faeries are not real but i wish thwy were so i could spray one with raid

harry houdini to his wife after a long exhausting dinner with arthur conan doyle

The way that most of Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes stories’ most horrible villains are rich dudes that are abusive to women, in a time such as the 1880’s, compels me.

There’s a whole subset of Sherlock Holmes stories that could be labeled Asshole Guys Try to Control Women’s Money.

Yup, there’s a huge number of times where Sherlock Holmes is the ONLY person to take a young woman’s complaint or worry seriously and finds out someone is up to some serious evil.  Holmes also shows a lot of compassion and empathy with the victims over and over again.  (This is why I find “Secretly a woman” or “Trans” Holmes headcanons much more convincing than “sociopath” Holmes.)

I am never going to shut up about how much I specifically love The Adventure of The Copper Beeches because it is literally Sherlock Holmes listening to a young lady he does not know except as a potential client, agreeing with her that a potential job she has interviewed for that she thinks is SUPER SKETCHY is, indeed, sketchy as fuck and when she says she’s probably gonna take the job anyways because the money is good and she needs it going “OKAY I GUESS but for the love of god please write to us so we know you’re okay we will literally drop everything and jump on a train if you want us to”.

The job turns out to indeed be sketchy as fuck, she writes to them, Holmes and Watson drop everything and jump on a train when she asks them to. I read this story for the first time when I was twelve and it made a HUGE impression.

This is also the basis for a lot of speculation about Holmes’ family life.  The idea that he has been a victim of abuse, or his mother was abused (or even murdered by his father.)  There’s definitely SOMETHING that makes him very aware of how dangerous isolated families can be, and the dark things that can happen behind closed doors.  Plus, of course, the motivation to devote himself to stopping crime.  And yes, so much of it is of the personal type. 

dude see this is one aspect of the original books i NEVER understand why modern remakes (cough cough) don’t go all in on. Like, in the 21th c we HAVE all the dumb forensic shit that made Victorian Holmes stand out, but we STILL DON’T HAVE uh….you know, compassion for women and minorities, or the willingness to believe them, adequate community support for domestic violence or hate crimes, etc. etc. which you’d think is exactly where a renegade consulting detective would come in handy. A good modern day Sherlock Holmes remake, instead of trying to convince us that Holmes is some super genius for being better than fingerprint analysis or whatever, could have him just be…a good person who helps out people the police can’t and won’t help. There you go. That’s how to write a relevant modern Holmes.

One thing that annoys me is how much the BBC version of Sherlock (and the fandom around it) focus on police cases or cold cases.  In the stories, Holmes’ bread and butter cases had fuck-all to do with the police and in a few stories, he actively works around/against them, or outright lies to them.  Of the many, many things I wish that show had done differently, this is one is particularly obnoxious since it’s such a gimme.

There were very few actual murder cases in the Canon, and Holmes handled them either one of two ways:

Option one: The murder victim was innocent while the killer was an abusive bastard, see Speckled Band. Conclusion, arrest and have the killer charged (Or in the case of Speckled Band, indirectly murder him yourself then shrug and go home)

Option two: The victim was murdered to protect someone that the victim was abusing, or for vengeance, see Boscombe Valley, Devil’s Foot, Abbey Grange. Conclusion, Oops, I don’t know who the killer is, I am suddenly incompetent, oh look a pheasant.

#my favorite murder in holmes canon#is when they straight up witness a lady murder her blackmailer#do nothing except destroy his other blackmail material#and then straight up lie to lestrade about it#sherlock holmes#more of this in modern adaptations pls (via @cactusspatz )

The most faithful way to adapt Holmes in the modern day would be to put him in a minority or immigrant community, the sort of place where people don’t trust the police and need to find alternative routes to seek justice.

Made you wonder why certain modern adaptation focus on Holmes view of women that is sexist in today’s standard but pretty normal in the Victorian time but not how he treated women with way more sympathy and respect than most dudes in his time (actually listen to the woman, not treating them as crazy/hysterical when even their own husband thinks so, not judging a woman for their occupation as in The Woman case where most men will see her as a whore who wants to scam the noble man instead of a woman who only wants to protect herself from a rich powerful douche).

I liked Elementary's approach, which was a mix of the police procedural and private investigation aspects of what various fans liked.

