Protect Internet Freedom from now until forever. It's important existentially! Americans stand with UK citizens in our struggle against government censorship
I don’t do politics on my tumblr. I try and keep it a stress free zone (believe me I worry about it plenty, that’s the point of needing a place to switch off). But I just spent two and a half hours filling out that questionnaire and now I’m leaving a comment not in the tags, but where people will actually see it (and I hate drawing attention to myself) because this is important.
The governments agenda is clearly spelled out in this consultation, through the phrasing of the questions.
Excuse me while I link a video. It’s a clip from a comedy so it’s a bit exaggerated but it demonstrates the point very well.
Almost all the questions in that survey were “leading questions”. They had an inherent presumption that the person answering agreed with age restrictions, wanted more severe ones and wanted more websites and services restricted. (Believe me I take no pleasure in being correct that VPN’s are next on their target list).
This is a consultation where they try and make you look a monster for saying no. They push the “but it’s for the children” hard. Like there was one question where in order to say no, you had to not object to children sending/receiving nudes which felt wrong. I mean that’s bad, obviously that’s bad. But the answer isn’t total lockdown of the internet to verified ID.
So yeah if you are from the UK then fill this out, and fill it out carefully. Don’t let them manipulate or trick you into agreeing that mandated age restrictions are necessary, as that is what we have with this “you must prove your identity” and it looks like they want to make it worse, not roll it back.
Also section 4 I think it was, is skewed in the opposite direction as it wants to know the benefits of AI chatbot usage for kids… so slam that part too. Say no to AI and no to age verification.
When I filled this out, I focused my answers to all of these questions on *education*.
Educate kids and parents in school and at home how to recognise dangers online: Common recognisable scams, links that may contain viruses, etc.
Teach them about privacy online: Not giving your name, age, or location to strangers on the internet, INCLUDING THIRD PARTY DATA HARVESTING. That we need more protections around websites trying to gain consent to take our data.
I pushed how facial and biometric data gathering is synonymous with this. And pointed out all the existing data breaches, and how THAT puts our kids in MORE danger.
My response was the same for the AI questions. I made my answers focus on education. On how AI is doing negative things with the environment and water supplies, how AI is taking our data from those data breaches and using them for identity theft, and other crimes. etc.
All my focus went into IGNORING THE LEADING QUESTIONS THAT WANT YOU TO AGREE WITH THEM
And putting all my focus into PROVIDING EDUCATION, OTHER OPTIONS, METHODS THAT ALREADY HAVE HISTORICALLY WORKED, AWARENESS AND SAFETY CAMPAIGNS.
Put the onus on learning self responsibility, and providing open access resources on internet safety education.
You don't need to answer THEIR biasedly led questions.
You can answer the question with the problems THEY are causing, and the solutions for a better path forward.
Importantly though. Don't be rude, or swear. Or they'll likely dismiss your responses.
Be thorough. Be smart.
It takes forever to fill that form out, but it can be done in a way that circumvents their bullshit.
we all know (I hope) that Holmes is autistic and also variously mentally disabled in other ways.
I’d make it a sibling who is autistic too, but who is intellectually disabled and completely non-speaking, unlike Sherlock (and Mycroft if you like… I don’t have strong opinions on whether he is autistic). in the late nineteenth century, such a person could be in some sort of an institution or in full-time care at the family’s house, paid for privately (and we do think the Holmeses are relatively well off).
I’d open the story with the final Holmes parent dying and entrusting, in their will, the care of this sibling to Sherlock and Mycroft, but sans any sort of useful details about their needs or even their location (maybe the parent meant to have a conversation with Sherlock and Mycroft about them but died suddenly before having the chance). for bonus heart-wrenching emotions, maybe Sherlock and Mycroft didn’t even know about this sibling’s existence (perfectly possible given the way that disabled people were often hidden away in the past, especially if this sibling was born first).
