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cummunication · 5 years

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Are you Dating a Sociopath?

1 in 25. Research indicates that’s how many people are diagnosable sociopaths. When it comes to psychopaths, (luckily) the number is higher… 1 in 100. But let’s not get them confused. “Sociopaths are often called psychopaths and vice versa but there are differences between a psychopath and a sociopath. … And while sociopaths and psychopaths do share some traits, sociopathy (antisocial personality disorder) is generally considered less severe than psychopathy.” For example, a sociopath might be someone who takes advantage of others for money, fame, sex etc. while a psychopath is more likely to be a serial killer and commit mass murders. You can go your entire life without anyone knowing you’re a sociopath while psychopaths are the people more likely to commit severe crimes and end up in jail.

Antisocial personality disorder is the diagnosis in which sociopathy and psychopathy fall (cluster B) and it has been on the rise over the years. If you’re swiping daily on tinder, how many people do you pass each day? (I wouldn’t know because I’m not on the app but I suspect a decent amount). Let’s say you swipe 25 times each day. That means over the span of one week you have passed roughly 7 sociopaths. This can be alarming whilst dating because sociopaths don’t look like Hannibal Lecter and you can’t tell someone is mentally ill by looking at them. Sociopath’s actually tend to be extremely alluring and charismatic. It’s no surprise you may end up falling for one and not find out until it’s “too late”. So what are signs to look out for? Could you actually be dating a sociopath? Let’s learn more.

