buffer-overrun

Long time followers are probably sick of me rehashing this. But it is something I am still trying to work out for myself.

The original version of this post got picked up by sherlockfandomhateswomen and I completely freaked out and deleted the post. But I wish I hadn’t; I wish I had argued back. But that is still a pretty terrifying idea. I like living in my quiet little corner or the internet throwing ideas against the wall to see what sticks.

Part of the problem was that I was sloppy because I felt like I was talking to half a dozen people, but I was potentially talking to the whole internet. Which is something I am still very uncomfortable with about Tumblr and Twitter. (Jon Ronson’s So You’ve Been Publicly Shamed really clarified a lot of things for me about the terror of going viral.)

But I also wonder if the thing I was trying to say – that stereotyping, bad writing, and toxic tropes that grate on me when they’re about women don’t bother me so much when they’re about men – is actually misogynistic.

Post-S3, there has been a huge debate about Mary and why she isn’t allowed to be a complex character or maybe even an appealing villain like Moriarty.

And I feel like the difference is that Mary is actually well written (though I do wish they had let Amanda Abbington know about the character arc during episodes 1 and 2. They certainly didn’t do that with Richard Brook and Moriarty).

I also think it’s really interesting to think about what happens when you cis-swap a character. What kind of back story do you have to create to make the cis-swapped character make sense? And with Irene, when you cis-swap her she becomes less titillating, and more clearly a sexual predator.

I’ve been rereading two excellent fics where the person that Moriarty sends to fuck with Sherlock (and who makes John jealous, which makes him understand his feelings for Sherlock) is a man: If You Can’t Move Heaven, Raise Hell by splix and A Waste of Breath by Chryse.

I don’t want to lose any of the already very small number of female characters in Sherlock BBC, especially not Irene Adler, basically the smartest woman in the ACD Canon. But it’s fascinating to see what happens when you turn her into a man.

For me the three salient characteristics about Irene Adler in the ACD story are:

-Sherlock Holmes is fascinated by her because she’s clever and bold

-It turns out that instead of blackmailing the Duke, she is the one being blackmailed

-She beats Sherlock Holmes fair and square

And the BBC Sherlock writers managed to screw up all three.  And that has left a lot of people somewhere between grumpy and outraged by the characterization of Irene Adler. The BBC Sherlock Adler just seems to fit into too many toxic femme fatale tropes – she is a lesbian except for the male main character, she only seems to be smart or powerful when it’s about sex, she’s a sex worker in a totally unrealistic way, AND she needs to be rescued by a man. [Note that these are all tropes that were added to the story by BBC Sherlock writers.]  And turning Adler into a man sucks some of the poison out of these tropes.

[Spoilers for various fics below the break]

In If You Can’t Move Heaven, Raise Hell, Ian is basically a direct counterpart of Irene (a blackmailing sex worker doing a job for Moriarty) but somehow it seems easier to take.

In A Waste of Breath, Irene is replaced by (everybody’s favorite) Sebastian Moran, and the non-consensual part of what Irene does (e.g. drugging Sherlock, photographing and sharing the photos of her clients) is made explicit in a serial rapist character with an album of his victims.

(And obviously cisswapping Irene is not the only way to deal with the character.  Chase820’s Miracle Year has a very in-character (and therefore totally crazy) Adler in a very messy relationship with Sherlock. Both Roane’s Pull the Stars from the Sky and Vulgarweed’s The Bone Fiddle keep Adler as a potential love interest for Sherlock but make her an ally, not a villain.  And 221BeMine’s Scandalized is definitely on my to-read list after hearing it discussed in the most recent Three Patch Podcast.)

[Update: Scandalized is great. Perfectly in character and really chilling. From Molly’s POV, so some of the plot twists that annoyed me most in ASiB are minimized. Just Irene as a brilliant, terrifying psychopath. Amazing. You should probably read it right now.]