... in which she's the biggest geek in the whole wide world

[soupytwist]

OK, so rachel2205 asked me about multi-fandom love and asked which fandoms were most important to me and why. My comment got way too big for the comment box, so here it goes. If anyone wants to turn this into a fandom love meme, then please go right ahead, because I am all about discovering what people love and why.

Comments

[taintedrocky]

I didn't know you were a Sherlock Holmes fan :) I haven't read those stories in ages. Perhaps over spring break...

[penguin2]

Have you ever read the Mary Russell novels by Laurie R. King? They rock. She takes the canonical Holmes and follows him into his retirement years, where he meets a young student of...well, I won't say more. Lovely stuff.

[soupytwist]

I have refused to on the principle that they are romance novels, and while romance novels are perfectly fine things, I can't see Holmes being in love with anybody but himself or Watson. (And possibly Irene Adler, but eh, I am far from convinced on that one. "The Woman" or not, he never cared about her even a tenth as much as he cared about Watson.)

Is this a sign that I should read them anyway?

[penguin2]

I'd give at least the first one - The Beekeeper's Apprentice - a try. Laurie King has done a lovely job of keeping to canon, extrapolating the personality and life of Holmes in his later years (and even there there is a little...surprise that makes sense). I was turned on to these novels by my dear friend neko_seraph with almost violent enthusiasm (on her part, hee). Wasn't aware they're meant to be romance novels!

This is unfair of me, but...muhahaha...Mary Russell, the protagonist, is a studiously geeky, insistently empirical, utterly non-romance-minded young Jewish scholar...

...gotcha!...

[soupytwist]

Oh, you are mean! OK, maybe I do have to read them. If you tell me they're not really romance novels, then I'll believe you, although everything I have ever heard about them has led me to believe that's the case. (At least Holmes in love is hardly going to be even a teensy bit as sappy as Mills and Boon.)

And maybe when I get back to Blighty and can find the Baker Street picture, I'll post it. :)

[penguin2]

~grins~ Mean, that's me! Though I remain thoroughly puzzled by the romance-novel appellation and the M&B allusion. How exactly is a novel about the clever solving of crimes romance? Just because there happens to be emotion - and resented-and-battled-against Lurve - in it? Yeesh, by that yardstick there's precious little apart from gharstley dry-as-tinder stuff that isn't "romance"! I forced myself to read one M&B (or Harlequin, like it makes a difference) years ago and I can vouch absolutely that it was nothing like the Mary Russell stories...whereas *I* would definitely class the likes of Austen and Bronte (and much of Dickens) as romance, but we're told they're Literary Classics with a big L and C. This little black duck is much confuzzled :-)

And Holmes in love is as Holmes about it as he was about everything else, heh.

Picture gooood. "Back to Blighty" - awwww, that's given me my second homesickness attack of the day...

[soupytwist]

I'd thought they were all about Holmes and Mary falling in Love, like "feisty younger woman melts Holmes' icy heart" type stuff. Which, as someone who loves Holmes in all his drug-addicted fucked-upness, gives me the heevies. Though the quotes I've seen were all nicely written, I really have difficulty believing that someone else randomly becomes the Watson substitute just like that, you know? Emotion is good, but the stuff I've read very much gave off the impression that the books were kind of high class Mary Sue fanfic.

And when I get back I shall have to send you stuff, if you'd like. :)

[penguin2]

Mmmm. Fascinating. No, that's not how I'd have described 'em. Then again, I always, even in early childhood when I first discovered and devoured the original Holmes stories, felt that a mind as fine and a psyche as complex as Holmes' deserved to be propagated, and that through the offices (and orifices, muhahahaha) of a woman worthy of his mettle. And in Mary Russell, IMO the author has created that woman. ~shrugs~ What else can I say?

I never read Holmes for the "mysteries" - I have a lifelong disinterest in mystery-solving and crime fiction because I'm interested in people and their ways and mores and how events shape them (and for that matter, a lifelong disinterest in crime fact; if the crime in question didn't happen to someone I care about, I don't give a monkey's about it. Serial killers? No thanks, I just put one out. It's called felis domesticus). FVor me, the Holmes stories were all about the social history, the picture they painted of Victoriana and of Conan Doyle's own attitudes. Likewise for Graves' I, Claudius and

[soupytwist]

Arrghh, please don't mention orifices. *has seen traumatising birth videos and didn't need any more mental images thankyou :P*

We do seem to be quite different on that front - I always saw Sherlock's legacy either dying with him or being passed on via the ancient custom of apprenticeship. And while I absolutely love all the stuff the Holmes stories say about people, I also love a good mystery in and of itself; I read true crime books and such for fun. Though I would say that a good mystery is one that tells us something about people, somehow, and I definitely agree with the social history stuff. Mmmm... history geeking

[penguin2]

Ahh, so I've been misinformed then. Shows you how much I interact with fanficdom. Not. :P

Eurgk. I could never love a "perfect" character...as you well know :D Even that certain Lady who seems "perfect" but is definitely oh so human and wracked by doubts and self-deprecation and and and...

I'm getting more confuzzled than ever, and more than a little frustrated (or flustrated, as my beloved ex says). Because I see no reason to change my stated opinions of fandom and fanficdom (and you know what those opinions are!), but I'm faced with several bright wonderful enthusiastic people, yourself and neko_seraph and ridicu_liz among them, who are happily and brightly and enthusiastically neck-deep in the whole fan/fanfic ethos. Ay caramba, what's a Creator to do...

[soupytwist]

Oh yes! I've been a big Holmes geek since I was about six and read the short stories with my grandad. I love them very much indeed. I have even been to Baker Street and looked, and had my picture taken in a mock-up of the famous sitting room. (Complete with V.R bullet-holes in the wall! Squee! Oh my lord I am such a nerd.)

I need a Jeremy-Brett-as-Holmes icon. Dammit.

[penguin2]

What you need more is to post said Baker Street picture!!!

[mooetta]

Have you read John Lennon's books? Just that I was highly amused to read a few Holmes stories and found that they were sooo like John's spoof version, The Singularge Experience of Miss Anne Duffield, apart from all the malapropisms. Ellifitzgerald, my deaf Whopper!

Oh, and I just received The Eyre Affair as a belated birthday present. Am looking forward to reading it.

[soupytwist]

I've never read that, no. It sounds fun; as much as I love the Canon, it is definitely highly mockable. (Although not as much as the people who've never read any of it think it is; Holmes never says "Elementary, my dear Watson". Ever.)

And yayayayayay for Jasper Fforde. I love those books. They are distilled geek joy; they're cracked-out fanfic for every book ever written. :D