XistentialAngst's Blog, page 201

You are the one with the list of canon refs in TAB, yes? Look what I found. In The Problem of Thor Bridge (which I was re-reading for its canon train carriage knee-grope and gun-handling scene), the cook couldn't boil an egg properly because she was readin

Ahahahahaha, that’s hilarious! I missed that entirely. Nice job! 

Jim Isn’t Dead, Peeps

miadifferent:

shadowfax044:

I was going to wait on doing this until I rewatched TAB
another time or two, but all the “Mary is the new Moriarty!” on my dash just
made me want to pull my hair out. I’m sure there’s tons more evidence for the fact that Jim is still breathing, but as I
really want to get something out there now before I go nuts yelling at my computer
screen, here we go.

Obviously, Jim and Emilia Ricoletti have been equated to one
another: Jim dressing in the bridal gown, both of them shooting themselves in
the head through the mouth, speaking and writing a threatening three-letter message
(IOU and YOU), having a network of others helping out behind-the-scenes. And yet the
fandom seems to be forgetting the most important part, here. Emilia Ricoletti didn’t commit suicide.
Alright, what she actually did was commit assisted
suicide, but she didn’t actually shoot herself in the head. That
was a ruse. And so was Jim’s
apparent suicide. (Remember Sally’s “these apparent suicides” in ASiP? You were told, but did you listen?)

Here’s where Emilia and Jim differ: Emilia only went through
the whole thing in the first place because she
was dying anyway, and this ruse would help advance women in the cause of social, economic, and political equality. Emilia faked her suicide to make her already-imminent death
count; Jim faked his suicide to ensure that Sherlock and John would be
separated (so that Mary/Moran could do her job and get to John).

And, as far as Mary taking Jim’s place as Moriarty… then
why would she put Jim’s little message up all over England? She has no reason
to want to bring Sherlock back. Whether some of TAB was real-time or all of it
was in Sherlock’s MP (I’m still a little undecided on that point), it was obvious that Mary wasn’t happy that Sherlock was
back; even in the last scene of HLV, Mary doesn’t look happy about the plane turning around. She can’t have broadcasted Jim’s message. And no one else, other than Jim, had reason to do so, either: for more detailed analysis on the motive issue, I recommend
reading what @someabominablemeta says here.

TL;DR Jim is
equated with Emilia, who wasn’t actually
dead, and who only died later and not
by suicide. It only makes sense if Jim was the one to broadcast his message
(or demand that someone else, such as Mycroft, have it broadcasted; seriously,
read that meta by someabominablemeta, it’s awesome).

EDIT: Also, the fact that the writers have been saying forever that he’s dead makes me even more sure that he isn’t. We know they lie. All. the. time.

I don’ think that “Mary Moriarty” and Moriarty still being alive are exclusive. Mary is in my opinion undeniable set up as Moriarty, or as his mirror. (And that casual viewers are blind to this enforces the relevances for me). 

I can solve your Miss Me video problem though with my “nothing is real” theory. I think, that Sherlock tries to figure out, who Mary is. On the timeline this is at some point after the shooting and right after Sherlock gets on the plane. So he drugs up, tries to figure out who Mary is, and his subconscious produces the result as a big blinking warning video. Moriarty is back. But this is just Sherlock’s subconsious deduction. There is no Miss Me video in reality. This can mean Moriarty is back in the form of Mary or they worked together all along and both are “back”.

It’s true that Emilia didn’t actually commit suicide that first time, but had a friend shoot her shortly thereafter (cause she was dying anyway). And I’m sure they could twist their way out of Jim’s death if they wanted to. But I think the biggest point about Emilia is that idea that anyone can now be the ‘bride’ because she set it up that way. That’s by far the more important aspect of the whole bride metaphor, which is sort of irrelevant if Jim is still alive.

As for who did the “Miss me” video, I agree Mary has no motive to do that and was genuinely alarmed/annoyed. My bet would be Mycroft or John with the motive to stop Sherlock’s forced exile in its tracks, which is precisely what it did.

"Remember where we left them."

miadifferent:

skulls-and-tea:

“It will be tough at times. Maybe that’s the word? A tougher series.”

“We’re certainly going to put them through the mill. It’s going to be more of an emotional upheaval.”

