chemistryholmes:

shuofthewind:

chemistryholmes: Read More

First of all, thank you. This observation has been lurking on the edges of my mind for a while, but I never found a way to put it into words, so thank you so very much for doing so.

And secondly, I think I have to attribute my love of and admiration for Holmes and Watson to the intelligence of it all. It is a smart series. It expects you to have a brain to understand what’s going on. That’s why I love it so much. It helps that I identify so much with both Holmes and Watson, with Holmes’ brain and his struggle against boredom and Watson’s loyalty and overall jolliness. 

But that’s just me.

No, thank you! I really appreciate you sharing this with me, and for being nice about what I’ve written. Putting thoughts like this out onto the internet can be a little scary…

But I totally agree, I love that so many different versions of Sherlock Holmes “expect you to have a brain.” It is nice to be engaged in stories that expect a lot of you as a reader/viewer.

Anyway. Thanks.

I think it’s also become a lot more accepted to take pride in your geeky obsessions with the stories. I’ve been a fan since a friend of my mother’s gave me the collected stories when I was seven or eight, but I’d often bring them up with friends and they either had no idea what they were about, or I’d get the usual “but those stories are no good for girls!”

My parents encouraged me to read voraciously, and read anything that interested me, and I also grew up in a very non-“gendered” household (my father and I did most of the cooking together, and he’d sit there and play Barbies with me, then we’d play with Legos, then I’d help him work on his car, you know?) so when I went out into the “big real world” I was hit with this whole “why do you like those things, you shouldn’t like those things!” mentality (primarily about my tastes in fiction - mysteries, science fiction, etc and my fascination with cars and motorcycles and aeroplanes) and I kind of… stopped talking about it. Kids at school had enough ammunition to make my life miserable, I learned early on to stop giving them more.

But now, I’ve found a whole community of like-minded people of all genders, and I can nerd out about it with impunity, and it’s wonderful.