they have to go on a big adventure to get them out of the institution they are in — after finding them in the first place, of course, which won’t be easy when they might not even be using the Holmes name — and on the way get caught up in other crimes being committed at the corrupt institution. there would be scope here for some really interesting discussion of how to communicate with disabled people (for the investigation) when the AAC technology we would tend to use now is not available, or when knowledge of BSL was not wide-spread, or when nobody has even done research into how to communicate with people who have certain conditions, and also some discussion of how people assume disabled people (especially the non-speaking) don’t understand, which could lead to some of the residents at the institution having heard some really relevant things because the care staff just didn’t consider not talking about it in front of them.
naturally, along the way Holmes comes to the conclusion that he is mentally disabled too. maybe they’re poking around the records in the institution’s archive and find out that his parents inquired about having him put there too? maybe he didn’t talk for much of his childhood and they thought he was intellectually disabled too?
institutions were for physically disabled people too, so we could explore Watson’s feelings about his old war wound and his (what I think is) myalgic encephalomyalitis / chronic fatigue syndrome from having enteric fever. going with this, I think it is probably best if we make Mycroft completely abled, to contrast. with Sherlock finding out he is disabled too, we could put in that maybe Mycroft as a young teen heard his parents worrying about how they thought they had just had a blip with their first kid, and Mycroft turned out fairly normal (if a bit clever) which comforted them, but now the third one’s all weird too. and Sherlock angry at Mycroft for never telling him about this (which can be all mixed up with anger at their parents for never telling them about their older sibling). (would need to figure out a way for Mycroft to have heard that conversation and not know about the sibling. maybe the parents were referring to them in past tense as if they had died young, which would be a perfectly reasonable assumption for Mycroft to make given nineteenth-century infant mortality. but actually they were just doing it out of shame.)
it would have to be handled with a lot of care to avoid coming across as using disability for cheap drama, but disabled people do deserve to be included in drama and so it would be worth the effort. I don’t know how it would conclude — I don’t know what the happy ending is here — but I’m sure I could find one.
actually, I might write this… please nobody take my idea!
as a sign language student (granted, ASL) and amateur Deaf history enthusiast, i immediately locked onto the idea of the Holmes sibs needing to learn BSL to communicate, especially considering one of the most momentous (read: disastrous) events in Deaf cultural history occurred in the year 1880, known as "the Milan Conference".
(infodump under the cut)
in brief, this was an international conference of educators of the deaf/hoh where it was decided that oralism (teaching deaf kids to lip read and speak) would be designated the "gold standard" for deaf education over teaching the manual mode of communication (BSL and fingerspelling). this was deeply harmful for way too many reasons to go into here (mainly: lipreading is mostly guesswork, kids were deprived of their natural language during the crucial window of language development aka birth-5y/o leading to all kinds of cognitive and behavioral issues in life, and that sign language was associated with the "primitive" and verbal communication associated with the "civilized").
before the milan conference, deaf education in the uk was predominantly the "combined" method (which certainly had its limitations, but at least included some signing along with the speech lessons). AFTER the milan conference, the western world was plunged into a century of what's now considered "the dark ages of deaf education", where oralism alone was predominant and any signing at all was discouraged... to the point where students were often made to sit on their hands. yknow, sort of like the equivalent of having your mouth duct-taped shut?
ugh--i could go on and on about this, but suffice it to say that Secret Holmes could plausibly have learned BSL to communicate, but SOMEone wouldve needed to take the initiative to teach them--it was not the norm.
(anyone interested please check out this cool essay i found on the impact of the milan conference on deaf education in Scotland during the turn of the century)
anyways! my mind started whirring on the backdrop of this setting, and here's MY alternate pitch, 100% piggybacking onto your pitch:
Secret Holmes (as i am now calling them) is born profoundly deaf. the language deprivation that was so typical of hearing households with deaf children (and, sadly, remains typical to this day) led to cognitive and behavioral issues that... yknow, naturally arise when a child has no means of communicating--or even articulating anything to ONESELF. these behavioral issues led to the Holmes parents thinking their child had significant intellectual disabilities (and possibly they did have those also, and/or was autistic? bc that's still a great angle to parallel sherlock...) and decided to send them away to one of these asylums and never speak of them again--basically, pretend this child never existed, other than to send checks to the asylum for their care.
as you said, the holmes parents die and pass the knowledge of and responsibility for this sibling on to sherlock and mycroft, warning them that if they went to see their sibling, they would not be able to speak (in the parlance of the day, they would be called "dumb", as in "deaf and dumb", aka nonverbal).
