The Mrs. Bradley Mysteries

[osprey_archer]

As I watched the pilot episode of The Mrs. Bradley Mysteries, articles that I’ve read about Sherlock floated through my mind. Specifically, the articles where people argue that the audience would roundly reject a female character as snarky, immune to social convention, and borderline sociopathic as Sherlock

Comments

[cordialcount]

Well, but she had to see him thrash to make sure it made the right pattern of splash marks!

/thumbs directionally confused

Or maybe there’s just not much overlap between people who watch The Mrs. Bradley Mysteries and the fandom audience the Sherlock articles were written for.One problem with trying to use the audiences of different shows for a comparison is that someone curious can't-- not without being sorely short of ethics, anyway-- force a random slice of the population to watch X and Y show. All the audiences are both self-selected and strongly influenced by how the show is marketed. I'd expect shows that are honest about their unusual characters to have fewer but more positive reviews

[osprey_archer]

Forcing people to watch X and Y would totally ruin the sample, anyway. It's like having a friend who nags and nags that you should watch/read/listen to X, till you hate even the idea of X, even if it sounded good the first fifteen times.

[cordialcount]

Out of curiosity: Have you ever been asked, or seen someone be asked, fifteen times? In real life, I mean? I start feeling uncomfortable the second time I rec something (be it a fannish canon or a banking service) or ask the same person if they've read it, and would never try more than three times, and no one's ever tried to push something on me more than twice, so I always thought the "a dozen times! every time you meet!" thing was an exaggeration.

[osprey_archer]

I've had a couple of friends who just didn't know when to stop. It was never every time we met, but every time we got in the vicinity of the topic, they would bring up their pet show.

[asakiyume]

My thumbs are as directionally confused as cordialcount's, though since it's you, and you don't have patience with heartless, self-centered characters unless they've got some strongly redeeming qualities, either in their character or else in a meta-sense, in the overall story, I guess this sounds good? For me it's the dismissiveness of the dull son that gets me--not that he's her son and she's dismissive (though, okay, I guess a little bit that, as well) but I just hate it when clever people know they're clever and despise dull people for being dull.

[osprey_archer]

Looking over the entry, it occurs to me that I should have included a "So these are Mrs. Bradley's redeeming qualities" section, although it's difficult to pin down without giving away most of the plot. I think it's one of those things that relies a lot on the actor's charisma - although there were 66 books in the series in the spawned the TV show, so maybe not

[asakiyume]

So the thing you saw was saying that [by and large female] writers of slash are writing about men because they don't like/aren't interested in female characters, and that this is because society as a whole doesn't like female characters? Because yeah, that statement seems arguable with on several points.

There's probably lots and lots and LOTS of different reasons why people write slash. One thing I've thought is that for female heterosexual cis writers, it lets them explore relationships and sex and emotions without there being any implications for themselves--it's like it can be undiluted and more intense maybe? You write slash--what do you think?

[osprey_archer]

There are many writers of slash who have issues with female characters, but it's definitely not universal. There's a continual state of soul-searching among more thoughtful slash fans about this, which I think is mostly a good thing, except when someone starts constructing justifications why it's totally consistent with their social justice stance that they don't write women (or people of color, or so on

[osprey_archer]

Personally, I was cheering for the costumes. It's hard to go wrong with everyone swanning around being all twenties.

(Although Phryne Fisher has both twenties clothes and the milk of human kindness, so it's possible to have everything at once.)