And it was waaaaay more compassionate towards women

criminal profiling is just astrology for cops

taking a forensics class and watching the professor explain one by one how criminal profiling, hair microscopy, and bite mark analysis are all pseudoscience responsible for ruining innocent lives, and how on top of that, fingerprint analysis, despite being significantly more reliable, is subjective and prone to contextual bias. and also bullet striation analysis has the same issues. and also bullet lead analysis doesn’t work. and also handwriting analysis has an error rate high enough to render it useless

Also how can Arthur Conan Doyle write a character like Irene Adler 1891 and have her 1. Outsmart Sherlock Holmes and get away with it and 2. Be in no way a damsel or love interest to Sherlock.. But every modern retelling not only has her be a sexual /love interest character but she is posed as being very very smart… But never smart enough to just outwit him, get away with it and move on? Women can be smart, sure, but no one is allowed to be smarter than Sherlock.

It’s been over 120 years and Irene is, at her best, never as decently treated as the original.

Arthur Conan Doyle: Here’s a story about male insecurity where the police underestimate her for being a woman and feel the need to get her because she’s a woman and Sherlock is ultimately beaten by a woman and in a bit of character development accepts it and acknowledges her intellect.

Sherlock fans: Uh no way Sherlock is smart Sherlock is so so smart she must have used her feminine wiles or her sexy things or her love to undermine him but he gets her in the end i feel a strange catharsis at changing this ending but I’m sure Doyle always meant to be this way, it just feels right.

Half of the reason that Adler was able to out-wit Holmes was because Holmes was too narrow-minded. Holmes is smart and has knowledge of many subjects, but he also strongly relies on social order and norms to solve crimes. He’s even says in A Scandal in Bohemia that:

Holmes uses this social norm and order to stage an attack and find out where Adler hid the photo in her house. He drops his guard and is so proud of himself because he knew that this would work, he knew that if he created disorder,  “natural” order would attempt to counteract that disorder.

Adler defies those social orders and norms: she is an untitled American woman who earned her own money through a career as an opera star, instead of relying on a husband or family to have financial security; she outwitted Holmes because she cross-dressed and indicated that she frequently did so, allowing her to have a lot more freedom roaming around London on her own terms, and her stage career aided that so that she could act like a man easily; and she didn’t care one bit about her reputation or being a “pure” woman, had several boyfriends, and was known for being an “adventuress”. More importantly, she had the ability to defy those social norms while simultaneously being able to present herself as the ideal respectable and under-estimable Victorian-era woman.

Adler literally defeats Holmes by dressing in drag then happily goes off with her new husband whom she loves very much. And Holmes respects that and is thoroughly impressed. Not only does he respect that, he realizes that he was on the wrong side of things, that he shouldn’t have agreed to take on the case for the King of Bohemia. This is the exchange that follows after Holmes, Watson and the King read Adler’s letter.

Holmes takes Adler’s side and realizes that the photograph is her protection from the King, not something she intended to use as a weapon against him. Adler never exploited the King to get what she wanted, only kept it as a safeguard of her own happiness. She made sure she had a way of ensuring that she alone guided her future.

Irene Adler is “the woman” to Sherlock Holmes, not because she was sexy or he was in love with her. She was a reminder that real life doesn’t always follow what social norms and order are to be expected, that people shouldn’t be taken on face value or respected just because of their title or apparent respectability and ability to follow social order and norms, and that there are two sides to every story.

Take a lesson from Sherlock Holmes, people. Doyle knew what he was doing. If we’re going to keep making him roll over in his grave from creating Sherlock Holmes media, please, at least respect him and Irene Adler.

there’s something really satisfying about the fact that sir arthur conan doyle was the most gullible motherfucker on the planet

sir arthur conan doyle: here is my oc, he is a super genius who solves all the mysteries using the power of deductive reasoning

also sir arthur conan doyle: i have deduced that these fairies are real as shit

sir arthur conan doyle: there’s only one way to determine if these fairies are real… i will give you girls these cameras, that i bought myself, and then i will develop the photos, so i know they haven’t been tampered with

some girls who took selfies in the woods with paper cutouts on hatpins: that seems reasonable

harry houdini, after showing his good friend how he got tricked by a con artist: so as you can see, anyone can make it seem as if they can talk to ghosts

sir arthur conan doyle: harry… i can’t believe you never told me you can talk to ghosts, for real, using actual magic