BUT! when they show up to the asylum, they find that Secret Holmes went missing from the insitution YEARS ago... they just never notified anyone and kept cashing the checks! when sherlock eventually tracks down Secret, he finds them at the first publicly-funded/free school for the Deaf in london.
this school? the real-life "Asylum for the Deaf and Dumb" in southeast London, headmastered by a man named Joseph Watson. And yes, I am of course proposing that John Watson is a descendent of his. From the wikipedia:
...As it turns out, when Secret was still fairly young, some kind soul had seen them and realized they had that holmes intellect inside them, but was unable to DO anything with it, given the lack of language. this kind soul spirited the child away to the deaf school, claiming they were an orphan foundling in need of charity and schooling, and so Secret Holmes eventually came to learn BSL and written english (albeit late, and less fluently), under the care of this boarding school.
now, i cant decide which direction i like better:
1) Secret Holmes is an older sibiling who was sent away when Mycroft was too young to remember. This would put Secret starting school around the late 1840s/early 1850s, when students wouldve been taught by the combined signing/oralism method. Being one of the few jobs available to Deaf people, Secret Holmes may have taken a job teaching at this school by the time Sherlock finds them. Maybe they've been doing their own detective work among the insulated community of the school?? Sniffing out corruption, even? And then as deaf schools shift to the oralism-only method in 1880, Secret lives in fear of losing their job and the only home theyve ever known...
OR
2) Secret Holmes is a younger sibling, born after sherlock moves out and loses contact with his parents, and is still a kid attending this school as a student when sherlock finds them. And then sherlock becomes their guardian and needs to slowly learn how to communicate with them, eventually discovering how fucking smart this kid is, despite being underestimated by everyone, and its all terribly cute bc sherlock is NOT the maternal type (but john kinda is) and sherlock just loves this kid anyway cos theyre smart and spunky. its not quite as saccharine and domestic as you might first expect from that kind of story, sherlock is still awkward af and its not like he and john become a quasi-nuclear family for the kid, but at least now this lonely orphan has a few family members, and they're actually taking the effort to learn to communicate with them!
ALTERNATIVELY: scratch all that, take prev's pitch in its entirety, and just add the tidbit that john is the one who gets the idea to use BSL to communicate with nonverbal Secret Holmes based on this old book passed down from his grandfather, joseph watson, titled "Instruction of the Deaf and Dumb", complete with some limited vocabulary instruction
(ok, that last bit's a lie--i found this book scanned onto the internet archive and as far as i can see the only drawings of hands in it are in the fingerspelling alphabet chart (which in itself is similar to, but notably different from, the BSL alphabet you see today). descriptions of the book SAY it includes signing vocab, so maybe the dense text includes written descriptions of signs? maybe i just missed an appendix?)
you might be able to tell i stumbled onto one of my special interests here and spun out, whoops! i am not a writer, myself, so if anyone wants to take any of the ideas i wrote here and incorporate it into a fic or headcanon or whatever, please feel free, so long as any stuff pertaining to deaf history/culture is well-researched and respectful! unless, of course, someone DOES write this show for the BBC, in which case i absolutely demand a credit line 😂
WAIT! I almost forgot to add that its also gay af. and not in an easy way, either... I'm talking a homoerotic, codependent, at times psychosexual, are-we-being-queerbaited-or-is-this-an-intentional-subtext-slow-burn-kinda-thing sort of deal. make us FEEL it.
yes so this stuff is super interesting! I am also a sign language student, but of BSL! not super fluent at the minute — around level one or two — but one of the very first things we were taught was all the history around signed language and the oral method, especially including the Milan conference and its consequences.
