violsva | Entries tagged with that blue hellsite

In my head, somewhere, there’s this muggleborn Ravenclaw at Hogwarts, who loves history. And she’s so excited about History of Magic, she reads all the books she can find, she looks for how it fits in with muggle history…

And then she gets to Hogwarts and realizes that wizards don’t care about history. At all. Class is taught by a ghost who doesn’t care about anything modern and seems surprised when he realizes students actually exist, no one cares if they fall asleep in class, everyone has been assigned the same essay topics every year for the last five hundred years. It’s all about rebellions and wars and treaties, and there’s no social history at all.

And her first couple years she just deals with it, because, hey, new fascinating world she’s learning all about, she can deal with one poorly taught class.

But what made me think about this was the title of Harry’s essay in third year. “Witch-Burning in the Fourteenth Century Was Completely Pointless - discuss.” Because look at that from the point of view of someone who knows something about the motives behind witch-hunts.

So that’s when she loses it and spends the whole summer researching and writing an essay on the historical effects of magical existence on muggles. How wizards let people scapegoat other muggles and especially women for things muggles wouldn’t believe in if there weren’t real wizards everywhere. How pureblood wizards were happy to screw up the lives of the muggles living near them and then avoided all consequences because hey, they had Flame-Freezing Charms if the worst happened, what did they care if someone else was caught and died horribly instead of them. How even today muggles were falsely diagnosed with mental illnesses because wizards weren’t careful enough with their Disillusionment Charms, or because wizards thought Memory Charms were the solution to everything no matter how they affected the victim.

And she hands it in at the start of the year and a week later she gets summoned to the Headmistress’s office.

And Professor McGonagall smiles at her and says “This is a bit unusual, but would you be interested in a TA position?”

This isn’t something I’m working on; it’s a bit of Holmes’ POV somewhere in the middle of Let Me.

I did everything I could think of to stop needing him. I clutched a pillow, leaned against it, warmed it with my own body heat. I stroked my own hair, caressed my own face and shoulders. I tried, with all the force of my considerable imagination, to conjure up his presence, his warmth, his scent, the sound of his voice or simply his quiet breathing.

When I could, when my mind was not tearing itself apart and I could focus on baser desires, I pretended that my own rough fingers were shorter and thicker as they stroked my prick, and that my quick breathing was echoed by his. Even this did not work, and too often left me cursing, half frustrated and half bored with all physical concerns. It was not mere orgasm he gave me, much as we both pretended otherwise.

So, there’s a sort of long ongoing argument where one side says “Why is there no femslash? :(” and other people say “we just write what we want to write, and male characters are better developed and written to be more interesting” and the first people say “but isn’t fandom about reinterpreting canon and exploring things the creators don’t” and it just keeps going around and around and eventually someone says “why are you putting the burden on fanwriters when mainstream media has so much more power?”

This is solely in response to that last point.

Women have money. Historically ‘geeky’ fandoms haven’t been eager to take that money, but they’re starting to realize it exists and they might want some.

But all media still assumes that their core audience is straight white men 18-35. And they will not lose that audience if possible. And they assume that not writing about male characters will lose them.

But there’s a solution! If you write a show with no significant female characters, you can, they believe, still get women to watch it if you just make sure you have two pretty white men with lots of sexual tension. And straight white men 18-35 will still watch it, and probably deny that there’s any sexual tension at all.

The problem with saying that it’s on the creators is that we have so much evidence that if they can get away without writing lead female roles, theywill. And if they see that there is huge demand for shows with two pretty white men as the leading characters, they’re going to ignore any demand for anything else and then say that they are just giving female fans what they want.

If you object to any new female characters in a show about these two white boys, the creators of that show don’t know that you also watch Orange is the New Black. They hear “Women don’t want more female characters anyway. Actresses are sent death threats for playing love interests! Clearly there’s no point to focusing on the women in this show.”

And I’m not saying there’s an easy way to fix this. But there are reasons why we need to celebrate female characters in fandom, as much as we can. We need to say we want female characters, and show that we like female characters* or else we will be invisible in fandom, and women will be invisible in media.

The burden is on fandom because if we don’t show that we care about it, no one else will care. This sucks, but it’s what we have to deal with.

*Translation: that female characters will make more people watch the show, and that a lack of female characters will make existing fans say 'screw it’ and leave to watch something else, rather than also watching something else

I want to talk about John Watson’s career. Or careers, actually.

