It's a magical world

source: Sherlock Holmes (Downey films)
audio: Death Cab for Cutie, "Information Travels Faster"
length: 4:08
download: 308MB on Dropbox
summary: Holmes and Watson fight the future.

Premiered at Escapade 2019.

AO3 page | tumblr post

I have so many feelings about Sherlock Holmes. It was one of my first fandoms in many ways (I read the complete Holmes corpus when I was eight), and I still identify with Holmes almost painfully. When the first Downey & Law movie came out in 2009, it was exactly what I needed at that point in my life, and along with Star Trek it was my entry back into English-language fanworks online. I wrote a lot of fanfic for Holmes, and I started thinking about this vid idea at some point--certainly it's been on my vidding playlist since before the second movie came out in 2011. 

I always had the idea and the tagline, upcycled from The X-Files, about fighting the future; the second movie brings out that element even more clearly than the first one did, and in the first it was fairly overt. (The persistent slight anachronisms in fact start in the first movie too; they're also made clearer in the second movie.) But what rewatching the second movie brought home to me is how much the movies are presenting Holmes and Watson as a partnership: they are equals and complementary, and they're not very effective without each other. Like all great partnerships, it's founded on absolute trust, as well as their obvious love for one another. And as I went on making the vid I realized that that was the other half of the story about technology, and progress, and a war that cannot be prevented, only delayed. "So all life is a great chain, the nature of which is known whenever we are shown a single link of it."

This one, on the other hand, I want to share immediately.

Nothing on Earth of Interest (Seeds of the Melon) (899 words) by starlady
Chapters: 1/?
Fandom: Sherlock Holmes (Downey films), Hǎi shàng huā liè chuá | The Sing-song Girls of Shanghai - Han Bangqing
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warning: No Archive Warnings Apply
Relationships: Sherlock Holmes/Mary Morstan/John Watson
Characters: Huang Cuifeng, Irene Adler, Ah Q, Sherlock Holmes, Mary Morstan, John Watson
Summary: Shanghai, 1894 - Courtesans, captains, colonialists, detectives, opera reformers, revolutionaries, spies: when a murder in the foreign settlement forces Inspector Ah Quei into collaboration with the famed Sherlock Holmes, the two men find that Shanghai holds secrets enough to shake two empires.

This is the most allusively dense thing I have ever written, hands down, even at 900 words; if I were to give you the footnoted version, there would be one at the end of just about every line. I like it so far - I'm also quite irrationally pleased to have the first Singsong Girls of Shanghai fic on the AO3, and quite possibly in the whole world - and I'm looking forward to the rest of it very much.

Honi soit qui mal y pense (5908 words) by starlady
Fandom: Sherlock Holmes (2009)
Rating: Teen
Warning: No Archive Warnings Apply
Relationships: Sherlock Holmes/Mary Morstan/John Watson
Characters: Sherlock Holmes, Mary Morstan, John Watson
Summary: Sherlock Holmes returns, Captain Watson takes calculated risks, and Dr. Watson just gets on with it.
Disclaimer: Sherlock Holmes is in the public domain in the United States; no disclaimer is intended, implied, or necessary.

As I told M, the new movie has filled me with the determination to get back to some of my old WIPs, so here's one of them (mind the caesura in the middle marking the action scene I never wrote). It's in the steampunk AU continuity, set about five years after The Flying Empire, the first one in the series. Questions welcome, since this is, unapologetically, a fragment set loose from an unwritten whole.

I don't even know what to say to this, except maybe, JFC OMFG.

I went to Izakaya Sozai last night, for those of you in SF, and it's some of the best Japanese food I've had, period--well worth the trek out to Sunset. Also, I went to the main branch of the Oakland Public Library; Ghost in the Shell: SAC, here I come! 

