It's alright, Andy, it's just bolognese!

a multifandom blog -- you'll find sherlock holmes stuff, the cornetto trilogy, community, and mission impossible here (mostly sherlock though if i'm being honest) -- with some other random stuff in here too sometimes. amazing pfp is by @holmosexualitea, and the quote above is from Hot Fuzz!

[littlepartsofjoy]

Happy Sherlock Holmes Day!!!

These pictures are from our London trip last summer—one of my favourite trips ever!

Although I’m pretty sure ACD wouldn’t be too thrilled that Sherlock Holmes Day is celebrated on his birthday… so let’s say it loud: Happy Birthday, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle!

Fun fact: today is also my wedding anniversary—five years and counting! What a day to celebrate! 💖

[rknchan]

THE RAMBLING SESSION IS NOT OVER.

if we're talking subcultures, there's one i used to know a lot about. russian nihilists and narodniks("populists"). intertwined political movements in 1860-70s, close to socialism. ofc they have nothing to do with fashion. but they had a very specific look, you'd often see it described in russian classic novels - "this character is a nihilist point and laugh"

for nihilist women their looks often mattered a lot actually. the goal was to reject stereotypical femininity. they often cut their hair short or dressed more masculinely, their clothes were large, plain, convenient, sometimes old and even greasy. simplicity and convenience were important - many nihilist women pursued education or did manual labour (or...tried to) so they didn't need hair or clothes to get in the way.. they often wore shawls, big hats, glasses (sometimes even tinted?? i have never seen anything like this) and smoked

vera zasulich (pic1), a narodnik revolutionary (later a menshevik) was described as having unwashed hair and wearing some very dirty and unflattering clothes (but of course her beautiful soul shone through etc etc)

nihilist men on the contrary often had long hair. it was not really a gender thing; more like, not bothering to cut it - their were seen as uncaring about their appearance, or "looking like unpolished workers". they also were ill-fitted dark coats, hats and glasses

nihilists often tried to look like peasants (dressed like them, poorly or with elements of folk dress, grew out beards). it was a part of rejecting nobility (though many nihilists were lower-middle class) and getting closer to the working class - they went to the countryside and factories to spread socialist propaganda, worked as teachers or doctors or sometimes did manual labour in fields/factories themselves. (however this didn't really help them w blending in...)

bazarov from fathers and sons was THE nihilist character who embodied that look. (the last screenshot is from the 1983 adaptation, i find it very accurate. everyone go watch it)

speaking about 1860-70s in russian empire, there was article about costume design in demons (2014) which i of course have lost ): the designers were looking through fashion plates and big artists for inspiration, but it was not what they wanted. they were too polished, perfect, sophisticated... while the setting of demons is just an average provincial town. and then they found THE inspiration. the peredvizhnik art movement... (we've talked about it here before)

i think demons 2014 sucked massive ass. but they really did a decent job at costuming and capturing the atmosphere

[rknchan]

thinking back on young sherlock holmes (1985) [SPOILERS]

the weirdest thing about the plot is how... it seems absurd and not fitting the classic holmes mystery vibe at all. at first. but when you think about it more seriously ... "egyptian death cult that worships ancient gods and injects people with poison that causes terrifying hallucinations" is exactly what acd could have written.

"supernatural horrors having a realistic explanation" is his favourite trope (the hound of the baskervilles, the sussex vampire)

murderous cults are his favourite trope (study in scarlet, valley of fear)

substances that lead to death or insanity due to horrible hallucinations appear in acd canon too (the devil's foot) (funny how it was used in the bbc version of HOUN as well... so many years after...)

acd loved ancient egypt! and wrote supernatural mystery stories about contemporaries who are reincarnations or heirs of ancient egyptians and want to protect their heritage

most likely the movie crew didn't think of it and just wanted what was popular at the time. an orientalist action adventure for teens, indiana jones style. unless...

there was an awful lot of promotional photos showing holmes (and watson) with his classic attributes - the deerstalker, the pipe, the inverness coat. you'd believe holmes actually looks like that throughout the movie until he doesn't. all these attributes are used in minor scenes and don't even belong to him from the start!

the deerstalker hat belonged to the murdered school headmaster and holmes keeps it as a memory. the coat belonged to the villain and holmes takes it as a trophy after defeating him. the pipe doesn't even matter! h&w bought it as a distraction/cover for their mission because they just had to buy literally anything at the antique shop. and it's watson who tries smoking it!

fanservice marketing bait? or a meta commentary on how everything we seem to know about sherlock holmes is not real, and how our image of him is shaped by other people?

from a basic cinematic theory pov, this movie is an atrocity. most of its character arcs happen off screen! literally told and not shown!