“When you’re in love, it’s easy to gloss over some of your partner’s less flattering traits. But if your gut tells you something might really be off with this person, don’t write off those feelings ― especially if you suspect they could be a sociopath. Sociopaths don’t look like the Joker and show up cackling and howling and ready to manipulate They’re not always so easy to recognize. They can appear to be the guy next door. And until you get to know them, you wouldn’t necessarily know they are sociopaths. So what is a sociopath exactly? Characteristics include a persistent disregard for right and wrong, a tendency to lie and manipulate others, a lack of empathy and remorse, emotional volatility, an inflated ego, and engaging in impulsive and irresponsible behavior. And though the label is frequently used in the media and pop culture, it’s not actually a clinical term. The closest clinical diagnosis would be antisocial personality disorder, which is characterized by a pattern of disregarding or violating social norms, laws and the rights of others without remorse ― not being a loner, as the name might suggest. It’s estimated that roughly 3 percent of men and 1 percent of women meet the criteria for antisocial personality disorder. It’s worth noting that some experts prefer to use the term “psychopath” instead. Some use sociopath and psychopath interchangeably to describe a person with a more extreme case of antisocial personality disorder. Others, contend sociopaths and psychopaths are similar, but differ in some key ways ― for example, sociopaths lack empathy but are capable of it, while psychopaths are incapable of it altogether.” If you frequent my blog you are well aware I was in a life-threatening relationship several years ago. Although my ex never sought professional help (as many sociopaths don’t) I would bet my life on him being a sociopath. Since I am not a licensed professional, I can not technically diagnose him but like I said, I’d bet my life on it. I’ve also had my mental health professionals refer to him having a personality disorder… narcissistic, borderline as well as sociopathy. In the beginning, he was beyond everything I could’ve asked for. Little did I know what was to come or who he was behind the mask. If only I’d known what to lookout for I might’ve saved myself years of misery. So due to my own experiences I’m here to help you. Here are some of the most prevalent, common warning signs you or a loved one may be in a dangerous relationship with a sociopath. “RED FLAG #1. Having an over-sized ego. The Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM-V) notes that sociopaths have an inflated sense of self. They are narcissists to the extreme, with a huge sense of entitlement. They tend to blame others for their own failures. They prey on your good qualities. People with sociopathic tendencies are accustomed to lying, so it’s not as hard for them to fake feelings. Some sociopaths are skilled at pretending they’re wounded and hurt. Sometimes a sociopath will target a woman because she’s big-hearted and maternal and vulnerable to wanting to care for someone who’s been emotionally hurt.” RED FLAG #2. Lying and exhibiting manipulative behavior. Sociopaths use deceit and manipulation on a regular basis. Why? Lying for the sake of lying. Lying just to see whether you can trick people. And sometimes telling larger lies to get larger effects. Their professions of love feel false and hollow. They often will say things like, ‘You’re the girl I’ve always wanted.“ Or, ‘I couldn’t be luckier to find someone like you.’ Sort of pat, trope, cliche expressions, as if they heard that in a movie and they’re merely repeating it. Their professions of love and caring do not feel genuine. Something about it feels off. They do not feel emotions in the same way that regular people do. What they do is see others express emotions in real life or on TV and then they mimic them.” My ex-boyfriend once dropped off a note on my car while we had been broken up and I had gone no contact for several weeks. What first appeared as a heartfelt, long, love letter, I later found out he copied off the internet. Of course he claimed to have created this beautiful poem himself but I guess he forgot the internet is a thing and how easy it would be to access the lyrics. Needless to say, it didn’t mean much after I found out it was copyrighted. “RED FLAG #3. Exhibiting lack of empathy. They don’t really have the meaningful emotional inner worlds that most people have and perhaps because of that they can’t really imagine or feel the emotional worlds of other people. It’s very foreign to them. They treat you or others with contempt and cruelty. You might also want to observe not just how they treat you, but how they treat other people in the room. Sometimes you’ll catch them behaving heartlessly to someone when they don’t know you’re watching. RED FLAG #4. Showing a lack of remorse or shame. The DSM-V entry on antisocial personality disorder indicates that sociopaths lack remorse, guilt or shame. They have volatile mood swings. This person might have unexpected, unstable and abrupt mood swings. You say something and suddenly they go into rage. A sociopath likes to control and manipulate. So if they thought their ability to control was being threatened, that might send them into a tizzy. RED FLAG #5. Staying eerily calm in scary or dangerous situations. A sociopath might not be anxious following a car accident, for instance. Experiments have shown that while normal people show fear when they see disturbing images or are threatened with electric shocks, sociopaths tend not to.” This is due to a difference in biology. FMRI scans show people with antisocial personality disorder have a different sized amygdala than someone without. This physiological difference may explain their constant need for stimulation as the amygdala also known as the “fight or flight” part of the brain, is in charge of emotions such as fear; which sociopath’s display less of. “RED FLAG #6. Behaving irresponsibly or with extreme impulsivity. Sociopaths bounce from goal to goal, and act on the spur of the moment, according to the DSM. They can be irresponsible when it comes to their finances and their obligations to other people. They may have a criminal past and refuse to take any responsibility for those misdeeds. Particularly if they tell you there was a criminal past but say, ‘It’s not my fault. They just did it to me. I happened to be in the wrong place and I was blamed.” Side note - My ex happened to say the same exact thing when he was convicted of a felony. According to him, however, nothing was ever his fault. “They’re constantly making messes you’re left to clean up. There would be regular crises in your life related to money going missing, or other relationships with family or friends breaking down, this is because the psychopath prioritizes his or her needs and enjoys risk-taking and sensation-seeking behavior. You would be left to clean up the mess. RED FLAG #10. Showing disregard for societal norms. They break rules and laws because they don’t believe society’s rules apply to them.” My ex boyfriend would smoke cigarettes inside of public restaurants, and whip out his penis in the middle of a family park. He would also frequently disregard traffic signs and make safety violations while driving. I’m not sure if he did this to be funny, to scare me, or because he felt he was above the law. Perhaps it was a mixture of all three. “They are also extremely controlling. You begin to detect that your partner is excessively controlling, dictating when, where, what time and under what circumstances you’re going to get together. They attempt to manipulate your behavior and control who your friends are and your activities. RED FLAG #7. Having few friends. Sociopaths tend not to have friends—not real ones, anyway. Sociopaths don’t want friends, unless they need them. Or all of their friends are superficially connected with them, friends by association. They don’t have many friends or close relationships. The individual is very, very evasive about their personal life and details of past relationships and very overly guarded and evasive. And if they get irritated when you probe them about it, that could be a bad sign. RED FLAG #8. Being charming—but only superficially. Sociopaths can be very charismatic and friendly — because they know it will help them get what they want. They are expert con artists and always have a secret agenda. People are so amazed when they find that someone is a sociopath because they’re so amazingly effective at blending in. They’re masters of disguise. Their main tool to keep them from being discovered is a creation of an outer personality. They seem too good to be true. They are that man or woman at a club or at a bar who just seems to be paying you too much attention and is too solicitous. However, you quite like the attention. That’s the thing about psychopaths: They can at first be fun to be around, and so you get drawn in. They need to do this, as they are later going to use you and all the information that they have extracted from you during this courting phase. They establish a closeness only in as much as it is useful to them. There’s something glib about their charm. There’s no depth to it. It can be turned on and off. RED FLAG #9. Living by the “pleasure principle. If it feels good and they are able to avoid consequences, they will do it! They live their life in the fast lane — to the extreme — seeking stimulation, excitement and pleasure from wherever they can get it. RED FLAG #11. Having “intense” eyes. Sociopaths have no problem with maintaining uninterrupted eye contact. failure to look away politely is also perceived as being aggressive or seductive.” I’d like to add, even if your partner does in fact, have many or all these characteristics, if you are indeed in a relationship with a sociopath you might dismiss them and brush it off as being “all in your head”. This is due to something called “gas-lighting” which is a manipulative tactic sociopaths use to make you believe you’re crazy. That’s why it can be so difficult to end a relationship with a toxic person. I’d like to reassure you if you suspect something is up with your significant other, you’re probably right. Especially if you spend a decent amount of time researching “am I in an abusive relationship” or look up videos on sociopaths. They’re very good at making you doubt yourself so you don’t leave them. I’d suggest listening to your intuition. Your instincts are there it just becomes harder to recognize while dating a dysfunctional person who abuses you. I hope this helped in even the slightest way. Feel free to reach out with any further questions or comments. Help is available and you are not alone. Contact the national domestic violence hotline for more information/resources.

