How there is no pining!Sherlock and John isn’t picking one person over the other

 (Sherlock Meta by Pretty Arbitrary)

I started here: http://snogandagrope.tumblr.com/post/73218819172/sorion-leandraholmes-sorion-yaycoffee

But then this meta went so far beyond that that I decided to make it its own.

After John found out about Mary’s lies, Sherlock did NOT vehemently make his approval known.  He did something even better than that.

He provided John with all the information he needed to make his choice for himself, and then he offered his support to John in whatever decision he wanted to make, and then he stepped back.

Once Sherlock found out about Mary, he set up a scenario where John would find out everything about Mary without anyone’s emotional baggage weighing in on the issue.  Mary’s truth is presented to John in the form of facts: she is/was a professional killer; she deliberately did not do her best to kill Sherlock; she loves John so much that she would do absolutely ANYTHING to protect him and their relationship.

And then, back at Baker Street, he brought John face to face with his own emotional truth.  He laid out the underpinnings of John’s psychology so that John would be forced to confront his own issues as they affected his decision, so that John’s own hangups would not influence this decision for him.

But he did not attempt to press John back toward Mary.  In fact, exactly the opposite: “What is she, here and now?”  He forced John backwards, away from her and any kind of emotional investment, to accept her as a client—the most objective, neutral thing a person could possibly be to John, who after all has learned Sherlock’s methods of analyzing clients in unemotional objectivity.  He makes John disengage as completely as possible (“Your way, Sherlock, always your way”), which simultaneously allows John to process what he’s learned about Mary from an uninvolved standpoint, AND gives John a solid emotional place to stand after the rug of his life has been yanked out from under him—in solidarity with Sherlock.  If Mary is a client, then by definition John and Sherlock are together.  Sherlock is there.

And then John took MONTHS to think it over.  Sherlock waited with him, on that I think we can be absolutely sure.  Although apparently he saw Mary at points (she refers to him giving her the silent treatment, which implies that they must’ve been around each other enough for it to show), personally I think John probably largely stayed at Baker Street for that time (the chair coming back was meant to insinuate this, as John said himself; “Why does Sherlock think I’ll be moving back…?”).

In keeping with the neutrality with which he presented Mary’s truth to John, I think Sherlock probably approached that entire time period in the same way.  He provided John with every truth, insight, and offer of support that would allow John to make the best, most informed decision.  But he never attempted to push John in the direction of a decision.

HE WANTED JOHN TO HAVE THAT FREEDOM.  It was very important to him that John be able to make his choice on who to have in his life based on full knowledge and disclosure, and based on John’s own needs and reasons.

Sherlock can be a horrible dick, but he can also be a very good friend.

What’s more, I don’t think John ever chose Mary OVER Sherlock.  He didn’t need to; neither Sherlock nor Mary ever made it an either/or proposition.  And they could have, very easily.  Hell, if Mary really wanted Sherlock out of the way, she could have just killed him.  But she asked him to keep his mouth shut, because she knows Sherlock is devastatingly important to John and she would rather throw herself on Sherlock’s dubious mercy and keep him for John than kill him.  And Sherlock…Mary SHOT him.  If Sherlock had wanted to, he had the power and knowledge to influence John and summarily get Mary not only booted out of John’s life, but also probably arrested and extradited.

But neither of them did.  They were so, so, SO very careful to keep John from ever having to choose between them.  They both wanted him to have them both.

And John never does choose between them.  He falls back on the support of one, and then the other, as the situation requires—as is healthy in a functional support network!  Mary is presented to us as John’s pressure point, but Sherlock isn’t.  But why does that necessarily have to do with the amount of his love for either of them?  From John’s perspective, Mary is the one in a vulnerable position.  She is in danger from CAM, she is pregnant, she is his wife (and, let’s face it, John’s got a touch of the old-fashioned sexist chivalry; she’s a woman, and he’s a man, and it’s supposed to be his job to protect her).  Meanwhile, from John’s perspective, Sherlock is basically fucking invincible.  He came back from the damn DEAD; John is convinced he can do ANYTHING.  He does not see Sherlock as being substantially in danger from CAM (probably rightfully so), and therefore Sherlock is not a pressure point.

In fact…let’s revisit the moment when John confronts himself on screen at CAM’s house…and the fact that he is in fact Sherlock’s greatest weakness.  He looks shocked, and almost horrified.  He WANTS Sherlock to be invincible, impervious, and to realize that HE is the lever with which Sherlock can be brought to heel…  He stares, aghast, at Sherlock’s terrified face on that screen as he pulls John from the fire, shouting his name.  He can’t look away.  Until this moment, he did not TRULY understand how deep Sherlock’s feelings ran for him…and when he’s forced to see it, he’s not sure he likes it.

And I think that’s not because John is uncomfortable with Sherlock’s feelings for him—REMEMBER THE DRUNK SCENE FROM TSOT—but because he really, really needs Sherlock to be untouchable right now, for all their sakes.  Remember the Fall?  ”Alone protects me,” Sherlock said, and John rebuked him, “Friends protect each other.”  But they don’t, they don’t, and John is seeing that on screen in front of him.  HE IS SHERLOCK’S DOWNFALL.  He’s horrified at himself, being Sherlock’s pressure point, and he’s staring at the proof.

And then, then, the (near-)fatal goodbye.  Does anybody need reminding of how fiercely stoic John is?  Of how much Sherlock hates being emotional?  Look at their body language!  They have imposed a strict amount of space between them over which they dare not so much as sway—and that happens when people need that physical space to buffer themselves emotionally.  Their hands are kept firmly behind their backs, lest they reach out to one another in an unguarded moment.  They keep looking away from one another, which is a classic sign of being emotionally overwhelmed, especially in repressed people.  When it’s not written anywhere else on your body, it’s in your eyes, and so you hide them.  THEY DON’T KNOW WHAT TO SAY.  Because how can you say goodbye, forever, to the person you love?  John is not untouched.  He’s completely at a loss.  There’s nothing he can do here, and it happened for his sake, and he and Sherlock—neither of them knows how to reach out beyond their emotional walls to address everything that’s between them without completely fucking losing it.

You want a comparison?  Check out John at Sherlock’s grave, before he breaks down because there are no witnesses and at last he can let go.  So private in his grief that even we the viewers can’t see it beyond his darkened reflection and his hand over his face.  THAT is how intensely stoic John Watson is.

You want another comparison?  Check out their conversation at the end of Study in Pink, the way they’re standing, looking at each other (or not), and moving around.  If you don’t believe me, flip through these screencaps to watch it again for yourself: http://crime.grande-caps.net/gallery/displayimage.php?album=616&pid=455094#top_display_media

And if you have any further doubts, WHY DO YOU THINK WE GOT THE DRUNK SCENE in The Sign Of Three?  Both of them plastered enough to, for once, let down every guard and wall, and slosh into a happy puddle together with stars in their eyes.  At every moment of every day of his life that John is standing next to Sherlock, under that ferociously British stiff upper lip, THAT is the look John’s heart is directing at Sherlock.  In case you need a reminder:

So yes, it’s a shame the episode didn’t take a bit more time to remind us of John’s perspective on everything, but it is absolutely there.  We already have it.  It’s not just Sherlock, and it’s not hopeless pining!Sherlock, and it’s not uncaring John or John picking Mary over Sherlock or any of that.  Sherlock and John adore the fuck out of each other mutually, and now they both have a thorough understanding of just how deep it goes.

loriliesong:

Thank you for this perspective! I was devastated by the Tarmac scene, partly because it stirred up some very old abandonment issues. More of my issues come from John’s blasé seeming response to Sherlock’s declaration ( twice!) that this will be the last time they will ever see each other. And while I know the scene comes from ACD’s His Last Bow ( hated that story, by the way, for precisely the same reasons) it still seems far too stilted and cold on John’s part to someone who is not only his “one of the two people he loves most in the world” but who knowingly, willingly has just given up his entire life for your family. No matter how “stiff upper lip” one wishes to appear, to say goodbye without acknowledgement or word of thanks is incomprehensible. John Watson has always been the “one fixed mark” for all incarnations of Sherlock Holmes, but this felt like a betrayal of that relationship to me. Everyone needs a Watson in their life to praise, love and admire them for who they are, and in this scene it felt to me that Sherlock lost that just when he had finally made the most selfless, heroic and praiseworthy sacrifice imaginable. So yeah, issues.

Pretty Arbitrary:

That scene is incredibly emotionally constipated.  But we have seen, once and for all, how John looks at Sherlock when his barriers are down. There’s no question about how he feels.

But there’s another key point I think people are overlooking: JOHN DOESN’T KNOW THIS IS GOODBYE FOREVER.  He asks Sherlock how long, and Sherlock doesn’t give him a straight answer.  John is left thinking he will see Sherlock again!

