sussexbound:yorkiepug:totally-sherwholocked:sherlockbuddy:littleowls3:Why are people so...

sussexbound:

yorkiepug:

totally-sherwholocked:

sherlockbuddy:

littleowls3:

Why are people so convinced that IF Mary is alone in Morocco it must mean she’s a villain? She could be investigating a lead for Mycroft, on holiday, it could be a flashback to past history or 10 other things. ‘Data! Data! We can’t make bricks without clay!’

The hunt for e4 ‘subtext’ is becoming like Sherlock’s drug dreams. Just say no, fandom.

Well, everything’s speculation at this point, of course, but some things make more sense than others. And spending a lot of money on sending AA/film team to Morocco to film a holiday sequence f.ex. seems unlikely whereas filming a bit of her backstory does not. A backstory to explain parts of her villainous past. Or are you doubting that she’s a villain at all?

People are convinced that if Mary is alone in Morocco it must mean she’s a villain, because she is a villain, and has been introduced as such in S3.

So, she shot & killed a character called Sherlock on a show called Sherlock…is her villainy even speculation at this point?

And they actually textually told us what her past involved in HLV.  She wasn’t running a pro-bono children’s clinic in Marrakech, she was killing people–for pay–outside of any sort of ‘she was just being patriotic’ type excuse you might find if she was working under the auspices of the CIA or MI-6 (and honestly even when you are working for either of those entities your morality has to be pretty squiffy).

From HLV:

MAGNUSSEN: I’ll look at the files on Mrs Watson.  Mmm, ah. This is one of my favourites.  Oh, it’s so exciting.  All those wet jobs for the CIA. Ooh!  She’s gone a bit … freelance now. Bad girl.  Ah, she is so wicked.

If Charles Augustus Magnussen is impressed by your level of wickedness, it’s got to be something!

And if you don’t want to take Magnussen’s word for it, there’s always Mary herself:

MARY: Everything about who I was is on there. (Directly to John) If you love me, don’t read it in front of me.
JOHN: Why?
MARY: Because you won’t love me when you’ve finished...  and I don’t want to see that happen.
MARY (addressing Sherlock): How much d’you know already?
SHERLOCK: By your skill set, you are – or were – an intelligence agent. Your accent is currently English but I suspect you are not. You’re on the run from something; you’ve used your skills to disappear; …
SHERLOCK: Magnussen knows your secret, which is why you were going to kill him; and I assume you befriended Janine…in order to get close to him.
(…)
MARY: The stuff Magnussen has on me, I would go to prison for the rest of my life.
JOHN: So you were just gonna kill him.
MARY: People like Magnussen should be killed. That’s why there are people like me.

And yes, I suppose you may argue that she had a change of heart, and wanted to get out of that line of work.  But her actions (such a shooting sherlock, with the intent to kill, after he offered to help her, just to hide her past from John, and then threatening to kill Sherlock again in the empty house when he threatened to tell John) seem to indicate she hasn’t changed all that much.  

Remember war criminals walk away from the atrocities they commit, and and start new lives (spouses, children, responsible business owners, involved in their communities), under assumed identities all the time.  That doesn’t make their past actions any less abhorrent, nor does it mean that the things about their nature and psychology that made them capable of such atrocities in the first place, have suddenly disappeared.  Nor, does it mean that they shouldn’t be held accountable for the crimes of their past.

I’m pretty sure that past is going to come back to haunt her.  That makes Morocco most likely something to do with her past, imo.

EXACTLY was @sussexbound said: Mary is TEXTUALLY a villain. This is not subtext. This is not imagined-in, wishful-thinking subtext. This is not a question of interpretation. Mary is, textually, canonically, unarguably, a villain who has killed, canonically, many times, for MONEY. For personal gain. This is not a good person.

What IS subtext, and I would say wishful-thinking, imagined-in, not-really-there “subtext”, is claiming any sort of remorse on Mary’s part. She has shown, to date, in canon, NONE. Not for her past - if it IS past, and her shooting someone rather suggests that it isn’t, along with having kept stuff like: her assassin outfit, her weapons, her equipment for scaling a skyscraper from the outside, etc. And not for anything that she’s done in canon so far, either. Here’s a list of things that Mary has not shown any canonical, textual remorse for: 

lying to John: on the contrary, she rationalises it as having had to do that (and let me just interject that there are ALWAYS choices!) in order to keep John from finding out who she really is, which I already find objectionableshooting Sherlock. One could especially argue an utter LACK of remorse given the fact that she threatens him again in the hospital, then stalks him like a target with a loaded, silenced gun in her pocket. She also doesn’t appear to feel that John had any right to be angry with her over this, too, given her snide, sarcastic reaction to the fact that he didn’t speak to her for several months, even refusing to let him have a say in naming their child when he finally took her back. letting Sherlock take the full fall for having shot the man who was blackmailing her. Yes, of course this was Sherlock’s decision, but a thank you would have been the very least she could have given, when the man she SHOT gave up his freedom so that his best friend could keep his wife out of prison. 

THAT is canon, folks. That’s what we’ve been given. Any assumptions of “remorse” on Mary’s part or having changed her ways is reading in something which is simply not there. We’re given a woman who stole a dead baby’s name, invented a fake past for the grieving man she moved in on, doing everything in her power to keep him from being able to make his own choice about her to the point of trying to kill the man he was grieving when they met, and never apologised for any of it. That’s what we’re given in canon. On top of that, she manipulates and gaslights him, questions and demeans his abilities, and takes pleasure in other people’s jealousy and discomfort. That’s canon. Anything else is simply not the character on the screen.