#sociopath #sociopaths #clusterb #abuse #domestic abuse #domestic violence #mental abuse #emotional abuse #verbal abuse #dating #dating advice #relationship #relationships #redflags

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harrisonkitteridge-blog · 8 years

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Sherlock Season 4 – TL;DR: The Fanfiction is Better

SPOILERS AND PALATE-CLEANSING FIC RECS FOLLOW

Season 4 of Sherlock was always going to be a tough sell for me, because the moment they revealed “she’s a secret assassin!” I stopped buying the Mary Watson character. It’s what film critic, Mark Kermode, calls the “Meg Ryan is a helicopter pilot/Keanu Reeves is an architect” problem. Amanda Abbington was just not believable to me as a spec ops assassin, and she wasn’t equipped to perform the action convincingly. And all that was before the problems with the story were even revealed. After Mary shot Sherlock, every time she turned up on the screen, my stomach clenched, because, as presented, she was capable of anything – demonstrating profoundly antisocial tendencies: lying, manipulation, self-serving extreme violence, and disregard for human life. Her total rehabilitation was simply not plausible to me and probably wouldn’t have been even if its foundation hadn’t been the unbelievably ludicrous, glib assertion: “That was surgery.” (Not how guns and bullets work!) Watching her subsequent chumminess with Sherlock, whom she shot in the chest and killed (he flatlined), made me feel like I was being gaslighted. In my mind, it wasn’t good enough for her to say, “I only hurt Sherlock because I love John so much I can’t lose him!” Go down to any battered women’s shelter and you’ll hear similar stories of abusers’ rationalisations for beating up the person their property dared to smile at in the grocery store parking lot. Watching Mary joke and laugh with the people she’d victimised so horribly while continuing to marginalise John made much of The Six Thatchers almost unwatchable for me.

I understand that the undercurrent of intimate partner abuse in the Watson family was wholly unintentional, and it reminds me of the criticisms of 50 Shades of Gray. In both cases, two-dimensional characters (“Action Barbie” and “Sexy Troubled Billionaire”) there solely to serve the plot – not function as decision-making protagonists in their own lives – were the problem. (Yes, I just compared Sherlock to 50 Shades of Gray. At least 50 Shades of Gray had the excuse of a novice writer wrangling with the knottiness of a BDSM relationship as an excuse. Moftiss should know better.) Nevertheless, as much as I disliked the Mary Watson character, as much side eye as I gave her and John’s frankly dubious “love story”, I was appalled by Moftiss icing her so Sherlock could figure out he needs to check his ego. She was just there to sacrifice herself for Sherlock after his douchery got a bullet fired at him and to give John something to shake and sob about. The entire storyline of their “strong female character” was essentially a morality play aimed at teaching Sherlock about the dangers of hubris and a fulcrum to lever up the man-tear quotient. Then they turned their BAMF assassin into the benevolent spirit providing emotional instruction via DVD from beyond the veil. *vomiting emoji*

