Tanok Smerti

astonishing idiot, arguably insane | sherlockian much | Ukrainian & English, learning Spanish & Greek | Слава Україні!

[moethh]

the ol’ jitterbug!!!

(alternatively, POV: you’re Mrs. Hudson and you’re coming up to see what the racket is about)

[bavovniatko]

We have an actual word for what's going on with Trump and Mask

[very-sincerely-yours-zine]

We're proud to present... our artists and writers! 🎉

Keep an eye out for all our talented contributors, we're looking forward to what everyone will create! 🏡🐝

Links to all our contributors under the cut:

Artists:

@4thelneyj0nes

@artaudmatic

@contact-guy / mollyostertag

@creaturasol / creaturasol (IG) / jonk.md (IG)

@ghostbees

darc.la.farse (IG) / darclafarse (Bsky)

@eronposts / mustachecat212 (Twt)

@haedraulics

@jabbage

@kagilasgilas

@diogenesprintco

metmarfil (IG)

@naimu420 / _naimu420 (IG) / naimu420 (Bsky)

@pangaeastarseed / pangaeastarseed (IG)

@petitcroc / petit_croc_ (IG)

@pitayaparty / pitayaparty (Twt)

@prosodi / prosodi (Bsky)

@melonsharks / melonsharks (Twt) / melon.sharks (IG)

@sealbug

@soussune / soussune (Bsky)

smorescake (IG)

@slwtawn / slwtawn (Twt) / slwtawn (IG)

@svetlacreates

@Tchoupiraterie / pinny_1212 (IG)

@steel-peach / steelpeach (Bsky)

@the-art-of-a-lemonwedge

@thenoman-sland / thenoman.sland (IG)

Writers:

@bedheaded-league / the_bedheaded_league (AO3) / rosiealbrecht (Substack)

@daisyyydaisyyydaisyyy

@detectivehdbholmes

@estelraca / estelraca (AO3) / awritinghope (Bsky)

@fruitviking / fruitviking (AO3)

@hechiima / hechima (AO3)

@inevitablies / inevitablies (AO3)

@motorghost / motorghost (AO3)

@mistyzeo / mistyzeo (AO3)

@sonderlivra / elivra (AO3)

@rudbeckiasunflower / rudbeckia (AO3)

@louieclamlent / oorsprong (AO3)

@paverage-blog / average138 (AO3)

@orelsemystery / lufairchild (AO3)

@i-dont-talk-for-days-on-end / nuthatch_in_a_nutshell (AO3)

@twentytwo-onebee / beamkatanachronicles (AO3)

[unfug-bilder]

[jvgsjeff]

[yahenni]

[doctor-wormm]

please reblog this i spent way too long on what was supposed to be a quick edit

[contact-guy]

Re reading A Study in Scarlet and thinking about thin haggard nosy John Watson and young manic showoff Sherlock Holmes

Also got very emotional about the idea that Holmes has bad hair because he doesn’t see why he should care and dislikes barbers (being touched by a stranger!) so Watson cuts it to look more distinguished so Lestrade will take him more seriously

[contact-guy]

Quotes from memory but the part where he starts singing after investigating a murder and Watson is like “tf is happening” is really cute

[contact-guy]

two other funny cute moments in Scarlet, reading scandalous books and quoting Latin is very out of character for Watson and I must draw my own conclusions

[contact-guy]

Arthur Conan Doyle wrote this and now 140 years later I have to go insane. Btw did you know that “earnest” was code for gay at the time in London specifically did you did you know that

(this is a part of the Watson's Sketchbook series)

[contact-guy]

oh my god I missed it by two days but it's been ONE YEAR OF WATSON'S SKETCHBOOK! Still on hiatus at the moment as I do layouts for a new original graphic novel, but I'm itching to get back to them. This has been such a fun and absorbing creative project during a weird year...thank you for reading!

[rknchan]

more of my detective ocs

[pyronado-moved]

Please stop trigger tagging with #epilepsy tw/cw/warning/etc.

I need every single person to understand how horrible tumblr’s tagging system is

I go into the tag for epilepsy and its all flashing lights. We can’t use our own tag because people without epilepsy fill it up with improper warnings.

