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.