The Lying Detective at least provided relief from all the incoherent punching and shooting and rappelling of The Six Thatchers, even if it brought with it the lazy construct of the hallucinated spouse as an expression of grief (for real, though, the handling of the Mary Watson character and storyline is a masterclass in what not to do – so incredibly misjudged). One of the major issues I have with Moftiss’s writing is their careless, insensitive handling of serious mental health issues. Using auditory and visual hallucinations as shortcuts to say “I’m devastated by the loss of my wife” really rubbed me the wrong way. John wasn’t just talking to Mary in his head or forgetting she was dead, which happens to many people who lose a loved one suddenly. He was seeing her, hearing her – he couldn’t separate her spectre from reality. Those are not manifestations of grief; they are signs of profound psychological disturbance and distress that require urgent medical intervention, maybe even hospitalisation. They could have tied John’s extreme symptoms to sleep-deprivation from having to deal with Rosie at all hours of the night. The sleep-deprivation could have been exacerbated by insomnia brought on by feelings of guilt. But, no. They did it because real grief, presented the way a well-adjusted, middle-aged adult would experience it just wasn��t sexy enough.

I never found the “high-functioning sociopath” line funny, but thought they might take it to an interesting place. What is sociopathy? How does it manifest itself? How would it manifest itself in Sherlock Holmes? Why does Sherlock label himself this way? Was he misdiagnosed (he’s obviously not a sociopath)? Was he self-diagnosed? I don’t think Moftiss ever genuinely considered how having a personality disorder would affect a character’s behaviour outside of giving him funny quirks and making him a bit rude. “High-functioning sociopath” was just there as a clapback to Anderson then as something gangster to say before Sherlock shot Magnusson in the face. They never thought it all the way through. By way of comparison, Arthur Conan Doyle described Sherlock Holmes as a law unto himself, as the final arbiter. He was also called “masterful” – able to impose his will on others. When he chose, he had “an ingratiating quality” and could easily earn people’s trust. He was also an accomplished actor and master of disguise, who was able to fool even his dear Watson. There is a grandiose, manipulative psychology at work there that is knitted together with a deep sense of fair play and commitment to justice. While sometimes churlish and short-tempered, he could be profoundly empathetic. He also had nervous breakdowns, what we call major depressive episodes today, and used hard drugs to self-medicate. Sherlock Holmes’s psychology is full of fascinating contradictions. Everything Moftiss needed was in the original text, but they never got beneath the surface. So, while they’ve hit on some of these traits, they’ve never been fully integrated into a complete character because I just don’t think they’ve made the effort to understand mental illness and related drug abuse. There’s actually an interview of Steven Moffat describing Sherlock as “clinically insane”. The fundamental misunderstanding of what that means is why The Final Problem ultimately failed.

The appearance of the evil, secret sister telegraphed that we were heading into telenovela territory, and I wasn’t surprised by the contrivance of the Maze of Moral Abyss, all those macabre labours for Sherlock, John and Mycroft to perform – a steroidal re-hash of The Great Game. It was like something out of a 90s action film – The Rock meets Die Hard With a Vengeance, and I watched it as such. I half expected Bruce Willis or some other 90s throwback to come bounding in, armed to the teeth, start flinging grenades and just command them to shoot their way out. Even so, The Final Problem was the best of the three episodes this season – at least them spending nearly the entire episode at Sherrinford meant that it was cohesive tonally. I still don’t quite know what to make of them choosing to ground the entire plot – all those games, all those deaths – in Eurus’s cry for help. It is possible to humanise a psychopath within the constraints of their diagnosis. They have inner lives that aren’t limited to the monstrous, but they’re not like us – the emo play is always a loser – you can only out-manipulate them. They have an internally consistent view of the world, and once you understand the rules they follow, you can predict their behaviour and outflank them (it’s the basis of criminal profiling), but you have to empathise with them. Do you see how understanding all that not only helps with characterisation but buttresses the plotting and would have avoided the anti-climax of the ending? Answering the question: “What does Eurus really want?” then having Sherlock, John and Mycroft connive a way to give it to her would have been much more interesting.

