can i just talk about okay like this screenshot right here
fucks me the fuck up like
sherlock is so sad he’s so so sad
everyone loves tsot and i honestly can’t even watch it, it’s awful, sherlock is so miserable for the whole episode, i’m just,
i can’t even watch it
That and I’m getting a vibe that Mary is a little ticked off too.
Like, what is with that snarky smile she makes? She knows these two men mean more to John than she does, and that pisses her off.
Sherlock smiles slightly in earnest because he knows this is what John does – SAVES LIVES – and he admires that so much about John.
Mary seems to find that rather offensive. I think she likes John being “boring” because it means she has all the control.
Like they both smile at the same time AND LOOK HOW DIFFERENT THEIR SMILES ARE.
Two things: 1. John dressed as a groom. The hottest and most posh look he ever had. And Sherlock had to stand there seeing him marrying someone else. MY POOR SON, HOW DID YOU SURVIVE SUCH ORDEAL 2. PLEASE TELL ME I’M HAVING ALLUCINATIONS ABOUT WHITE POLKA DOT ON RED SUSPENDERS OH JESUS HOLD ME, JOHN WATSON WEARING SUSPENDERS LIKE WHY ARE YOU DOING THIS TO SHERLOCK AND ME HAVE SOME PITY DAMN YOU
Yes. Let’s just take a moment to realize how gorgeous John is here, yeah? That suit, tailored to within an inch of its life, those braces. Jesus, those polka-dot braces. But, what’s so bad about that whole thing is…Sherlock dressed him like that. Sherlock wrapped John Watson in the most beautiful of finery, and gave him away. Kill my entire ass.
Moni why. I mean, you’re right, you’re totally right, but why.
I know. I’m the worst. But, it just struck me. I mean, it’s true, right? Sherlock surely handled all of that and I am gutted by the thought.
So if everyone’s objective was to completely ruin my evening and leave me completely fucked up, you have succeeded
One should never feel incredibly aroused by red suspenders while bawling their eyes out, makes for a very odd situation.
tfw u never asked for this
First off- SHERLOCK”S SMILE. Like is me or is it that kind of smile you do when you admire someone but desperately tries to hide it but it can’t be helped so you do a tiny weeny earnest smile? And seriously look, it’s more prolonged than Mary’s because it’s real like what do you even.
Also can I just add that this scene is aesthetically bittersweet. I mean, look at Sherlock, he looks more alienated due to his black suit while Mary and John’s colors blend along with the decor.
Just – why.
Can we all take a small breath and recognize that John’s braces (*dies* *defibrillates self* *resurrects*) coordinate with the red stem on Sherlock’s boutonniere… in place of his lovely red buttonhole… Please. Can we see this.
WHAT IS WRONG WITH ALL OF YOU. *dies* (J/K i love this entire post)
(I just had a conversation with Katie @therealmartinsgrrrl that is fucking me up so hard right now.)
John Watson is a man who is a study in contradictions. He’s a soldier and a doctor, yes, we all know that. But he’s so much more complex than that shorthand lets on.
He’s a man who has a deep seated compulsion to care for and nurture others, yet has studiously avoid forming deep personal connections well into his forties. He’s pleasant and polite on the surface, but scratch past that and he’s a bit difficult, a bit salty and surly and not always a very nice person. He’s a friendly person that doesn’t have any friends. Not real ones.
The caretaking bit is an ingenious move. It’s a control thing, it’s a way of being in charge of every situation, of never being at anyone else’s mercy, of never being the vulnerable or needy one. I know this because I do this. I literally have made a career out of it, of never ever revealing myself yet focusing my attention and caretaking on many others. People like me, we like to see ourselves as the good ones, as the tireless givers, maybe even sometimes as martyrs.
We’re not always good people, though. Not necessarily. What we are, are people deathly afraid of being vulnerable, of being on the other end of that equation. Because needing others is a surefire way of getting hurt, and hurt badly.
Somewhere along the line, probably early in life, John Watson got badly let down by someone he depended on. Fanon often lays the blame at the feet of alcoholism running through the Watson clan (and as the adult child and grandchild of alcoholics, I personally tend towards this view.) Perhaps is was poverty, not of the grinding sort but the everyday, not-enough-money, working-two-jobs sort that tends to let kids’s needs slip through the cracks. Perhaps it was just a combination of a sensitive temperament and a home life that just didn’t have room for those kinds of needs.
