Holiday gifts & thoughts on the new Sherlock Holmes film

[igrockspock]

I have received some absolutely lovely holiday gifts this year, and exchange season is not even over yet!

katmarajade wrote me A Kitchen Invitation, an absolutely adorable ficlet about Kirk and Sulu being foodies together. I've been feeling nostalgic for Star Trek lately, so this little story was an especially nice surprise.

At holmestice, I received Three Themes,

Comments

[rubynye]

Oh damn. Thanks for the warning. I am disappointed in the movie, and in the friend who recced it to me -- I would have thought she'd notice a heroine being fridged.

[igrockspock]

Maybe your friend needed to take her feminist goggles off for a day so that she could enjoy a movie for once. Sometimes I wish I could do that...

[rubynye]

*nods* Good point.

I tend to... run my mind on parallel tracks? For example, I really like the movie L A Confidential, which is exciting and complex and well-written and well-acted, even though its treatment of women is severely dodgy and its treatment of Black people is pretty damn awful. Both observations exist, neither cancelling out the other.

[igrockspock]

Yes, that is a sensible approach. I can do that too, up to a point, but I usually need really strong writing and characterization to compensate. I don't care for the way the BBC Sherlock series treats women either, but I love the relationship between John and Sherlock so much that I can overlook the gender fail (and write my own fanfic for the sadly marginalized ladies). In the movie, Irene dying probably wouldn't have been a deal breaker if it had been important to the story, if she hadn't been poisoned by Moriarty for liking Sherlock, or if she had been replaced by a character who was even funnier and sassier than she was. Since none of those things were true, and the movie had writing problems anyway, I spent a lot of time being really pissed off about Irene.

[gaedhal]

In canon Irene is already dead at the beginning of "A Scandal in Bohemia," so Conan Doyle
kills her off at the very moment she's introduced. And that's Doyle.He never meant for
her to be anything but a one shot character who leaves an interesting memory. It's
non-canon dramas, films, and fanon that make Irene anything more.

[igrockspock]

I dont't honestly care what happened to her in canon. In a story that's already revisionist, killing off one of your best characters is a dumb writing move, and we live in the twenty first century now. Women should be included in our narratives in substantial and interesting ways.