I did consider making Secret Holmes (as you’ve dubbed them) deaf, but since I’m autistic and hearing I thought I’d be able to do a better job of writing an autism plot. it’s also more likely that a child would be sent away and kept secret for mental disability than for being deaf; deaf people were routinely kept as part of their families (albeit not able to communicate with them as well, which is obviously horrible) as the same level of support needs doesn’t tend to exist as does with, say, intellectual disability. (and the social stigma was of a different sort; not necessarily less, or better, but different.) Alexander Graham Bell’s wife Mabel Hubbard and his mother Eliza Symonds are good examples. (obligatory note about Bell being anti-sign-language. boo.)
but we could very easily have a friend of Secret’s be a deaf person, because there would have been some deaf people at these institutions. (maybe they could even be an older member of staff, who knows a form of signed language from the pre-Milan-conference days and is trying to teach some key vocab to this struggling, non-speaking autistic person? it could be a really beautiful scene where Sherlock has completely given up on being able to get anything like a statement from his sibling as they just seem unable to communicate, and then sees that if you stop trying to force them to communicate the ‘normal’ way then everyone is happier.)
BSL (due to not being taught after the Milan conference) had become very unstandardised by the time this story would be set so I don’t know how likely it would be that even somebody with a book about it could just turn up and start chatting. also, figuring out from diagrams what your hands are meant to do for particular signs is an absolute pain in the arse and it’s so much easier if someone can actually demonstrate the signs to you.
we all know (I hope) that Holmes is autistic and also variously mentally disabled in other ways.
I’d make it a sibling who is autistic too, but who is intellectually disabled and completely non-speaking, unlike Sherlock (and Mycroft if you like… I don’t have strong opinions on whether he is autistic). in the late nineteenth century, such a person could be in some sort of an institution or in full-time care at the family’s house, paid for privately (and we do think the Holmeses are relatively well off).
I’d open the story with the final Holmes parent dying and entrusting, in their will, the care of this sibling to Sherlock and Mycroft, but sans any sort of useful details about their needs or even their location (maybe the parent meant to have a conversation with Sherlock and Mycroft about them but died suddenly before having the chance). for bonus heart-wrenching emotions, maybe Sherlock and Mycroft didn’t even know about this sibling’s existence (perfectly possible given the way that disabled people were often hidden away in the past, especially if this sibling was born first).
they have to go on a big adventure to get them out of the institution they are in — after finding them in the first place, of course, which won’t be easy when they might not even be using the Holmes name — and on the way get caught up in other crimes being committed at the corrupt institution. there would be scope here for some really interesting discussion of how to communicate with disabled people (for the investigation) when the AAC technology we would tend to use now is not available, or when knowledge of BSL was not wide-spread, or when nobody has even done research into how to communicate with people who have certain conditions, and also some discussion of how people assume disabled people (especially the non-speaking) don’t understand, which could lead to some of the residents at the institution having heard some really relevant things because the care staff just didn’t consider not talking about it in front of them.
naturally, along the way Holmes comes to the conclusion that he is mentally disabled too. maybe they’re poking around the records in the institution’s archive and find out that his parents inquired about having him put there too? maybe he didn’t talk for much of his childhood and they thought he was intellectually disabled too?
institutions were for physically disabled people too, so we could explore Watson’s feelings about his old war wound and his (what I think is) myalgic encephalomyalitis / chronic fatigue syndrome from having enteric fever. going with this, I think it is probably best if we make Mycroft completely abled, to contrast. with Sherlock finding out he is disabled too, we could put in that maybe Mycroft as a young teen heard his parents worrying about how they thought they had just had a blip with their first kid, and Mycroft turned out fairly normal (if a bit clever) which comforted them, but now the third one’s all weird too. and Sherlock angry at Mycroft for never telling him about this (which can be all mixed up with anger at their parents for never telling them about their older sibling). (would need to figure out a way for Mycroft to have heard that conversation and not know about the sibling. maybe the parents were referring to them in past tense as if they had died young, which would be a perfectly reasonable assumption for Mycroft to make given nineteenth-century infant mortality. but actually they were just doing it out of shame.)
it would have to be handled with a lot of care to avoid coming across as using disability for cheap drama, but disabled people do deserve to be included in drama and so it would be worth the effort. I don’t know how it would conclude — I don’t know what the happy ending is here — but I’m sure I could find one.
actually, I might write this… please nobody take my idea!
