A Scandal in Fandom: Steven Moffat, Irene Adler, and the Fannish Gaze

[jblum]

The thing about the latest round of "Is Steven Moffat sexist?" that's currently flapping round the blogosphere, is that if within the same week you can manage to get accused of hating women by a Guardian blogger, and simultaneously accused of championing women and hating men in the Christmas special by the Daily Mail ... you're probably doing

Comments

[azarsuerte]

I'm not criticizing her. I'm just saying my wants for the character were so shaped by CND's interpretation that I knew there was no way the Irene I wanted was going to be the Irene we got (unless Moffat was a closet fan of the CND books *g*). So I wasn't happy with the character, but I'm fully acknowledging the problem to be with my expectations, not necessarily Steven Moffatt's writing.

(Also, just a semantical note but it bears clarifying: by "firmly rooted in but very different from," what I meant is that CND's Adler takes the rough sketch of the character from the ACD short story and gives her much a much more complex personality and motivations, so that Watson's portrait is true to the information he had, but from Irene's perspective, that information is incomplete and sometimes inaccurate. Hence, the character is different because we are seeing her through the eyes of someone who knows her better. Steven Moffat was transposing the character into a completely different setting, which is an entirely different thing and what he had to adapt/take away from the short story is thus also very different. So I'm not comparing the way the two writers adapted the character at all except in that I like one's choices better than the other's. :-) )