The obvious pop cultural point of connection with The Final Problem is The Silence of the Lambs. We all were drawn to Hannibal Lecter – we couldn’t help liking him and felt conflicted about it. At the end of the film when Clarice says she knows he won’t come after her because he would consider it “rude” – now that’s interesting. What is Eurus’s “That would be rude”? My inability to answer that question gets to the heart of my problem with Sherlock – I don’t feel like I understand any of the characters or what is motivating them. Superimposing the tropes of storytelling onto the episodes and trying to read between the lines is the only way to make sense of them. They’ve been building to this Eurus confrontation for literally half a decade, and it still fell flat. They gave her whole backstory, and I still don’t understand her. By way of comparison, The Silence of the Lambs is 2 hours and 18 minutes long, and Anthony Hopkins appears on screen for only fifteen minutes, yet we all understood exactly who Hannibal Lecter was, what he was capable of, what he wanted and why. I’ll grant that The Silence of the Lambs is an unfairly high bar, but it provided a clear blueprint for the complex, charismatic, psychopathic serial killer pulling the strings. At the end of The Final Problem, Moftiss asks us to believe that the answer to Eurus’s “problem” was the love of her family. She obviously coveted Sherlock’s attention enough to murder poor Victor Trevor and set her elaborate stage, but anyone who understands even the basic contours of her psychology knows her shaking and crying in a burnt out house and needing a hug from her brother isn’t how that story ends.

I seriously wonder how much better Sherlock would have turned out if at some point in the last 5 years Moftiss had just googled Cluster B Personality Disorders and spent a few days boning up. They wouldn’t have made such a hash of Mary, and Eurus wouldn’t have been “Female Moriarty Who Lost Her Bottle in the End” – utterly anticlimactic. Or did they do the research, but they just couldn’t give a woman the minerals to be a proper villain?

To be clear: I wouldn’t have many of the complaints I’ve laid out if I hadn’t constantly been told Sherlock is the cleverest show on television. It’s not. It never was. The plotting of the first two seasons got it pretty close to being included in that conversation, but it’s no The Sopranos, no The Wire, no Mad Men. At this point, I’d say any workmanlike police procedural has it beat, hands down. Remember all those arguments about which was the better show, Elementary or Sherlock? Well, Elementary won. And that unsexy police procedural structure is why. The show has an identity, a solid foundation – it’s consistent. Moftiss can’t seem to decide what Sherlock is about, and that’s why so much of Season 4 felt like lurching in and out of a Jason Statham film, a Masterpiece Theatre offering and a Lifetime movie. At least The Final Problem managed to break that pattern. It was essentially the Sherlock Holmes origin story, and it took us back to the ancestral home, back to the first tragedy. Even just visually, we were clearly in Skyfall, which shows that Ralph Jones picked up exactly what Moftiss were putting down when he called them out on the “James Bonding” of Sherlock. (The literary beef that ensued was entertaining, and Jones bodied Gatiss with “The Second Letter” – the cipher in the cipher was the mortal wound.)