Whatever happened, it made John Watson shut down the parts of him that needed, made him sublimate that basic desire for connection into caretaking, into doctoring, into healing the wounded, and in a war theater, no less, an arena that cranked the stakes up to do-or-die and left no room for emotions or vulnerability.
(Insert “And whatever the hell happened with John and Sholto” somewhere in here.)
But then…Sherlock. Why Sherlock? Why anyone, honestly? Whatever the reason, something about this strange, strange man awakens something so long dormant in John that he probably thought it didn’t even exist anymore. A feeling of needing. Of wanting. Of a desire for connection so deep and terrifying it hurts to much to contemplate.
John dates all these women in the interim. He probably sleeps with most of them at some point. But none of them are Sherlock. None of them reach that deep place of needing, of wanting to be understood. Not even close.
(And then Sherlock goes and does the worst possible thing and leaves him behind. Good God. No wonder John is traumatized and wounded and still angry as fuck three years later. Just think of the magnitude of that betrayal, of the one person you allow yourself to need wholeheartedly leaving you behind. It’s hard to even think about for too long.)
And even after all that, John’s need for connection to Sherlock is so great he doesn’t even hold out a week before he’s back in his orbit.
And that, I think, is what John is running from, what he can’t yet deal with, why he marries Mary even after Sherlock’s return. He’s not hiding from his sexual attractions. Well, maybe he is, just a little, but much more than that he’s hiding from the enormity of his own confusing and overwhelming emotional need, and the power it gives Sherlock over him, the way it takes away John’s control and ability to keep another at remove.
At the end of it all it’s not his orientation, but his desire for love and acceptance and true companionship from Sherlock Holmes, that are the actual skeletons in John’s closet.
(Am I projecting? God yes. It’s late and it’s tumblr and I’ll ramble if I want to.)
This is beautiful to me, especially as someone who is right there with you on the caretaking-as-intimacy-replacement. I don’t do this all the time with everyone any more, but definitely it is a pattern.
Why Sherlock…he’s got everything, doesn’t he? He’s got the brilliance and the danger and the adrenal stimulation but he’s also got that thorny thorny hard to get along with, needs someone to help him with the mundane stuff, uh, stuff. He’s high maintenance. Speaking as someone who follows the caretaker pattern, that particular combo has, in the past, been crack cocaine to me. “I am the only one who gets you. That guarantees that I’m precious to you.”
And John is precious to Sherlock, just as Sherlock is precious to John.
This sounds vile but it’s also so, so real. For me, this pattern was the foundation of the most insanely intense relationship of my adult life. Yeah maybe it’s projection but I buy it.
AHHHHHHHHH YES THIS. THIS THIS THIS.
Honestly, what we’re describing here is the classic caretaker/borderline-slash-narcissistic codependency paradigm.
They would be a Chernobyl-level disaster in real life. Thank God it’s fiction, so they can get their happily ever after.
Why, no, we’re not working out our collective neuroses here. I don’t know why anyone would think that. *snerk*
I love the colors in this. It’s like John has two faces? (BTW DO YOU REMEMBER JANUS THE GOD WITH FACES… Guess what english name has for origin Janus?) One of John’s faces is blue – cold – for the outside world – queen and country – marriage – a nice life under control – sad One of John’s faces is yellow – warm – for Sherlock – genuine – impulsive – never boring – a beautiful life of love friendship and adventures – happy
At this point he is torn between these two sides of him since he is celebrating his upcoming marriage that will definitely make him blue/sad forever, with Sherlock who he has missed and will miss everyday because he is the only one making him feel warm and alive.
So when he says “He musn’t see”, he’s talking about everything he has to hide. He can’t have Sherlock seeing what he is about to become, he has to hide the other side of himself, one last time, to enjoy the hapiness of Sherlock’s presence. And then he’ll go away and leave this yellow/warm side behind him.