holmes is shown as quite sociable, even romantic; his dream is not to be alone, he has some love life! even rathe/moriarty says that sherlock lets his emotions distract him too much - could you believe anyone could say that about sherlock holmes ever? and then his girlfriend is killed in the very final act, and you realize that this is meant to be the starting point for the sherlock holmes we all know

watson on the other hand... to put it nicely, not the sharpest pencil. loves food too much. most of the jokes revolve around his stupidity or gluttony (think ron weasley from later hp movies but worse). quite a scaredy cat - which could be forgiven, he's a child witnessing horrors, but so unlike the canonical absurdly brave watson. he doesn't really enjoy the adventure, feels like he is forcefully dragged into this by holmes, and they're not even that friendly and often bickering and looking down on each other. this isn't as surprising as sherlock's characterisation, because way too many holmes adaptations fall into these cliches. and yet... in the final departure scene, the narrator(adult watson) claims: i used to be a coward but after meeting holmes i grew stronger, braver, became a real man. something like that. END CREDITS ROLL

holmes will become an emotional recluse years after the movie events! watson will become a brave and loyal soldier&womanizer years after the movie events! their friendship feels like just acquaintaince because they ARE just schoold acquaintainces, and their real friendship is only about to start!

i'd wish to hunt these filmmakers for sport, but then it all starts making sense, and at this point i just respect their game. having all the character arcs unresolved makes sense for a prequel. but who the fuck would ever do that. congratulations????

this movie is either lowkey stupid, or extremely smart on some ungodly level. i'd think having the first ever cgi character is too important to waste on some mediocre teen adventure movie... but afaik the reverse happens in the cinema industry often. wasn't even toy story predicted to be a flop

was the movie crew aware of what they were doing? was the audience aware of what they were watching? we'll never know goodbye

also one of its redeeming qualities is that watson looks like his HOUN1929 version. so niche so made for me

[dump-troy-marry-me]

the world if harmon had cared about his female characters.....

[rknchan]

the state of russian translation industry(? can i call it industry?) is dire its so dire... it has been for a long while i guess. but the problems i have seen before only in amateur translations are slipping into the Big Publisher

ig the root causes are:

- in case of anime/manga, the game of telephone. because most animanga translators are amateurs, raws are hard to find, and overall japanese is not that easy to learn for foreigners, the translations are almost never direct. it's usually "japanese -> english -> native language", or even "japanese -> german\italian -> english -> native language" (hello wedding peach manga)

im not judging amateur indirect translations cause guess what. im an amateur indirect ja->eng->ru translator. the media im working on is so niche that it will probably never get anything better than that. but sometimes... they're very bad. the english syntax bleeding through russian text is unescapable. sometimes they don't even know that puppy love is an idiom (hello pretty rhythm) - so let's go add some puppies to translated text that have never been here in the original (also my pet peeve is using titles like "mister/miss"... the language is not english the characters are not english Why are you sticking to english terms. but this problem is much more difficult than it seems)

- the rise of automatic translators. especially noticeable in animanga because the most popular auto translators are disfunctional when it comes to ...let's say japanese->russian. google translate will play the same game of telephone with english. yandex is just unusable for hyeroglyphic languages ig. but also people are using it for european languages without any editing what is their excuse

- ai translations. the prev point but ten times worse. so often even if you ask ai to write a russian text, english structures WILL be bleeding through. we end up with automatic sounding sentences that no real person would say everrrrr. even a common english construction like "she made him feel happy" would require a very different russian construction

all these + lack of editing (or also outsourcing editing to ai) and we're in hell. sometimes when i read books translated in 90s or ussr and the writing is so refreshingly good

i have a bad advice to any ja->eng->native animanga translator... your translated text should feel like it has always been a native language text and not a translation. like something a real native speaker could say. all the nuances of japanese text have likely already been lost in english translation, so you might as well not gaf about staying true to english text. ofc try to stay true to the content / character's manner of speech / etc. check the original text as much as you can even with google translate. but your first priority should be making your translation feel real and coherent

[deckhanddandy]

I have to be honest with you, Bunny, that’s a lot. That’s a lot of traces.

[afewmarblesshortofmysanity]

rip mycroft you would have loved blood pressure medication

[bobparkhurst]

I need to hear youre Mycroft Holmes from Young Sherlock Character analysis because he just screamsss abused and parentified eldest sibling and I love him so dearly and my friends do not understand my obsession with him specifically.

I love this ask because I have been thinking about Mycroft nonstop since first watching YS.