“A lot of serialization is latent, isn’t it? It’s hidden.”

“[Season 4] is going to be… I suppose you’d say… consequences. It’s consequences. Chickens come to roost. It’s dark in some ways…”

“There are answers coming to questions which nobody has asked. There’s one thing that no one has really brought up…”

“We’ve actually set up something, I think—[co-creator Mark Gatiss] and me, we’re very exultant about a little thing we’ve set up that no one is talking about. ”

“It’s not that we’re being clever. We never know. Sometimes people go mad for one thing we think is quite trivial and completely ignore something we think is standing right in front of you.”

– Steven Moffat on Series 4 [ x ]

Sorry I couldn’t resist.

Reading their comments made me think abut Mary IS Moriarty and was from the very start, like the Harry/Harriet thing. I hadn’t seen that precise theory til after TAB. Could that be the thing no one found?

TAB Meta Masterpost UPDATE

heimishtheidealhusband:

multifandom-madnesss:

[click here for the masterpost]

After 24 hours of uni-induced tumblr exile on my part, the next major update is complete! It now contains 200+ links (this is an estimate, I’m too tired to count them right now). 

Please keep messaging me about posts I should include, or tag/mention me/submit the link =) 

Tagging some folks who appear on the masterpost for signal boosting reasons, and other who I think might be interested below the cut. 

Keep reading

Holy crap this is comprehensive.

Awesome List!

glassofteajlc:the director of TAB showing how much attention to detail goes into the editing...

glassofteajlc:

the director of TAB showing how much attention to detail goes into the editing process of Sherlock and people still think this 

wasn’t intentional ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

So blatant!

heimishtheidealhusband:thememacat:teapotsubtext:johnlockise...

heimishtheidealhusband:

thememacat:

teapotsubtext:

johnlockiseternal:

We can all go home

if she deletes this, i’m gonna flip

OMG

RIP, softly softly

(But real talk though if they’re talking about it in this way doesn’t this make you guys think it could be a red herring? No? Just me?)

but we're SUPPOSED TO find mary funny. we're supposed to like her "impish sense of humour". mofftiss overreached having her shoot sherlock to prove their point that she's a skilled assassin so we don't but they're not foreshadowing her as M. it's a way to

friend, lemme tell you a thing. mary is moriarty and john’s going to take her ass out.

right after sherlock said that he was going to save mary he clutched his chest where she shot him and doubled over in agony. he can’t even lie to himself about liking her. in the after interviews mark and amanda practically stood up and shouted at us that mary was the villain. she’s lit differently - more harshly, less forgiving, starkly - than anyone else. she wears a red coat while everyone else is in black. she’s cruel to sherlock AND to john. she is NOT meant to be likeable to anyone who is paying attention.

listen to me. this show is not made for the casuals. we have been told in every way possible that this is a show about looking deeper, solving the puzzle, finding the truth. they want us to look beyond the surface. they JUST GAVE US 90 MINUTES OF META ABOUT SHERLOCK’S SEXUALITY AND PASSED IT OFF AS AN EPISODE.

mark and steven do not want to make a show about the three amigos. this is about sherlock and john, just the two of them against the rest of the world, always two of us, forever. 

queenofnobullshit:There are many things that make me believe in TJLC. There’s the BBC’s LGB...

queenofnobullshit:

There are many things that make me believe in TJLC. There’s the BBC’s LGB Commission, there’s Moffatt’s rant about those who don’t read the subtext, there’s this quote by Gatiss, there’s the aborted love declaration on the tarmac, there’s the acting, there’s the omnipresence of queerness.

And yet, nothing confirms TJLC to my eyes as much as this: The one time I stopped believing wholeheartedly in TJLC, the one time I decided to try and like Mary, the one time I thought that maybe Sherlock and John could just be super close friends, and that Mary could be part of their trio (I’m not super proud of that), I got thrown a curve ball. Mary killed Sherlock. 

TJLC allows to accurately predict what is about to happen. TJLC allows a fairly opaque episode to become completely transparent. And when you drop TJLC, even for a second, things stop making sense and you are out of your depth.

