Petronia

Because if I end up dropping this or other WIPs only to pick up the threads a year later - or longer orz - I'm gonna need to know what my rationale was at the time. XD; THE VOICE OF EXPERIENCE.

The epic Baidu Knowledge thread on Holmes's virginity or lack thereof** SO RIGHT the sexuality issue: as far as I'm concerned you can write Sherlock Holmes as any orientation or kink you want and I'll buy it, as long as it's not normal. Wow that sounds wrong ahahahaaa. Basically 1) w/r/t the Greater Whatever I've been long baffled by the assumption that "kinda has a thing for Irene Adler" equates to "heterosexuality", accept or deny. I mean, in Victorian terms it's like saying a dude is PROVEN STRAIGHT because... he owns a signed photo of Lady Gaga... 2) w/r/t the BBC series I think ppl make their mistake in trying to pin him to anything definitive, when the point of the show is that dude's self-image, attitude vis emotional intimacy, etc. are all kinda in flux. In fact, the opportunity as such is to sidestep didacticism and present... not facts, surely, but... events?

** The plurality concluded he wouldn't be, if only because formulating theories without data is a no-no, right? Haaaa.

Class signifiers and Waughian real estate: I'm never very good with this? Lestrade is more middle class than in the original, I think, Watson is meant to be exactly the same but there's a sense in-fandom of subtle gestalt flying over American heads (or Asian XD;). I'm dead cert Harry is Big Law (it would explain a lot!). Meanwhile in ACD Holmes is minor gentry and all but not A VULCAN PRINCESS like he comes across here. I'm honestly not sure if he was pitch-shifted more or if the rest of England was... Weirdly enough I was reading Donald Thomas's pastiches (Greater Holmesian Whatever fanfiction being unrestricted to the Internets but seemingly a form of manna that blankets Chapters bookstore and local libraries with the first dew), and then I went on TUMBLR and someone [okay, Tom] had blogged about disruptive turn-of-the-century change in the British landowning classes due to the inexorable forces of comparative advantage pace Ricardo. XD; Actually I think it'd be cool if in this setup the Holmeses no longer owned some sort of massive fuck-off Brideshead-esque estate; the boys have both been but Sherlock lacks sentiment and Mycroft thought about it but ehh. It's American pop stars who live in the things these days, one sometimes gets the impression, the way English poets purchased Venetian palazzos in the first half of the 19th century. But that must depend on the region. XD;

So yeah: 1) Irene Adler is an American pop star, do you see the avenues of hilarity opening up, 2) honestly John I'm not sure you're Charles even, you might be the teddy bear.

Didn't someone already use "The Physical Impossibility of Death in the Mind of Someone Living" as a fic title? If not I call dibs: another point of unintentional hilarity in VALL: Moriarty's Greuze. GREUZE. It's like. The semiotics pile up. Maybe the modern equivalent would be a very obvious Pre-Raphaelite? That a policeman wouldn't look twice at because it couldn't be anything but a reproduction. But no matter how ppl dig Waterhouse on postcards he doesn't actually speak to the flavour of the post-Modernist era, so I sat there thinking, what would a dude who wore Westwood suits and McQueen ties and in a past century would have splurged recklessly and publicly on a GREUZE collect, in this day and age? And then it came: Damien Hirst. XD; Primo the finances behind the skull are sorta mysterious and dodgy in RL, secundo IT IS A SKULL id est a redoubled layer of contrast/parallel (the first being Sherlock's not!Banksy association), tertio no one would credit you keeping a platinum diamond skull lying around on the mantelpiece, their eyes would skip right over it. Whereas a shark in a formaldehyde tank really couldn't be mistaken for much else but.

One can keep digging in this general direction: it gets better. (Collishaw's work is well worth investigation, by the by.)