The man is SUCH a parentified eldest sibling, I think that's so clear. His one hundred percent biggest priority when we meet him in the show is Sherlock - it's not his father, it's not his mother, it's not himself, it is Sherlock. For all that he can be frustrated or irritated with him, Mycroft's biggest drive is to ensure that he is taken care of. And like, more than once, we see Sherlock talk him into some legally dubious nonsense because for all that Mycroft does seem to want his stable life, he actually does trust his brother and want to support his brilliance. It's interesting to me, because to me that says he doesn't want Sherlock to feel controlled or trapped in his life, even when it comes with capital C Consequences. Even right at the end with the key, he's pleading, he's not overbearing. When he loses his temper, it's out of fear for Sherlock (i mean, not only has he watched his father fall to obsession, he's *seen in Bea* another one of his siblings groomed and harmed by Silas - he's terrified Sherlock will go the same way), not frustration at him.

I left a tag on one of my gifsets that Mycroft is neither Cordelia nor Silas' favourite child, and tbh I think it's true. Much as I do love Cordelia, she doesn't seem to be as invested in Mycroft as she is in her other children. Of course he is the eldest, but the fact that nobody mentions Mycroft until halfway through the family dinner that was so important to her? It's really quite telling to me. I'm not sure that was always the case - though Mycroft may not realise that, as he would have been only little when two new babies would have taken her attention - but now? I could see Cordelia even a little resentful, as by his presence and his father's absence, it's Mycroft who represents her imprisonment in the asylum and the systems keeping her in her grief. In a way, that's also true of Sherlock - his father gets to swan off and be romanticised, where Mycroft has to deal with the daily care - and that comes with pushback. You cannot tell me that there's not been moments where Sherlock has thrown the fact that Mycroft is not his father back in his face.

Which leads to another interesting and sad thing - Mycroft is continuously being described as what he is not. Hodge compares him unfavourably to both his siblings at times (though he doesn't know with Bea). Sherlock is Silas' wanted heir. Bea is the golden missing child. Silas is the father whose return spells freedom for Cordelia - until the reveal. Heck, even Cordelia is the joyful excited partner for Sherlock's schemes that Mycroft could never be because he's been too busy keeping the foundation together. The man has struggled for years doing his best, and it will never be enough. I think Max plays this beautifully, because I think Mycroft is also fully aware of all of this, and is basically desperately trying to keep himself believing this is all fine and normal. That his family distrust him so quickly - and that he just accepts that, at the dinner when he pretends to work with his father? Fucking heartbreaking.

That dinner is also sad and telling on something else too - it's easy to think of Mycroft as stoic, but tbh, he's not really. We see him fraying all the time (the man is exhausted, imo), and at the dinner, he cannot hide the fact that he is flinching over and over, when both Silas and Sherlock get physical and loud. That does not, to me, imply good things about what happened when Silas got loud before. The time he doesn't flinch when someone gets physical? When James kicks his chair. He reacts, but it's not a startle response. It's only when Silas and Sherlock do it. Honestly, my feeling is that Mycroft's abuse took a different form to that of his brother's (and different again to Bea's - that's a whole other post), and he's also spent his life keeping that knowledge from Sherlock.

I'll stop rambling now, but there's so much to talk about with Mycroft. He is so chewy, and has my whole heart.

[hazel-artt]

i can't help but love him

You all remember the scene where Sherlcok and James fight about silas' financial situation and Sherlock says that James has no family of his own and Moriarty goes "YOU KNOW NOTHING ABOUT MY FAMILY."

MY GOD- the raw emotion in his tone, the intonation, the pitch- all of it new to us right??? We hadn't seen him talk like that not before NOR AFTER that scene.

OUF-His family's situation shaped the entirety of his personality (obviously-probably?) so i can't wait to learn more about it.

but i still love him so much though :c

As for this fanart, i just went with the honeycomb because YOU KNOW

something's up with it. I made a whole composition with the boys and the lovely women who matter the most but i'll be going at it slowly...

FOLLOW FOR MORE

[theghostparty]

Said, "I'm always tryin' to run from what I'm known for," Baby, that's the thing about a shadow. - We Go Way Back, Noah Kahan

A belated hurrah to season two! Can't wait for them to haunt each other forever!!!!

[holmosexualitea]

Guess who got around to watching Project Hail Mary

[defectivegembrain]

Troy and Abed in the Morning guest Philomena Cunk

[nathalieskinoblog]

[trans-tim-stoker]

why can gay people never say i love you normally it’s always got to be some shit like “cold hands, warm heart”

[subhuman-and-feedable]

Best Sherlock Holmes Adaptation Characterization

Granada (don’t spoil. I haven’t seen it yet)

RDJ Sherlock Holmes (ditto)

BBC Sherlock

Sherlock & Co

Fawx & Stallion

Young Sherlock (I also have not seen this one)

A secret other option! (Put it in the tags!)

Voting ended onApr 18

I’m not asking your opinion on the media itself, just which characterization is your favorite.

[tenderlywicked]

Moriarty-ish lifehacks 😈

(On a side note: having a new hyperfixation is very stimulating, at least in my case, because I tend to speedrun my daily tasks to commit to it in full 😉)

[ignoretendernesses]

— the moon & my man