Fic Rec Sherlock

Yeah, I know I just had a fic rec post, but 1) there's a lot of new stuff as S2 hits America and 2) two things have hit in the last couple of days that I've just been reading obsessively.

PR FOR THE NEW SEASON (Assume *FULL SEASON* spoilers)
PBS has video of the NYC PR event, and more.
Transcript of the chat with Gatiss


Really Freaking Useful
A guide to the Sherlock fandom online

This is on Lyndsay's Tumblr, but it's so important that I'm going to repeat the meat of it here:
An opinion: there is no difference in origins between a 79 year old Baker Street Irregular who discovered Sherlock Holmes at age 10 when he saw Basil Rathbone kicking Nazi ass in Sherlock Holmes and the Secret Weapon and a 15 year old fangirl who discovered Sherlock Holmes five minutes ago when she finished streaming BBC Sherlock... All that’s necessary to begin a long, healthy Sherlockian life is love of the characters.


FIC REC (NO SPOILERS)
When I saw the post on 221b_recs about the AU where John and Sherlock, both single fathers, meet because of their kids, I was all "You MUST be kidding me!" Not that I was that interested in a story narrated solely by Sherlock's kid, because seriously? Sherlock would make a shitty father.

And then I clicked the link just to boggle, and ended up reading Getting Better for three full hours past my bedtime. On a work night. Sherlock is a crappy father, but he's got a great kid. And believe it or not, it's casefic.


THE SLUMBER OF FEELINGS
Wow. This was long. And spread over several months (I'm not sure why it's taken me so long to find out about it.) And occasionally it's hard to read without getting defensive, because it's written by an autistic person who has been treated poorly by non-autistic people in general and the Sherlock fandom in specific and thus is really pissed at people just like me -- for really good reason.

So why am I reccing it? Because it's an incredible series of essays about Sherlock and autism by someone who knows. The cycle is presumably not complete; there are references to related essays that I haven't found. It's eyeopening and informative and impressive.

That said: DO NOT CLICK THESE LINKS UNTIL YOU'VE SEEN FALL. C'mon, it's just 6 more days; if you've made it this long without spoilers, hold out.

Then come back and read these.

Prologue "The general theme is “explaining the autistic experience by analyzing Sherlock as though he is a high-functioning autistic”."

Stereotypy Finding and explaining Sherlock's repetitive motions and "sulks." On demanding John send texts (PINK) and ignoring John's upcoming ASBO (BANK): From the outside, the autistic’s behavior during a shutdown is interpreted as sulking, pouting, stewing, or passive-aggressive nastiness. It’s fairly clear the majority of Sherlockians interpret Sherlock’s behavior here as negative, as bullying or controlling John. Not many consider if Sherlock asks John to send that text because if John refuses, Sherlock’s hands will shake uncontrollably mid-text, and he’ll drop the phone. Or, Sherlock ignores John’s court date because he’s filed it under Future Events, and logically decided that John’s plight is less important than catching a murderer.

Sensory Impairment Where Sherlock is both oversensitive and undersensitive, and why. In spite of Sherlock’s assertion during the drugs-bust that he’s a high-functioning sociopath (spoiler alert: there’s no such thing), the entire scene is a display of Sherlock’s sensory and social impairment culminating in a tantrum. The thing about autism, as I said a moment ago, is that a person can experience emotional and social overloading, not just sensory overload; and in my experience, both can happen at the same time. In the drugs-bust scene, Sherlock’s privacy is violated. Lestrade sets up a scene designed to humiliate Sherlock on multiple levels—about which more later, but for now, I’ll note how goddamned important boundaries are to autistics, and how it ruins not only our sense of privacy, but our sense of our own reality, when people ignore those boundaries.

Sherlock's moments of social fail, allistic privilege, and the POV from autism This post is heartbreaking on several levels - you really can't read it without wanting to put the boot up some fans.
There’s an undeniable tendency in the fandom to pathologize Sherlock’s actions, coupled with no attempt to understand why Sherlock might act the way he does. He’s cast as a heartless sociopath (by the by, it’s depressingly common for autistics to self-diagnose as sociopaths). People bemoan his “abusive” behavior. They ask why anyone, particularly John and Mrs. Hudson, would want to be around him—and they usually answer with the assumption that John, and Mrs. Hudson, are victims, abused into submissive servility. Anyone who doesn’t see Sherlock this way is met with disbelief: asked if they watched the same show as everyone else, for example, or asked if they always feel the need to justify what is “obviously” horrendous behavior. Even people who honestly like Sherlock, or identify with him, are expected to criticize him.

The times Sherlock gets it right and is smacked down and misunderstood MAJOR SPOILERS FOR BASK AND FALL! So the pull quote's from GAME: Small wonder that Sherlock puts so much effort into stamping out his emotions. No one around him gives a ripe fuck how he feels about anything, as long as he serves his purpose to Society At Large. For example, it’s not that Sherlock felt no compassion for the five pips in “Game”—it’s that Sherlock expresses his concern by doing something tangible to help. His scornful descriptions of John’s idea of compassion is, interestingly, a knock-down of allistic standards. John’s basically asking Sherlock to pretend he isn’t excited over a confrontation with a worthy foe, and instead, pretend he is worried about Moriarty’s victims. Because, to allistics, being a “good” person has a lot more to do with feeling and expressing the correct emotions at the correct moment than it does with moral character. “Good” people, in John’s view, are panicked, worried, and stressed when somebody’s life is at stake. In Sherlock’s view, “good” people react to bomb threats by stopping the bomber.

I will say that I completely disagree with street_howitzer's interpretation of a BASK scene that gets a major rant, but the issue is brought up here.

Also, John takes a bit of a whipping as a character in that post; this one offers an interesting new angle on his actions to a scene in BASK. (The John part of the series of essays is hinted at but doesn't appear to have been written. Yet.)

Further discussion on the topic and what research the actors and writers may have done. My tuppence: Cumberbatch has referred to Sherlock several times as autistic and we know he is the kind of cerebral actor who does a lot of thinking and research into his roles.

And to round off, a general educate thyself post.