On another level, truthfully, I am a bit incandescently pissed about the decision the writers made here.  That is just too much self-sacrificial Sherlock.  I’m not clear on why it’s ticking me off to this level, and I’m still trying to sort it.  But I think it has something to do with how single-mindedly the narrative focused on Sherlock this season.  It’s his show, of course, but when he is both the subject of the narrative and the central POV…it had the effect of shutting out any of the other characters.  Their actions still made the plot move along, but…there was too much of a sense that they were all there for Sherlock’s benefit.

I’m on to something here, I think.  I should continue this on another post.

What John thinks about Irene
(Sherlock Meta by xistentialangst, cloisteredself and Pretty Arbitrary)

xistentialangst:

"[She] Got herself on a witness protection scheme, apparently."



I love John’s face in this last gif. It’s like “heh, I forgot; you’re SHERLOCK” followed by sadness that Sherlock is incapable of feeling normal attachment to anyone and a hint of tragic “he’ll never feel it for me either”.  Lord, Martin.

cloisteredself:

This, to me, is one of the clearest scenes to demonstrate John feelings for Sherlock. It’s plain on his face and there’s really nothing else going on in the scene to explain away what’s going on. At the end of TSoT there’s a lot of stuff on johns face, but there’s so much in his heart at that moment that it’s hard to be precisely confident about what he’s telling us on screen.

But in this scene, he’s only really reacting to one thing, Sherlock’s (apparently) cold dismissal of Irene. And since Martin is utterly brilliant it’s a clear read of the emotions he’s feeling.

Pretty Arbitrary:

This entire episode is a paean to pining!John, and it actually explains a lot about the conclusions he comes to regarding Sherlock after.

He spends most of the episode being jealous of Sherlock’s interest in Irene, and being shut out.  Sherlock won’t tell him what’s happening, won’t let him see the phone, literally shuts a door in John’s face when he’s opening the package.  Meanwhile, John’s counting the number of text messages and trying to figure out what’s going on, how he can help. When John confronts Irene, he’s angry.  He simultaneously wants to protect Sherlock’s heart, and he wants Irene to go away.

And just in case anyone had doubts about John’s jealousy and attachment, Irene calls him out on the couple thing.

So then Irene shows up in Sherlock’s bed.  And John, finally, gives up.  He cedes the battle, leaves the two of them alone to get together.

And that’s when the truth comes out.  John misses the entire denouement of the case—the thing he lives for, the thing that sends that spike of excitement through his veins and makes him stare at Sherlock like he lit the stars in the sky.  The moment that, frankly, the show and the actors have a habit of playing a lot like an orgasm (Sherlock’s ‘Oh!’ face, and hey, remember John’s post-coital ‘oh, oh, Sherlock’ in the Great Game in front of the Vermeer?)  In this episode, John is left out.  That moment belongs to Sherlock and Irene.  (And it’s not even what John meant to give up.  He thought literal orgasms were going to be happening, not figurative ones.)

And then, a little while later, Mycroft comes to him and asks him to lie about Irene being dead.  Neither of them is sure whether it would break Sherlock’s heart or not, but they don’t want to take the chance.  John doesn’t even want to lie to Sherlock, but at the last minute he decides to, to protect him.

And Sherlock, knowing that he’s lying, knowing that he doesn’t have to, lets him.  Leaves John closed out.  Leaves John to believe that Sherlock chose Irene over John and that even so, Sherlock doesn’t really give a fuck about anyone or anything, even the woman that John let Sherlock go for.

So how should he think Sherlock feels about him?

Honestly, this has always made this episode leave a bad taste in my mouth.  Because by letting John walk away believing that Sherlock chose Irene over John and that John must carry the burden of knowing the truth about what happened to her, Sherlock IS choosing Irene over John.

Especially with his smug little phone-flip at the end, which says nothing but that he’s proud of himself for leaving everyone in the positions they’re in at the end of this episode.

It’s particularly nasty when you realize that nothing happens to change John’s mind about this being the truth between now and when Sherlock turns up at the restaurant a couple of years later, having left John to grieve painfully with no real reason that made it necessary or much apparent regret that he did so.

Why John didn't speak to mrs Hudson during hiatus

 (Sherlock Meta by Pretty Arbitrary)

Q: Many thanks for the reality check concerning the dickish tendencies of John Watson. I admittedly woobified him during hiatus. The became so upset when I learned he hadn't visited Mrs. Hudson in two years. I didn' understand. You post helped put it into perspective. I'm still not happy with it but I get it.

A: Yeah, well, the hiatus was a fuck of a thing to do to somebody, and clearly it did do some significant damage to John.

Also honestly growing apart from Mrs. Hudson over it is one of the more understandable, not particularly dickish things John has done.  I mean…hell, I can understand how it might’ve felt in his shoes.  Mrs. Hudson is part of Baker Street, for John.  She’s a part of that life.  The idea of calling her up and talking to her, if I were in his shoes, would have felt like lifting 500 pounds.  Missing her, missing him, all the times they’d had and everything that might have been.

John had a family, for two small years.  A real one, that was always there for him, that saw him and cared about him (and that very possibly may have been something he’s never had before).  And without Sherlock…Mrs. Hudson still cared, but sometimes in a situation like that the ache of the empty spot is so big that all you can do is avoid it or hurt.

If he did call, small talk would be one thing, but he would have feared: what if she wanted to Talk About It?  What if she needed support herself, and John was too fragile to give it to her?  They’d either end up breaking down together, or, worse, John would have to turn her away, or he’d let her talk and then come away that much more fractured.

And…Sherlock didn’t just die.  Sherlock committed suicide in front of him.  That’s not just grief and mourning all the things lost.  That’s guilt.  Especially for John, who was so devoted to being there for Sherlock, to helping.  Who must have asked himself for those two years: did the last thing he ever said play into it?  He called Sherlock a machine.  If he’d cared, if he’d stayed, if he’d listened…could he have done something?  Could he have headed it off?

So honestly it made total sense to me to find that John hadn’t talked to her since he’d moved out.  In his place, I’m not totally sure I would have been able to do it either.

So that one I don’t hold against him.  He did, after all, come back to see her when he finally felt strong enough to face it.

The deeper significance of John's psychosomatic limp

 (Sherlock Meta by Pretty Arbitrary)

Anonymous said:

Pardon me if it's mentioned before. I realized that in His Last Vow, John kicked down Wiggins and kicked a chair in 221b after Sherlock's reappearance. With his psychosomatic limp. I can't help but feel that there's a deeper significance to the limp than his adrenaline/ risk addiction (or dependence). He was limp because of meaningless existence in A Study in Pink. Then Sherlock came along, and he felt he was doing something/ could move on. Therefore no longer limp. Then emotional rush/ tension that kept giving him impulses to use his leg to do something. Like how someone want to stomp when they are mad.

Pretty Arbitrary:

Oh yeah.  No, people don’t develop psychosomatic injuries over adrenaline addiction.  I think it’s pretty obviously tied to John’s feelings of uselessness.  It’s a physical manifestation of his sense that there’s no purpose or place for him, and nothing for him to contribute.

John’s clearly a man who needs to feel like he’s needed.  Not just useful—because John is a doctor, he’s always got something valuable he can contribute to society, and furthermore he clearly doesn’t suffer from fundamental self-esteem issues.  He needs to feel like he’s doing something that requires him,something that not just anybody can do.  Any doctor can treat hemorrhoids and strep throat.  But when he was in Afghanistan, with a team, he wasn’t interchangeable with just anybody else.

And when he’s with Sherlock, there’s no one else who could be there, who could fill the role in Sherlock’s life that John does.

I think this tells us something about why and how John grieved.  Because when he lost Sherlock, he didn’t only lose a friend.  He lost his place in life.  This has a similarity with losing a spouse, or a parent when you’re a child, in that the person you’ve lost isn’t only someone you care for, but someone who forms an important foundation in your life.  In a very practical, real sense, their loss leaves you struggling to find your bearings and rebuild your entire life around yourself.

(Sherlock really has no conception of what he did to John with that stunt.  I don’t think he can; I don’t think he’s got the experience or background to have any idea how extensively he shook up John’s life.)

It’s worth noting that John is still limping in The Empty Hearse, even though he’s met Mary and is meaning to propose.  He loves her, and she brings much-needed stability back into his life, but this indicates that he isn’t finding his purpose with her.  He doesn’t feel like this relationship with her is the thing he’s needed for.

And I like the fact that Sherlock didn’t reallycure John’s limp.  He made it go away because he gave John a purpose; he didn’t fix whatever it is in John’s head that makes him need to be needed so badly that he’d develop a psychosomatic limp over it in the first place.

That limp represents John’s sub-conscious (or maybe not so sub-conscious; if you asked him he might well tell you this to your face) equating of uselessness and brokenness.  He sees himself as having been discarded by the Army due to no longer being able to do the job; ergo, he’s a cripple, he’s broken, he’s refuse.

