in which Sherlock has this National Coming Out Day thing covered
Originally published at Faith Seeking Understanding. You can comment here or there.
According to my school’s LGBT + Allies group, tomorrow is National Coming Out Day, and we are all invited to wear purple. I just may do that, but really, I’m not sure I can do it better than Sherlock. And John agrees.
I don’t actually ship John and Sherlock, though I do see the potential and have enjoyed some Johnlock stories that use this pairing to do good work with their characterizations. (Also *cough* some for slightly less high-minded reasons.) But what I find so fascinating is that, while I think in the original period when the stories written you could read these two men as simply being incredibly close friends, I’m not sure they can be read in quite the same way today. I don’t necessarily mean that the characters are gay, but rather, I think that when a decent man like John gets married as he does in the stories, with the feminist revolution bringing men and women into something more closely resembling full partners, you’re not going to have room for the same kind of friendship. It won’t go away, but it will change. You don’t run into that problem with a lot of quest-based fics (Sam and Frodo could be closer than friends without Rosie posing any kind of a challenge, at least until they got home), but when the friendship and the romance inhabit the same space, that is problematic. Doable, perhaps, but fiendishly difficult to do well.
I may write more about that tomorrow. I’ve been thinking about the question, and the day’s as good a time as any other.
***********************
In other news, I spent much of today in the dentist waiting-room trying to get a broken temporary crown put back in. (It must be Thursdays; I never could get the hang of Thursdays.) Excruciatingly painful at the time, and excruciatingly boring as well. Another reason I love Sherlock: he’s the only one I’ve ever seen how flat-out excruciating it is to be really and truly bored. It’s a physical thing for me, honestly.
But in a weird way, this is one of those things where fandom helps keep me sane by keeping me amused. At some point, I noticed the way I was holding my cheek out and tenderly touching my chin reminded me of the way Mycroft does that in “The Great Game.” (S01E03) Which made me think about how Sherlock famously prefers to text but Mycroft prefers to actually call people. And that’s telling about their character, I think. That one wishes to remain above it all and send out missives without having to enter into a full relationship, whereas the other is able to manipulate those relationships to gain information and control he wouldn’t normally have. Or something like that.
Still coming off the anesthesia, so that may not make a whole lot of sense. But it was a new Sherlockish thought that got me through the boredom.