Creature of Mad Enthusiasms

Yesterday was Scintillation of Scions. I would love to run in (tired) circles squeeing about how well the raffle did, or the wonderful wide diversity of panels/panelists, and the fun of the Basil Rathbone Birthday B&W dinner.

But there's one thing that I really, really need to vent about today and that's Herlock, the first episode of which was aired in its entirety.

Herlock is a web series with college aged gender-switched Sheridan and Jonny. It was conceived of and written by a cis (I think) man, who said that "I left Holmes fandom for a little bit and when I came back it was entirely made up of young lesbians. So I wrote a Sherlock for them."

...because the fact that they were already fans of Sherlock and Elementary and oh, yes, CANON means that they need niche marketing, I suppose...

Anyway, I can't speak to the lesbian part of it (although Cardi, who was staying at our place, did, at length and at volume). I sure as hell can speak to how women are portrayed and "pissed me off" is a fucking UNDERSTATEMENT.

Sheridan is young and chic and -- like Dr. Sheldon Cooper and Sherlock and Bones -- extremely emotionally disconnected and brusque and socially maladept while "not being autistic or anything."

THIS. IS. PROBLEMATIC.

Look, I *like* Big Bang most of the time and I adore me some Sherlock, this is still problematic as hell and offensive as hell and it needs to stop being a trope. (And at Scintillation? Seriously awkward as a presentation coming just a few hours after an advocate and consultant with autism herself spoke about the presentation of mental illness in Sherlock and the canon.)

But that doesn't begin to cover my problems with Jonny. Do let me vent in boldface all caps about Jonny. Every complaint I had about the presentation of Joan Watson in Elementary is magnified and intensified in Jonny. As M pointed out, Joan Watson may have given up her original career in Elementary, but she also *achieved* it. She had a career goal and she put in the hard work and time necessary to achieve that goal. Elementary itself is arguably less the story of Sherlock trying to unscrew his screwed up life as Joan realizing what it is she really wanted to do when she grew up, and again putting in the time and work necessary to achieve and live that goal.

I ranted at the time that watching Joan do this over the course of a couple of seasons, especially as we watched her toss her interim career as well was feeding into the stereotypes of women as irrational and impulsive, but I cannot deny that Joan is consistently portrayed as competent, consistent (when compared to Sherlock especially) and extremely capable.

Besides, I hadn't met Jonny yet.

In the course of 45 minutes, we watch Jonny, a graduate student in veterinary school on a scholarship throw away everything she has ever worked for and throw away any CHANCE of achieving an independent career. Basically, Herlock is 45 minutes of Jonny researching a horse-based crime, becoming aware of Sheridan Hume, and becoming obsessed with Sheridan Hume - to the point of badly damaging, if not probably ending, her academic career to follow Sheridan Hume, who actively solicits her to leave school.

Wow, that totally doesn't portray women as impulsive, irrational, prone to emotional reasoning, unable to set and achieve self goals, and naturally being relegated to following after their love interest at all, now does it? Hey kids! Don't you want to imagine yourself throwing away everything you've worked towards for that person you just met? Isn't flushing your future for pussy instead of prick such an empowering feminist message?

Oh. Mah. Gawd. Just Oh. My. God. I. Can't. Even.

Nobody is going to believe this, but I'm actually warming to Elementary this season... or at least thawing toward it. I still think that the mysteries themselves are ludicrously complex, but this year the personalities involved are being handled beautifully.

It helps tremendously that the three things that bothered me the worst about S1 have been directly addressed onscreen. ( All of them early in the season, but cut for spoilers anyway )

I'm not talking about my house being part empty on FB, but enough people have left LJ that I feel that I'm not drawing a target on the house by admitting that I am now in the land of poutine for a while.

M and I got here Tuesday. Yesterday was only one show for me - The Three Musketeers, which was good, but also spun to be very dark. There was a note taped to my seat inviting me to a chat with D'Artangnan and Lord Buckingham after; a large but private reception where the actors answered questions. (D'A said that "gritty reboots are the fashion" when asked to compare this production to the sunny first one of '68. To a woman who'd seen the one in '68!)