Use ‘flashing’ in place of ‘epilepsy’ in your tags. You aren’t warning people of epileptics, you’re warning us of flashing lights. Please please tag properly. Epileptics say this endlessly and constantly and it’s ignored. You are risking lives by doing this.

Here’s proof of what I mean:

THIS POST IS 100% OKAY TO REBLOG, I ENCOURAGE PEOPLE WITHOUT EPILEPSY TO ESPECIALLY DO SO!

[demonicsymphony]

And if you’re in the notes or tags telling us to “just get a new tag”

Fuck You

[the-haiku-bot]

And if you’re in the

notes or tags telling us to

“just get a new tag”

Beep boop! I look for accidental haiku posts. Sometimes I mess up.

[moroniccats]

I find it hard to call Holmes and Watson by their first names because. Like. They aren’t my friends. They’re my strange little creatures that I observe in their little environment with a magnifying glass.

[moroniccats]

EXACTLY

[contact-guy]

thank you guys for reading my ridiculous sherlock holmes comic i love making comics so muchhhhh

[contact-guy]

drew my silly little update and then immediately my city caught on fire in the most dramatic way possible and we had to evacuate and now I’m in a bizarre Airbnb while one cat pancakes herself under the bed and the other gremlins in the shower for some reason and I just wanted to say thank you again for giving me kind words to read at this time

[contact-guy]

thank you for the words of support, we are safe and home for the time being. When I am not making comics I often work in animation, which has been devastated in the last several years by greedy corporations - so many people I know have been out of work for years (why do I have time to make an entire webcomic? well,). Now a bunch of those folks have lost everything to these fires as well. Here's a list of GoFundMes that need some cash if you have anything to spare ❤️‍🩹

[random-brushstrokes]

Leonid Pasternak  (Ukrainian, 1862–1945) - The Torments of Creative Work

[caressthosecheekbones]

oh leonid, we're really in it now

[wintersmitth]

Leonid, you really understand it.

[alexaloraetheris]

Save me Leonid, from my empty Word document

[elodieunderglass]

Leonid what should I do about the emails

[hudders-and-hiddles]

i’ve always found it interesting that acd wrote a study in scarlet about the start of this great relationship between holmes and watson, and then followed it up with a story in which watson finds a wife. 

it’s almost as if people immediately picked up on the queerness of their relationship and acd had to protect himself and his characters by introducing plausible deniability.

[stedesdimple-deactivated2025020]

Also to note, Mary was introduced mere months after the Cleveland Street scandal (the raid of a male brothel in London that sprouted an attitude towards homosexuals that even still bled into the Wilde trials years later).

Cleveland St. scandal -> July 1889

The Sign of the Four -> February 1890

Taking into account that A Study in Scarlet was published in 1887, it’s very possible that ACD was writing TSo4 WHILE this was happening.

The scandal was a VERY BIG DEAL at the time, considering there were notable people found to be connected (included men of royalty). If ACD was at all nervous about there being ANY homoerotic connotations towards his work, he would’ve added in Mary to protect himself as soon as he could. Which, coincidentally, he did.

Just some food for thought :^)

EDIT: Just did some more research, turns out the idea for TSo4 came about in late August of 1889. At a dinner. Also attended by Oscar Wilde. 👀

[holmesguy]

Great information. Considering the above points I want to add that Doyle wrote a story that opens like this:

It was in the year ’95 that a combination of events, into which I need not enter, caused Mr. Sherlock Holmes and myself to spend some weeks in one of our great University towns…

This is from The Adventure of the Three Students.

So what is this “combination of events” in 1895, into which Watson need not enter, that caused Watson and Holmes to leave town? Most chronologies place 3STU as occurring sometime in spring, and well, what else occurred in spring of ‘95?

The trials of Oscar Wilde. We can imagine that Holmes and Watson are leaving London due to the controversy, persecution and panic for queer people caused by the trials.

Now, 3STU was written in 1904, years after the trials occurred, and four years after Wilde had passed away. But the points I am making in bringing it up is that, as the above posts are saying…These sorts of real-life events certainly could have had an influence on Doyle’s writing. 

