Five Favourites
The rules of this circulating challenge are as follows: it’s time to love yourselves! choose your 5 favourite works you created in the past year (fics, art, edits, etc) and link them below to reflect on the amazing things you’ve brought into the world. tag as many writers/artists/etc as you want (fan or original) so we can spread the love and link each other to awesome works!
I haven’t been tagged for this, but I have seen this challenge go around during the last few days, and then decided to do this anyway, to give myself a little boost of morale.
Because, I have been struggling lately, to make progress with and let alone finish any of my fanwork projects. And as I came across this challenge, I thought I hadn’t completed five fanworks (gifs, edits, fics in my case), let alone more than five, in the last year.
But when I went and checked what I had created between May last year and May this year, I was surprised to find that I had created more than five fanworks, and that I even found it a little difficult to choose just five out of them.
So, here they are.
The first four are gifsets, the last one is a fic. (Just click on the underlined text, and it will lead you to the respective gifset or fic.)
In addition to linking to them, I am also going to use the opportunity and talk a little bit about what the works mean to me and about the thought processes which lie behind them.
1)
A gifset of Sherlock and John repeatedly ignoring Jim Moriarty at the pool (in TGG) and communicating with each other instead, via words, nods, looks.
This one actually forms a nice pair with another, second gifset that shows Sherlock and John communicating in their very own kind of language/ways.
(Yes I know, I am cheating a bit, putting two gifsets under point one, but these two sets just belong together.)
Recently, “myfirstisthefourth” commented on the second of the two gifsets in the following way: “YES!!!! The quiet subtleties of their relationship are practically Screaming. #communication #we have an understanding #a different kind of intimacy”
I couldn’t express it better myself, what these two gifsets are about. The intimacy and love between John and Sherlock, visible in the subtle ways they communicate with each other. And this is such a big part of what love and intimacy are about, aren’t they? To know and understand one another, and those times that one doesn’t, wanting to try and gain that understanding?
2)
The second fav I choose is one of the first gifsets I ever posted and also my most popular one to date. It’s a collection of Sherlock’s little appreciative smiles when John is being bold and clever, and/or supportive.
And I love this one myself, because, it raises the spirits, it shows how much Sherlock loves and appreciates John, how competent and intelligent John actually is, and, last but not least, it shows how well John understands Sherlock and how supportive he is of him.
Take the second gif, for example. Sebastian Wilkes has just demonstrated his disinterest and disregard for Sherlock’s deductions and for Sherlock himself.
John however, knows that Sherlock didn’t ask Sebastian’s secretary about his trips around the world. That Sherlock said that just to “irritate” Sebastian. John tells Sherlock that, and Sherlock smiles.
And then, John tops it all of with, unlike Sebastian, actually showing interest in Sherlock’s deductions, asking him, “How did you know?”
3)
My third fav is a gifset inspired by the song “Renegades” and Sherlock.
This one is actually very personal and means a lot to me, even if that might not be apparent on first glance.
The song’s lyrics are a beautiful illustration of what Sherlock, the series, is about for me, of who Sherlock, the character, is in my eyes, and, consequently, of why I fell in love with both the series and the character. (I am not much of a fan of series 3 and series 4, but I still love series 1 and 2.)
At the beginning of ASIP, John's afraid to deviate from the norm, of not fitting in, that people will talk. He tries to live a normal, ordinary, civilian life, to function in society, but that's not who he is or what he can be.
On his blog, John describes Sherlock as someone who “sees through everything and everyone in seconds.”
And this is what Sherlock does when he first meets John, what he does for him. Sherlock sees him, really sees him, understands what kind of a person he is, the way he works, who he is.
Then he makes a plan of how to stop John’s leg hurting, of how to stop John hurting. Of how to give him back his agency, his confidence, and also fun and happiness in his life.
Sherlock comes along, gets John up on his feet again, and basically tells him: “People will always talk, that's what people do, but it's okay to be yourself, it’s okay to be different. And you are not alone, you can be different with me together. From now on, it's just us against the rest of the world.”
4)
Like the gifset before, this gifset, a crossover between Sherlock and the poem “Alone” written by Edgar Allan Poe, is also very personal and means a lot to me.
It is about Sherlock as a character. About him being and feeling out of sync with the world and other people. And the boredom, sadness, and loneliness he feels as a result.
I chose certain lines of the original poem and rearranged them, changing their chronological order. Then I matched them with gifs from certain scenes of Sherlock, illustrating them, and extending the meaning of both the lines themselves and the scenes.
5)
Last but not least, I choose my fic “ Sources of Light and Warmth” which I wrote and published in late summer/early autumn of last year.
It is a Johnlock fic, that imagines an alternative way of how Sherlock and John’s relationship could have progressed after s1.
This is how I summarized the fic on AO3:
Sherlock reopens his eyes to find John standing in the kitchen entrance, drying a mug with a towel and looking at him. “What were you thinking about?” John asks, a warm smile passing over his face. “You.”
Not tagging anyone specifically. Anyone who sees this and wants to do this, go for it!