The rest of the time I shopped my wallet flat - not good going for my plans for this one to be the "cheap" vacation before JASNA! But there are dark chocolate lemon creams to buy, and minties, and there's a new store called Olive Your Favorites with flavored oils and vinegars for mixing and matching and ZOMG, I spent almost $200 on vinegars alone. (They loooooove me there...) I have GOT to learn to flavor my own oils and vinegars!

I'm light on plays this year, so I'm doing other town events instead. In lieu of an evening show, I took a market class and watched the instructor make labneh, queso fresco, and paneer. Then off to Raja for superb saag paneer.

In writing news, I've joined the John H Watson Society and sent them an essay for their journal. In with the edits, the said that my description of Elementary made her want to see it and she thinks it will inspire others to see it too.

I find this hilarious.

1) Elementary's first season will come out on DVD August 27.

2) According to Blogtor Who, there's going to be a SherlockBBC con in Birmingham. Which some incredible moron has titled "Elementary." Because that won't cause any confusion (or come across like the start of a pissing contest) *at all.*

3) Because I don't think I've said this in public, Elementary fans can breathe a sigh of relief that I'm not going to be harshing the squee over S2 because I won't be watching S2. I watched S1 through because I'd pitched several articles about aspects of *all* the 21st C interpretations and thus needed to talk in an informed manner about Elementary as much as the Ritchie movies and BBC.

If the ratings stay the way they are, the show will run for quite a few seasons. I don't begrudge that. May your fandom continue to make you happy.

( Latest episode under cut. Pass over if you don't want squee harshed although FWIW I'm bitching about something new )

I was amused to overhear a couple of people enthusiastically discussing the episode behind me in the line for lunch at work. Not a context where I expected Elementary to show up.

I'll give Elementary its due tonight.

First, the mystery was actually plausible (by TV standards) and required no-one to be suicidal, stupid, or profoundly oblivious.

Second, one thing it has done ABSOLUTELY RIGHT from the beginning is not make a big deal out of Lucy Liu's ethnicity. "This is New York," the show basically says. "This is what New York looks and sounds like." (I believe that this was one of the biggest draws of the show to Liu.) And so I was not actually surprised but I was extremely pleased that when given an option to be sensational, the show simply repeated "This is New York. This is what New York looks and sounds like."

I'll even throw in a third: I thought the continuity shout-outs were a nice touch.

WARNING: Probable spoilers in comments.

I can't get this out of my head, so I'll work it out through my fingers. Note: *non-plot* spoiler for latest Elementary below.

So, over the weekend, M and I had a total fight long discussion about Joan Watson. While I'm not entirely convinced by her POV, I found her thesis compelling enough to put both our takes here for the hive mind to chew on.


MY TAKE:
I have felt that the casting of Watson as a minority woman has turned out to be a case of 2 steps forward, 1000 back because Joan is saddled with so many anti-feminist cliches. The ones at the head of the list are:

- She makes emotional decisions
- She walks away from things she starts
- She is inarticulate, unable to explain either feelings or actions (and instead either avoids or lashes out)

After years of training to be a surgeon, she has a crisis of conscience and gives it all up after one crisis. Her second job is, according to Sherlock, not just in a different field, but probable self-punishment. When tempted back to medicine, her reaction is to look back at her experiences via photos... and delete them. When tempted to a new and different thing in her life, she dumps her only paying job to take it.

She cannot tell her boyfriend or her family why she changed her jobs. She cannot tell her former doctor friend why she isn't coming back *and* she does not admit, even when directly credited, that she ordered the test that saved a girl's life. She only seems to talk to her therapist, and even then she doesn't actually *communicate,* evading and talking around some of her decisions - such as her decision to stay with Sherlock without pay - AND without telling him what she has done!