So. Watson is a:

Doctor
Soldier
Author

He doesn’t have a choice about leaving his career as a soldier. Once he is wounded he’s lost that. But it’s worth pointing out that this isn’t his main occupation or identity. He went to Netley for training in 1878 and was shot in 1880; he had barely two years in the army altogether and then he didn’t have anything else to do with it until 1914. And he doesn’t like war (CARD).

(This was something I found interesting about BBC John. Because he IS a soldier, probably career military, and this IS a major part of his identity, and the BBC unlike Doyle keeps bringing it up. Which is a valid thing to explore, but not necessarily supported by the original canon.)

His being a doctor is more important to the stories. He takes advantage of medical knowledge on cases (BOSC), saves lives (STOC), and uses his occupation to relate to people (RESI). Eventually (possibly twice) he leaves Baker Street altogether to start a medical practice.

But that isn’t primarily about his profession. He leaves when he marries, once it is socially required that he have an independent living situation and income beyond his army pension. And it isn’t his focus (just as his marriage isn’t his focus). As soon as Watson moved out (c. 1888) he started publishing. He wrote STUD while living with Holmes, but very little else, either in the ‘80s or '90s. But once he was supposed to be practicing medicine, suddenly he writes SIGN (1890), the Adventures (91-92) and the Memoirs (92-93).

(This is also what happened to Doyle: he set up as an opthalmologist, got exactly zero patients, and wrote the short stories to have something to do.)

(I am ignoring the heartbreaking thought of Watson publishing all those stories after Holmes’ death. Memoirs. Oh god.)

But the point is these writings aren’t about medicine. They aren’t about the army or India. They’re not focused on himself, and they’re not fiction. (well, not exactly)

The stories are about Holmes. He writes them especially when he doesn’t have Holmes(/the adventures) in his daily life. And as soon as Holmes is back Watson quits his medical practice again.

Watson very quickly sees himself as an adjunct to Holmes, and values the aspects of his identity that are useful to Holmes’ profession. Holmes uses “us” whenever he can; I think he only says “my” cases when Watson actually wasn’t present for them.

Basically, Watson’s profession is “consulting detective’s assistant.” That’s his identity, that’s his main source of income, that is what he prioritizes in his life.

[from this post, and really desperately in need of context; oh well]

“The only language this school teaches is Ancient Runes!”

“And really shitty Latin.”

“Can you actually be said to be teaching a language when it’s solely disconnected phrases with no meaning given?”

“No, okay, but the pronounciation -”

“Guys. My point. Is we should see what the library has in French and German and Russian and I think Cho wanted to improve her Mandarin? And then start a study group. Could we just have one or would we have to have separate ones for all the languages, do you think?”

“Oh, good idea. I know Durmstrang teaches German and Russian, you’d think Hogwarts would at least provide the option.”

“Do you think we could get some of the merpeople in the lake to give Mermish lessons? How did Dumbledore learn it?”

I just put up a few things from tumblr and I think I'll keep doing that, because tumblr inspires me to thinky posts but I want them somewhere I can find them again.

Let's put this up here as well.

Apparently I do have things to say! (in response to this) Mostly in Holmesfic, because that’s mostly what I write. Mostly exceptionally specific.

To start with, because people dealing with unpleasant circumstances is pretty much the basic stuff of narratives, and if we’re talking Victorians then you have a full supply of unpleasant circumstances as soon as you use a female pronoun. But they were there, they were doing things anyway.

And because people ask for them, for Yuletide and other challenges and Rarewomen (which I should be finishing now instead of writing this).

It’s not because there isn’t enough of it in fandom, because I’m pretty sure that if there was I would still be writing it. But there certainly isn’t enough of it.

Or maybe it is: because I’m interested in things on the margin of stories and teasing out characters and ideas that are only implied, and a lot of those characters are women.

And because media gets it wrong. Because people (men) spend all their time talking about Irene Adler and warping her beyond recognition and basically talking as if she’s the only woman Sherlock Holmes ever spoke to, and this is wrong. Like, factually incorrect. So I write about other women, instead, in hopes someone else will too.

And that Rex Stout thing is going around and man that makes me angry. It’s just full of a nasty mid 20thC misogyny that I can’t stand. And if you get women wrong you get marriage wrong, you get human relationships wrong, if you write women as aliens then eventually all your characters become aliens.

