John's practiced speech

 (Sherlock meta by Ivy Blossom)

dead-dory asked:

In your metas, you've said that John's words at Sherlock's grave were practiced, the way his speech to Mary in HLV was. I think the part about "please stop being dead" was raw, spontaneous, not premeditated... but I can't watch that scene without crying, so I won't check. All these well-worded litttle speeches from John indicate to me that he has been working hard at learning to express himself, to put feelings into words.

Ivy Blossom:

Hmm okay…yeah, fair enough.

I said that speech was”practiced” like the one for Mary, but since he doesn’t  think he’s going to speak to directly to a living breathing Sherlock, I don’t think it’s actually the same kind of “practiced”. In the case of the graveside speech, I mean that whatever he manages to say are things that he has repeated in his head a lot of times already.

I don’t think emotional things come out of John’s mouth without running through his head a lot of times first. I don’t think John can learn to be better at this the way that Sherlock can learn to accept and embrace his emotions. John finds emotional honesty really difficult and I suspect he always will. Which, fictionally, is fabulous, because it means there will always be something else under the surface that you know he’s feeling and acting on, but can’t vocalize. It’s a beautiful thing. He’s a beautiful character.

I don’t think the things John said at Sherlock’s grave are any less real or raw because he’s already thought them a bunch of times. I think the things he manages to say are always massive understatements, including and especially “don’t be dead.”

That probably makes it worse, doesn’t it.