If anyone was wondering where I get some of the supplemental stuff for Sherlock, there are actually a small collection of tie-in sites for the series online. Aside from a few scattered things on the BBC site itself -- which tend to not work for US fans without a proxy -- there are also a tiny set of mock blogs and other sites set up in sort of mini-ARG fashion. The most useful one, of course, is John's blog, but from there you can also get to Sherlock's site (the same one John admitted finding in "A Study In Pink" when he looked Sherlock up, and the one Sherlock posts his answers to in "The Great Game") and Molly's blog, and a few other things.

John's blog is from whence the fandom gets a lot of things like the name of John's therapist, and some tantalizing bits of write-up about unaired cases. I don't know who's behind it, but the general accuracy to the on-screen stuff suggests that it's Gatiss and Moffatt, or one of the other fantastic scriptwriters on the series. You can't actually leave comments anywhere, but you can read the ones left by various other characters, including Mrs. Hudson, Sally Donovan, John's sister Harry and a few of his friends, and a couple of anonymous blokes, the oilier of which is almost certainly Moriarty having a bit too much fun.

John's blog is also from whence I get some of the babble about Sherlock being surprisingly affectionate. The comments get hilarious and awesome when Sherlock finally gets curious enough to read the site on the regular -- at a couple of points Sherlock and John get into a back-and-forth that ends with 'wtf, why are we getting into this on my blog? Aren't you downstairs?' ("I. AM. BORED.") A lot of the comment ping-pong makes it pretty clear that the two of them do actually spend social time together, voluntarily on both their parts. John discovers once that Sherlock is only vaguely familiar with the concept of James Bond and declares that he is going to sit his flatmate down for several of the movies. Sherlock, surprisingly, does not argue -- less because he wants to actually see Bond movies, I suspect, than because he is curious about what is this new piece of context that John considers important enough to cram into his head?

John also shows a remarkable ability to cope with weird. He responds to a particularly pointy set of corrective comments with "It's your turn to buy the milk, Sherlock." (Note that he does this because he surmises -- correctly -- that Sherlock is going to see it, because Sherlock is incapable of setting someone straight and then not coming back to see the follow-up response.) Sherlock in turn decides to inform him via blog comment once that he's gone shopping and there is now beer in the fridge next to the feet. John's remarkable ability to adapt to these things is conveyed by his answer of nothing but a smiley-face, which expands to Oh, brilliant, beer! rather than Oh, jesus, it's feet now?.

The one about the aluminum crutch is one of my favorites, being almost wholly made up of John's valiant attempt to punctuate and paragraph one of Sherlock's WALL O' TEXT explanatory rambles, as extracted from his voice mail. It turns out that the telegraphic wadges of deduction he gives normally are his "tl;dr" mode, and that if nothing intervenes to stop him, Sherlock will outline everything all at once, in a five or ten minute monologue with almost no breaks for breath. Interestingly, John does put the parentheticals in sensible places -- either he understands the heirarchy of importance of the various observations, or he can read in Sherlock's tone which ones Sherlock thinks of as the tangential bits.

Sherlock's website, notably, sort of irritably directs people wanting to get in touch with him to do so via John's blog. He keeps very little from John -- this is evident also on-screen, as when John pretty much just tells Sherlock that he's going to walk off with his debit card and do the shopping. (John does not ask for, nor does Sherlock supply, a PIN, and this is not something someone like Sherlock would have written down. John comes home with the shopping anyway; obviously, he already knows what Sherlock's PIN is, which means he's probably done this before.) He's fantastic at lying to other people, but apparently the only way he can work out to lie to his flatmate is to just never breathe a word about, around, or related to, whatever it is he doesn't want John to know.

Comments

  1. "John, fetch me a revolver."

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    1. That's, "John, fetch me my revolver," and it's Sherlock's odd sense of humor rising to the fore. Given the repetition, I'd guess it's ascended to the status of an in-joke/reference, probably after John (im)patiently explained why boredom does not give Sherlock the right to shoot happy faces in Mrs. Hudson's walls. Particularly interesting as it means Sherlock has tumbled onto the idea that people will come to their estimations of him partly from the way he interacts with third parties in front of them -- posting it on the blog, directed to John but clearly readable by others, is for show.

      So far as I'm aware, the only gun in the flat is John's, a Browning L9A1 (presumably MkII with ambidextrous safety, as John's shooting left-handed). It would have been his service weapon. I don't know what the standard procedure is for turning in or registering or storing your weapon after leaving the British Army, but I do know that it's much rarer and more difficult to get a gun permit in the UK than it is in the US, and quite likely that gun was (and is) extraordinarily illegal. (An impression buoyed by the way John backpedals in the comments once after typing something like 'if I'd had my gun' in one of his entries.) At the very least, someone who's been invalided home with depression and PTSD on top of a bullet wound would be, shall we say, discouraged from keeping firearms loose in his desk drawers.

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  2. Particularly interesting as it means Sherlock has tumbled onto the idea that people will come to their estimations of him partly from the way he interacts with third parties in front of them...

    I'm trying to wrap my head around the meta-fiction possibility that Holmes wants to be thought of...at least personality wise...more like House. That's likely an over-simplification and leans very heavily of context, but it's a fun little connection in the "House is Sherlock, but Elementary's Sherlock is House" map in my head.

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    1. Not quite. House wants people to think of him as cantankerous and dangerous and mean. He wants people to expect the worst of him, so that when he does it, it's re-normalized as "just House", and when he doesn't do it, it's disconcertingly nice and knocks people way off balance. IIRC, Cuddy found out the hard way once that House does have a filter, and it does get used most of the time; Wilson, though occasionally frustrated with House's inability to do things the normal (boring) way, is pretty much the only person who perceives anything House does as unapologetically kind. And mostly that's because he's Wilson, and secretly caterwampus in some of the same ways.

      In Sherlock's case, I think more likely what happened is that he could not for the life of him figure out what it was he was supposed to do to make other people not hate and fear him, so he's gone 'fuck it, this obviously doesn't work, I refuse to spend the energy on trying to be nice'. It's gone on so long that he genuinely has no idea what people want in terms of surface social things anymore, but he doesn't seem to be making an effort to press buttons and be cruel the way House and the Elementary Holmes do. Even when it was in everyone's best interest that he be cruel to John, right before throwing himself off a building, he still wasn't -- he was begging. He's mostly bewildered by the way people think things are mean when they're just true; if they're going to assume he doesn't care then maybe he just really shouldn't.

      Sherlock also has some issues with realizing, basically, that other people can see him when he's not paying attention to them. The lack of self-consciousness is an asset sometimes, but also leads to John trailing behind him muttering "Actually, I'm not his date..." on tape loop and other people getting truly weirded out when he enjoys the idea of a murder. House and Elementary Holmes are well aware of how they look from the outside, even when they are not specifically going for a reaction from a particular person, and they intentionally make themselves pointy and unpleasant to bother.

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