I'm going to make the case for Mycroft definitely being autistic. Known facts about Mycroft include:
He has the same routine every day and very rigidly sticks to it. He goes between his home, his work and his club, which are all in close vicinity to each other. We can infer that he probably finds breaking his routine distressing, or at least not ideal.
He founded a gentleman's club which attracts oddballs like himself, where you can enjoy creature comforts without having to socialise and make small talk.
He loves silence. Does he have a lot of sensory sensitivities?
Although he's good at deducing facts about people, he seems to be very bad at inferring how they are going to feel and act, which leads to a lot of problems in The Greek Interpreter.
He has a job where he deals with facts and figures, because he's very good at memorising them and storing them in his mind. He's kind of the government's IT guy.
Although he's not 'clubbable' and doesn't seem to have any kind of social circle, we can maybe infer that he has few good friends who trust him - his neighbour Mr Melas seems to have seen him as a good person to turn to in a crisis, at least.
oh my goodness how could I not have considered the Diogenes Club stuff… no way the man who came up with that is NT. (plus all those other points which make lots of sense.)
we can still have the thing of Mycroft passing as abled better than Sherlock and Watson, though, since those things are less immediately obvious as weird than how Sherlock’s autism and other mental disabilities present. (could include discussion of being disabled on only one axis versus on several.)
If you care to/have the energy to, I would love to hear you expand on Watson having ME/CFS!
content note: discussion of medical symptoms
yeah so this is a theory that I came up with along with an acquaintance of mine who has ME! (I don’t have it but have other physical conditions.) we know that Watson’s bullet wound continues to bother him for years, but this is separate. here’s the relevant section from SCAR, literally the third paragraph ever in a Holmes story. my emphasis.
Worn with pain [from having been shot], and weak from the prolonged hardships which I had undergone, I was removed, with a great train of wounded sufferers, to the base hospital at Peshawar. Here I rallied, and had already improved so far as to be able to walk about the wards, and even to bask a little upon the verandah, when I was struck down by enteric fever, that curse of our Indian possessions. For months my life was despaired of, and when at last I came to myself and became convalescent, I was so weak and emaciated that a medical board determined that not a day should be lost in sending me back to England. I was dispatched, accordingly, in the troopship ‘Orontes’, and landed a month later on Portsmouth jetty, with my health irretrievably ruined, but with permission from a paternal government to spend the next nine months in attempting to improve it.
here’s another, from later in the same story.
My health forbade me from venturing out unless the weather was exceptionally genial, and I had no friends who would call upon me and break the monotony of my daily existence.
‘enteric fever’ is what these days we would refer to as typhoid, and it’s an absolute bitch. as Watson notes, it was common amongst military men in British-controlled south Asia, in part because you get it through unclean food and water, and kitchen hygeine on campaign wasn’t the best. even now, the NHS website says it’s mostly commonly found in people who have been in India, Pakistan, and / or Bangladesh.
it’s a bacterial infection, the details of which aren’t too important, and it causes fever, along with various gastric complaints and chills, coughing, etc. it’s horrible and can cause internal bleeding and infection in the stomach lining, which could easily be life-threatening, especially with limitedish medical resources and if the patient has semi-recently been shot.
Watson gets through it, but then has these continuing health problems, which include overall weakness amongst some non-stated symptoms. this is where the ME comes in. it’s a condition which often begins very suddenly following a bacterial or viral infection, even though the person has got better from that infection itself. using the second extract, we see that the weather has an impact on his abilities, which ligns up perfectly with ME (it’s a dynamic condition after all). the condition often messes with the ability to regulate temperature, as well as which the ambient air pressure can mess with joints if there’s any pre-existing issue with them, which ME would cause.
the bit that clinches it for me is that his health is irretrievably ruined. that’s what ME often is, at the end of the day. persistent health problems which do not and can not go away, after an infection. he can, as he notes, try to improve his health, but try is all he can do. also, I can’t find it, but I’m pretty confident he notes in other stories that his abilities and needs and restrictions vary from day to day (although not in those words, of course).
so yeah, there’s a little summary of the ‘Watson has ME’ theory!
