The Purpose of Minor Characters 

(Sherlock meta by Ivy Blossom and blameitontheillustrator) 

Ivy Blossom:

There are two things any minor/supporting character has to do: they either through some means cause regression or growth in the protagonist, or they are or create or clear away an obstacle that advances the plot. Often they do both of these things.

This is the case for any minor character. If they don’t do these things, the story does not require them, and they should be axed.

There is a lot of criticism in media about the lot of female characters. There aren’t enough female protagonists, which is a problem and that is something we should keep complaining about. Since most protagonists are men, that leaves most of the women in fiction as minor or supporting characters, which means they are always either a catalyst for main (male) character development, or they are present to advance the plot, or both.

There is nothing inherently wrong with useful minor characters. The part that’s wrong is institutional, that women are so often only minor characters, and therefore usually supporting a man’s story. But that’s not a fault in any particular story, that’s the fault of the story-making industry. We need more female protagonists, and we need them now. 

What we should demand for all supporting women in fiction is that they have their own, human and coherent motives for the things they do to advance the plot. They must have their own character and their own lives that intersect with the protagonists, and they must do things for reasons that make sense for them in light of their character and context.

Minor female characters can, in no particular order: suffer, sacrifice themselves, die, live, cause murder and mayhem, make dinner, throw dinner at the progtagonist, etc. There is no wrong action they can take, or no wrong action taken against them, as long as what they do, and what happens to them, is clearly part of a larger coherent arc of their own. Their stories have to make sense.

That said, there’s no reason why minor female characters shouldn’t be as complicated any another. Female characters can be contradictory, confused, sometimes wrong, sometimes awkward, as long as they are still living a coherent and explicable life of their own. They can love the wrong people, forgive the wrong people, try to become something they aren’t. They can be strong, they can be weak, they can be too tired to notice what’s going on around them. They can make bad decisions that benefit the protagonist, as long as someone thought through why she would do something like that and restricts her actions to things that are in keeping with her character and her circumstances. It doesn’t have to be a good reason, but someone has to think about what the reason is.

Asking for minor female characters that neither help transform the protagonist nor influence the plot is asking for female characters who will get cut from the script at the first opportunity. If the only good woman in fiction isn’t there at all, we have a whole other problem.

blameitontheillustrator:

I agree wholeheartedly, but if this is regarding Sherlock, then I think it misses the point. The criticism that I’ve seen the most is precisely regarding the lack of internal coherence regarding the female characters, especially Mary. Mary is unequivocally portrayed as a villain in His Last Vow. Not only does she shoot the protagonist, but she threatens him again as soon as he wakes up. She claims that she has done things that would make her John Watson fall out of love with her. But in TST, all that is gone. It’s left unexplored. Apparently, the worst thing on Mary’s resume is her failure to rescue British hostages. This story does not make sense. Not in light of the character, not in light of the context.

Of course Mary’s role was always to further the plot and the protagonists’ development. But they made her a villain, and then chickened out.

Ivy Blossom:

You say Mary is unequivocally portrayed as a villain in His Last Vow. “Unequivocally” suggests that there is no point in the story where that perspective is questioned or debated, and yet there is a lengthy and important scene in His Last Vow where Sherlock tells John, and us, that she can be trusted, and explains his reasoning. He is unsurprisingly right in his assessment of a criminal, and we become, like Donovan or Anderson, his incredulous audience. And it turns out that John feels the same way we do, that Sherlock must be wrong, that his explanation is unconvincing and cannot be true, that a person like Mary cannot have shot Sherlock and be worthy of our trust at the same time. Doing bad things while trying to be a good person is John’s struggle in this series as well, and Mary is a dramatic example of it.

I liked that a lot about Mary’s arc. I expected her to be a villain as well, but they turned the tables on us in a way I find very pleasing. She is a villain by trade, she absolutely is, but she wants to be different, she wants to be a different person, the person John thought she was. She tries but often fails.

I’m very surprised that you feel that Mary’s past is left unexplored in TST. Mary’s past is the subject of TST. Not her entire past, only a snippet of it. But we don’t get any character’s complete past history, let alone a supporting character’s. Why do you think what we see in TST is the worst thing Mary’s done? They never suggest that. It’s fairly easy to imagine that there was much more in her past that brought her to the point of having the skills she has and the clients she had. I don’t get the sense that it’s the worst thing she’s done; It’s just the one that comes back to bite her in the end. A secretary. Not the worst thing, the most overlooked and mundane thing, really.

Another thing that is not “all gone” in TST: Mary was right. Knowing about Mary’s past does cause John’s heart to waver. He used to like Mary. She predicts that her real self would break John and make him not love her anymore, and she is proven pretty much right in TST. I wouldn’t say that he stops loving her completely, but he’s certainly heading down a pretty dark path in that regard. Do you think that marriage would have survived?

Mary does indeed shoot the protagonist in HLV; and she threatens him afterwards, twice. She doesn’t stop doing that sort of thing in TST. When she feels threatened, she lashes out and does terrible things. She knocks Sherlock out to get the usb drive and to keep him from following her, which is at least a step up from shooting him, but still. That shows us a lot about the side of herself that she’s trying to bury. Mary has some very bad instincts that she’s not great at controlling.

I don’t think it’s chickening out to not make her villain. I think her story mirrors John’s and Sherlock’s in an interesting way. They are all constructions of their past experiences and decisions, they all do things they aren’t proud of, but their better selves can shine through all of these failures and foibles, and it’s worth it to keep trying.

This story makes sense to me, though I can see it does not to you. Obviously these things are subjective. I have my own criticisms of this series (conveniently finding DVDs not just once, but twice, for instance), but Mary’s story arc is not one of them.