And because it’s so easy not to, it’s really easy to write stories with no named female characters and way too easy to write stories that don’t pass the Bechdel Test and this is actually really scary, that you can just accidentally not have any women in a story and not notice.

But mostly because women are sexy and women on top of each other are sexy and women are adorable and women having sweet lesbian crushes on each other are adorable and women are awesome and women whacking people with pokers in defense of their loved ones are awesome.

And because if a character just starts creating herself in my head it will be her. That’s just how it seems to work. And I have no problems with this.

I just thought of a problem with lots of Holmes adaptations that also explains why the Granada ones are awesome.

People want the main characters of a show to be the people things happen to. They want the show to be all about the characters and the people they know and their enemies and so on.

Sherlock Holmes is not this kind of a story. Holmes is almost never personally involved in his cases. Someone else shows up and asks him for help.

Holmes and Watson have their own lives and emotions and experiences, but they aren’t focused entirely around crime. We mostly see the crime, because the assumption is that that’s what’s interesting, [this is an important book because it deals with war. this is an insignificant book because it deals with the feelings of women in a drawing room.] but the rest is there.

The crimes do not affect them personally. They may be in danger for their lives, but it is always on behalf of someone else. Even in The Empty House, where it could easily have been all about this man who wants to kill Holmes, it isn’t. Holmes is after the murderer of Ronald Adair. He uses the other man’s vendetta to bait him, but he doesn’t seem to have much of one himself.

This is the problem with focusing so hard on Moriarty (and one of the many problems with focusing on Irene Adler) and Holmes: it makes the story about Holmes fighting Moriarty rather than Holmes fighting crime. Holmes needs to be on the side of justice, and taking down Moriarty is because of that position, rather than because of anything personal.

But if you don’t start out with “Holmes solves crimes for other people because he loves justice” as a premise, you can end up with Holmes running randomly around London after Moriarty, because he hates Moriarty personally. Or because Moriarty’s *challenging* him and he *loves* challenges. Not to name any names, Moffat.

Things don’t happen to Sherlock Holmes. Sherlock Holmes happens to them. And then he goes home and plays the violin and thinks about something else, or the next case, or bees.

#three stories about moriarty and one about adler and this is what everyone chooses to focus on #episodic narratives are not necessarily bad #monster of the week #you can do all kinds of interesting things with h or w being kidnapped #but you shouldn't have to do that to make things interesting

People keep saying there’s a link between creativity and depression. And there is. Specifically, you’re MORE creative when you’re LESS depressed.

I know that when you have a mental illness you want to feel like there’s an upside. But the whole point of depression is that there isn’t one. It sucks. Maybe there is a link otherwise, maybe people who have been depressed but aren’t now are more creative than other people’s baseline. I don’t know. Studies are inconclusive. But being actually in a state of depression right now means being less creative than you could be.

If you are creative when depressed, you will be so much more creative when not depressed. You rock for being able to overcome the ‘hating yourself and everything you do’ part of this illness. But imagine not having to overcome that. Because the drugs or therapy techniques are overcoming it for you so you actually have time to get shit done.

So I cut this bit from Arte Regendus and it’ll probably never fit anywhere else, but I still like it:

I began keeping a diary when travelling from India to Afghanistan. Travel in that region was a thing of combined calm and anxiety; long stretches of quiet were livened by the awareness every minute of the possibility of bandits, rebels, or wild animals. Though I was with a group, it was not large enough to be wholly unafraid of predation by tigers, or more human enemies. I saw the landscape as an excellent setting for adventure, which had encouraged me to join the Army in the first place, but as I waited for that I used my time in writing a journal, which occupied me but could be put away at a moment’s notice should my medical skills be needed. I had vague ambitions of making a book of it. I kept up this record even when the lush landscape of northern India slowly turned into the dry empty hills of Afghanistan.

After Maiwand I was too ill to continue with it, and upon my return to England I thought despairingly that I should have nothing more of interest to record. And then I met Sherlock Holmes.

The rented room is dim and the sheets are stained and the blinds on the dusty window are broken and the lowering sun turns everything yellow and eye-straining.

Jane makes tea on the chafing dish and pushes her hair back. The wave has grown out entirely, twisting just the ends where they fall over her shoulders, unfashionably long and distracting.

“I could cut it for you,” says Sherlock, draped across the bed, between drags on her cigarette.

“It wouldn’t look any better.”

“I’ve done mine, yours wouldn’t be more difficult.”

“I mean, it’d still be straight. Boring.”