(side note, he also says his ‘nerves are shaken’ and frankly I’d be shocked if he didn’t have PTSD from being shot, so that’s in my view of disabled Watson too.)
we all know (I hope) that Holmes is autistic and also variously mentally disabled in other ways.
I’d make it a sibling who is autistic too, but who is intellectually disabled and completely non-speaking, unlike Sherlock (and Mycroft if you like… I don’t have strong opinions on whether he is autistic). in the late nineteenth century, such a person could be in some sort of an institution or in full-time care at the family’s house, paid for privately (and we do think the Holmeses are relatively well off).
I’d open the story with the final Holmes parent dying and entrusting, in their will, the care of this sibling to Sherlock and Mycroft, but sans any sort of useful details about their needs or even their location (maybe the parent meant to have a conversation with Sherlock and Mycroft about them but died suddenly before having the chance). for bonus heart-wrenching emotions, maybe Sherlock and Mycroft didn’t even know about this sibling’s existence (perfectly possible given the way that disabled people were often hidden away in the past, especially if this sibling was born first).
they have to go on a big adventure to get them out of the institution they are in — after finding them in the first place, of course, which won’t be easy when they might not even be using the Holmes name — and on the way get caught up in other crimes being committed at the corrupt institution. there would be scope here for some really interesting discussion of how to communicate with disabled people (for the investigation) when the AAC technology we would tend to use now is not available, or when knowledge of BSL was not wide-spread, or when nobody has even done research into how to communicate with people who have certain conditions, and also some discussion of how people assume disabled people (especially the non-speaking) don’t understand, which could lead to some of the residents at the institution having heard some really relevant things because the care staff just didn’t consider not talking about it in front of them.
naturally, along the way Holmes comes to the conclusion that he is mentally disabled too. maybe they’re poking around the records in the institution’s archive and find out that his parents inquired about having him put there too? maybe he didn’t talk for much of his childhood and they thought he was intellectually disabled too?
institutions were for physically disabled people too, so we could explore Watson’s feelings about his old war wound and his (what I think is) myalgic encephalomyalitis / chronic fatigue syndrome from having enteric fever. going with this, I think it is probably best if we make Mycroft completely abled, to contrast. with Sherlock finding out he is disabled too, we could put in that maybe Mycroft as a young teen heard his parents worrying about how they thought they had just had a blip with their first kid, and Mycroft turned out fairly normal (if a bit clever) which comforted them, but now the third one’s all weird too. and Sherlock angry at Mycroft for never telling him about this (which can be all mixed up with anger at their parents for never telling them about their older sibling). (would need to figure out a way for Mycroft to have heard that conversation and not know about the sibling. maybe the parents were referring to them in past tense as if they had died young, which would be a perfectly reasonable assumption for Mycroft to make given nineteenth-century infant mortality. but actually they were just doing it out of shame.)
it would have to be handled with a lot of care to avoid coming across as using disability for cheap drama, but disabled people do deserve to be included in drama and so it would be worth the effort. I don’t know how it would conclude — I don’t know what the happy ending is here — but I’m sure I could find one.
actually, I might write this… please nobody take my idea!
Stupid fuckwit manosphere podcaster: We need to go back to Traditional Christian values where people were Chaste and Moral!
Actual medieval Christian priest, trying not to cry: Look. I know you're going to fuck. But just. Just don't fuck in the Church. Fuck in the Fucking Woods, fuck in the fields. Fuck in the regular woods even. Just. Don't fuck in the fucking Church, it's not a Fucking Church. Please. This guy I know fucked his girl in the Church and they got stuck together by God and everyone laughed at them
Other Priest: Yeah guys for real just come to my brothel its dope, its off Gropecunt Lane you know the place.
Lots of pop culture fiction about the Middle Ages likes to tackle the concept of witch trials (even though that didn't even become a thing until the mid-1400s and didn't hit the stride we think of it with today until the 1600s) in one of three ways:
"actually they were really witches with magic powers! (Bad)"
"actually they were really witches with magic powers! (Good)"
"they weren't witches at all they were smart women of science more sophisticated and advanced than those STUPID inbred people could comprehend so they killed them because they thought that medicine was evil"
no they were just weird people. How do you treat weird people?