So true

Mirrors, Meta, and Breaking the Fourth Wall

iamjohnlocked4life:

When Sherlock is going through how the women executed the ghostly bride projection, he’s going through how Mofftiss has been queer coding the show. Character mirrors abound in the series, over and over again. It’s one of the basic tenets of our huge repository of meta. By showing a series of bride deceptions, we’re shown that this is done again and again, a mirror being held up to our core characters (Sherlock, John, Moriarty, Mary) through different iterations of other characters, their relationships reflected back at them ad infinitum.

Sherlock then goes on to identify the women’s one mistake: they broke the pane of glass, hence the sound of the glass shattering. The cult of women social justice champions is so obviously a mirror for our TJLC community that my husband even paused the playback on our watch through to comment, “Hm, conspiracy? Where have I heard that before…” and give me a knowing wink. He knew the cult was our mirror before they were unmasked to the audience. So what was our “mistake”? We shattered the glass: we broke the fourth wall. We broke the meta code. We spilled the beans before Mofftiss was ready, and we won’t let it go, because we know we’re right. We saw TJLC and we spread the word, and we won’t stop, even when Mofftiss has had to lie to our faces at conventions and interviews time and again. And though they have to put up a front of us being “wrong” or “hysterical” in the public sphere for the rest of the show to work, they know we are right, and we will win in the end.

Love this.

So, let me see if I got this right:

ramblings-from-yours-truly:

We guessed about the special being a gothic Victorian fantasy inside of Sherlock’s mind palace



We guessed about the MP fantasy being set in the few minutes between Sherlock’s takeoff on the plane and Sherlock’s return



We guessed about Sherlock resorting to drugs in order to solve the mystery
We guessed about the poor state of John and Mary’s marriage (to the point that she first appears dressed in mourning clothes while visiting her husband, who has left her in order to live with Sherlock again)


We guessed about the mentions of Redbeard



We guessed about the visit to the Diogenes Club
We guessed about Fat!Mycroft

We guessed about there being a literal elephant in the room and it being gotten rid of (aka Reichenelefant™, BYE FELICIA)
We guessed about the shameless amount of green everywhere (AHEM Sherlock wearing a completely green outfit, AHEM), which was a very gay color back in the time (especially when combined with a clean-shaven face)
We guessed about Moriarty’s death (or apparent survival) being explained via the Bride’s death (or apparent survival)

We guessed about Andrew Scott’s reappearance in the special despite his name not showing in the cast list
We guessed about Moriarty being under the Bride’s veil (more like the whole dress)
We guessed about Mofftiss creating divergences from ACD’s canon because there were things that ‘everybody’s been getting wrong’ and ‘need to be fixed’ (aka the Reichenbach Falls Scene That Has Changed Everything™)
We guessed about John and Sherlock having a conversation similar to that of TPLoSH (”Holmes, I hope I’m not being presumptuous, but there have been women in your life?” “The answer is yes… you’re being presumptuous.”), aka the “We Are In The Middle of a Stakeout But Hey Buddy Do You Happen To Want to Fuck People” Scene™
We guessed about Moriarty being finally dead after all
We guessed about Victorian!John and Victorian!Sherlock calling each other by their first names, which is something incredibly intimate to do in the Victorian era (as well as them being perfectly comfortable with it)
We guessed about Sherlock’s ‘ghosts’ being Moriarty’s presence haunting his mind (who, by the way, represents his respressed homosexuality and his feelings of love as well as ‘impulses’ towards John).
We guessed about guns being given a very sexual connotation (aka Gun/Dick Comparison Scene™ and Moriarty Gun Blowjob Scene™)
We guessed about a final reference to Sherlock being more comfortable in the 21st century (because he gay as hell), something like ‘maybe in a different time…’, which we also got (”But then, I’ve always known I was a man out of his time”) 

…and we got all of this from a total of three minutes worth of footage from the special (in the form of trailers and pictures), a couple of shady tweets and whatever little info we could scrape from any other declaration made by the writers, director, cast or whoever.

AND YET YOU TRY TO TELL US THAT WE ARE GOING ABOUT THE ABUNDANT SUBTEXT ALL WRONG AND THAT JOHNLOCK IS NOTHING BUT A FIGMENT OF OUR WILD FANGIRL IMAGINATIONS
LIKE

This is why I can’t stay away from meta and setlock. It’s like we get to sort of have the show before we have the show, and how else can we bear the wait?

XA