Sherlock shrugs. Jane pours the tea into chipped cups and brings one to the bed for Sherlock. Sherlock shifts her head to stay out of the sunlight.

“You’re not going to be able to afford to go to a salon any time soon. Or even a home kit.”

“Dammit, Sherlock -!”

“I’m sorry, dear, but we both know it.”

“Fine. I’ll cut it myself.”

“When I’m offering to help?”

Jane sighs, pours herself more tea, looks away.

“Maybe.”

Sherlock rolls her eyes expressively at the ceiling and stubs her cigarette out in her empty cup. “Maybe we’ll get a case.”

“If we do, it’s going to the rent.”

“We can make rent.”

Silence.

“Jane!”

“I don’t know. I thought we could. But - do you have anything you’re hiding away?”

“Of course I don’t. I’m not keeping secrets from you.”

Jane’s lips move. She rarely swears out loud, but it’s clear enough.

“Dammit,” says Sherlock. “Fine. We’re going out tonight, dear.”

Jane stares. “Out where?”

“Friends of mine. Do we have anything for dinner?”

Jane makes a face. “Tea. Oatmeal.”

“Tea it is, then.”

*

Jane watches Sherlock change into trousers without much surprise, and throws her threadbare coat on at Sherlock’s request.

“Don’t take it off.”

“All right.”

“And bring all the money we have.”

“What! Sherlock!”

“We’ll make more.”

“Where are we going, Sherlock?” Jane’s wary. Sherlock’s trousers, she thinks, eliminate the worst possibilities, but that just means she has no idea whatsoever what she intends.

Sherlock smirks a little. “Allison’s.”

“I’m sorry?”

“Come on. And for God’s sake call me Holmes.”

Sherlock turns with a flourish of her coat and starts off down the hall, and Jane, as always, follows after her.

[In response to this]

It’s always adorable when someone else figures out how very little Doyle cared about Sherlock Holmes.

Snakes drink milk, right? Whatever. Watson got married in … 1888. Or 1889. Or maybe 1887. Who cares. Mary Morstan was an orphan who spent a lot of time visiting her mother. Does Holmes laugh a) frequently b) infrequently c) only when he’s caught a criminal d) all of the above? Who cares, we’re on deadline and I’m broke. One story takes place both in the middle of summer and in October.

Does Holmes know about anything non-essential to his work? No. Does he know the Polyphonic Motets of Lassus and spend his free time deciphering medieval palimpsests? Yes. In Study in Scarlet he doesn’t know who Thomas Carlyle is and in the Sign of Four he quotes him.

And this still led to the first modern fandom and over a century of extremely devoted readers.

Some of the devotion is because it’s confusing - people have spent way too much time trying to come up with chronologies (summarized by the amazing spacefall here). Maybe universes with more flaws naturally attract more fans, because there’s more room for interpretation and addition and filling in the gaps. It seems to work for Star Trek and the X Files and Harry Pottter. (And Greek mythology, if we want to talk about non-modern fandoms)

It should be maddening, but it really isn’t - it feels like opportunity. I really love the contradiction here, both the tiny contradictions within canon that make everything more interesting, and the larger contradiction of a character disliked by his creator but so brilliantly drawn. It makes one feel as if the reason everything works so well regardless is due to some actual animating spirit from the characters themselves. Sherlock Holmes is certainly more real to most people now than anyone who was actually alive at the time.

Or possibly I’m a little overly spiritual from lack of sleep. But I find it wonderful for some reason that 100 years after Doyle gave us that utterly indifferent permission we’re still marrying him, murdering him, and doing anything we like to him.

queerwatson:
also wait i was too in pain victorian fem watson is also a midwife that’s what she does instead of being a general practice doctor
okay thank you for your time

Watson ranting at Holmes for hours about the terrible standards for midwives
and also about male doctors’ attitudes towards female reproductive health
and teaching all the women she meets about birth control
and getting Holmes to help with removing women from abusive situations
and both of them rolling their eyes right out of their heads at some of Holmes’ clients/clients’ relatives
Watson puts a picture of Semmelweiss up on the sitting room wall
or Elizabeth Blackwell
BAMF Watson in a dress with a medical bag and a gun wait I wrote that one
Watson yelling at Holmes for taking risks and Holmes telling her she wouldn’t do the same if Holmes was a man and Watson saying “I damn well would”
Victorian Fem!Watson swearing.

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Violsva

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May 2025

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

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