the thing about bi lighting too is that it's not just sherlock fans who identified it, it's sherlock the show which invented it. we weren't exactly seeing pink, purple, and blue lighting used to signify bi characters before that lol

say that again real quick

i wondered about that, specifically if it might have been used in anything related to jack harkness. i haven't watched a lot of dr who, but i did notice that in the RTD era, gatiss wrote a ghost story, and moffat introduced bi jack harkness. i haven't watched torchwood at all, so i don't know how much moffat had to do with it. or if it shared a lot of design crew with sherlock, say, for instance, a lighting designer. maybe others can fill me in.

it also strikes me as possibly an element of theatricality, having been to stage shows that put most of the cool lights on one side of the stage and warm lights on the other.

ive literally never seen bisexual lighting as explicit as that shown in stag night

imagine being john watson and being so bisexual that your surroundings change its hue to match your bisexuality

john being a “conductor of light” may make you think of light like lamplight or sunlight, but it’s actually bisexual lighting

BBC SHERLOCK + bisexual lighting

Using your brain to control your heart to control your penises

Sherlock introduces the stag night as an, ‘embarrassing’, story.  What exactly about the stag night was embarrassing?  Not getting excessively drunk: that’s par for the course.  So, what is Sherlock hinting at, here?  Something embarrassing happened at the stag night.

The story begins with his visit to Molly.  He shows her a file with a picture of Vitruvian man with John’s head pasted onto it: this explains his anxiety, he’s going drinking with the perfect man, he doesn’t want to lose control of his penis, in the closet.  From this we already see that Sherlock is apprehensive about losing control with John because of drinking.

Once they begin to drink John sees, and is annoyed by, Sherlock’s beakers of beer plus his phone.  It is obvious to him that Sherlock is going to attempt to control their drinking in with a bit of science,

So…  the phone symbolizes Sherlock’s heart via its association to Irene’s phone.  The beakers, long, cylindrical and filled with yellow liquid represent their penises.  The app, the graphs, Sherlock’s measurements are symbolize logic, his brain, his rational mind, Sherlock trying to control the events of the night with his brain.

So, basically we have Sherlock using his brain to control his heart to control their penises,

(The screen cap above, I think makes an allusion to John’s heart, as well.  The graphic of Sherlock’s stop watch disappears into John’s back.  The red rectangle on his left side.  Logic will control their hearts and their hearts will keep their penises in check.)

At the climax of Sherlock’s, ‘system’, he is very well lit in blue light, a blue glow all over him,

 As soon as John rebels against Sherlock’s way of drinking we get the scene where John lets loose and starts drinking away from Sherlock’s control.  Here we see the clouds of the bisexual flag very clearly in the background: blue for opposite sex attraction, pink for same sex attraction and purple for its synthesis,

Once we have this explicit key we can look back at the colouration of the previous scenes and see the story that the colours tell.

The various bars that they go to all have varying degrees of these three colours.  To me, this shows that the whole night, they’ve been oscillating between getting close and getting far away.  Sherlock tries to keep things, ‘blue’, AKA straight between them, this is especially clear right when he’s asking about John’s, ‘maximum volume discharge’, ironically an incredibly sexual thing to ask.  This is right before John’s rejection of this repression.  This is Sherlock trying his hardest to be straight in this context, hence he is bathed in blue.  John, by contrast, is only faintly framed in blue, his face and body are not in blue, at all.

At the second bar we see, there is a very large phallic statue between them.  It casts two penis-shaped shadows: one tall and faint and one shorter and darker.  The latter also appears to be coming from John’s direction and pointing at Sherlock.  To me, this could represent John’s arousal vs Sherlock’s blue tinged, arousal.  Here John has pink light hitting his face and the shadow directly behind him is also pink.  Though the left side of JOhn’s face is blue (the side of the heart), the middle of his face is still pink and he has a symbolic boner behind him,  

At this club Sherlock shows his incredible and supposedly non-existent drinking prowess in a gesture I can only see as symbolic.  He polishes off that whole penis of beer and then does a mouth wipe surrounded by purple,

We cut to the next scene via this,

…a clear reference to Sherlock’s heart.

I remember this one, u so good!