Cloistered Self

Florida man stumps neighbors by covering home in aluminum foil

TARPON SPRINGS, Fla. - Polish artist and Tarpon Springs resident Piotr Janowski recently covered his home, including the concrete driveway and the surrounding palm trees, in sheets of aluminum foil.

Source

BI PRIDE and VISIBILITY not ERASURE!!!

I know you two; and if I’m gone, I know what you could become, because I know who you really are.  A junkie who solves crimes to get high and the doctor who never came home from the war.  Well, you listen to me: who you really are, it doesn’t matter.  It’s all about the legend, the stories, the adventures.  There is a last refuge for the desperate, the unloved, the persecuted.  There is a final court of appeal for everyone.  When life gets too strange, too impossible, too frightening, there is always one last hope.  When all else fails there are two men sitting arguing in a scruffy flat like they’ve always been there and they always will.  The best and wisest men I have ever known.  My Baker Street boys.  Sherlock Holmes and Doctor Watson.

So if anyone is interested in my opinion, this is the message I see this sending.

First of all, it’s wrapping up potentially the last episode of the entire series, by giving the last word on Sherlock and John’s identities, relationship and life purpose to Mary…  That alone upset a lot of people.  

Lines like:

I know what you could become, because I know who you really are.

Who you really are doesn’t matter.

My Baker Street boys.

Really drive home the fact that she owns these men, that she is the one getting to define who they are allowed to be.  That is a sensitive topic for queer fans, whose entire identities and existence have been defined by powers outside their control forever.  It feels like John and Sherlock are being stripped of their agency.  It is the straight (arguably dangerous and abusive) spouse of one of the pair who gets to ‘give her blessing’, give them permission in other words, to become whatever or whoever she deems appropriate.  It is her vision of them that they are allowed to inhabit.  She defines their existence, identities and purpose.

Also, it seems to kind of fly in the face of the heart of ACD canon.  Mary was a mere blip in canon.  The Granada series chose to erase her completely, because they recognised that the heart of the Sherlock Holmes stories is the relationship (however you want to define that) between Sherlock and John, and nothing should come between that, or you lose the heart of your story, and your audience.  

For people who saw a queer relationship between John and Sherlock in this adaptation (and believe me there is a book’s worth of support for that reading), having a woman, especially one who had lied about her own identity, shot, drugged and repeatedly threatened/endangered the protagonist, and whose husband had admitted before her death (in TST) that he didn’t even like her anymore, get to be the one to define who John and Sherlock are and what their relationship would be allowed to be from beyond the grave just seemed insensitive at best and downright insulting at worst.

Secondly, what she seems to be saying here is that the the way that John and Sherlock have tried to manage their brokenness and become better men (Sherlock trying hard to substitute drug addiction with helping people by solving crime, and John managing his PTSD-related adrenaline addiction by helping in this endeavour), doesn’t really matter.  Let’s just ignore all the effort that must have gone into it, let’s erase flaws or struggles that are too uncomfortable, and reduce these men from human beings to legends.  Who they really are doesn’t matter, all that matters is the legend, the stories, the adventures.  Let’s not focus on these very real, human men, with human problems, human pains, human grief, human struggles.  That’s uncomfortable, and difficult.  Let’s just ignore/erase all that, and let them be a legend, let their real identities be rewritten, fictionalise, sanitised, so they don’t make, in Sue Vertue’s words, ‘The 99%’ of the world uncomfortable.