oooh, I can't resist asking #1 for 'The Anatomist'!
What was my inspiration for this fic? How did it come to me?
Oh man, The Anatomist.
I was by no means the first person to sit down and have a good think about Molly Moriarty. I don’t think I was even the first to speculate about Molly as Jim’s sister; in the months after the first series of Sherlock aired, fandom was launched into a creative fervor that encompassed pretty much any scenario you could reasonably imagine. (The unreasonable scenarios followed shortly after.) Molly in the first series of the show was more or less a walking punchline, and I was hardly the only fic writer who felt that some murder and mayhem might be a cathartic experience for the poor woman.
At least part of the appeal of writing a fic like Anatomist is that it acts as a sort of textual two-finger salute to canon and all it represents. I’m a Holmesian from way back, but my relationship with Sherlock is much more complex. Also, I was having a pretty tough year in 2010; I couldn’t help but infuse Molly’s ruthlessness in the fic with some of my own anger and frustration, and I admit I found satisfaction as well as tragedy in her willingness to destroy the things and people she loved for the sake of her own self-preservation.
But all of that isn’t enough to build a story on. There has to be something more, and I think The Anatomist would never have grown from a concept into a story if I hadn’t decided that the Molly we’d seen in the show was not an act, but very much the ‘real’ Molly. She is not just Molly Moriarty, not just her father’s daughter. She is Molly Hooper, too, because there will always be a part of her that wants to be. There is a strange kind of twisted goodness in her despite everything — she is a monster, but a lovely one.
Or maybe that’s just what we need to believe, she and I.