My apologies to people with disabilities in the audience; I don’t mean that this is true, because it’s so very not.  What is true is the frustration that can arise from feeling like you’re less than fully functional.  For a lot of us, even a weekend of flu-ridden sofa-coma is enough to leave us feeling like a lump or a burden on the people taking care of us.  For John, clearly he’s turned that frustration in upon himself.

But think about this one for a moment.  Lots of us want or need to be needed.  But for that urge to be rooted so bone-deep that John is in physical pain, his body actually physically twisted from the deprivation when he can’t fulfill it…  He seems to have picked that limp up subsequent to being invalided out of the Army, and it’s understandable if that gave him a sense of being kicked to the curb.  But even before that, he must have had a deep sense that being useful to other people is an overriding priority.  How does a person learn that the most important thing in their life is that they need to be useful to someone else?  Where could he have come by this sense of needing a One True Place in life?

There’s not a single possible answer.  Some people suffer abuse that teaches them that if they’re not being useful, they’re being a waste of space.  Other people grow up being told that they’re meant for Great Things, that they’re bound to do something Important, until they feel like they’re a failure if they’re not.  But I think we can be sure that there’s something fractured in John’s psychology, and it goes way deeper than John simply having a high tolerance for risk.

You might also ask yourselves, what kind of history could a person come from to leave them blase enough with being called stupid’ or ‘an idiot’ on a daily basis to live with Sherlock without ever getting riled or taking those words to heart?  What happens in a person’s life to give them a ‘love for danger’ that in fact flirts with emotional masochism?  Watson canonically has a gambling problem.  In the show, John gambles, too.  He gambles with trusting Sherlock to keep him safe no matter what kind of hair-raising insanity Sherlock pulls them into, and he gambles with whether the people he’s chosen to love will cut him too deep for him to bear.

It’s not news that the characters on this show are all, um, questionable in their various ways (let’s be honest, it’s modern noir, they were never meant to be upstanding ethical icons of good behavior).  But whereas Sherlock is batshit but not especially broken, John is really, truly a fucked up mess underneath all that cuteness and stoicism and friendly demeanor.

A discussion about Sherlock vs. Mary

 (Sherlock Meta by listentotheshityousay, Pretty Arbitrary, violethuntress, carolyn-claire and baudown)

carolyn-claire:

"Because John can’t ever know that I lied to him. It would break him and I would lose him forever, and Mary, I will never let that happen. Please, understand, there is nothing in this world I would not do to stop that happening."

Tell me that, if this was how it had gone, if it had been Sherlock saying this to Mary, fans wouldn’t now be calling that the most romantic line and the greatest evidence of Sherlock’s eternal, selfless love to have happened in the show thus far. Imagine it, think about it, and if you believe that it would have been evidence of true love coming from Sherlock but is evidence of sheer selfishness coming from Mary, ask yourself why—and then try to explain it to me. (Understand that you’ll be talking to the hand, though.)

baudown:

Hello, hand!

I’m not a Mary hater, and I don’t think the quoted line necessarily conveys sheer selfishness; but I do think it’s more ambiguous coming from Mary than it would be coming from Sherlock.  Because it’s John and Sherlock we’ve been watching, and we’re meant to see them as soul mates, no?  We’ve seen how they first met, and what draws them to each other, and how they complement each other, and how they’ve progressed individually because of their relationship.  We’ve seen them hurt each other and help each other and we’ve seen their loyalty and devotion to one another.  In short, we’ve seen them fall in love.

 But we haven’t seen any of this with John and Mary.  We only see their relationship after it’s established, and we’re told very little about how it developed (other than that Mary helped John through his grief over Sherlock).  So I think it’s very difficult to have the same kind of emotional investment in John/Mary, whose relationship we’ve essentially been told about, as opposed to John/Sherlock, whose relationship we’ve witnessed every step of the way.

Those words coming from Sherlock would be the culmination of everything we already understand and accept about his feelings for John.  But the same words coming from Mary, in the immediate wake of learning about her past and about her lies to John, couldn’t possibly have the same emotional resonance.

 If Sherlock said those lines, I’d believe them, because it’s been demonstrated to me that those are his feelings.  But I simply don’t know enough about Mary (as yet) to accept them as an honest expression of love.

carolyn-claire:

Because it’s John and Sherlock we’ve been watching, and we’re meant to see them as soul mates, no?

No. Seriously, no. That’s a Johnlock-flavored fannish interpretation of what we’re shown, and it’s a fun one, but that’s all it is. For people who are predisposed to see what we’re shown that way, who want that to be true, it’s “obvious,” but it’s not text and it’s not obvious to the rest of us, even those of us who enjoy Johnlock AND John/Mary. We see as much that’s questionable, and even awful, in John and Sherlock’s relationship as we see that’s good: Sherlock lying to John, leaving him to grieve (to further his plans, not to save John or anyone else—that’s text), drugging him, manipulating him, etc. And John beats the crap out of his “beloved” friend, repeatedly; certainly not a way I ever want anyone to show me that I’m their “soulmate.”

Meanwhile, the text tells us that John and Mary are in love, shows them being in love—it’s there, and it actually IS obvious if one isn’t working hard to explain away all evidence of it; they’re adorable together. She hasn’t been on the show as long as Sherlock has, no, but she also hasn’t done all of the horrible things to John that Sherlock has in that time. It’s that predisposition to Johnlock, again, influencing how people see her, not the writing. It’s bias, and it’s internal, not external.

That’s what I’m talking about, that’s the examination that needs to happen. We have all we need from the writing to believe that Mary loves John and that that statement isn’t any more selfish coming from her than it would be coming from Sherlock, if we allow ourselves to see and accept it. Realizing that should be a wake-up call, not an opportunity for more rationalization.

violethuntress:

I think it’s more than a “fannish predisposition”—I think the bias, as you say, which is the right word, because it is bias, is encoded into the narrative—but that’s not the tack I want to take here to begin to respond to this claim.

My response is that I think for many, many Johnlock-invested fans, those words would not be seen as profoundly romantic, but rather profoundly fucked up. “John can’t know that I lied to him”?! No. I couldn’t accept it as loving or romantic, and many other fans I regularly converse with couldn’t either.

As prettyarbitrary has argued quite convincingly, if John and Sherlock’s relationship appears fucked up, it’s because it is. But the main idea is that all the fucked-up-ness is consensual. The manipulation on the train car in TEH which I and many other fans thought was horrifying is only ever so slightly made acceptable by John’s smile and laughter afterward—because any normal person would have told Sherlock to fuck off at that point, but John didn’t, and in fact seemed to like Sherlock’s manipulation. So rather than take my cues from my own sense of indignation, I’m taking my cues from John himself.

Sherlock’s betrayal of John in TRF is also quite possibly inexcusable. That was the rub of Reichenbach—how do you come back from such an immense betrayal? Or can you? True, some fans tried to gloss over it, but for the most part, you found fandom truly struggling with how to work through this issue. For me, and for many others, it was going to be about two factors: (1) realizing it was a huge mistake and genuinely apologizing and (2) actually acting in a way to make up for it; in other words, not just talking the talk, but walking the walk.

Does Sherlock do that in series 3? Well in TEH, he pretty much covers #1 (though yes, I found the train car scene jarring and can only make sense of it by understanding it as some kind of consensual kink that Sherlock knows John will enjoy). And then in SoT and HLV, Sherlock DOES walk the walk. He supports John, gives him space, is there for him, doesn’t lie to him anymore (as far as we know; is even brutally honest at times that it may have been better not to be); and in fact attempts to protect John and Mary from harm (though the way he goes about that is … a bit not good).

Here’s the thing with Mary, as I’ve talked about before: she doesn’t seem to exhibit remorse; she doesn’t even do step 1 in terms of apologizing (verbally) for what she did to John (“sorry…sorry again!”). We also don’t see her do anything to make it up to John and to prove she won’t lie to him anymore. A typical mantra of couples therapy is that if your partner catches you in a lie (say, about an emotional affair), you need to become “an open book” so they know they can trust you again. Let them know and see everything, and eventually, over time, they’ll come to trust you again. Mary doesn’t DO this in His Last Vow; she doesn’t even tell John her name (I put this down to shitty Moffat writing, but that’s what we have). She does seem to give John his space, which is something, but it’s not everything; she doesn’t even apologize.

This is all by way of saying that I am very happy for people to ship Johnlock, or John/Mary, or Marylock, or whatever they want to ship. But shipping Johnlock doesn’t mean that you’re operating out of some kind of mental obtuseness or selective understanding of BBC canon. If Series 3 had ended after The Empty Hearse, I would have a lot of trouble rooting for Johnlock, given Sherlock’s surfacey and glib approach to John upon his return; luckily we got a Sherlock with more depth and devotion in the other two episodes. If Sherlock had created a cover story to get John to like him more—say, if Sherlock had told John that he couldn’t contact John because he had amnesia that he just recovered from—and then Sherlock said to Mary, “John can’t ever know that I lied to him. It would break him and I would lose him forever, and Mary, I will never let that happen. Please, understand, there is nothing in this world I would not do to stop that happening”—honestly, I think most Johnlock shippers would be 100% done. I know I would. But that’s not what happened.

