in a way john watson is a fantasy (what if you had this brilliant enigmatic friend and what if he liked you in particular and what if he offered you the excitement of youth and adventures and a way out of boring society life and all without having to actually give up your status as a gentleman so you could have the best of both worlds) and in a way sherlock holmes is a fantasy (what if someone never got tired of you despite your various strange habits and mood swings and instead of simply tolerating you they genuinely liked you and what if you didn’t have to live alone forever and what if you never had to give up doing the things you love) and of course there’s the most fantastical part of it all (what if you could afford london housing prices)
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urgh OK so i just finished bingewatching company retreat (sequel to jury duty) and have moved onto the behind the scenes/commentary bonus eps, and. as much as i enjoyed the show, the thing that keeps driving me up the wall is the way they're framing it like the "heroes" (aka the "normal person" thrown into the show) are some kind of saints among men!!
and it sucks cos it feels JUST off the mark for what the moral of the show SHOULD be: that your average, everyday person is, most likely, gonna be a pretty caring and supportive person when you give them people in obvious need of care and support. that individuals (at least when thrown together with a small group of other individuals) are basically Good.
the way they keep harping on anthony being such a uniquely Good Person is driving me crazy. bc not only is that such an uncomfortable thing to be on the receiving end of over and over again (there's only so many times you can say "geez, thanks, guys!" or "i was just doing what my mom raised me to do!"), it also paints a more cynical world view and sorta "others" the audience at home?
like the very premise of "What Would You Do?" is, literally, to get the audience to wonder what they would do when facing blatantly obvious injustice out in public. and from what little of the show ive seen over my dad's shoulder, the answer is rarely ever "laugh at them" or "join in the cruelty". people fall into one of two camps: those who intervene and those who cringe and fall victim to the bystander effect. those in the former camp get thrown a fucking parade, the latter get a head shake. we've all been in both camps, at some point or another.
but the thing is that it's never a question of compassion or sympathy over the plight of another human being. people have empathy in spades! it's a question of whether the person is going to make the choice to break the bounds of Western social niceties and butt into someone else's business, or make a scene in public and forfeit some of their own comfort for someone else's. and thats what anthony DOES! throughout the whole show, but especially at the end!
maybe I'm just being too nitpicky about how they're wording all of this, but imo if you're going to single out the "heroes" of this show and dole out praise, it shouldn't be for their compassion, but for their bravery in Doing The Uncomfortable Thing of breaking the generally agreed-upon societal norm of "ignore others misfortune to save everyone the embarrassment and not seem like a busybody".
that man. anthony. captain fun. his first DAY at the office, advised a man he'd only just met to give a woman he'd only just met a public proposal, when asked for his opinion. no fucking WAY could that have been me!! you're not getting me give someone big advice like that on my first day as a TEMP! but amy had told him earlier she liked being the center of attention and he clocked her energy and he heard the excitement in kevin's voice and when kevin asked his opinion he was like yeah. yeah man fucking go for it! hyped him up! was giggling just thinking about it afterwards! and then he agreed to FILM the thing and didnt RUN AWAY when it went awkward!! man i woulda been OUT! OF! THERE! but he tolerated so many uncomfortable situations without running away or turning a blind eye! only forshadowing the climactic scene of the whole show--the ULTIMATE sticking your nose in other people's business, even when it's hard and uncomfortable! THAT'S the commendable thing, imo.
things the "heroes" should be praised for:
demonstrating the empathy and kindness inherent to most everyday people
their good sense of humor, positive energy, and ability to roll with the punches
making the CHOICE to do the uncomfortable thing rather than just quietly sympathize or outright ignore another's strife
things the "heroes" should NOT be praised for:
having some kind of unique capacity for sympathy and comradery with your fellow imperfect human beings
one of the biggest tragedies of early 2010s tumblr is that the devil (bbc sherlock) took root as the face of johnlock when the guy ritchie films were RIGHT there
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i love headcanoning old men as ftm. like considering fandom loves to equate being transmasc to being young no one will probably agree with me but i look into his eyes and see the wisdom only a post-menopausal man could provide
we all know (I hope) that Holmes is autistic and also variously mentally disabled in other ways.
I’d make it a sibling who is autistic too, but who is intellectually disabled and completely non-speaking, unlike Sherlock (and Mycroft if you like… I don’t have strong opinions on whether he is autistic). in the late nineteenth century, such a person could be in some sort of an institution or in full-time care at the family’s house, paid for privately (and we do think the Holmeses are relatively well off).
