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.