Pretty Arbitrary:

I get the impression that people are trying to separate love and selfishness when it comes to Mary, as if the two can’t co-exist in a person.

That statement of Mary’s in itself says a lot about how much she loves John.  It also says a lot about how she loves John.  She does love him, intensely, even irrationally.  Quite possibly, for a woman whose lifestyle requires her to be ruthless, cripplingly.  And she loves him in a way that prioritizes keeping him over the prospect of his overall happiness.  (Well, truth-based happiness; I’m pretty sure Mary’s idea was that he’d be perfectly happy so long as he stayed ignorant.)

Yes, that line would be equally self-centered if it came from anybody else in the world as it is coming from her—but the point is that it’s not Sherlock who says it.  It’s Mary.

And yet, that in itself doesn’t make her a bad person.  It makes her probably very much the same as a hell of a lot of people in the world.  It’s not like she’s the only person in the world—or even the only person you, reader, have probably ever personally met—who is selfish in her love.  And taken by itself, that act probably still ranks lower on the shittiness scale than Sherlock bailing out and leaving John to think he was dead for two years.  Both acts are terrible things to do to someone.  But doing something terrible isn’t the same as being a terrible person.

What makes Mary a bad person is mainly being a professional assassin.

But being a bad person is also not the same thing as being irredeemable.  Even a career villain can decide to reform.  Which is why John gives her a second chance.  And it’s not Mary who withholds her name (and it’s not John who assigns her a new one).  She provides John with all the information, gives him the choice of whether to read it or not.  If he’d asked, while they were standing in the Holmes’ living room, she might even have told him her real name.  But he didn’t.  He accepted the new identity and name she had crafted for herself, chose to take her as the woman she seemed to want to become rather than who she had been before.

OR, of course, she could turn out to be a lying super-villain.  Whether the faith he gave her was the right choice or not, we’ll have to wait till S4 to find out.

So yes, Mary is objectively a bad person.  Yes, she’s a worse person than Sherlock.  No, that’s not the same thing as being evil or irredeemable, and it’s completely irrelevant to the question of whether she’s a good character or not.  (Personally I think she’s a terrible person and a fantastic character, even though I also have trouble imagining how the show can continue to make room for her.)

It’s also to the point to note that nobody ever implied that this was a show about healthy, emulation-worthy people or relationships.  In fact, quite the opposite.  Mycroft did warn us at the outset: this is a show about people who prefer living in war over living in peace.

listentotheshityousay:

People often point out that Sherlock’s love for John is selfless and that Mary’s love for John is selfish, and that this is why Sherlock deserves John more than Mary ever will deserve John. But is it really that simple? Sherlock being a better person than Mary doesn’t exactly mean much. Just because Mary is selfish doesn’t mean much either. It says a lot about what kind of people they are, yes, but it doesn’t say an iota about who John would love. John doesn’t love people because they’re good people. If John was looking for someone who wasn’t selfish, Sherlock would lose that battle by a mile when competing with the majority of London.

After all, I’m fairly sure that Mary is getting a lot of heat not for her past as an assassin (I mean, this is also a problem), but because she shot Sherlock. If she hadn’t shot Sherlock, she wouldn’t be betting half the hate she is receiving from both the fandom and John. If she hadn’t shot Sherlock, and say, she shot Magnussen instead, she would have gotten off a lot easier. Neither the fandom or John would have been so inclined to be angry at her if she had not shot Sherlock.

But oh well, the theory of narrative causality and all that stuff.

Sherlock and Mary are both not good. Sherlock shoves a man out the window several times. Mary has a past as a freelance killer. Of course, relatively speaking, Mary is much worse than Sherlock. That doesn’t really make Sherlock a good person, but it makes him seem like one.

My point is this: Mary and Sherlock are both not good people. Sherlock is a better person than Mary. Mary’s love is more selfish than Sherlock’s. None of these facts change the fact that they are both in love with john Watson or guarantee that John will choose one of them over the other. We don’t choose the person we deserve, we choose the person we need.

And we all know who John Watson needs.

Confrontation at 221B

 (Sherlock Meta by Pretty Arbitrary)

This is one of my favorite expressions in the whole series.

Sherlock is seeing just how hurt and isolated John is at this moment.  And I love that John’s comment is bitter and snarky, but you don’t really know just from what he says how deep it runs.  It’s Sherlock’s look here that lets you know how much John is really hurting.  (And god, they play off each other so beautifully.)

And I love that some of John’s pain is Sherlock’s fault, and Sherlock’s recognizing that.  And some of it is John lashing out at Sherlock even though it’s not Sherlock’s fault.  

And I think Sherlock was braced for that, going into this whole confrontation, I think that—well, that and him re-injuring himself—is why he seems a bit tense and coiled-up through this scene.  Sherlock isn’t going into this with no horses in the race.  He does have something to lose.  He could alienate John.  And the careful way he draws parallels between himself and Mary, the way he basically is saying, “We’re alike, we do the same things, we do the same things to you, and you love the same things about us”—it’s a technique that could, on the one hand, calm John down from his anger with Mary and steer him back to focusing on the things he loves about her, but on the other hand, it could transfer John’s anger at Mary back toward Sherlock.  John’s unlikely to simply write Sherlock off at this point, after what they’ve already gone through this season, but he’s got plenty of reason to be furious, and if anything was likely to bring that skeleton back out of the closet, it was this moment right here.

All of which is amazing.  And yet it’s still not as amazing as the love and empathy and exasperation and resignation in Sherlock’s look toward John right there.  It’s one of those looks where you can tell he’s seeing his friend so clearly.

John's Grieving

 (Sherlock Meta by Pretty Arbitrary)

Two years of deep, barely functional grieving for the person you chose to make the center of your life?

That’s not weird.

John’s grief, and the intensity of it, the level to which it has eaten him, for me is the single strongest indicator of not just the depth of his feelings, but the reality of him and Sherlock sharing a committed relationship before Sherlock’s ‘death.’

Here’s the thing.  Losing a spouse—or a…significant other, because whatever else Sherlock might be to John, he is that—is not like losing anyone else in your adult life, except perhaps a child.

Everything is woven together with this person.  Your whole life.  Your living arrangements.  Your social circles.  Your finances (John and Sherlock are both making a significant part of their living from Sherlock’s work).  Not to mention your needs.  I’m not talking co-dependency here (although that could be another issue at hand), but you have this one person at your back, always.  This one person who has made your battles their battles, and vice versa.  A person you turn to when life gets heavy, and when you want to share something wonderful, and when you just don’t want to be alone.  A person for whom you have reshaped your life to create a space for them, made choices that made allowances for them, woven your life goals, career goals, economic goals with theirs.

When you lose that person, you lose all of that.  Everything.  Your life turns to sand under your feet.  I’ve seen it happen to people I’m close to.  It’s not just that they’re grieving and looking for something stable they can move forward from.  It’s that there is nothing stable left.  They’re trying to figure out how to schedule their life with one set of hands and make financial ends meet with one paycheck and reconfigure their own expectations and how to turn the path they had been on into one that gets them to a whole new place—and where the hell that even is.  All while grieving, aching in the space someone used to occupy at their shoulder.

John lost everything when he lost Sherlock.  Had to decide whether to live with his ghost in a place they had loved or go somewhere new.  Had to decide whether he had the strength to fight to redefine his relationships with the people who had been their friends but were now only his friends—or whether that hurt too much and he couldn’t even bear to try.  Had to go back to a job that…hell, we don’t know whether he’d been working except as Sherlock’s assistant.  He might have been a year out of practice and had to throw himself back into medicine with a gap in his resume.  Had to live in a London that no longer included Sherlock.

It’s not a surprise that meeting Mary is what got his feet back under him.  She must have seemed like the first stable thing, the first possibly meaningful thing he’d found in his life since Sherlock.  The first thing he had touched that didn’t hurt with the memory of Sherlock’s touch having been there.

It’s no wonder he moved so quickly with the engagement.  God knows how strongly he really felt about her vs. the fact that being with her meant he could breathe again, meant he wasn’t feeling his life eroding under him like a muddy bank every time he tried to take a step.

Who Sherlock and John actually are 

(Sherlock Meta by Pretty Arbitrary)

I think that Sherlock is probably either asexual or demisexual, and that it’s very rare for him to feel a compelling attraction (whether sexual or emotional) towards anyone. And when he does, his arousal (whether sexual or emotional) tends to be generated primarily from his intellectual fascination and engagement with them.

(So far, that’s not really headcanon, is it?  That’s just what the show has given us.)

