Is there a “seeming desperation to sanctify Mary” in this story?

 (Sherlock meta by Ivy Blossom as a resopnse to this post by archipelagoarchaea)

Is there a “seeming desperation to sanctify Mary” in this story? Mary is very explicitly no saint. She repeatedly does things that we and John find unforgivable. She does it in S3, and she does it a few more times in S4. If they’d wanted her sanctified, I’m pretty sure they wouldn’t have written her chloroforming Sherlock and running off on John and Rosie.

You say that Mary’s flaws are “treated like cute little quirks”. Mary’s flaws result in you disliking and distrusting her, and also result in John disliking and distrusting her. John feels what you feel. That’s a consequence, and it’s not a small one. It doesn’t look unintentional to me.

Do you think Mary emotionally manipulates John into wanting to be a hero? John wants to be a hero from the moment we meet him. Mary didn’t invent that version of John, John did. Mary is the mother of John’s child and has just died thinking better of him than she should have, and given that he’d been quietly cheating on her, I’m not sure what you expect John to think. “She thought I was better than I am” seems about on point.

It’s true Mary’s sacrificial death isn’t a redemption, and that’s a really good point. One selfless act doesn’t fix all the things she did or turn her into someone else, but it does complicate who John thought she was capable of being. Mary is always trying to be “out of character”. Her instincts tend to be bad, but she’s committed to trying to make good choices. Mary is not entirely one or the other, and she leaves the story partway through her own redemption, leaving John with a lot of guilt and questions that will never be answered.

You say “If Mary were so important, so great at showing John and Sherlock how to understand each other, their relationship would have been better after she was introduced, not worse. That’s basic logic.” Story complications (which is what every non-protagonist character in a story is) should not resolve the main story line. Mary is not there to improve the relationship between John and Sherlock. She’s there to threaten it in some way, create a situation that modifies the status quo, and then push them to another level. That is every minor character’s job, and specifically Mary’s.

Mary is the catalyst that pushes John back to Sherlock in the first place, and then the force that nearly separates them forever. The experience of life-changing loss and grief forces John to display the full range of who he is, and to see that Sherlock is capable of understanding all of him and accepting him. Mary’s death, more so than necessarily Mary herself, brings them back into alignment, and closer and more honest than they had ever been.

I don’t know why you want Mary to be the “truly caring [and] insightful” one. It sounds to me like you’re wishing that Mary was the one who deserved John’s love and devotion, not Sherlock. As you say, Mary was wrong about what John was capable of; John gives up and abandons Sherlock when he was in danger, though Mary thought he would never give up. Mary is wrong about how heroic John can be, but Sherlock predicts where John is likely to give up and counts on it. Sherlock does not judge John for that failure. What does that tell you? Who’s the truly caring and insightful one by the end of this story? Who’s the one who actually knows who John is and loves him for it? Who’s the sanctified hero?

You say: the story needs to show, not tell. So what does all this show?