All of you should watch Complicit by lola, a Sherlock vid that reconsiders Soo Lin and Sherlock and their relation to each other. I don't think it's completely successful at challenging the Orientalism and fail of that episode, if only because the episode only gives a vidder so much footage to work with, but it does succeed in challenging what the show thought, or wanted us to think, and in forcing us to reconsider some home truths, and in restoring some agency to Soo Lin, and equally importantly in stripping some of it from Sherlock, who is not as independent as he likes to think.

Holmes Big Bang steampunk AU meta and background post, ahoy! 

This post contains major spoilers for the entire story, which I unreservedly recommend that you read first.

( Meta, with extreme spoilers )

Yeah, I'm just going to post this. It is, I suppose, a sneak peek for my Holmes Big Bang story even though it is set two years after the action of same (during the events of the 2009 movie, as you'll see) and contains one (or two, depending how you count it) extremely minor spoilers for the story, though the sneak peek is not my primary posting impulse. Comments of all stripes very welcome.

Title: untitled
Pairing: Holmes/Watson/Morstan
words: 1143
rating: ...well, there's kissing.


( Captain Mary Watson sat by her husband's beside in the veterans' hospital just after midnight )

Title: Second Face
Words: 8613
Warnings: None
Rating: Teen
Pairings: Adler/Holmes, Holmes/Watson
Summary: Marseilles has more than one surprise for Irene Adler.
Disclaimer: Sherlock Holmes is in the public domain in the United States; no disclaimer is intended, implied, or necessary.
Notes: Directly follows Recompense. Thanks to all the commenters on that fic who said, "When Holmes comes back..."; without you this story would have ended very differently.

Read it at the AO3, or below.

---

Irene Adler lay for a long time in John Watson’s bed, the good doctor stretched out beside her, ( Continue... )

This rather short story isn't going to get any longer. Time to post!

Title: Infernal Machines
Length: 733 words
Warnings: None
Rating: Gen
Pairing: Holmes/Watson
Disclaimer: Sherlock Holmes is in the public domain in the United States; no disclaimer is intended, implied, or necessary.
Notes: Either a missing scene from or a scrap of a very slight AU of the second movie. Directly inspired by Infernal Machines, the phenomenal jazz album by Darcy James Argue's Secret Society. The pen-and-ink drawing in question is actually the album cover.

Read it at the AO3, or below.

---

Seeing the doctor engrossed in one of the papers in the pile on the workbench, Holmes turned and crossed to his friend’s side. “What is it, Watson?” he asked.

( Continue... )

I have no less than 3 Holmes WsIP at the moment, and the plotbunnies for a fourth are frolicking around me. How did this happen, I ask you? I don't even know. So, in an effort to kick these stories along, I share my recent link obsessions. (Speaking of which, I watched the second movie trailer for the first time, and, um, wow, that's not a whole Holmes/Irene subplot that was obviously left on the cutting room floor, not at all!)

elspethdixon on what's in that particular anæsthetic

damned_colonial on Holmes's shirts! And again! Also, twistedchick on more clothing

mllesays on the women of Holmes's universe and melannen on Miss Madelyn Mack

and hradzka on ACD's word rate.

Shifting focus slightly, hradzka writes an RPF poem about the famous Conan Doyle-Wilde dinner which produced both The Sign of Four and The Picture of Dorian Grey. Wikipedia tells me that one of ACD's brothers-in-law was E.W. Hornung, the creator of Raffles. I'll let kindkit tell you about Raffles. These are the sorts of coincidences, dear readers, on which an awesome edifice of RPF historical fiction call it what you will could be built.

Also, did anyone else ever see that movie Topsy-Turvy, about Gilbert & Sullivan writing The Mikado? And Sullivan is depressed because he wants to be a SRS Composer who writes SRS Music? Totally, totally is the same as ACD with Holmes as far as I'm concerned, and you will not convince me otherwise! And this too could make an interesting story.

Finally, I at least can't listen to U2's Achtung Baby without storyboarding Holmes/Watson vids to every single song in my head. It helps that it's an awesome album.