Furthermore, I find it interesting, the sorts of people Sherlock seems to tend to find attractive (for a given value of ‘attractive’).  I don’t know whether he acted on it, and I don’t know how extensive it was, but I think that he found Irene and, yes, Moriarty both attractive in this sense.  (And I think that Moriarty crushed whatever burgeoning fascination Sherlock was developing when Sherlock discovered that he wasn’t just weird and different and brilliant and interesting, but that he was also evil.  Irene’s brand of manipulative but not murderous amorality, he seemed to find more acceptable.)

I wonder if Sherlock finds people like them appealing because they are fascinating and brilliant and challenging and different, or if he finds them appealing because he has enough narcissistic self-obsession rattling around inside him that he is automatically drawn to people who remind him of him.  (Both of them are characterized as being both physical and intellectually parallel to him; Moriarty with his suits and his similar view on the world, and Irene with her eyes and cheekbones and hair and…everything.)  And I find the possibility of that interesting, because is this Sherlock being fascinated by his own damage/weirdness, when he believes he sees the same thing reflected back at him from others?

Whatever is going on there, I think even Janine fired it up in him, a little bit.  I think he was definitely pretending when it came to an actual relationship with her, but she too is weird and interesting and different and a bit ruthless, and he liked that in her (and she liked that in him).  It might even include Mary, just a little (“I like him” she says, and Sherlock rather likes her).

And usually the people who find Sherlock truly compelling and attractive are the people like these, who hold up a mirror to his own weird different challenging ruthless brilliance.  And I think that Sherlock is at the same time attracted to and repulsed by the ruthless brilliant different people, because they are not good (and, he believes rightly or wrongly, neither is he).  While they’re fascinating, he was raised in a home loving and nurturing and rational enough that he understands that in the end, he does not want that for himself.  It is not the kind of love that you cup in your hands and hold close to your heart for its warmth and light on a dark night.  It does not nurture.  It cannot truly and wholly love you back.

But then, there is John.  Sherlock finds John appealing partly because, despite all John’s camouflage, he too is weird and different, and he can be ruthless and challenging, and maybe he’s not brilliant but he makes Sherlock more brilliant and that’s even better.  But also I think—even more deeply and more truly—he’s attracted to John because alone of all the people who have compelled and been compelled by Sherlock, John is the only one who is actually a really decent human being.

John’s not perfect.  He has some real doozy moments.  But fundamentally John is somebody you could reasonably trust to do the right thing by other human beings in the area.  John is somebody who will care about you, and take care of you, and be reliable and devoted to you.  He nurtures, and he loves with a glowing warmth that radiates from every fiber of his being.

And I think this appeals not only to Sherlock, but also to Mary.  (And maybe it is also the reason why the true monsters always give him a second look too—because for them, someone who is both different and challenging but also still good is something interesting and different enough to at least be worth a moment of attention.)

And as for John, I think that John is probably primarily (but only? we have no idea) sexually attracted to women, but that he forms very deep and powerful emotional (maybe even romantic) bonds with certain men.

(Again, when it comes to John, so far this is just what we’ve seen for ourselves.)

We’ve seen that he likes men who are commanding, unsociable, and difficult.  I think he likes being needed by them.  I think he likes being challenged and pushed and even frightened by them.  They are men whom (I assume, given John’s level of fondness for his old commanding officer) he trusts with absolute and unshakable conviction—men whom John is not only willing to entrust with his entire being, but who will actually ask him to put himself into their hands (again, this is the nature of a commanding officer in a warzone, which is what both Afghanistan and, if you believe Mycroft, London are).

They are also both men who recognize, appreciate, and respond to John’s total faith in them.  Both the men we have seen (and the woman, as it turns out) are people who put him in danger—but also they are also people who share the danger with him.  They may be his commanding officers, but he expects to be treated as a full partner, with his own role and responsibilities.

Furthermore, John clearly needs this.  He was a ghost of a man at the beginning of the series, and all indications are that when he thought he had lost Sherlock, he grieved with all the ferocity of a besotted widower.  Possibly (although the flat was nicer) he even returned to that half-existence he’d lived in before he met Sherlock (and we can wonder, now, whether that malaise before ASiP was due to his being kicked out of the war or due to the ‘loss’ of his commanding officer?).

So this relationship he has with these men, sexual or asexual, romantic or otherwise, is clearly deeply-rooted and intense, something that fulfills a long-standing need in him at least as deep as his desire for a spouse.

And I think that Sherlock and John absolutely are in a committed long-term emotional relationship, whether romantic or otherwise.  I don’t know how consciously aware of this Sherlock and John are (sometimes they seem more aware of it than others; did Sherlock consciously think of his vow as a wedding vow?  Did John consciously realize what was coming out of his mouth in the confrontation at Baker Street?  How aware were they of…hell, everything during John’s stag night?), but I think that Mary is aware that having John inevitably means sharing him with his other life partner.

As Sherlock recognizes that he must accept it.  There may have been a time when he could have kept John all to himself, but he abrogated any right he had to that when he left for two years and told John nothing.

So, finally, what is it that makes John take Sherlock back?  What is it that makes him take Mary back?  What happens in those episodes that we don’t see that somehow makes up for what they did to him?

Nothing.  Nothing makes it okay.  There is nothing that could possibly make lies and betrayals of that magnitude okay.  He is John, and he loves them, (and maybe taking the calculated risk that his loved ones won’t do such a thing to him again is even a bit enticing to him—after all, Doctor Watson always had a gambling problem, but this Watson plays for higher stakes than horses), so he gave them a second chance.

And, finally, how could he give Sherlock such a cold send-off?  How could he stand so stoically, watching Sherlock fly away?  Because

1: Like I said before, they are both emotional turtles and I’m pretty sure they would both rather be shot again than be caught blubbering with sentiment.  And

2: Because Sherlock might think they’ll never see each other again, and Mycroft might think they’ll never see each other again…but Sherlock promised John he’d be there for a lifetime.  And John has learned that when he bets on Sherlock, he always, always, always wins.

And that is who I actually think these men on the show are.

About John "choosing" Mary

 (Sherlock Meta by gaydetectives, roane 

and Pretty Arbitrary)

Question:

What I don't understand is how John, who is addicted to danger and excitement and such, could've "chosen" Mary for those reasons because it's what he likes. Mary didn't seem like any of those things. She seemed quite normal and domestic, so how could Sherlock and Mary say he chose her because that's the characteristics he likes? I don't know just felt like sharing with someone and hearing someone else's opinion.

gaydetectives:

Sherlock and Mary say that John chose her because they’re fucking liars. It’s simple as that - I love the both of them, their characters are wonderful, but they’re horrible terrible liars that put the blame on John to avoid further explanation because Mary is hiding things from John and Sherlock is hiding things from John and John knows literally nothing about the two most important people in his life.

roane:

I disagree. I mean, they both ARE liars, but they weren’t lying about this. What Mary and Sherlock both meant is that John recognized Mary for who she actually is, and was drawn to that.

John THOUGHT he wanted normal and domestic. All through the first two seasons we see John aiming to present a normal face to the world. Mary is his chance to do this, he thinks.

Of course, what John really wants is danger and excitement, and subconsciously he knows this, so he chooses Mary.

Or as I think I said in the Mary Morstan panel at 221b con: John marries Mary expecting to get what he thinks he wants. What he gets instead is what he actually wants.

Sherlock and Mary just recognized it before he did.

Pretty Arbitrary:

Hahaha, Roane had the answer to this: that what they are saying in that scene is that John subconsciously realized that Mary wasn’t what she seems and that is the real reason he was so attracted to her, even though at the time he didn’t know he knew.

I agree with her.  Sherlock makes this point pretty explicitly, really.  It’s not like it’s subtext.  He spends the entire episode pointing out to John how he keeps missing the fact that he’s attracted to alarming people.

(Which is not to say they aren’t horrible liars, because they ARE.  They just weren’t lying about this.)

I do like how it is one more piece of evidence for how divided John’s conscious mind is from his subconscious mind.  Which is interesting in about 100 ways, including why Sherlock has always seemed to think John is so much better at detecting than John believes or even seems to be.

Discussion about John Watson in S3 

(Sherlock Meta by ravenbasslady, cantpronounce, wmsscottholmes 

and Pretty Arbitrary)

ravenbasslady: I think I may finally have figured out why Season 3 left such a bad taste in my mouth. Well, obviously— no resolution of The Reichenbach Fall. No real reunion between Sherlock and John. All the punching. After a while, it seemed unnecessary...

cantpronounce: Yes! If John’s forgiveness of *that woman* is genuine, and not part of a plan, then the writers have effectively ruined his character for me, and I am done.  But I don’t think this is the case. Hope not, anyway.

Sorry, I just have to address the John thing. Because John is my baby and I just am compelled.

I really don’t see John as out of character in S3. Hurt? Yes. Devastated? Yes. Confused about his feelings? YES.