My favorite part about Sherlock Holmes getting really into beekeeping in retirement is he mentions bees exactly zero times before that. He just woke up one day in 1903 like
Absolutely yes, but I also love that in A Case of Identity, Holmes is like:
If we could fly out of that window hand in hand, hover over this great city, gently remove the roofs, and peep in at the queer things which are going on, the strange coincidences, the plannings, the cross-purposes, the wonderful chains of events, working through generations, and leading to the most outrè results, it would make all fiction with its conventionalities and foreseen conclusions most stale and unprofitable.”
So it's like as a young man he goes "Boy I wish there was a tiny society made of individuals with a shorter lifespan than my own which I could life the roof off of and observe." And then he just sits on that for a few decades before going "WAIT! BEES!!!!"
(Also he's holding Watson's hand in his omniscient flying person fantasy)
I'd just like to note that in those days it was fairly common for two gentlemen or two ladies to walk arm in arm so they kept pace with each other and didn't miss miss any conversation. It would be even more important for two people flying.
Sure, the connotations of two men holding hands has definitely shifted over the past century and is now more likely to be seen as having romantic implications (sadly, I think) than when this was written. What is a normal thing to do in a homosocial friendship has shifted.
...But I think that it does suggest that if Holmes is fantasising about whizzing around omnipotently and making brilliant deductions on a social scale, he wants Watson specifically there with him to be impressed?
(And of course if you want to read them as having romantic feelings for one another, flying above London hand in hand is pretty romantic in multiple senses of the word)
post-1895 (the date being significant because of Oscar Wilde’s trial), men holding hands / linking arms in public became much more associated in England with homosexuality and as such many men avoided it*. which I feel interacts interestingly with Holmes and Watson holding hands (which they also do in CHAS).
* source: How to Be a Victorian by Dr Ruth Goodall
what do I do if I really desperately want to play KCD and have started it but have never played a combat video game before in my life. do I just have to learn how
I'd like to take a moment to appreciate the Captain's character development over the course of Ghosts.
I went back to watch season 1, which I haven't in a while and I almost got whiplash from how nasty Cap is! He's insufferable! An absolute walrus. Honestly, I can barely believe I fell in love with the character as hard as I did over just season 1 - he's so mean to the others!
But by season 4? He's singing songs and skipping with his daughter Kitty. He is watching clouds, listening to ABBA, going birdwatching, and likes choreographing dance moves. I mean look at him. He actually smiles!
Speaking of smiling, this is him reacting to a tank in S1, something he's obviously extremely interested in and passionate about:
And here he is around 4 years later, about the thing he's excited by:
Like, look how he's changed. He smiles. He plays. He has fun. He's not even just growing into the personality he hid away while he was in the army, he's a different, happier person.
Anyway, I could say a lot about how we love him so much as a character because we all want to grow into better people and are desperate to finally feel like we deserve the love of those around us and how we all feel like we're inherently unlikeable but want to overcome that feeling and accept ourselves for who we are, even if who we are isn't what the world expected us to be- but I'll just say heheh blorbo.
the fantastic thing for me is that I have, basically parallel with the Cap, extremely autistically gone through essentially the same transformation while I watched him do it
it’s so important, actually, that Shane Hollander is aware he’s terrible socially. he’s aware he’s not quite getting things right. because you can see him actively thinking about how to be normal: when he leans against the wall in the first scene, when he spits after Hunter does, when Rose is surprised at him saying ‘sure’. it’s really easy to portray autistic people as unaware (often interpreted as uncaring) that we’re bad socially and accidentally say rude things, but no, actually, Shane knows he’s like that and knowing doesn’t make him any less like that, because he’s autistic. you stay terrible but also in a constant state of panic because you know you’re getting it wrong but no matter what your brain just can’t compute how to get it right. it’s not something your autistic brain is capable of.
the repeated (I can think of at least three off the top of my head) references to Lady Emma Hamilton in Blackadder are so funny to me. she lived two hundred and fifty years ago why are you still gossiping about her
dailybridgerton
titsay
annaxmalina
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