We Can't Rewind, We've Gone Too Far

[I am currently copying over posts I like from tumblr; my apologies for any weirdnesses on your reading page]

So I’ve just finished rereading The Seven-Per-Cent Solution by Nicholas Meyer, and it is an excellent story and I love it, but it did remind me of something.

Because it has a swordfight on the roof of a moving train. And Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Holmes by Loren D. Estleman has a high speed hansom cab chase through London. These are not isolated examples. (And in BBC Sherlock, of course, Dr. Watson commits more murders in the first two episodes than he does in all of the canonical stories combined.)

And a claim I see a lot is that fangirls make everything about romance. Which is not completely inaccurate.

But fanboys tend to make everything about ridiculous action movie scenes. Which isn’t any more in the spirit of the originals, really.

okay, new theory (well, probably not new, but i haven’t seen it before):

Sherlock Holmes is stolen by fairies at Reichenbach

Luckily he had wide-ranging literary tastes as a child and it turns out his forgetting mechanisms are faulty, so he remembers not to eat anything and fights his way out three days later.

Except, you know, not three earth days later, whoops.

#doesn't really have a plot #so #meta #sherlock holmes #fairies #reichenbach #crack meta i suppose #there would be more plot if watson was fighting him out #hmm #i have seen the dr who version #multiple times

today has not been great (for no particular external reason (except that it’s raining)) but on the other hand there is fiction and it is wonderful

i picked up Travelling with the Dead by Barbara Hambly because I liked the first in the series and Lydia the wonderful impractical impulsive scientific girl, I like her a lot (although the central library nearest mom’s house has a terrible new remodel) (also i took out another book which probably won’t have lesbians but the blurb has the perfect set up for lesbians and apparently i am incurably optimistic about these things)

i am rereading Winter in London by Waid because I wanted comforting Holmesfic and apparently i find explicit trauma recovery comforting, and I’m almost at the part! with kissing! the nice kissing, not that other time. And it’s so lovely and introspective and poor everyone, oh god. And Mycroft is excellent

(note to self - reread GREE and BRUC for the thing. and that bit of So4 for the other thing with the actual deadline)

I just reread Matches by janeturenne and rabidsamfan - i really should link, it just feels like work, but it’s at janeturenne.livejournal - and … yes. boys. sex. in a haystack. and still emotions <3

the Comfortable Courtesan continues wonderful and sweet and darlings! and also I am rereading earlier parts because it consistently makes me happy and !!Sandy!! !!Mr. F-!! <3Docket and Tibby!<3

Also the “oh god these wonderful characters” feeling is quite close to the “oh god i have a crush” feeling, though a bit distanced. Huh.

[from here]

I’m not going to bother researching the details for an actual essay, but there are ways that the Watson of most of the Case-Book and His Last Bow is a completely different (and far less interesting and worse-written) person than the Watson of the earlier stories, and a lot of bad Watson characterization I think is based on that later version.

And Doyle by that point clearly disliked Watson (a lot more than he ever disliked Holmes, actually), from his comments on his sense of humour etc., and so he wrote him and described him in a way that’s really annoying not really evident earlier.

Watson in the Return can figure out what Holmes is basing his observations on without prompting. Watson in SUSS can’t see through the “my friend has this problem…” line. These are two different men.

Sherlock is sitting in the back of an ambulance, being questioned. “History of military service,” he says. “Nerves of steel…”

And he sees the blonde figure casually standing behind the police cars.

It makes no sense.

But he says, “Actually, you know what, ignore me,” and jumps down.

He strides past the police.

Mary smiles at him. “Are you all right? Sergeant Donovan’s just been explaining things to me…”

“Good shot,” says Sherlock, looking down at her hands. Gloved. Of course.

“Yes, must have been, through that window.”

“Well, you’d know,” says Sherlock, and Mary blinks up at him innocently.

#they have adventures #then sherlock jumps off a building like an idiot #then mary meets this nice ex-army doctor while he's gone #then sherlock comes back #realizes mary hasn't told john anything about her past #drama results

Putting this on Dreamwidth as well as Tumblr:

So I’ve been thinking about soulmate AUs. The kind where your soulmate’s name is written on your skin. How would that start? When would that start?