And finally, the scenes in the latest episode that made me want to smack her, there's her reaction to her friends' concern - stomping out, and then snapping "that was out of line." She could have shut the whole thing down with a "this is how I feel and it's not what you see" - but instead, she completely blames them for caring, even though viewed from the outside her actions have been a textbook checklist for a woman being groomed for abuse.

No, seriously. From the outside, this is what has happened over six+ months:
- Isolation from friends
- Isolation from family (Sherlock has to broker that peace)
- Gave up her job to work with him full time
- Gave up her home to live with him full time
- Showing interest in nothing but what he does, a subject that has never interested her before.

Joan Watson has suddenly made a former client the center of her world and blown off everyone and everything else. That's enough red flags to make a parade, and she doesn't explain herself, just lashes out when people dare question that - even after she's been arrested doing the new work!


MAUREEN'S TAKE:
It is unfair to extrapolate this year of Joan's life as "normal" for this character, and thus unfair to look at her actions and say "the producer is saying X about her or all women," especially because you cannot become a surgeon in the first place without smarts and long-term discipline.

That having met her family, it is reasonable to say that Joan was more or less told that she had to grow up to be either a surgeon or a lawyer or some other high-powered job and was groomed for it rather than picking the career on her own. Furthermore, she was probably told from childhood that achievement isn't enough, it has to be HIGH achievement.

That whatever happened in the operating theater and the following suspension wouldn't just rattle her confidence, but shatter her world. That the Joan that we've met is broken and flailing and rudderless not because she's a damsel in distress, but because anyone of any gender needs time to process that the lifelong plans are not going to happen as projected.

For the first time in her entire life, Joan has a clean slate. She is able to look at the world without her parents' or her own expectations and truly decide what SHE wants to do; if she wants to go back to the plan or start a whole new one. This process inevitably involves false starts, mistakes, being overwhelmed, etc. Elementary (because God knows it's not about well-crafted mysteries; even M won't defend that part of it) is primarily about Joan's evolution from "Mommy's little surgeon" to her own adult self.

That we've probably seen exactly what Joan was like as a med student; throwing herself into studies so that she can be the best she can be in the shortest amount of time possible; not being the best is intolerable. That her friends were completely out of line with the intervention and if they were worried about her situation and what it looks like, they should have talked to her one-on-one, maybe even come to the brownstone and met Sherlock rather than making snap judgements themselves and confronting her.

And while M didn't really defend Joan against the charge that she is crap at communication, M's willing to give her a partial pass on the basis that Joan is still processing all of these life changes and that's not easy to put into words.


So there you go. Two opposing views of Joan Watson, both of which interpret the same data presented by the show. (And I'll tag this post... at some point.)

So, I'm starting to kick around the prep work for my March presentation to the Tin Box, which is on canonical stories with plots that don't translate to modern times. (Yes, that will be a future pitch.) It's going to include Scandal, because hello, dynastic marriage. (Nobody focuses on Irene as blackmailer, ever notice that? It's always the sex or the slippery opponent angle or the love interest. But I digress.)

Anyway, all we know of Irene in Elementary is that she has been the textbook fridging - her death made S the man he is today and *is the direct reason why he met Joan Watson.*

Which makes me wonder how interesting it might have been to have called the character ”Mike Stamford."

( Cut even though this spoiler really isn't a surprise )

And then there's the Joan issue. Not that John recast as a woman of color is a problem, but the constant demeaning sexism she's putting up with? So far Sherlementary's "father" and a Baker Street Irregular have implied she's a whore; [spoiler] asked if Sherlmentary was banging her, Sherlementary himself tried to hire her as assistant *and housekeeper* -- that there, THAT'S a big damned problem.

It's everything I feared, listening to the producer going on and on about his Sherlementary's woman issues. He didn't cast Joan to be an advance; he cast someone he could have the hero and just about everyone associated with him treat as second-class snatch and everyone's supposed to be so pleased on the rare occasions when he can be arsed to be halfway nice to her. ( More spoiler )

What the fuck is next, Joan singing "he hit me and it felt like a kiss"?

Hell of a rewrite for literature's most famous friendship.