But he wasn’t out of character. He’s always gotten off on danger, on being in charge, on being the BAMF in the room. And now he’s angry and upset and confused and of course he’s going to be violent. He’s violent. He is. He punches and shoots and gets angry, he’s got a temper…

Did it seem amped up in S3? Yeah.

Because John is a fucking emotional disaster.

The Reichenbach Fall fucked him up beyond belief. Then he finally finds someone who kinda maybe a little bit fills the void Sherlock left - you know, after the year+ of drinking himself into oblivion and grieving. And then Sherlock waltzes back in, seemingly as if he’s been on extended holiday - John doesn’t know what he endured. WE do, but John doesn’t. - and mocks him, actually MOCKS him for his grief and pain and anger.

I hated John punching Sherlock, I hated it with every fiber of my being. But I put myself in John’s shoes, and I get it. He was in so much pain. His life was over. Then he tries to start again, while still grieving Sherlock, and what happens? Sherlock is back from the dead, and he’s laughing in John’s face.

John had committed to this man. He didn’t date anymore by The Reichenbach Fall. He was completely devoted to Sherlock. He watched him commit suicide right in front of him. He was DESTROYED by Sherlock’s death.

He’s not over it yet. Sherlock being back doesn’t make the grief and sadness and anger just evaporate.

And now he’s confused. He’s committed himself to someone else, but he wants Sherlock, but he hates Sherlock, but he loves him. I mean, he’s a mess.

Instead of getting the time and space and calm he needed to sort this all out, he got an unplanned pregnancy, almost losing Sherlock again, finding out it was his wife who did it, and then being forced to pretend to forgive her. He’s so fucked up. I can’t even begin to imagine what this man has been through.

As I see it, John was completely in character for a John who’s a disaster.

wmsscottholmes: I get what you’re saying, and you’ve said it beautifully, but I still keep getting stuck on something:

As per viewing the show itself, yes I see grief, but I never got that John was (or realized that he was) in love with and fully committed to Sherlock , as a spouse would be.

And again , I keep getting hung up on this point; John’s deeply hurt, crushed , broken, angry, love/hates Sherlock by the end of His Last Vow. How can this man, so ethical , who is always reining Sherlock in for doing immoral things— this guy — who (in the context of this conversation) is behaving like a jilted, abused spouse, how can he take Mary back?

It’s just hard for me to buy it. I am probably thinking way too hard about this….

Pretty Arbitrary: Hahahaha, as you are about to see, if you’re thinking too hard about this, you are in good company!

I don’t see any hate in John toward Sherlock at the end of His Last Vow.  Of course he’s angry at Sherlock in The Empty Hearse, and near the end of His Last Vow he’s furious with Mary.  He does transfer some of that anger onto Sherlock in the heat of the moment, but it’s not truly Sherlock he’s angry at.  He’s just lashing out at someone he trusts to be able to handle it.  And during the confrontation at 221b, Sherlock is inviting and, in fact, actively encouraging John to direct his anger at him rather than Mary.

Note when Sherlock speaks in that scene, how he draws John’s attention back at the points when John is angriest.  Note how he deliberately compares and associates himself with Mary, saying, “She and I are alike, and we are what you like.”  That does two things: it simultaneously encourages John to transfer his angry from Mary to Sherlock, because implied is if they both have the trait that is pissing John off then he should be angry at both of them, yes?  But it also implies that if John does not hate Sherlock, then he shouldn’t hate Mary either.

But it’s not hate.  Not for Sherlock and not even for Mary.  It’s just anger born of his feelings of hurt and betrayal.  We see in that scene that far from hating Sherlock, John trusts him.  In his anger, John allows Sherlock to guide his decision—“Your way, Sherlock, always your way” (a graceless but total acquiescence)—and Sherlock is the one John sides with at the end.  The closing frame is Sherlock and John in their chairs, a matched set of bookends, while Mary sits uncomfortably in the outsider’s chair between them, with the attitude of a defendant on the stand—or a client.  Like Sherlock said at the beginning of the season, “Just us against the world.”

And there’s certainly no anger in the final scene on the tarmac.  They’re squinting because of the sun, but their body language is an almost exact duplicate of their talk in A Study in Pink after John shot the cabbie—right down to the head motions. (I think they actually rewatched the footage to do this.)  That body language is very intimate and faux-cordial.  It’s putting on a show of stoicism for the people around them (don’t let the police see!  Don’t let Mary and Mycroft see!) with hands clasped primly behind backs, while in reality they are facing one another squarely, mirroring each other’s body language, and looking alternately deep into one another’s eyes and at other things entirely when that’s just too emotional.

And their actual conversation is to agree that they’ve got nothing left to say—because they’ve already said it all!  These two have been in a position to overhear one another’s most heartfelt, private and honest opinions of each other.  What does John need to say to Sherlock when Sherlock saw him break over his tombstone?  What does Sherlock need to say to John when John’s seen Sherlock pull him out of a fire?

When it comes to taking Mary back, I’m surprised that anybody is surprised about it when John already forgave Sherlock for a similar betrayal.  Yes, Mary shot Sherlock—and John might be royally pissed about that, but Sherlock himself is saying, “Pff, whatever, it’s fine, she was doing what she had to do,” so how is John supposed to feel about it?  (I’d be confused and pissed, myself, which you’ll note is precisely the reaction John has.)

This may go far toward explaining the months it took for John to make up his mind.  Remember, this wasn’t an overnight decision.  It can’t have been later than September when they fell out, and then John finally accepted her back at Christmas.

And we don’t know why.  He might have decided that if Mary has gone to such lengths to reinvent herself, he should give her the chance to become that new and, hopefully, better person.  Or he might have done it to keep his unborn child in his life.  Or who knows?  Maybe she’s actually a bad guy and he and Sherlock are putting on a sting operation.  We do know that Sherlock is invested in getting John back together with Mary.  He worked hard in that first argument to keep John engaged and make sure he didn’t just get angry enough to dropkick Mary out the door, and at Christmas he primps around and bustles his dad off so that John and Mary can have alone time.  It’s entirely possible that the reason John finally took Mary back is because Sherlock talked him into it.

"I never got that John was (or realized that he was) in love with and fully committed to Sherlock , as a spouse would be."

I left this till last because it’s actually the most complicated.  The nature and status of Sherlock and John’s relationship always comes down to a matter of interpretation.  However, largely leaving aside the knotty ‘who felt what for whom when’ questions, this is what I see.

Nobody in their right mind would argue that John doesn’t love Sherlock deeply, in the more general friendship sense.  Before S3, did he know/think he was in love with Sherlock?  I don’t know.  But what we do know is that by The Reichenbach Fall, John seems to have given up his day job.  He’s not really dating anymore either, that we can see.  We know that he is defensive and protective in response to attacks on Sherlock, the way a person would normally be about attacks on themselves.  He punched a cop, for god’s sake.  You don’t take a swing at a police superintendent just because you’re a little annoyed.

And the implications: If John is not working as a doctor, then his primary source of income is his work with Sherlock.   They might split the checks and go separate ways to spend them, but I’m betting that they’ve started pooled funds for the bills.  It’s just common sense when you’re going to be paying out of the same check anyway.  Furthermore, John is clearly taking a proprietary interest in the work as a business for the two of them.  He’s thinking of his blog as PR and considering himself as manning the social angle. Being business partners—especially in an arrangement where you can’t just split up and continue to keep the business going—is an intimate, committed relationship in its own right.  Your fortunes are joined to this other person and they can’t easily be parted without significant destabilization.

And if John has stopped dating, then that seems to be an indication that he is no longer actively seeking (at least for the time being) a future away from Baker Street and Sherlock.  At the beginning of The Reichenbach Fall, do we have any sense that he imagines somewhere he would rather be, where he would be more satisfied than this?  He seems so contented that I certainly can’t imagine a life where he’d be happier.

Thus, by The Reichenbach Fall, whether John thinks he’s in love with Sherlock or not, he has certainly settled into a committed relationship with him.  (I’m interested in the question of whether Sherlock has noticed.  He doesn’t give a damn what things ‘mean’ to people emotionally.  He could well figure, “John lives with me, this arrangement is convenient” while everybody else is going, “Whoa, what do you mean you have a shared bank account?”)

And now, if nothing else, I hope I have assuaged your concerns of thinking about it too much. :D

Anti-social life partners and how John’s kind of a dick too
(Sherlock Meta by Pretty Arbitrary, chosenofashurha and realariadne)

Pretty Arbitrary:

I’m beginning to think that the other person in his relationship being anti-social may be important to John.

Throughout the show, we see John framed as the compassionate, nurturing one. The one who holds Sherlock to social standards, who gets him to behave like less of an ass, or at least more courteous.

