I feel like I should explain why I am so deeply invested in the relationship between two fictional characters that are over a century old. It is because I read it as thus;
I see John Watson as a man who unintentionally and subconciously fell in love with Sherlock Holmes. He wants to take care of Holmes, to be there for him whenever he needs him, and to generally be a better half and a partner to lean on. He has a wife who no doubt he loves, but he also loves Holmes and in a slightly different way. And Holmes does not make connections to other people the way the majority of other people do. The connections do not make sense to him, he does not really worry about other people’s feelings outside of the realm of what drives a person to their actions in a purely analytical way, and he thinks most times he would do better to have silence than the company of another person, in any way. Except for Watson. He smiles when he watches Watson. He lets him have a go at deducing things where he would shoot down anyone else who decided to try and voice their deductions. Sherlock Holmes, a man who doesn’t understand social queues, who doesn’t wish to deal with the niceties of social interraction, of not stepping on other people’s toes, does with John Watson. Because he cares about him. They are perhaps the most important people in each other’s life, and perhaps after a long while of being thus, the lines between platonicism and romanticism start to blur and it becomes a bit of a romance. It stops at romance, but that doesn’t mean it’s not a very powerful and beautiful emotional relationship.
I am so invested in these characters and how I read their relationship because it’s basically a projection of myself that is supported by tons of cannon and adaptions. I like having a model that is so close to the way I naturally experience relationships that is so prolific in a world where there is almost no representation of it. It’s such a beautiful relationship and wiping it out in favor of a typical sexual-romantic relationship is like burning the only copy of a beautiful book. When people disregard or erase this interpretation of Sherlock Holmes and John Watson’s relationship it literally feels to me like someone is erasing me. Erasing who I am and how I feel in relation to other people. And when there is no visibility at all, even within groups of people who beg for equality and are supposed to be open to a broad range of feelings and orientations- that hurts.
Erasure hurts.
Having prevalent characters representing a group of people, even if there are flaws in their representation, is incredibly helpful to allowing people to see something from another person’s point of view instead of just trying to imagine it.