The argument about the Bonding of the franchise was really about a lack of depth – the flash of fight sequences over the substance of watching a precise but troubled mind at work – and Jones clearly made a valid point. Gatiss shooting back that Sherlock being a BAMF is canon didn’t address the heart of the criticism. I think the Daniel Craig Bond films are much better than anything on offer in post-Season 2 Sherlock. Even with all the camp, sneering baddies and always slightly ridiculous plots, they never got anywhere near anything as radioactively, intergalactically idiotic as “That was surgery.” In a Bond film, when someone is shot in the chest at close range, it’s TO SHOOT THEM IN THE CHEST SO THEY STOP EXISTING. If they manage to survive, it’s a bit of a turn-up. Guns and bullets don’t magically become surgical implements. Yet Sherlock used this physics-defying rebuke of basic human anatomy to convince intelligent, educated people to go along with the rehabilitation of Mary Watson (why they chose to make her silly storyline so important is baffling). They then doubled down on that narrative in The Six Thatchers, piling on a barrage of action that was essentially extraneous to the story. All to get us to the moment in the aquarium where Mary dives in front of a bullet to save Sherlock, who for some unfathomable reason decided to talk over any attempts to pacify Norbury and all but commanded her to shoot him. Then Mary was kind of a ghost but not really. Then they introduced a long-lost evil sister and an island prison. Do all that if you want; just don’t insult my intelligence by smugly telling me it’s clever then hide behind Arthur Conan Doyle’s skirts when you get called out on it. If from the beginning Moftiss had just owned up to having wanted to write a glossy, slightly absurd, mainstream actioner with soliloquizing villains, I would have gladly gone along with it. But I’ve continuously been told I’m watching The Usual Suspects or some other complex thriller with a sense of humour when it’s clear I’m watching Bad Boys 2 with British accents. Again: that’s fine in the name of pure entertainment; just know that insisting it’s clever feels like a straight-up troll. At some point all the cognitive dissonance had to become too much to bear.

So what’s the result of all this?

The fanfiction is better.

Even relatively inexperienced fanfic writers with a limited set of tools at least attempted to flesh out the characters and give them backstories and lives, fully formed personalities. It didn’t always work, but the effort was appreciated. The superstars of the genre used the hiatus to write stories that surpassed anything Moftiss gave us in Season 4, particularly in terms of character development. When characters’ motivations drive the plot, the story is not only more cohesive narratively, it’s more engaging and lasting because all the shocks and gasps are earned and move beyond cheap manipulation for the sake of entertainment. At the heart of the narrative success of the top-tier fanfiction is empathy. The writers got inside the characters’ heads and asked, “Who are these people? Where are they from? What experiences shaped them? What do they want? What are they afraid of? Whom do they love?” Moftiss seemed to reverse engineer everyone’s behaviour and emotional reactions by working backwards from the plot – everyone is just there to be manipulated, to be made to speak or act because the plot demands it, so those questions can’t really be answered. That labyrinth Eurus runs Sherlock, John and Mycroft through is a microcosm of the entire franchise. If I didn’t read fanfiction, maybe I could have gone along for the ride with Moftiss, but I knew there were fully realised characters out there whose hurt wasn’t manufactured, whose choices mattered beyond setting up a gag or a plot twist, who were protagonists in their own lives no matter how small their roles were.

Not even Sherlock escapes this poor treatment.

Here’s what exactly none of the plot-driven, post-Season 3 Sherlock fanfiction I’ve read failed to consider: Sherlock dealing with the fallout of having been captured and tortured in Serbia then being shot by Mary. Do you know why they all went there? Because being the victim of that kind of brutal violence tends to affect people psychologically, and those effects ripple into the lives of their friends and family. But in Moftiss Land, Sherlock being chained and beaten at the opening of the third season was just there so we could watch Mycroft crack wise while wearing a fur hat. Mary shooting him was meant to “Red Wedding” us, nothing more. There were no lingering physical or psychological effects from Sherlock having been tortured. It’s never come up again, not even as an aside. Really think about that and what it means about the quality of the writing, about the depth of the characterisation, about the empathy being deployed towards the eponymous hero. Sherlock is obviously the character Moftiss hold in the highest esteem, but Season 3 proved Sherlock is just a prop to them – their most beloved prop but still just a thing, a toy. The only real narrative through lines in Sherlock are the twists, and they’re the only elements that aren’t played right on the surface. Everything else is meant to be taken at face value. There is no subtlety, no subtext. There are Easter eggs and other markers laid down mostly for plot payoffs – a puzzle to solve – but no emotional depth, no narrative consistency. Sherlock is and always has been elementary – there were just too few episodes for most of us to suss it out sooner.