But that’s not really right, is it? That’s not compassion. That’s propriety. They can be the same thing, but they aren’t always.  And this is something the show sometimes highlights.  ”That’s kind, isn’t it?” “No, Sherlock, that’s not kind.”  Because sometimes, the white lies and omissions propriety encourages us to indulge in avoid wounds.

But also, “Will caring about them help save them?”  Because sometimes, propriety—getting wound up because you know you’re supposed to, because you’re supposed to care and express your caring emotionally—is a distraction from doing the things that will actually help.

And in “Many Happy Returns,” Sherlock says that John’s friends don’t like him. And you know what? They don’t, really.  Justly so, because honestly John is a bit of a jackass. He almost blows off Mike at the beginning of ASiP. He turns his nose up very rudely at Donovan over the ‘state of your knees’ thing. He’s awful with and sometimes to his girlfriends. He snaps at Mrs. Hudson (and remember her comment at Christmas in ASiB?  The one time of the year when Sherlock and John have to treat her nicely? I mean, I don’t think they’re terrible to her or she probably wouldn’t love them the way she does, but that is the comment of a woman used to being taken for granted), he punches a DCI, jumps on board Sherlock’s “childish mocking of Mycroft” train (granted Mycroft kind of invites it; I’d be hard-pressed not to poke some holes in his hot air balloon).

And we think it all makes sense, because most of the time we’re seeing the world through John’s eyes. Because in any single event, we can usually find some reason to justify his behavior.  But what he doesn’t invite us to think about is how his behavior really looks to people outside him—especially in the collective, as the way he generally lives his life and treats the people around him.  Imagine being Donovan, standing in that doorway, having just been publicly humiliated by Sherlock because you had the gall to express (admittedly through name-calling) your disapproval of how much he gets off on people dying—and here’s this dude neither you nor Sherlock actually know, and he walks up to you, looks you in the eyes, looks at your knees, gives you a snide look and follows the crazy guy inside.

If I were Donovan, that’d kind of ruin my night. But she still shows concern for John’s well-being on his way out.  She’s tougher than I am.

And at the beginning of HLV, after a mere month of not being in touch with Sherlock or careening after him on cases (a month is not a long time! Even people with best friends and close family can sometimes find a month falling by the wayside), John is twitchy, frenetic, closed-off, rude and snappish with a woman—one of his neighbors, whose son has gone missing!—who has come to them for help.

Is this supposed to be new? Are we supposed to believe that John never got twitchy or nasty at people like this before? Or, looking back through the series, do we see that this is a pattern of behavior he’s always had, but it was just eclipsed by the levels Sherlock took it to?

(I invite you to remember John’s reaction in TGG when that little kid was reading off the countdown. He was concerned, yes, and I’m sure that was genuine (because being a dick is not the same as being evil), but he was also completely hyped and excited, getting off on the danger to another person. It was okay, because Sherlock saved the kid just in time, and then we got John’s little “Oh, Sherlock, oh” reaction which has been likened with some justification to his O-face.)

So you know what? John’s kind of a dick. But significantly, he’s a much smaller dick (Haha, sorry, it’s just funny on so many levels) than Sherlock—or, probably, Major Sholto, that poor bastard. John is bad at emotions, but he’s good at normal, good at propriety, good at greasing the social wheels. When someone else is being jittery and impatient and wound up for him, it’s so much easier for John to be patient, compassionate, nurturing and respectable. And those are all things that John wants to be/wants to believe he is.

Anonymous replied:

Yes. This. I think ACD John (who does exhibit kindness, compassion, etc.) tinges the perception people have of BBC John. Dickish John deviates pretty significantly from the canon I remember, though it’s been a while.

Pretty Arbitrary:

BBC John does exhibit kindness and compassion.  He doesn’t have the breathtaking disregard of other peoples’ feelings and dignity that Sherlock does.  For example, when he snapped at Sherlock for being too brutally honest with Molly about her gay boyfriend.  Or when he was worried about the lives of the bombing victims and distraught that Sherlock seemed to be having too little reaction to them.

But he’s also capable of being very self-absorbed, he’s a bit of a misogynist in, I think, a pretty typical modern male way, and he habitually makes the mistake of assuming that the surface appearance is the same as the truth.  Which is a very normal thing for people to do, and all too often leads to dismissing people without bothering to look deeper.  So he can be pretty shallow.

These actually are traits that ACD Watson exhibited strongly.  He was a good Victorian gentleman, much concerned with propriety, and Holmes was pretty much forever remonstrating with him over it.

What BBC John has…well, not ‘in addition to,’ considering how repressed the Victorians were.  But John’s got stoicism wound up so tight that the other way he is a dick is by NOT TALKING TO ANYBODY ABOUT ANYTHING IMPORTANT EVER.  Have an emotion?  Well Jesus don’t let it get out!  It might find another emotion and breed and infest the pantry!

He’s got his reasons, though, the poor fucked up little puppy.  That repression is the kind of behavior pattern you tend to learn along with ‘trust issues.’  So, like, he really ought to be visiting his therapist on a more regular basis.

realariadne:

The important thing here is that John wants to be normal, wants to be proper and fit, but he isn't. He is better to fake it and he really care, but he isn’t normal, he has a problem, a real problem, because he isn’t free. Sherlock is free to be himself, even if he is treated as a freak and had a terrible and alone childhood with others.

Sherlock is free.
John isn’t.

John needs to fit in, it is a compulsion, he loves his dark wild side and he can’t live without it, because he becomes a dick when he doesn’t have it. But he feels the necessity to be like the others and fit in the hetero-normal job-good buddy-life. So he is upset when he is seen as a homosexual, not normal, etc.

Maybe is because of his sister and what happen to his family after that. When he was younger, all the expectations of a normal future was put on him, and he wasn’t normal. John is the master of disguise. So much that he is deluded. And the need of girlfriends and marry is quest for normality, to fit in.

Why Sherlock and Mary loves him? Because he is not normal, and he gets them, he is caring and loving of the different, he fight against it too because he wants to be normal. But he loves to be different inside. So when he is really in the normality he aspires, he is caged and unhappy and a dick, because he is frustrated and snappish and in withdraw. But Sherlock and Mary see the love, the caring and the understanding, how he laugh of black humor, he get them, he see them, (even if he doesn’t know) and that is what that save them and make them love him and try to find his approval so try to be more ‘normal’ so John feels more happy.

I think John suffered a lot as a child at home. His father was a definitive abusive figure, his sister out of the closet was seen as a failure, as a sin, so John have to be the normal one to save the family, save the family from the father, save the sister from herself. And maybe the mother too. He can let himself be free, he has no right.

I think when he was in the military he was really free, far away from his family, from society, he could be himself and even bisexual (I really think he is) but return to London was to return to the prison of his life before. And even with Sherlock he had the society and his family to respond. So a lot of girlfriends, looking for a wife to settle down and pass as normal at last. The disguise would be complete, he could be let in peace. But John Watson would never be happy in a ‘normal life’.

Pretty Arbitrary:

John isn’t free, yes!  He really has caged himself.  He’s almost mutilated himself, with the extent to which he has forced apart what he thinks he’s ‘supposed’ to be and what he wishes he had the freedom to be.

(I also think, at this point, that that mental separation is fairly conscious for him.  His downcast glance, when Sherlock calls it an addition “of a sort.”  The way he doesn’t argue when Sherlock tells him he’s attracted to dangerous people—he only argues about why Mary has to be one of them.  He knows enough to know what he wants, and I’m dying to know how it came about that he feels unable to let himself have it.)

And I like these thoughts on John’s family life and youth.  I’m so curious what it was like.  Much more than Sherlock, John feels to me like a man who didn’t get things he needed in his childhood.

chosenofashurha:

That is EXACTLY how I picture John’s home life, and why he represses himself so much. I’m so glad I’m not alone in this. Coming from a similar household, I always kinda worried I was Mary Sue-ing him, but that other people can interpret it like that…. phew.

Pretty Arbitrary:

No, it’s not just you.

Saying that John Watson is closeted is a loaded term, because our minds go straight to the slash and in this case, I’m not necessarily talking sexuality.  I’m talking about how to closet yourself is to divide yourself.  It’s to hide a part of yourself away and separate it from the rest of your life.  It’s a survival tactic, to hide away a part of yourself that you don’t want to get rid of or can’t get rid of, but that you wouldn’t be able to survive with if you let people see it.

But it also hurts.  Because if you have to do it, it means that people who are important to you hate a part of what you are.  It means that the people whom you love, you can’t trust to love you back unconditionally.

It’s something that comes up most often with sexuality, but not only with sexuality.  Mental illness, self-harm, trauma, addiction, hobbies or interests that the mainstream has declared creepy…

John is so definitely, obviously closeted about something.  It’s fun for our slasher hearts (and meaningful to some people who struggle with this situation themselves) to decide that it’s his sexuality, but whether it’s that or something else, it means that John has faced that situation.  Where the people he needed most, the ones he would otherwise trust, were somehow a threat to him.  They taught him that some element of his personality was unacceptable, dangerous, to be cloistered except around certain specific individuals who might be able to understand.