Not with the beginning of writing. For centuries, in China, in Sumer, in Egypt, in Mesoamerica, writing was used for accounting or religion, and nothing else. Most people would never be able write their names or recognize them if they were written. Only royalty, gods, and perhaps some property owners would.

Individual scribes might have had signatures. For that matter, for all we know individual Paleolithic artists might have had signatures. But most people wouldn’t. What would happen the first time someone was born with an unknown symbol on their hand?

Probably it would be an isolated mystery. Remember, in most of these scenarios there’s no actual guarantee that you’ll ever meet your soulmate (although most people seem to end up with one from the same general area. Which is statistically unlikely). No one would know what it meant. Maybe people with symbols would be seen as special, or divine, or demonic.

And then it might start happening more often - or stop happening, if writing stopped being used (like in Greece after 1200 BCE). But most of the time still no one would know what the symbol meant. And most people wouldn’t have symbols, because most people’s soulmates wouldn’t know how to write.

(Sometimes I think the theory is that people would have a thumbprint instead of a soulmate mark? But this would be basically useless for matching purposes - you would have no idea where to start. So from that point of view the first people with actual names would just have them instead of the thumbprints that everyone else had and didn’t know the meaning of.

Incidentally, using thumbprints for recognition isn’t universal in non-literate societies either. European society didn’t realize that fingerprints were unique until the late 19th century. In a lot of places, they weren’t used until people were already using signatures, and needed an option for illiterate people. Also, while they are an identifying mark, they really have no relation at all to your name. For most of human existence, having a physical marker of your identity really wasn’t that important.)

Only somewhere with at least moderately widespread literacy would someone be able to look at a mark and go “Oh, that’s my friend Imhotep’s name. What a coincidence!” And only somewhere with widespread literacy would Imhotep’s soulmate also be able to write their name. Most early languages were logographic, and in cuneiform names specifically were almost always logographic, so you wouldn’t even be able to sound it out.

Phoenician (starting 1050 BCE) was the first widespread writing system, and was simple enough and common enough that sailors could write in it. It was also the first phoenetic script which would allow you to easily approximate the pronounciation of the writing on your skin.

But still, most people wouldn’t have symbols. Most people would never meet anyone with their name on their skin.

This would be a problem in AUs where you never feel sexual attraction to anyone who isn’t your soulmate. Imagine religion and culture in a world where almost everyone is functionally asexual.

How long would it take, until someone realized that if people’s names matched up, they had some kind of bond? How long would it take before this was a generally accepted theory?

Also, how long before this was seen as at all important, given that most people with the status to know how to read would also have arranged marriages?

But once it was generally accepted, suddenly literacy would become a lot more important. People would demand to learn how to write. (Some people would learn that their soulmate’s name wasn’t in the local writing system. What happens then?) People would want to give their children more unique names (ancient Rome had about thirty given names for men total, and they named their daughters “first Julia” and “second Julia.”)

Anyway, around ancient Rome or so, when there would not only be a lot of literate people but also a lot of people able to recognize foreign alphabets, suddenly there would be a huge drive for 1) more literacy and 2) better long distance communication, so you could find the Caius or Ξανθίππη or שָׂרָה who had your name on their skin. And as this idea became more and more widespread, so would this desire. The same thing would be happening in China and Ethiopia and India.

This would revolutionize world history. There would be strong motivations both for exploration and for making peace with foreign cultures. Everyone in Rome with a Jewish soulmate would want to make sure they wouldn’t be killed before they could meet them. Everyone with a soulmate in a strange language would want to know at least what language it was.

Come to think of it, these are also all good reasons for why people wouldn’t believe in soulmates. Your soulmate can’t be one of the hated barbarians, so that symbol doesn’t mean anything!

And that’s leaving out the fact that lots of people still wouldn’t have a soulmate who could write, and completely ignoring the existence of polyamory.

So getting to a modern society with everyone just knowing that that was your soulmate’s name would involve a really complicated history, probably nothing at all like ours. And there would be huge pressure to ignore the existence of soulmates at all.

No conclusions here, just taking an illogical premise way too logically.