I’d open the story with the final Holmes parent dying and entrusting, in their will, the care of this sibling to Sherlock and Mycroft, but sans any sort of useful details about their needs or even their location (maybe the parent meant to have a conversation with Sherlock and Mycroft about them but died suddenly before having the chance). for bonus heart-wrenching emotions, maybe Sherlock and Mycroft didn’t even know about this sibling’s existence (perfectly possible given the way that disabled people were often hidden away in the past, especially if this sibling was born first).
they have to go on a big adventure to get them out of the institution they are in — after finding them in the first place, of course, which won’t be easy when they might not even be using the Holmes name — and on the way get caught up in other crimes being committed at the corrupt institution. there would be scope here for some really interesting discussion of how to communicate with disabled people (for the investigation) when the AAC technology we would tend to use now is not available, or when knowledge of BSL was not wide-spread, or when nobody has even done research into how to communicate with people who have certain conditions, and also some discussion of how people assume disabled people (especially the non-speaking) don’t understand, which could lead to some of the residents at the institution having heard some really relevant things because the care staff just didn’t consider not talking about it in front of them.
naturally, along the way Holmes comes to the conclusion that he is mentally disabled too. maybe they’re poking around the records in the institution’s archive and find out that his parents inquired about having him put there too? maybe he didn’t talk for much of his childhood and they thought he was intellectually disabled too?
institutions were for physically disabled people too, so we could explore Watson’s feelings about his old war wound and his (what I think is) myalgic encephalomyalitis / chronic fatigue syndrome from having enteric fever. going with this, I think it is probably best if we make Mycroft completely abled, to contrast. with Sherlock finding out he is disabled too, we could put in that maybe Mycroft as a young teen heard his parents worrying about how they thought they had just had a blip with their first kid, and Mycroft turned out fairly normal (if a bit clever) which comforted them, but now the third one’s all weird too. and Sherlock angry at Mycroft for never telling him about this (which can be all mixed up with anger at their parents for never telling them about their older sibling). (would need to figure out a way for Mycroft to have heard that conversation and not know about the sibling. maybe the parents were referring to them in past tense as if they had died young, which would be a perfectly reasonable assumption for Mycroft to make given nineteenth-century infant mortality. but actually they were just doing it out of shame.)
it would have to be handled with a lot of care to avoid coming across as using disability for cheap drama, but disabled people do deserve to be included in drama and so it would be worth the effort. I don’t know how it would conclude — I don’t know what the happy ending is here — but I’m sure I could find one.
actually, I might write this… please nobody take my idea!
as a sign language student (granted, ASL) and amateur Deaf history enthusiast, i immediately locked onto the idea of the Holmes sibs needing to learn BSL to communicate, especially considering one of the most momentous (read: disastrous) events in Deaf cultural history occurred in the year 1880, known as "the Milan Conference".
(infodump under the cut)
in brief, this was an international conference of educators of the deaf/hoh where it was decided that oralism (teaching deaf kids to lip read and speak) would be designated the "gold standard" for deaf education over teaching the manual mode of communication (BSL and fingerspelling). this was deeply harmful for way too many reasons to go into here (mainly: lipreading is mostly guesswork, kids were deprived of their natural language during the crucial window of language development aka birth-5y/o leading to all kinds of cognitive and behavioral issues in life, and that sign language was associated with the "primitive" and verbal communication associated with the "civilized").
before the milan conference, deaf education in the uk was predominantly the "combined" method (which certainly had its limitations, but at least included some signing along with the speech lessons). AFTER the milan conference, the western world was plunged into a century of what's now considered "the dark ages of deaf education", where oralism alone was predominant and any signing at all was discouraged... to the point where students were often made to sit on their hands. yknow, sort of like the equivalent of having your mouth duct-taped shut?
ugh--i could go on and on about this, but suffice it to say that Secret Holmes could plausibly have learned BSL to communicate, but SOMEone wouldve needed to take the initiative to teach them--it was not the norm.
