See I don’t think Sherlock and Watson had much of a pining phase. I don’t think it makes sense for them despite the raging homophobia and queer panic of the era they were active in. I don’t think Holmes’s 1) deductive prowess 2) autistic rizz would allow for a long period of gay pining.
Holmes knew from the get go that Watson looked at both men and women with admiration. He’s got the greatest observation skills and deductive prowess of an era. It doesn’t take much to notice Watson NOTICING EVERYONE with gusto, he’s hardly subtle about his thirsty descriptions of men and women alike, even in his writing. He’s a former army man. A significant number of his former associates from the army have decidedly “languid” (late 19th century queer coded) qualities. This dude, even if he has yet to partake of any homosexual activities himself, is no stranger and holds no medical objections. (Particularly if you think of him as being based on Doyle, who wrote some very sympathetic, very progressive medical things on homosexuality in his day.)
And then you have Sherlock. Of strange habits. Uncouth. Very direct and to the point Sherlock Holmes. He’s not rude, not by any sense of the word, he’s too kind by nature, but he doesn’t brook any bullshit and has a low tolerance for artifice for artifice’s sake. And he’s DEFINITELY queer. (I did a whole academic presentation basically low key proving by the end Doyle KNEW what he was doing. That was a QUEER man Doyle was writing.)
This queer disaster, on a cocaine bender after not sleeping or eating for three days, emotionally disregulated in the wake of a case, will turn to the doctor Watson who is desperately and unsuccessfully trying to herd him into bed and feed him a sandwich simultaneously and say something along the lines of “My friend, your doting, as symptomatic of a larger altruistic nature, is one of your more attractive qualities. And I do find you devastatingly attractive, my dear Watson.”
And, Poor beleaguered Watson, so distracted as he is by trying to get Holmes to eat and sleep before he actively collapses on the floor of their rooms (which he has done. Many a time.), doesn’t pause to think about that before replying “And I’m absolutely besotted with you as well, good chap, but please can we discuss this OVER A GOOD MEAL after you’ve had a good restorative SLEEP, because damnit man are you TRYING to die???”
And the next morning they were in a relationship neither of them seems to consciously remember entering. Truly the dumbest brilliant gays.
the avatar movies are crazy bc “what if colonizers literally inhabited and puppeteered the bodies of indigenous peoples in order to exploit their homeland” sounds like the premise of some sort of anticolonial horror film, like specifically the kind of thing that would be commenting on self-indigenization among white settlers, but because it’s James Cameron his whole takeaway from that premise is “it would be preddy cool”
actually sorry. the takeaway is also “the white settler possessing an indigenous body would actually be extremely good, perhaps even The Best, at being indigenous, and he would become their Leader”
The takeaway is that James Cameron hired a multi disciplinary team to create the most “alien” culture possible and after years of design what they ended up with just looked like the indigenous population that their Anglo American creators had waged a genocide against decades before. Something unpleasant in the Canadian mind stirred and twisted and managed to summon the ghosts of their own shadow haunted world.
The takeaway is that James Cameron leaned into it. The music they wrote was too foreign sounding, so they substituted “world music” for the Navi - a movie short hand for indigenous sounding. The alien bodies weren’t attractive enough to the western male gaze, so Cameron gave them mammalian breasts. This whole narrative about dozens of experts across dozens of fields building the culture of the Navi, while true, is just a distraction from the fact that Cameron designed Pandora and its cute cat eyed blue aliens already.
The takeaway is that dozens of ethnologists, musicologists, archeologists, historians and speculative fiction artists mostly just built baubles and artifacts to be displayed in supplementary materials. A well designed string instrument in the, “World of Pandora,” book. A materially sound weaving displayed at the “World of Pandora,” theme park. The same colonizer historian who reconstructs Hopi pottery for the Smithsonian, constructs Navi pottery for Disney’s Animal Kingdom.
Perhaps you’re old enough to remember when the world first met James Cameron’s Avatar and the globe was cleaved into two groups; one totally enchanted by this alien paradise, and one that went, “oh so it’s Dances With Wolves. Just beat for beat. No it’s not Pocahontas, it just looks like Pocahontas because Pocahontas was cribbing the same styles and materials from Dances With Wolves. Come on, Kevin Cosner won the Oscar for Best Picture for this movie it’s not an obscure film.”
The takeaway is that Avatar is also the dream of white maroonage. The history of colonization is also the history of defection. From James Cameron to Kevin Costner, from the Avatar Fans back to the first Europeans to walk the shores of Turtle Island; people have projected real and imagined freedoms and powers onto the members and first nations found there. That Pandora distills down the dream of a pre-contact, non agrarian and anti-industrial, spiritually rich but materially limited culture and that this distillation just looks like blue Powhatans, well that probably means something.
I wish a mainstream live action adaptation would be brave enough to fully explore themes of queerness within Sherlock Holmes, yes there are independent works that are great (such as Bee Keepers Picnic) however they remain in obscurity with the larger public, a mainstream adaptation would be great. Readings/head cannons of Sherlock and/or Watson as queer are treated as lesser than by the wider audience, a mainstream adaptation would make the concept of queer Sherlock more accepted. Most mainstream versions imply queerness but as a joke (BBC Sherlock), need to give both Watson and Sherlock a female love interest (Soviet and Guy Richie) or are cannot make it explicit (Private Life of Sherlock Holmes).
Granada is interesting to me because it both refused to have Watson get married and has Holmes and Watson spend the rest of their lives together but also took out moments of physical affecrion between the two when adaptation scenes from the original stories and changed scenes to be less sweet such as in The Dying Detective and The Devils Foot but despite that they maintain this soft affection between the two.