Doyle and Houdini’s relationship is the funniest thing in the entire history of the skepticism movement

Doyle was SO CONVINCED that Houdini had legit magic powers and could turn into smoke or some shit to escape things and Houdini was like “no seriously it’s a trick let me show you how it works” and Doyle was all “it hurts me that you won’t trust me with this secret”

If memory serves he eventually decided that Houdini was subconsciously magic and in denial

In Sherlock Irene Adler is just as obsessed with outwitting Holmes as he is with outwitting her, and I feel like that’s a fundamental misreading of the source material, because in Doyle’s version Holmes happens to get in Irene’s way, so she does the functional equivalent of trapping him under a cup, sliding a newspaper under him and dumping him out in the backyard.

“Which author would you want to bring into 2015″ is such a hard question to answer I mean you could watch Arthur Conan Doyle despair over everything Sherlock Holmes within the last century or you could present Douglas Adams with an iPad

I would quite like to unleash Dickens on the Tories.

imagine William Shakespeare in the age of social media. 24/7 supreme dick jokes and the world celebrates.

Victor Hugo vs Twitter’s 140 character limit

Okay but Oscar Wilde on Instagram

Give Asimov an actual real robot

Different Sherlock portrayals as cats. Because I can.

House is the uncontrollable crazy cat.

Robert Downey Jr. cat is the flaunting type.

BBC Sherlock is the brooding cat.

Elementary Sherlock is the cuddly one.

Canon Sherlock is an awesome YouTube keyboard cat that Watson is always impressed by.

Dudes check this out.

Okay so there’s this website called litographs that prints entire(or almost entire) books onto t-shirts. I mean seriously. look at this shit. 

They have Les Mis

They have the phantom of the opera

They have the adventures of sherlock holmes

They have Leonardo da Vinci’s note books

They even have EDGAR. ALLAN. FREAKING. POE.

I AM SO EXCITED GUYS YOU HAVE NO IDEA

you can get them here

People who think the modern bbc sherlock fandom is crazy

No you dont understand

Sherlock Holmes fans have always been crazy

When Conan Doyle killed him off they wore black bands in the streets in mourning and protested so much that he was forced to resurrect him due to the sheer demand

the Sherlock fandom has always been crazy

Deadpool Killustrated #1-4

Butchering stories from literature’s finest authors!

The Woman

love this!

"We’re in."

{screeching}

Is it okay that I’m lost? 

"Well it’s obvious you need my help, because you’ve actually found two."

"No we haven’t."

*stares at Harry* “Yes, you have.”

This. Is. Brilliant. 

I don’t even care if this technically doesn’t fit the blog #yolo Potterlock 5ever this needs to be on our potterlock tag.

You are never alone with a good book. This charming campaign is from Grey Tel Aviv. Via Taxi 

this is amazing!!! why have i not seen it before!!

Different Sherlock portrayals as cats. Because I can.

House is the uncontrollable crazy cat.

Robert Downey Jr. cat is the flaunting type.

BBC Sherlock is the brooding cat.

Elementary Sherlock is the cuddly one.

Canon Sherlock is an awesome YouTube keyboard cat that Watson is always impressed by.

Allow me to introduce my trusted associate…

I made this graphic because some people like to complain that changing the gender/sex of the characters somehow “ruins” or “desecrates” Arthur Conan Doyle’s legacy. Funnily enough nobody ever complains when they are turned into mice, dogs, etc. (Presumably because they are still male.) As you can see there have been several female versions of these characters in the past, and they have hardly ruined anything.

Some of the oldest adaptations only had the actor info for Holmes on IMDB, so either Watson didn’t exist in those films at all, or the actor is unknown. (If he did exist it’s pretty safe to assume he was male.)

I excluded incarnations where Holmes/Watson only appeared once as guest stars in unrelated tv shows. (There were lots.)

Okay, I’m really curious about robot Watson.

Sherlock Holmes in the 22nd Century- it’s a cartoon, I youtubed it once because I was curious too! x,D Lestrade is this sexy space police girl. It was totally worth checking out for a laugh.