silentauror's Blog, page 32
January 30, 2022
anexperimentallife:My fics are fully type 3, hahaha! I us...
My fics are fully type 3, hahaha! I usually know how they’ll start, how they’ll finish, and at least a few of the points along the way.
January 28, 2022
The current fic is at 18,500 words! I just laid down 2,000 more tonight! :) Almost have these idiots...
The current fic is at 18,500 words! I just laid down 2,000 more tonight! :) Almost have these idiots out of the woods!
January 25, 2022
Soooo…. way back in 2014, series 3 of Sherlock aired. I went...
Soooo…. way back in 2014, series 3 of Sherlock aired. I went slightly mad and immediately wrote three long, plotty, dense fix-it fics (Deductions of a Lesser Mind, Act IV, and Vena Cava). And then I was tired, and I decided to write something light and silly, allllmost crack. To my immediate irritation, that story instantly became the most popular one in my collection, by a WIDE WIDE margin. It has, despite having written literally over 2 million words more fic since then, retained that title. Best of Three just set a new hit count record in my own collection (and I only compete my fics with each other, never with other authors’!), reaching 140,000 hits sometime quite recently (did one of you lovely souls rec it recently or something??), with a staggering 6,245 kudos, and 1,800 public bookmarks (2,625 counting private ones). I have a little tradition of celebrating my fics’ progress with every new 10,000 hits reached, meaning that Best of Three has now had fourteen of these posts where I talk about how it came about and what new record it’s achieved this time. Fourteen!!! That’s so crazy! My irritation with this story’s popularity (ha!) faded years and years ago. Now I’m just delighted that so many of you apparently like it so much and that it’s still being read, re-read, and newly discovered eight years since its posting, way back in February 2014. That’s such a gift, so thank you for reading this one and for all the love you folks have heaped on it over the years! May John’s “sympathy erections” continue to make you chuckle for many more years to come!
January 24, 2022
Thank you so much for your reply about Irene! I suppose I’ve tried to make sense of the situation within the fiction of the story, but you’re right, if you look from the perspective of bad writing it stops being so confusing. Writing morally corrupt and en
2/3 There is a disturbing trend of people who are supposed to look out for Sherlock making him pay for his rudeness/carelessness with violence or insults. I hate it, because when Sherlock missteps he gets told off (sometimes he deserves it and sometimes he’s right but everyone else is being too stupid to notice), especially by John, so as time goes on all the additional jabs at his character stop feeling like banter and more like open animosity.
3/3 Speaking of bad writing, I think it’s ludicrous that Sherlock is capable of making the mistakes he does throughout the show but he was able to predict which therapist John would go to, Mrs Hudson kidnapping him, etc down to the hour, probably that John would put him in the hospital too and bring his cane as a nice parting gift. I also think it was ooc for this Sherlock not to realise the killer in ASIP was a cabbie like he does in the pilot. Silly me, I thought what made him human was love.
Hey, sorry this is so late in coming! Things have just been super busy lately! Yes, I completely agree with everything you’ve said here.
Just to be super clear, it’s not that I think that Moffat or Gatiss are bad writers, per se, but they’re lazy af and entitled af. Gatiss once sneered at someone asking a question about unresolved plot threads as us wanting “pablum”, when what we the fandom have actually requested is, simply, quality work. Finished work. Work that doesn’t leave gaping holes. I firmly believe that they’re capable of writing work that meets that description, but they’re smarmy and self-satisfied and are too busy scoffing at the very people who gave them the platform that they have to actually listen when we point out that something is half-baked.
I could rant for a very long time about their view of what feminism looks like, but I won’t do it again today.
I fully agree about their inconsistent treatment of Sherlock. Either he’s a super-human intellectually, or else he’s so stupid that literally everyone else in his universe is said to be smarter than he is. He’s the only person who ever needs to face a consequence for his actions - and not only that, but also the actions of OTHER people, like how Vivian Norbury’s choice to pull a trigger and Mary Morstan’s choice to somehow jump in front of Norbury’s bullet were in any way done because Sherlock Holmes controls everyone and everything around him. What an incredibly stupid suggestion. I’ll also just point out that attributing the agency and decisions of two women to a man is incredibly misogynistic, even if I loathe one of those women. Mary’s actions were her own, and they were all very bad and she never once had to face a consequence or even pretend to be sorry for them. John also has a lot of shit to answer for (THE MORGUE SCENE, ANYONE!!!!), for going back to Mary (WTAF) after she shot Sherlock in the heart, on purpose, with the specific intent of preventing John from making an informed choice about her. Again, I could go on and on and on. Sherlock is the only person who has to face punishment, and man, do they love to punish him.
I think I just had a breakthrough realization that Molly slapping Sherlock is their Mary Sue. Wow. Lol.
