December Posting Meme: Sherlock Holmes
starfishstar asked: How you became a Sherlock Holmes fan...and, if it's different, how you became a More Holmes fan in particular. :-)
Sherlock BBC was my gateway, back in 2012, right after Reichenbach. A man I used to date sent me both series on disc from England, saying that Sherlock reminded him of me, and that he thought I would like the show. (I resent the first; he was correct about the second.) I no longer know what grabbed me so hard about the show? The visual design, certainly - I was right on the cusp of becoming a vidder - but that couldn’t have been all of it. I’m sad to say that whatever-else-it-was, it didn’t last: nowadays I find the show, even the first two series, nearly unwatchable, boo. :-(
But that first summer, I watched and re-watched it several times, I mainlined fic, I read selected ACD novels (which didn’t really capture me in their own right, but were fascinating as source for the show)… It was all Sherlock, all the time. And even though ACD itself wasn’t yet something I enjoyed on its own terms, I was already discovering that I liked ACD fic - or I should say, the characterisations and relationships therein - much better than I liked the bulk of BBC fic.
Elementary began airing that fall, and I immediately recognized in Miller’s Sherlock the Holmes I knew from ACD canon and fic, the one that I liked so well. I also adored Liu’s Watson, and was much taken with S1 as a whole, which is beautifully constructed - even early in the season, that was apparent. (Sadly, the show would never again attain the beauty of that first season.) I kept on dipping into ACD canon for insight, and I started listening to the Bert Coules radio plays as a solution to my not enjoying canon much: Coules lives very close to canon, and thus was useful for discovering the shape of the original cases and a lot of the key interactions.
So there I was, about six months in to this thing and already conversant with four Holmesian universes. And honestly, it was probably the very multiverse-ness of it all that kept me engaged: there was always new material, there was always stuff to think about and analyze with how the new material related to the source and other adaptations… There was just a ton of stuff to chew on.
Becoming a Moreholmesian… That was possibly always going to happen, given that one of the things I most enjoyed about Holmesiana was the compare/contrast/interplay of multiple adaptations from the same source. But it was also 100%
language_escapes’ fault.
I met Lang in the Elementary fandom: she has been an obsessive and omnivorous Holmesian since she was, dunno, twelve, she was regularly throwing up fascinating commentary about how strongly grounded Elementary is in ACD, and I stalked her into becoming a friend of mine. Sometime during that year, she discovered that I’d never heard Coules’ “The Lion’s Mane” all the way through to the end (the library’s CD was damaged), and she consequently demanded my snail mail address so she could send me a copy. All innocent and unsuspecting, I gave it to her.
The package that arrived… Can I even remember what-all was in there? Honestly, I think she took all her duplicate copies of every random thing and indiscriminately threw them in the box. (Remember, she’d been collecting Holmes stuff since she was twelve: it was a bizarre assortment of I-have-two-copies-of-this.) A dozen eps of Coules (although give credit where it’s due, the Coules eps were deliberately-chosen favorites), several eps of the Rathbone/Bruce radio show, an audio bootleg of the Secret of Sherlock Holmes stageplay starring Brett and Hardwicke, a print copy of Case-Book (which is still in copyright in the U.S., and thus I’d been having trouble accessing the stories), a complete set of the Howard Holmes series, a complete set of the Twenty-Second Century series, the Peter O’Toole Sign of Four, Veggie Tales’ “Sheerluck Holmes”… Just omg, here is an indiscriminate collection of Holmesian crap, some gold, some weird, some shlock, do with it what you will. I was supposed to take particular note, I remember, of tomato!Watson.
Time went by, and true to form, Lang continued to throw random Holmesian crap at me. It was far from all bad: she knew where the good stuff was, and at least when she threw weird-ass shit at me, it tended to be fascinatingly weird-ass shit, you know? The New Russian Holmes series came into existence somewhere in there, and I started watching it mainly so that I could keep up with her, but then ended up loving it in its own right. And for every egregious Asylum film she pointed me at, there’d be a Murder By Decree, so that was fine. But I still mostly thought of myself as an Elementary fan.
Then she and I signed up for our first
holmestice together, which at the time ran heavily toward BBC. And by “heavily toward BBC,” I mean that it was like 90% BBC, and also there was one sign-up asking if Great Mouse Detective “counted.” Lang and I both loudly said FUCK THAT, and we promptly offered Dinosaur Holmes and Veggie Tales, don’t talk to us about what fucking counts. (I have not been quite so impetuous with a sign-up since? BUT I WOULD HAVE WRITTEN VEGGIE TALES IF I HAD MATCHED ON IT. *pounds fist on table*) Anyway, that sign-up was probably when I “became” a More Holmes fan, never mind that I’d spent the previous year and a half training for it: there’s something about FUCK THIS NOISE I WILL WRITE YOU THE TERRIBLE ONE WITH THE DINOSAURS IF YOU ASK FOR IT that makes one commit to a thing.
(True fact, the vid was made in the same spirit of FUCK THE HATERS TAKE THE TERRIBLE DINOSAURS AND ALSO WATSON AS A TOMATO AND LIKE IT that underscored all of Lang’s and my multi-Holmesian shenanigans together. I scrupulously scrubbed our language of FUCK THE HATERS when we were publicizing it, but FUCK THE HATERS was very much at the foundation of that vid. But it was a sincerely joyful, devil-may-care FUCK THE HATERS, so except for one or two grumpy comments from someone about us leaving out a favorite adapt or - get this - having Elementary in it at all,* I think people didn’t mind.)
Anyway, I’ve kept on with the More Holmes stuff because I genuinely like knowing all kinds of obscure random shit, it entertains my brain to lay two adaptations side-by-side and analyze their different approaches, and I feel like my participation actually matters in these little micro fandoms, which I don’t really feel for the bigger ones. Also, this fandom is so freaking huge that I haven’t run out of good stuff yet.
Who knows if I ever will.
* What is it with people having to randomly volunteer that they hate Elementary? I really don’t see that with any other adaptation. Except maybe the Peter Cook Hound of the Baskervilles, which seriously, come on, is not equivalent at all. (NB: This is not a request for anyone to earnestly volunteer an explanation of why they hate Elementary.)
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