A few people saw through all the flash of Sherlock from the very beginning, and I tip my hat to them for being far more perceptive than I. (If they’re running around being insufferable and shouting, “I told you so!” they’ve more than earned the right.) The first two seasons were a fresh, shiny new take on the somewhat musty image of the great detective, and we all got to watch Benedict Cumberbatch take command and come into his own. But the real reason those early episodes were of such a higher quality was the low budgets: they handcuffed Moftiss. They couldn’t get all the helicopters, Aston Martins and rappelling super soldiers on their juvenile wish list, so the plot twists actually had to be interesting not just turned up to eleven. We all mistakenly assumed that character development that would match the level of the plotting would come later. What those early critics of Sherlock understood (and what has come to pass) was that the reverse would happen: the plotting would sink to meet the level of the poor characterisation. What most of us took for slight faux pas we could overlook, they realised were portents of the slide in quality we’ve all witnessed. They knew Moftiss weren’t to be trusted to dock the ship, and they were absolutely right. Once Moftiss were truly given free rein, the true heart of Sherlock was revealed, and it’s just confused but lacks the self-awareness to realise or do anything about it.

Being “the smart kids” is part of the hardcore Sherlock fandom’s identity, and I don’t see many of them being able to admit that Moftiss bamboozled them. (We all got took, guys.) The capricious characterisation, careening plot and disjointed editing have thus far been interpreted as intentional, as Moftiss hiding the ball, as further evidence of their diabolical cleverness – all the incoherence taken as a collection of hidden clues to be thoroughly investigated. Even though Season 3 made it clear the story was spinning out of control and Season 4 has seen it hurl itself off a cliff (but only just miss smashing its head on the rocks), much of the earnest analysis will likely continue. Many of the casuals are in it for the slick deductions and probably embraced all the high-octane thrills. (There will be an inevitable backlash, though – you can’t fool all the people all the time.) The excellent ratings of Season 4 mean the bean counters will want a Season 5, or at the very least more Christmas Specials. Enough of the audience is probably still on board to justify it financially. I can only hope Benedict Cumberbatch and Martin Freeman have enough sense to withhold their participation. The Final Problem wasn’t the unmitigated disaster I was expecting, but everything from Season 3 onwards has made it clear the show can’t live up to its early potential and that the problems with the storytelling are baked in. So, it’s best this latest Sherlock Holmes incarnation just come to a close before it becomes a career-devouring black hole.

Thank goodness the fanfiction provides someplace the characters can live on.

Fics to Cleanse the Palate

TRUTH MAY VARY by @amalnahurriyeh

Seven years after Sherlock's death, John's life is normal.

And then it isn't.

I don’t usually rec incomplete work, but this is close enough to being done to be satisfying. If Season 3 onward had shown even a fraction of the emotional maturity of this story, we would be in a very different place.

Read on AO3.

STRAIGHT BOY PAIN by @glenmoresparks

Sherlock is in pain. Billy Kinkaid, the Camden garrotter and best man Sherlock knows, diagnoses it. Ademar Silver, a male prostitute in south London, attempts to treat it. Lestrade, kindly Detective Inspector of New Scotland Yard, doesn’t notice it. Eventually, John Watson, healer and registered medical doctor, cures it.

And a beautician called Penny paints Sherlock’s toenails.

Read on AO3.

FAN MAIL by @scullyseviltwin

“WatsonChick143 has been rather maniacal in her commenting as of late... she’s left comments on everything you’ve posted John, something so obvious can’t have escaped even your attention."

A fan of John’s blog graduates into stalking.

Read on AO3.

THE YELLOW POPPIES by @silentauroriamthereal

Sherlock is threatened and assaulted in the hospital immediately after having been shot in the heart, first by Mary, then by Magnussen. As he recovers at Baker Street with John and plans the attack on Appledore with Mycroft, he fights to work through the trauma caused by these two visits. Set during His Last Vow.

Read on AO3.

And in an act of shameless self-promotion:

BEFORE HOLMES MET WATSON by Meeeeeeeeeeeeee!

What does it mean to be a detective with no cases to solve? Sherlock Holmes tries not to ponder this question as he distracts himself from his professional failings with bare-knuckle boxing at an underground fight club and vials of cocaine and morphine. John Watson spends his days in an operating theatre on an Army base in Afghanistan, doing his best to patch up the wounded and failing more often than he'd like. The dark, violent worlds in which both men choose to live complicate their romantic lives and cause them terrible suffering but set them on paths that are destined to cross.

Read on Wattpad or Tablo OR download the Ebook on my website.

I’m always looking for recs, so PLEASE ADD A FIC YOU THINK ISN’T GETTING ENOUGH LOVE.

#sherlock #s4 #the final problem

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