John's physical abuse of Sherlock

 (Sherlock Meta by anarfea)

Q: I've seen a lot of posts lately about John beating up Sherlock in TLD, and I know you've been calling John out as an abuser since S3 at least. But I haven't yet seen anyone discussing Sherlock firing his gun in Mrs Hudson's general direction. Personally I found that scene pretty shocking. Any thoughts?

A: It was absolutely awful, but I don’t think it affected me quite the same way because it just seemed like one more incident in a series of awful incidents showing Sherlock’s appalling disregard of gun safety. While I do not own a gun, I have experience with them, and it is ingrained in me that you never, ever point a gun at anything you don’t intend to shoot, whether you think it’s loaded or not. Sherlock has pointed a gun at himself, at John, shot the walls, more times than I can’t even count.

So, yes, I agree with you, it’s terrible. He was high out of his mind and totally out of control in that scene and he could have killed her. The fact that Mrs H handles the situation as calmly as she does is a testament to her and an indication that she’s had a gun pulled on her lots of times before. The things she says in that episode “you’re not my first smackhead, Sherlock Holmes,” and also the line about not being a “civilian,” remind us that Mrs Hudson is a creature of the battlefield, too, just like Sherlock and John and Mary. We’ve known that about her for a long time (the first thing we learn about her is that Sherlock helped get her husband executed and she therefore owes him a favor), plus the fact that she took a beating from the CIA goons in A Scandal in Belgravia, show that Mrs Hudson was always a bamf, we just needed reminding.

Which is why I think that while Sherlock’s behavior towards Mrs H is terrible and I am not excusing it, I would not characterize it as abusive, where I think John’s behavior towards Sherlock absolutely is.

To clarify what I think defines abuse, I think it requires a sustained imbalance of power. Sherlock doesn’t have power over Mrs Hudson. She owns 221b, She could kick him to the curb if she wanted. When he is shooting wildly in her direction, she disarms him, handcuffs him, and hauls him off to John in the boot of her car. She is at her limit, she has decided exactly how much of Sherlock’s shit she is willing to put up with and this has just crossed it.

In other words, she sets boundaries. 

Why did I find John beating Sherlock in the morgue so much more disturbing? Because Sherlock has no boundaries. 

John punches Sherlock so hard it takes the skin off his knuckles and Sherlock is dripping blood from his nose and mouth onto the floor, then kicks him repeatedly, to the point that Culverton Smith, the serial killer, is like, “dude, lay off him,” and Sherlock’s response is “let him, he’s entitled.” What a telling, loaded word: entitled.

John thinks he’s entitled to hurt Sherlock because Sherlock hurt him, and Sherlock lets him, because he believes that he deserves it for having hurt John. The excuse that they both give is that Sherlock “killed his wife,” but John’s anger at Sherlock extends back further than that; he never forgave Sherlock for the fall, and Sherlock knows it. In a way, the scene is sort of a reboot of the reunion scene, where John tackles Sherlock to the ground in the restaurant, and Sherlock, although he is in agony (you can see it on his face and we know that he has just been rescued after being tortured in Serbia), lets John attack him because he thinks he deserves it for having faked his death. And then he lets John do it again and again as they get kicked out of multiple restaurants.

And this dynamic continues throughout S3 and TAB. John belittles him, and threatens him, because he thinks he’s entitled to, and Sherlock takes it and takes it, because he thinks he deserves it. Never once does he raise a hand in self-defense or ask John to stop.

And I know that people have said that Sherlock did shitty things to John, too, and he absolutely did (the train car scene is awful, the non consensual drugging was awful), but it felt different to me because I just saw two co-dependent people doing shitty things to each other where each of them was giving as good as they got. But I felt like since S3, Sherlock has been acutely aware that he could lose John forever. John leaves Baker Street. John marries Mary. John has a baby. And Sherlock is desperate to keep John in his life at any cost. If John wants to use him as a punching bag every now and again because he’s still angry about Sherlock faking his death to save John’s life, then Sherlock will take it. And honestly, at least on screen, it has never been made clear if John even knows that Sherlock did it to save John’s life, or that he was tortured in Serbia. Because Sherlock has never told John those things because to do so would be a form of self-defense. Would be asking for mercy he feels he doesn’t deserve.

So the tldr is:

Sherlock shooting wildly in Mrs Hudson’s general direction was terrible and he could have killed her. It would have been an accident, but it would still have been his fault. And Mrs H expertly defuses a very dangerous situation and gets Sherlock under control so he can’t hurt her or himself (without beating him, I might add).

John could have kicked Sherlock to death on the floor of that morgue and Sherlock would have let him. John kept kicking Sherlock even though he’d already disarmed him and Sherlock wasn’t fighting back.

And the later is far more disturbing to me.

Also, no one is shoving Hudlock down my throat. No one is telling me that if I don’t ship Hudlock I should stop watching the show. I don’t see Hudlock shippers telling other shippers “don’t ship Sherlolly or Sheriarty it’s abusive.” But I see these things and nastier ones from the radical arm of the dread acronym fandom, all the time.

And to make it abundantly clear: I’ve never said and will never say, “don’t ship Jlock because it’s abusive.” I have elsewhere defended people’s right to ship whatever they want. Fiction is not reality. Depiction is not endorsement. But the purity wankers don’t extend rare pair shippers the same courtesy, and I’m just tired of the hypocrisy, honestly. Every time someone calls John Watson a “bamf” for threatening to break every bone in Sherlock’s body while naming them, and then turns around and say that I shouldn’t ship Sherlolly because Sherlock doesn’t respect her, my blood pressure rises.

Honestly, I think the toxicity in Sherlock fandom is why I have pushed back so hard against John as a character and jlock as ship as much as I have. Because people keep telling me it’s beautiful and wonderful and I keep feeling like I’m being gasslit.