Yeah, these are definitely ‘cry in the wilderness’ material. I mean, y'know, we’re sane and there’s certainly a lot of very good reasons we drew the conclusions we did. It’s fascinating that while most of these are Series 3, there’s one that’s Series 4. I was talking about this recently with TSoT in particular, how the episode creates lots of parallels between the romantic/matrimonial love between Mary and John and Sherlock and John’s partnership. I *think* it’s just that… John and Sherlock are super important to each other, and no one gets to like, *surpass* them, particularly in Sherlock’s importance to John. Think Spock and Kirk. It’s just (obviously) maybe Spock was more important than Jim’s own soul, but he wasn’t directly and indirectly compared and contrasted to Jim’s actual *girlfriends*. That’s… that’s somewhat tasteless, in a way. On the other hand, Jim never had a serious girlfriend; in the Reboot, Spock has Uhura and they don’t have soulmate angst, so it’s just a lot more *normal* relationship, and direct comparison is once again avoided even though Jim has a warm relationship with Uhura just as Sherlock does with Mary (and Molly, for that matter).
The problem in Sherlock is that ultimately, there’s this structural tension between what the narrative seems to intend and what it actually implies. This is also an issue with Mary. I remember talking with @mifletset about Mary before S4, and she said we’re supposed to like Mary and people only disagreed ‘cause they expected certain things from the narrative. It’s ironic ‘cause I’d agree nowadays, but I’d still argue that the narrative messed up. Mary teased Sherlock too much (particularly in TEH and during the wedding in TSoT) in a one-directional way Sherlock didn’t reciprocate, and he just took the whole shooting thing for granted and accepted it, and then when she died and John blamed him, Sherlock accepted that and blamed himself too, as Ivy said. I get that it’s actually true that Sherlock did like Mary and that John loved her and the surface reading of HLV happened. It’s just that it’s still *unnatural*, and not just ‘cause of shippy fangirls. It’s that the feelings were presented but not *supported* properly; saying Sherlock didn’t actually trust Mary was an attempt to make HLV make more sense, because the way he did react was… weird. The cognitive dissonance snowballs.
My point is that all these things happened for a reason that makes sense at the time (more or less), but together they fall flat. Just because you present a character as lovable doesn’t mean they *are*, particularly when they still do bad things and don’t face many consequences, or the consequences primarily fall on the main protagonists. You have to do more to balance the situation; Mary making cute faces and like, taking a shot for the protagonist the episode after nearly killing him isn’t gonna cut it. The circumstances create their own narrative subtext. Mary always being untrustworthy and vaguely threatening to John and Sherlock is… subtext. This is what it *feels* like to us (in fact, this is mostly about the structure of the scenes or the episodes, ‘cause from Mary’s POV, of course she’d be there at her own wedding or on her date with John in TEH, or even threatening Magnussen in HLV; this sort of externally forced conduit function is made explicit in TLD, when she’s *literally* an invisible spirit hovering over John and Sherlock’s intimate scene at the end). Saying she’s got to be the villain was just trying to turn the structural subtext into text. Essentially, subtext organically arises when the text denies explicitly acknowledging the consequences for the parallels being used. Subtext is a natural result of seeing enough patterns, that creates an empty space where consequences should be.
Anyway, so as I said, there’s a constant narrative mirroring that’s not even *specifically* about Mary or John and Mary (as well as with Molly and Irene). This is what Ivy was talking about with the ‘purpose of minor characters’. They serve as conduits and mirrors. Of course, I should note this isn’t *just* that, ‘cause John repeatedly says or implies romantic couple type behaviors with Sherlock that are explicitly paralleled with Mary or Molly. He’s even commented on his cheekbones in THoB. As Irene said at Battersea, ‘look at us both’– and clearly Mrs Hudson has been looking, so John gets exasperated and tells her he’s ‘not gay’ in TEH, just as Mary teases John about shaving for Sherlock and leaving ‘bristly kisses’ for her, until ‘His Nibs turns up’. It’s a joke that falls away by Series 4… but it’s not a good joke, because all that mirroring tells its own story, and on top of that, Sherlock touches his own mouth when talking about John’s moustache. That’s just blatant. This is something like compulsive paralleling gone amok. So… there’s gotta be an explanation. What is it?
The fact is that a) Mary did come between John and Sherlock even if all three of them resisted it, which is more or less why she died at the end of TST; b) John did treat Sherlock like a love interest (he ‘moved on’ after his death, he felt Sherlock rescued him and he literally said he loved him as much as Mary, he wanted to keep up and look well-dressed and clean-shaven next to Sherlock and his cheekbones, he wanted to really talk about Sherlock’s issues and have emotional intimacy… all but the sexual attraction, just as Irene said in ASiB). So, essentially, all the parallelism is there to say, 'look, it’s totally equivalent but platonic, okay’. John is like totally also married to Sherlock (and look, John is literally 'family’ in TFP and then there’s Sherlock’s literal vow to John and Mary so it’s literally like they’re all married) … but no homo. Except just like with Mary and her likability, it doesn’t… work. You can’t no homo that level of queer subtext. It takes up a life of its own, and possibly eats New Jersey at some point, like a huge carnivorous fungus…. Alas.