Obviously, he drinks and says He musn’t see. Becausein the end, the one who musn’t see is himsel. He musn’t see that he his about to make a huge mistake.
i mean there are a THOUSAND different parallels to sherlock actually representing sholto (the uniform,“into battle”, always secluded, repressed emotions, john’s obsession with them both, unsociable, “neither of us were the first”,ex-commander) and later in the exact same episode which is supposed to be about some straight wedding the entire plot has completely given up on, sherlock himself realizes that sholto is suffering from a delayed-action stabbing which is later followed with a fuck ton of “we wouldn’t do that to john watson” re-establishing parallels between sherlock and sholto, RIGHT AFTER sherlock’s long-winded speech in which he declares that john is more interesting than the same work he claimed to be married to in a scene which coincidentally involved “girlfriends are not my area”, “no (i don’t have a boyfriend)” and john licking his lips, a confession he would not have previously admitted to until this one speech where sholto realizes he’s dying when it’s ***too late*** until john watson saves him, and there are more desperate attempts to demonstrate the parallels to sherlock’s inner monologue which at this point basically consists of “i just realized at the end of my speech the same way SHOLTO realized at the end of my speech that i am in love with john watson and it’s too late because he’s getting married and now i am dying inside and i need john watson to save me the same way he saved SHOLTO a man i have been paralleled to from the beginning” and you watch all of this in a plot supposedly revolving around john and mary’s wedding which you see 0.02% of besides the gay speech and the gay interactions and the gay dancing and the bisexual lighting and the gay music and the fake balloon baby
and still
“Sherlock faces his biggest challenge of all – delivering a best man’s speech on John’s wedding day! But all isn’t quite as it seems. Mortal danger stalks the reception – and someone might not make it to the happy couple’s first dance. Sherlock must thank the bridesmaids, solve the case and stop a killer!”
I love that this isn’t even additional commentary; it’s literally just describing exactly what happens and all of our hearts are exploding
John is not done hugging Sherlock. He’s supposed to be done, and Sherlock’s trying to move on with his speech, and there’s an audience to all this, but John is not done and can’t quite take his arm away. He doesn’t want to let go.
John tells Mary to stop him; he can feel it coming. He knows his desire to hug Sherlock is latent and might, if Sherlock goes far enough in his speech, spill over and he’ll do it, audience be damned, with the ecstatic delight he genuinely feels, and indeed that’s just what happens.
Neither of them make very much room for each other’s uncontrollable emotional outbursts. They’re like ships in the night that way.
When John tells Sherlock that he loves him, that Sherlock is his best friend, Sherlock practically loses his bloody mind. John reassures him in a heartfelt way, briefly, and then quickly changes the subject, even through Sherlock is completely and obviously too overcome to proceed. I always wondered why he did that.
John doesn’t appear especially uncomfortable at that point, as he does later after the wedding when Sherlock looks so heartbroken that John will dance with Mary from now on. We see John being uncomfortable with Sherlock’s feelings, and that best man request isn’t one of them. It looks instead as though he’s just misunderstood which feelings Sherlock is having. John instead reacts as if he thinks what’s overwhelmed Sherlock is primarily the necessity of the speech, not the reality of his place in John’s life and his heart. It’s not clear that he entirely understood that that was actually news to Sherlock, which might help explain why he didn’t leave any room for Sherlock have those feelings in the first place. He didn’t believe they were mutual at that point, did he!
Likewise, Sherlock seems utterly oblivious to John’s desire to hug him during his speech. John is genuinely overcome, so much so that he is willing to ignore the audience and just react with pure delight and affection. And that’s a big deal for someone as buttoned-down as John is. But Sherlock doesn’t react to John at all.
We know the wedding was a very difficult day for Sherlock, and during the speech he reverts to the rather shy and introverted person he sometimes is when he is deeply uncertain and out of his depth. It’s the same version of him we see when John tells him off for getting something wrong, when he listens quietly and does what John tells him to do rather than getting into a spectacular fight. Or when he’s drunk off his face and tries to make a joke. It’s his rawest self, the one that has no automatic defences. And that’s who he is when he’s giving his speech (until his speech becomes something else, naturally). That’s who he is when John hugs him, though it looks as if he can’t accept the hug, or even feel it happening, because he’s trying to do this difficult thing instead. He can’t make room for John’s feelings at that moment, because of the wedding, the speech, the loss he’s experiencing. So it happens, and then they move on, and it’s all unexamined. Until later, perhaps.
Desperately unspoken, indeed. There is a missing scene in series 3, and you can feel it. Maybe it was in the drunk tank, lost to the comfortable amnesia of alcohol. Maybe it’s at the hospital after Sherlock’s been shot. Or afterwards, when John knows that Mary isn’t what she seems. Maybe it didn’t happen, which would mean it’s still to come. The moment when they look at each other with the real weight of all those feelings and reactions, all understood and acknowledged, interrogated and confirmed, and actually have the space to hold them all.