(anyone interested please check out this cool essay i found on the impact of the milan conference on deaf education in Scotland during the turn of the century)
anyways! my mind started whirring on the backdrop of this setting, and here's MY alternate pitch, 100% piggybacking onto your pitch:
Secret Holmes (as i am now calling them) is born profoundly deaf. the language deprivation that was so typical of hearing households with deaf children (and, sadly, remains typical to this day) led to cognitive and behavioral issues that... yknow, naturally arise when a child has no means of communicating--or even articulating anything to ONESELF. these behavioral issues led to the Holmes parents thinking their child had significant intellectual disabilities (and possibly they did have those also, and/or was autistic? bc that's still a great angle to parallel sherlock...) and decided to send them away to one of these asylums and never speak of them again--basically, pretend this child never existed, other than to send checks to the asylum for their care.
as you said, the holmes parents die and pass the knowledge of and responsibility for this sibling on to sherlock and mycroft, warning them that if they went to see their sibling, they would not be able to speak (in the parlance of the day, they would be called "dumb", as in "deaf and dumb", aka nonverbal).
BUT! when they show up to the asylum, they find that Secret Holmes went missing from the insitution YEARS ago... they just never notified anyone and kept cashing the checks! when sherlock eventually tracks down Secret, he finds them at the first publicly-funded/free school for the Deaf in london.
this school? the real-life "Asylum for the Deaf and Dumb" in southeast London, headmastered by a man named Joseph Watson. And yes, I am of course proposing that John Watson is a descendent of his. From the wikipedia:
...As it turns out, when Secret was still fairly young, some kind soul had seen them and realized they had that holmes intellect inside them, but was unable to DO anything with it, given the lack of language. this kind soul spirited the child away to the deaf school, claiming they were an orphan foundling in need of charity and schooling, and so Secret Holmes eventually came to learn BSL and written english (albeit late, and less fluently), under the care of this boarding school.
now, i cant decide which direction i like better:
1) Secret Holmes is an older sibiling who was sent away when Mycroft was too young to remember. This would put Secret starting school around the late 1840s/early 1850s, when students wouldve been taught by the combined signing/oralism method. Being one of the few jobs available to Deaf people, Secret Holmes may have taken a job teaching at this school by the time Sherlock finds them. Maybe they've been doing their own detective work among the insulated community of the school?? Sniffing out corruption, even? And then as deaf schools shift to the oralism-only method in 1880, Secret lives in fear of losing their job and the only home theyve ever known...
OR
2) Secret Holmes is a younger sibling, born after sherlock moves out and loses contact with his parents, and is still a kid attending this school as a student when sherlock finds them. And then sherlock becomes their guardian and needs to slowly learn how to communicate with them, eventually discovering how fucking smart this kid is, despite being underestimated by everyone, and its all terribly cute bc sherlock is NOT the maternal type (but john kinda is) and sherlock just loves this kid anyway cos theyre smart and spunky. its not quite as saccharine and domestic as you might first expect from that kind of story, sherlock is still awkward af and its not like he and john become a quasi-nuclear family for the kid, but at least now this lonely orphan has a few family members, and they're actually taking the effort to learn to communicate with them!
ALTERNATIVELY: scratch all that, take prev's pitch in its entirety, and just add the tidbit that john is the one who gets the idea to use BSL to communicate with nonverbal Secret Holmes based on this old book passed down from his grandfather, joseph watson, titled "Instruction of the Deaf and Dumb", complete with some limited vocabulary instruction
(ok, that last bit's a lie--i found this book scanned onto the internet archive and as far as i can see the only drawings of hands in it are in the fingerspelling alphabet chart (which in itself is similar to, but notably different from, the BSL alphabet you see today). descriptions of the book SAY it includes signing vocab, so maybe the dense text includes written descriptions of signs? maybe i just missed an appendix?)
you might be able to tell i stumbled onto one of my special interests here and spun out, whoops! i am not a writer, myself, so if anyone wants to take any of the ideas i wrote here and incorporate it into a fic or headcanon or whatever, please feel free, so long as any stuff pertaining to deaf history/culture is well-researched and respectful! unless, of course, someone DOES write this show for the BBC, in which case i absolutely demand a credit line 😂
WAIT! I almost forgot to add that its also gay af. and not in an easy way, either... I'm talking a homoerotic, codependent, at times psychosexual, are-we-being-queerbaited-or-is-this-an-intentional-subtext-slow-burn-kinda-thing sort of deal. make us FEEL it.
we all know (I hope) that Holmes is autistic and also variously mentally disabled in other ways.
I’d make it a sibling who is autistic too, but who is intellectually disabled and completely non-speaking, unlike Sherlock (and Mycroft if you like… I don’t have strong opinions on whether he is autistic). in the late nineteenth century, such a person could be in some sort of an institution or in full-time care at the family’s house, paid for privately (and we do think the Holmeses are relatively well off).
