, probably never more so then right then. Sherlock has an appearance to keep up, but only for John.
Especially just then.
Sherlock might be married to his work, but he doesn’t care about cases or criminals while he’s folding napkins. At that moment, he’s terrified that he’s only got John back in order to lose him again to his impending marriage. He’s having a serious emotional crisis and is trying to act like he isn’t, wouldn’t, and couldn’t. He’d just learned how to not be alone, and suddenly he’s about to be alone again. He’s in an absolute state, but he’s trying to make sure John doesn’t notice.
Is that a lie? I suppose so. But it’s not compulsive. He’s doing it for a good reason.
darlingbenny asked:
Pain is one of the least objective things humans can experience. It really is all in your head: how you think about it really does affect how you feel it, and how much of it you feel. If your pain is a bad sign, if it’s going to result in more and worst pain down the line, then it will hurt more and be harder to manage. If the pain is a sign that you’re heading towards something better, it will hurt less. Sherlock would know that. He would figure out how to make his pain useful, a step along the path.
As we’ve seen, I imagine that the first thing he would do is determine if he’s been mortally wounded, of if there’s anything he can do to ensure his own survival. He would cope by thinking strategically, and knowing that his actions and decisions are giving him an edge of some kind. He would be planning five steps ahead; how is he going to turn this to his advantage? He would be locked into a maze of possibilities and trying to anticipate and shape what comes next. As he does!
But in a moment of weakness, I imagine the place he would go for comfort would be 221b, as it was. I love that he thought about the texture of the wallpaper when he was afraid; that’s a beautiful detail. Maybe it would all be in details. A frozen moment in time, that seems in keeping with what we’ve seen so far. No motion, just fixed points, no beginning, no end.
Standing in the middle of the flat, maybe. The smell of baking rising up from Mrs Hudson’s kitchen. Maybe the sound of her shoes on the linoleum, his fingers on the back of a chair, the carpet under his feet, the mid-morning light through the curtains. A laptop that isn’t his. Crumbs. Shoe polish. Shoe laces. A cigarette. A stack of nicotine patches. Violin strings, the weight of a fork, the sound of water running on the other side of a wall, pages of a newspaper turning, being folded. John clearing his throat. Moving his lips as he reads. A cluedo piece. The flickering light of the television no one’s watching. The kettle boiling. The smell of toast, or takeaway. Rosin. A knock at the door, and the familiar anticipation it brings.
His world as it was, I would think. That’s what he’d retreat to. Every step along the way was a step closer to going back to it in his mind, surely. He was so sure he was coming back and that nothing would change. We know it didn’t occur to him that John would move on, that he couldn’t go back. So i think it would be that.
john squeezes sherlock’s neck
then he squeezes it again, harder
and finally as he moves to sit back down, his hand lingers and drops slowly, still on sherlock’s shoulder
♡ ♡ ♡ ♡
Goodbye I’m going to cartwheel into the sun.
I love that this isn’t even additional commentary; it’s literally just describing exactly what happens and all of our hearts are exploding
John is not done hugging Sherlock. He’s supposed to be done, and Sherlock’s trying to move on with his speech, and there’s an audience to all this, but John is not done and can’t quite take his arm away. He doesn’t want to let go.
John tells Mary to stop him; he can feel it coming. He knows his desire to hug Sherlock is latent and might, if Sherlock goes far enough in his speech, spill over and he’ll do it, audience be damned, with the ecstatic delight he genuinely feels, and indeed that’s just what happens.
Neither of them make very much room for each other’s uncontrollable emotional outbursts. They’re like ships in the night that way.
When John tells Sherlock that he loves him, that Sherlock is his best friend, Sherlock practically loses his bloody mind. John reassures him in a heartfelt way, briefly, and then quickly changes the subject, even through Sherlock is completely and obviously too overcome to proceed. I always wondered why he did that.
John doesn’t appear especially uncomfortable at that point, as he does later after the wedding when Sherlock looks so heartbroken that John will dance with Mary from now on. We see John being uncomfortable with Sherlock’s feelings, and that best man request isn’t one of them. It looks instead as though he’s just misunderstood which feelings Sherlock is having. John instead reacts as if he thinks what’s overwhelmed Sherlock is primarily the necessity of the speech, not the reality of his place in John’s life and his heart. It’s not clear that he entirely understood that that was actually news to Sherlock, which might help explain why he didn’t leave any room for Sherlock have those feelings in the first place. He didn’t believe they were mutual at that point, did he!
Likewise, Sherlock seems utterly oblivious to John’s desire to hug him during his speech. John is genuinely overcome, so much so that he is willing to ignore the audience and just react with pure delight and affection. And that’s a big deal for someone as buttoned-down as John is. But Sherlock doesn’t react to John at all.
We know the wedding was a very difficult day for Sherlock, and during the speech he reverts to the rather shy and introverted person he sometimes is when he is deeply uncertain and out of his depth. It’s the same version of him we see when John tells him off for getting something wrong, when he listens quietly and does what John tells him to do rather than getting into a spectacular fight. Or when he’s drunk off his face and tries to make a joke. It’s his rawest self, the one that has no automatic defences. And that’s who he is when he’s giving his speech (until his speech becomes something else, naturally). That’s who he is when John hugs him, though it looks as if he can’t accept the hug, or even feel it happening, because he’s trying to do this difficult thing instead. He can’t make room for John’s feelings at that moment, because of the wedding, the speech, the loss he’s experiencing. So it happens, and then they move on, and it’s all unexamined. Until later, perhaps.
Desperately unspoken, indeed. There is a missing scene in series 3, and you can feel it. Maybe it was in the drunk tank, lost to the comfortable amnesia of alcohol. Maybe it’s at the hospital after Sherlock’s been shot. Or afterwards, when John knows that Mary isn’t what she seems. Maybe it didn’t happen, which would mean it’s still to come. The moment when they look at each other with the real weight of all those feelings and reactions, all understood and acknowledged, interrogated and confirmed, and actually have the space to hold them all.
in which Sherlock repeatedly makes people reconsider their life decisions
What’s so funny to me about the moustache conversation is how hard they worked to get that in there. Because Sherlock is literally looking at John’s clean-shaven face and asking if he shaved off the moustache.
Rational comeback options for John:
or, perhaps the most obvious:
That’s how important it was that John mirror Molly’s “my crush didn’t like my attempt to look hot” response. They didn’t use ANY of these options.