This is something that can happen with returning veterans and PTSD sufferers, but in John’s case we have a few sparse clues that this pattern might have existed earlier.  The fact that his sister is queer, and John’s repeated insistence about queerness being okay.  The point that, if she’s around his age is old enough that in her youth she may have faced some fairly harsh discrimination and even danger because of it.  Her drinking, and their unstable relationship.  The reality that sexuality discrimination in a household tends not to stand alone, but often comes with sets of other conservative beliefs and intolerant patterns of behavior.

We don’t have enough to point to specifics, but we’ve got enough to imagine how we might connect the dots.

Is Sherlock afraid of Moriarty? 

(Sherlock Meta by Pretty Arbitrary)

Question:

I've seen a lot of fan-fic that indicates Sherlock is afraid of Moriarty. That he's repulsed by the idea of his survival, almost to the point of being physically sick over it. Do you think there's any truth to this idea? How horrified is Sherlock that Moriarty might still be alive?

Pretty Arbitrary:

Oooooooo.  I have a lot of thoughts on Sherlock and Moriarty.

I think Sherlock is probably pretty repulsed, yeah.  And also quite possibly sickly fascinated.  Check it out:

So in the first season we see Sherlock totally being into the Mystery of Moriarty.  This name he’s never heard before, that everyone’s afraid to say, fascinates him.  Presumably he keeps digging and continues to find nothing about this person.  A ghost so complete that he’s invisible to Sherlock Holmes, Master of the London Underbelly.

In Great Game, he’s so giddy about it that John and Lestrade both think he’s being inappropriate and maybe even questionably moral.  But we see how it hits him when that old woman dies.  We see that when he comes face to face with Moriarty, the memory of that is enough to make him raise his voice. “People have DIED!”  I read that as both disappointment and moral revulsion.  He’s angry!  This was a game!  This was a GREAT game!  He was having so much fun with this mystery no one else could solve…and then, Jim, you went and broke his heart and KILLED PEOPLE.  Solving a murder is fun because people are already dead.  KILLING them is not fun.  Watching them die, being PART of their death…Sherlock is not okay with that.

Because Sherlock’s damn questionable in many ways, and he doesn’t always value human life as much as many of us would wish, but he’s not evil.  He doesn’t want to see innocent people killed for no better reason than someone’s entertainment.

At that moment, I think Moriarty goes from being the best playmate Sherlock’s ever had to being, in Sherlock’s eyes, rabid.  A monster that needs to be put down.  Or…

It’s still deeper than that.

Here’s the thing.  Sherlock is a supremely narcissistic, self-centered person.  We’ve seen that he largely sees the world in terms of his own convenience, his own entertainment (not to the point of COMPLETELY erasing the personhood of others, but…often to the point of erasing it SOMEWHAT).  He has no patience with people, situations or rules that get in his way—not because he thinks what he’s doing is important enough to have an exception made for it, but simply because they’re in HIS way.

John Watson aside, we also see that the people Sherlock takes an interest in—the ones he shows some form of attraction to (not necessarily sexual, but some kind of fascination)—are the ones who are the most reminiscent of himself.  Mycroft (whom we discover Sherlock sees/has seen as a kind of guide and mentor, if grudgingly).  Irene (all but explicitly depicted by the show itself as a female Sherlock—looks like him, hair like his, moves like him, framed like him).  And of course Moriarty.

Because Sherlock’s a narcissist.  He’s in love with himself.  He’s vastly, vastly vain, fussing with his hair, going out of his way to dress well, popping his collar because as John says, it makes him look cool (possibly to the point where ‘looking cool’ is so instinctive to him that he doesn’t notice).  And he’s attracted to people who have qualities similar to the qualities Sherlock sees—and yes, admires—in himself.

To cover that ‘admires’ real quick: Sherlock’s in love with his own intellect.  He knows he’s incredibly hot stuff. He’s used to the world not noticing him and hating him for being different, but as you’ll notice, he’s written it off for being stupid if it doesn’t notice he’s awesome and get out of his way.  He likes John initially because John notices he’s awesome.  I am pretty sure that Sherlock’s also in love with his own ‘sociopathy’ (in quotes both because sociopathy is an obsolete concept in the medical field and also because Sherlock wouldn’t realistically qualify even if it were still a thing).  It’s a label he can give himself that keeps people away, and also…Sherlock is prone to drama, you might have noticed.  He likes the dramatic and the darkly glamorous—like pirates.

So.  I think one of the things that initially drew him to Moriarty was that Moriarty also has a flair for the dramatic.  He’s cool, let’s face it.  Moriarty knows how to work a brand, build himself a cult of personality.  AND initially he seemed to represent what Sherlock admires most in himself: intellect, and ‘socipathy’—where ‘sociopathy’ is really code for ‘not like everybody else, not like the people who never question, never look around them, just do what’s expected of them; better than them, edgier than them, not a sheep who just obeys social limits.’

But that’s not the kind of thing Moriarty turned out to be.  Moriarty turned out to a real monster, not a play one.  The kind of person who TRULY doesn’t care what kind of damage he does, who he hurts, how badly he hurts them.  The kind of person whose intellect has devoured him to the point where the world exists only as his plaything.

And I think the fact that we then discover Sherlock fears Moriarty more than anything tells us more about Sherlock.  And when we find Moriarty chained like an animal in the basement of Sherlock’s own mind, that tells us more.

It tells us that Sherlock believes there’s a part of him that is so much like Moriarty that Moriarty becomes a workable symbol for it.

So then: what EXACTLY is it about Moriarty that Sherlock fears so much?  He fears that Moriarty is right and that Sherlock is like him.  He fears that he IS Moriarty, that he has Moriarty inside him and in fact that he believes that so firmly—and fears it so deeply—that he has gone to the effort of locking down that part of his mind so that it can never escape.

So the final question is, what does Sherlock think Moriarty represents? He represents intellect run amok.  The brilliant mind, sprung all its borders and tearing like a wildfire through the world, devouring everything in its path.

Because Moriarty WANTED to feel.  That’s what he’s telling Sherlock.  He’s so bored, and he can’t find anything that can reach in and unlock this prison of crushing, mind-numbing depressive boredom.  Maybe at one time—PRESUMABLY at one time there were things.  Challenges that were enough.  Quite possibly that’s why he turned to crime.

Sherlock fears that his own intellect will eat him alive the way that Moriarty’s maybe got him (though I disagree; I think that Moriarty was probably depressed, and definitely psychopathic, insofar as a minority of psych professionals still believe that’s a separate thing from ASPD, and that you can’t get there from here as easily as Sherlock likes to think).  But it doesn’t matter if it’s true.  What matters is that Sherlock believes he sees it in himself.  He fears boredom.  That everything will become too easy.  That he might one day reach the point where nothing is enough to spark his brain to that intellectual high he needs.

I used the word ‘high’ here very deliberately, because this is Sherlock thinking like a junkie.  He’s not addicted to drugs.  Drugs aren’t what he wants, they’re only a substitute for when he can’t get his real high, the high he’s addicted to—the high of defeating a challenge.  Sherlock is maybe even worried that what classically happens to junkies might happen to him: that one day nothing will be enough, that he’ll develop a resistance to his favorite drug—his own intellect—and he’ll stop being able to find something that can help him reach that high.

And finally, the last thing, the thing that actually surprised Sherlock and made him put Moriarty’s face on his own mind and then shove it chained into a basement.

From everything the show has shown us, implied to us, or even cut out, Sherlock historically tended to turn toward self-destruction when he was in a destructive mood. Hold onto that thought for a second.

Since he put Moriarty’s face on that part of his mind, that implies to me that Sherlock had not encountered anything like Moriarty before meeting him. It implies to me that before meeting Moriarty, Sherlock might quite possibly not even have IMAGINED following a path like Moriarty’s.  I personally think that before meeting Moriarty, Sherlock’s greatest fear had always been that he would destroy himself with his own intellect.  But after meeting Moriarty, Sherlock’s deepest fear changed: he now fears destroying OTHERS with his own intellect.

And that is character growth.  Moriarty was one of the first things (after John—perhaps BECAUSE of John, because John was there that night, because their game almost destroyed John) that forced Sherlock out of his self-absorption, forced him to think about others, forced him to realize that the suffering of other people was even more alarming than the suffering of Sherlock himself.

And that is why I think Moriarty horrifies, sickens and queasily fascinates Sherlock.  And also why he’ll never be able to completely shake free of his memory, and he’ll never be able to simply shrug and let it go if Moriarty ever seems to show up again.  Poking Moriarty will always be like poking a sore tooth.  Poking Moriarty will always be like poking that underbelly of his own mind, wondering what’s in there and hoping and praying he’ll never really find out.