Being careful about making sure his work couldn’t be used against him in court would definitely be something on Doyle’s mind, because not only is that exactly what happened to his friend Oscar Wilde, but also to another man that Doyle knew and attempted to defend but who ultimately ended up being hanged to death, partly because of his diaries being discovered in which his homosexuality was detailed (he was hanged for treason but the content of the diaries worsened his case). So Doyle personally knew at least two people, two people who he liked and respected, two people who died because of things they had written being used against them–one sentenced to hanging and the other whose sentence worsened his health until it may as well have been a death sentence. So it wouldn’t be a stretch at all to assume that Doyle was trying to avoid writing anything that could possibly get him in trouble as had happened to his friends.

(Just a tangent: As was mentioned already, Wilde and Doyle knew each other. The Sign of Four and The Picture of Dorian Gray were commissioned at the same time by the same magazine editor. Doyle and Wilde met a few times and exchanged correspondence, and both had good things to say about each other’s work. Doyle even tried to communicate with Wilde’s spirit after his passing, according to this source, anyway: x)

[ogsherlockholmes]

When we have this context, it makes any non-queer reading of the books very difficult, as it almost seems like ACD is leaving space for the readers to figure out the true underlying narrative.

First of all, as is well established in this fandom, Watson is an unreliable narrator. Not only is that known through shaky details in the stories which can’t be explained- for example, his wound which magically changes places- but Watson explicitly states on multiple occasions that he has changed aspects of the cases (names, dates, etc).

Then there’s the wife, which I’m purposely addressing as ‘the wife’ because Mary Morstan was introduced as an orphan (an integral detail to TSoF), so how can she visit her family in later stories? Watson doesn’t go out of his way to explain his marriage -or divorce, if that’s applicable (it’s not)- and seems to forget the wife entirely. Ultimately, the wife becomes a phenomenon… a plot device. (She’s not real, basically)

So, ACD is aware that he couldn’t write a homosexual relationship into his stories due to the potential consequences of that (as evidenced above) but he’s not denying it. Well, if he is, he’s not doing a very good job. Watson is known and caught red-handed of hiding or changing details- his true relationship with Holmes is one of them. And ACD wants the correct people to know this- homophobic readers can think of multiple explanations for the bachelors on Baker Street and their true nature (cough cough Rex Stout), but queer readers will recognise the implicit suggestiveness of, for example, The Three Garridebs.

And we can’t know for certain, because ACD never had the opportunity to tell us what he really imagined went on in 221B behind closed doors, but perhaps he thought -and hoped- that one day, the true story may be told.

[paverage-blog]

I’d add to all of this what ACD said about his brother-in-law, E.W. Hornung, regarding the Raffles and Bunny stories (which read to a lot of us as explicitly more queer) and which are the “inversion” of Holmes/Watson.

ACD said, “I think I may claim that his famous character Raffles was a kind of inversion of Sherlock Holmes, Bunny playing Watson. He admits as much in his kindly dedication. I think there are few finer examples of short-story writing in our language than these, though I confess I think they are rather dangerous in their suggestion. I told him so before he put pen to paper, and the result has, I fear, borne me out. You must not make the criminal a hero.”

Agree with @ogsherlockholmes tags and I’m pretty skeptical that ACD gave enough of a damn to put a lot of this (consciously) in there, but who knows. It’s hard not to look at it through the lens of queer history based on the level of ambiguity baked into the stories and the Watsonian lies storytelling.

[outxfspaced]

‘tis the day, etc etc

[contact-guy]

THE FINAL PROBLEM - part 8

THE FINAL PROBLEM - part 8 of many - - part 1 - part 2 - part 3 - part 4 - part 5 - part 6 - part 7.

"It was the sight of that Alpine-stock which turned me cold and sick."

Forgive me for ending this update in the middle of a conversation, but the next one will be LONG long. (I won't ask you to forgive me for anything else)

This is in the Watson's Sketchbook series!

[softgrlfriend]

that’s enough emotions for a whole year. ciao

[insertchaoticenbyname]

The earlier in the year you reblog this the better it gets

[mycroftholmesian]

Happy Holmes Holidays Everyone! 🎄🔍

[kagilasgilas]

Little 221B Baker Street character line-up but it's slightly different every time I cross-post.

Quite satisfying to see them side-by-side like this 🙂‍↕️