Saavik's Scribblings

Reichenbach Falls

I made this quite a while ago (re: during my fall semester exams; to be specific on the eve of my pysch exam) to send to my own Watson because I am a little bit of a sadist a good person, and even more importantly, constantly neurotic and schizophrenic in character xD Anyhoo…it’s pretty much word for word from the book, with a few small editions of my own… The paper was dyed and treated, the envelope made by hand and all that jazz xD

Here is the watercolour page, sorry about John’s scruff… I’m not very good at painting it xD

A view of the letter, written with a fountain pen, for old timey’s sake

Unfortunately, the seal got all wrecked when i accidentally threw a sketchbook on it… whoops…but ahh well, it was an experiment with a new recipe for sealing wax and I didn’t really gauge how long it would be in the “smooshy” phase for…

Believe me to be, my dear fellows,

Very sincerely yours,

Sherlock Holmes

Let’s Talk about Irene Adler

So, I know that the new episode of Sherlock has been receiving a lot of flack about its portrayal of Irene Adler, but I quite liked the episode on a whole.  I thought that the character development of Mycroft was wonderful and that it had many sparkling moments such as the summary of other cases and the awkward Christmas Party. 

As for Irene herself, I’ve read a lot about how people feel her character was betrayed by falling for Sherlock and needing him to save her in the end.  When I watched the episode, I personally didn’t interpret that way; here are two characters, one who is implied to be gay, though disinterested in sex and another who is admittedly a lesbian, both are brilliant tacticians who are able to see many moves in the future and I think that it is highly unlikely that they would actually fall for each other in a romantic sense.  They are both attracted to others intelligence and are intrigued by each other but not romantically.  When he is moping around playing sad songs on the violin I don’t think it’s because he is emotionally affected by her “death” because he has fallen in love with her but rather because he would mourn the loss of such a marvelous mind. 

As for the end scene, I don’t think that Sherlock came in at the last moment and saved her, rather that they had planed this out for a considerable amount of time with them both bluffing and acting their way through their “attraction” and that he helped her because he didn’t want someone so brilliant to die.  I don’t think that it invalidates the character for him to help her when she needed it, but rather shows his respect for her, if she was anything less he would have let her die. 

One of the things that bothers me considerably about manic feminists, particularly internet ones is the mentality that when a female character accepts help it becomes anti-feminist.  As much as it loathes me to say it and while I would much rather be completely self-sufficient, everyone needs help sometimes.  Men need help, women need help, people need help.  It’s a humany wumany thing. 

Now, don’t get me wrong, I think that the damsel of distress stereotype is still rather strong in contemporary cinema and television (I’m giving you a glare romantic-comedies), and it does bug me a considerable amount.  But I just don’t think that Irene counts as falling into the damsel trope in this episode.  Sure, she gets help, but so does Sherlock, and Watson, and Mycroft. 

As for her dealing and working with Moriarty, I’m pretty sure that that was only thrown in because they had to deal with the cliffhanger from Season one and they wanted to do so without having him play a major part in this episode.  The BBC Sherlock is not the complete cannon of the books and it has already been established that all the villains are somehow connected to Moriarty so it didn’t really bother me that he would be the one to nudge her to Sherlock. 

Am I saying that her character was flawless; no, it could have been a lot better, there were moments where she seemed quite lost, but on the whole I don’t think that it was quite as abysmal as a lot of people are making it seem. 

It all hinges on how you read the episode, if you go for it at face value, then yes, it was a sexist awful melange of confusion.  But I think if you consider some of the motivations behind a lot of Sherlock’s behaviors then the story becomes much deeper and much more palatable…

anyhoo, hope I haven’t offended any of my deeply feminist friends <3

On a quick art related side note: I really enjoy drawing with pens without sketching it in pencil first.  I like the feeling of knowing that if my pen slips there is no way of removing it, I like the sense of permanence it gives. I do apologize for this drawing however, because it’s a bit shitty… xD