January 22, 2022
thegreatgherkin87:
casgirl:
Me: misses the charging port...
Me: misses the charging port while trying to plug my phone in
The bbc sherlock who lives in my head:
Every time, hahaha
January 21, 2022
Benedict Cumberbatch digs into toxic masculinity in 'The Power of the Dog'
This was a nice interview! I didn’t care much for the interviewer. She didn’t seem to know much about Benedict or listen particularly to his answers (or at least, acknowledge them or show interest in them before plowing on to the next one on her list) and she asked him the same questions that he’s been getting for the past 15 years now: about the carjacking in SA, about his parents being actors, about what fame is like, about his year in Tibet, rather than actually listening to the interesting things he was saying and following up on them. She actually said something like “so, your parents were actors” and he very gently corrected her to say that they still ARE actors, and then she used the past tense for Wanda and Timothy again. Super irritating. But Ben was lovely, as ever. <3
January 19, 2022
elennemigo:
Benedict, behind the scenes training for Doct...
Benedict, behind the scenes training for Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness! (Leaked photo)
This is, um… good. Yes. Very good.
(Thank you, @shana-movershaker!!)
January 18, 2022
Let me know if you’re sick of this topic by now, but I saw a post about Sherlock and Irene and it reminded me how confused I still am about ASIB. What was the point of making Irene a lesbian if they were going to make her fall in some way for Sherlock? It
Hey! Sorry this took me a second (lol) to answer! I’m not at all sick of discussing any of this, ha!
So first, we have to consider that Steven Moffat, who wrote this episode, is a misogynist. I could write you a whole entire essay about that, but to summarize, he writes women *very* differently from the way he writes men. Every “strong woman” character he’s written (to the extent that I’ve experienced, at least) tends to exert her strength through violence. Irene literally hurts men to extort them for information for her terrorist boss. Being on the “side of the angels” doesn’t matter if you’re sexy or cute or female in general. Irene was fully down to sell out her entire country to save her own skin and was working directly for the man Sherlock and John spend several series actively opposing. But Irene is a woman, so it doesn’t count. There are dozens of other examples - Molly slapping Sherlock in a moment of “strength”, in some misguided sense of entitlement that told her she had the right to demand an explanation for Sherlock’s drug usage, and while I don’t even want to wade into the steaming heap which is Moffat’s writing on Doctor Who, I’ll just point out that their darlings, River Song and Mary Moffat, are both assassins. I never did understand the complicated reasoning behind River Song’s “need” to kill the Doctor, and Mary never once even offers a reason for choosing a career path in murder for personal gain. She also never exhibits any sort of remorse for any of it, including all the parts that affected her “beloved” John, like lying to him endlessly, abandoning their infant to protect herself, comparing him to a dog, denying him permission to go somewhere without her, and also trying to murder his best friend. It only makes sense that a canonical lesbian would be powerless to retain her sexuality in the face of an attractive, intelligent man. Because that’s how sexuality works!
So that’s reason #1. Reason #2 is that Sherlock shows his “humanity” in weakness: by making mistakes. His “mistake” in this one was, apparently, slightly falling for Irene, despite knowing that she worked for Moriarty, despite knowing that she was a lesbian, despite knowing that she absolutely betrayed him, and despite not actually being interested in her in a sexual way at all. John literally left the house (in a jealous snit) to let them be alone together, and Irene was all over the notion of them having sex, yet Sherlock spent the entire time lost in case reflections, and only snapped out of it when he realized that John had left. I don’t know if they were trying to underscore his eccentricity or something, but that’s partly where the weakness (or laziness, but same difference) in their writing comes in, that it’s not abundantly clear to us after all this time. Series 2 aired in 2014, and here we are, eight years later and still going, “so yeah, wtf??” They use Sherlock’s “weakness” again in failing to deduce Mary’s past, along with his miscalculation about Magnussen, etc. Every time something bad happens from series 3 onward, it’s definitely Sherlock’s fault, and everyone else in the world is smarter than he is, all of a sudden.
Better writers would have made it much clearer that Sherlock was intrigued by the intellectual puzzle that Irene posed, that he’d kept her phone as a bit of a trophy for having outwitted her (which again is misogyny; Irene Adler outwitted Sherlock in the original ACD), and not had him “mourning” after her supposed death. I mean, Sherlock was visibly upset when the woman in TGG was killed as he listened over the phone. There’s reason to think he might have been upset to learn of another person’s death, someone he had met and sparred with. But it was always ONLY Irene who made things sexual or implied intent, never Sherlock. It’s bad writing, honestly. I think they really like the idea of making Sherlock some sort of Bond who can woo every woman within 900 meters, but also that he’s a dork with no social skills, and the mix sometimes works well and sometimes really doesn’t.
I don’t know if that was coherent at all, but that’s the five cents my brain rummaged around and found. :P What do you think?
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