I’d open the story with the final Holmes parent dying and entrusting, in their will, the care of this sibling to Sherlock and Mycroft, but sans any sort of useful details about their needs or even their location (maybe the parent meant to have a conversation with Sherlock and Mycroft about them but died suddenly before having the chance). for bonus heart-wrenching emotions, maybe Sherlock and Mycroft didn’t even know about this sibling’s existence (perfectly possible given the way that disabled people were often hidden away in the past, especially if this sibling was born first).
they have to go on a big adventure to get them out of the institution they are in — after finding them in the first place, of course, which won’t be easy when they might not even be using the Holmes name — and on the way get caught up in other crimes being committed at the corrupt institution. there would be scope here for some really interesting discussion of how to communicate with disabled people (for the investigation) when the AAC technology we would tend to use now is not available, or when knowledge of BSL was not wide-spread, or when nobody has even done research into how to communicate with people who have certain conditions, and also some discussion of how people assume disabled people (especially the non-speaking) don’t understand, which could lead to some of the residents at the institution having heard some really relevant things because the care staff just didn’t consider not talking about it in front of them.
naturally, along the way Holmes comes to the conclusion that he is mentally disabled too. maybe they’re poking around the records in the institution’s archive and find out that his parents inquired about having him put there too? maybe he didn’t talk for much of his childhood and they thought he was intellectually disabled too?
institutions were for physically disabled people too, so we could explore Watson’s feelings about his old war wound and his (what I think is) myalgic encephalomyalitis / chronic fatigue syndrome from having enteric fever. going with this, I think it is probably best if we make Mycroft completely abled, to contrast. with Sherlock finding out he is disabled too, we could put in that maybe Mycroft as a young teen heard his parents worrying about how they thought they had just had a blip with their first kid, and Mycroft turned out fairly normal (if a bit clever) which comforted them, but now the third one’s all weird too. and Sherlock angry at Mycroft for never telling him about this (which can be all mixed up with anger at their parents for never telling them about their older sibling). (would need to figure out a way for Mycroft to have heard that conversation and not know about the sibling. maybe the parents were referring to them in past tense as if they had died young, which would be a perfectly reasonable assumption for Mycroft to make given nineteenth-century infant mortality. but actually they were just doing it out of shame.)
it would have to be handled with a lot of care to avoid coming across as using disability for cheap drama, but disabled people do deserve to be included in drama and so it would be worth the effort. I don’t know how it would conclude — I don’t know what the happy ending is here — but I’m sure I could find one.
actually, I might write this… please nobody take my idea!
I'm going to make the case for Mycroft definitely being autistic. Known facts about Mycroft include:
He has the same routine every day and very rigidly sticks to it. He goes between his home, his work and his club, which are all in close vicinity to each other. We can infer that he probably finds breaking his routine distressing, or at least not ideal.
He founded a gentleman's club which attracts oddballs like himself, where you can enjoy creature comforts without having to socialise and make small talk.
He loves silence. Does he have a lot of sensory sensitivities?
Although he's good at deducing facts about people, he seems to be very bad at inferring how they are going to feel and act, which leads to a lot of problems in The Greek Interpreter.
He has a job where he deals with facts and figures, because he's very good at memorising them and storing them in his mind. He's kind of the government's IT guy.
Although he's not 'clubbable' and doesn't seem to have any kind of social circle, we can maybe infer that he has few good friends who trust him - his neighbour Mr Melas seems to have seen him as a good person to turn to in a crisis, at least.
Stay on permanently. Not as my sober companion but as my companion [...] This is an important decision and I encourage you to discuss it with others. Explain what you have been to me and what I believe you can be to me — a partner.
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Libraries are sneaky, because once you go in, it's soo easy to get a library card, and once you have one, you can pretty much grab one of everything of all the stuff they have there with no consequence, and take it home. But then once you're home and you've read all the stuff you'll have to go back to the library to return the stuff, and once you're at the library again, you're at the library again, so might as well pop in to see what they got, and then you're hauling half their shit home again, and then you'll need to return to the library to return them, so you're at the library again
And the next thing you know you've read 3000 books, your crops are clear and your skin is watered, an angel descents from the heaven to suck your dick twice a week, and also you've got some books to return so you've got a perfectly valid reason to go pop in to the library. Just a little bit.
