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@unfortunatelyimaginary

"My own suspicion is that the Universe is not only queerer than we suppose, but queerer than we can suppose." - J. B. S. Haldane - This is my main, multi-fandom blog. Sideblogs include @wrongshallfail (history jokes), @amusing-and-time-wasting (helpful + funny non-fandom stuff), @tolkientolkientolkien (Tolkien stuff that I try to keep separate from my main blog), and @alien-fairy-princess (my asexual/aromantic/lesbian and neurodivergent/autistic/adhd pride blog) alienfairyprincess @ ao3
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unfortunatelyimaginary
liveandletrain
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gaphic

‘Why is trending so weird’ because of tag spam. Because people (and bots) are tagging like it’s Instagram.

This is spam. It’s against TOS and it throws trending completely out of whack, along with being wildly annoying.

Please, please, PLEASE report posts like this as spam, because otherwise it’s just gonna get fucking worse

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gaphic

‘Cottagecore’ is trending right now and the tag is literally 80% spam from real humans who don’t fucking know how tumblr tags work

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dogroseberry

I'm glad more people are addressing this because it is a serious issue, arguably as bad as the bot epidemic.

But here it is in the Terms of Service. It's been there long before this shit started happening.

Intentionally tagging incorrect tags is abusing the tag system and therefore against the TOS. The posts that tag shit like images of cigarettes as celebrity names.

That's what the TOS is trying to avoid. Within good reason. OP is right; the longer this is condoned, the more people will join in, the more prevalent this gets, and the less relevant tags will become. Tags will be as relevant here as they are on Instagram or TikTok and shit.

That and it's just fucking annoying and disrespectful to other people's time, all for the sake of scrambling for popularity online whatsoever, let alone Tumblr out of all sites.

So to anyone still bitching on how this "unfair" because you want an excuse to abuse the algorithm to get likes on your dusty ass selfie, please fuck off back to one of those platforms instead.

Oh crap I didn’t know about this lemme go through my posts o-o

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siren-the-gryphon

Just to add to this. Having tags, even a lot of them, is ok, as long as they're relevant. Posting art of several characters and tagging them with the fandom and each character or something is ok. Tagging your selfie as every generic/popular tag you can think of is not.

unfortunatelyimaginary
liveandletrain
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aethersea

honestly it was a red flag when bbc sherlock went “well obviously the word written in blood isn’t the german word for revenge, it’s clearly the beginning of the name ‘rachel’, what absolute idiot would fail to see that” when in the original novel it is, in fact, the german word for revenge, which sherlock points out gleefully to a roomful of policemen who all figure it’s the beginning of the name ‘rachel.’

and by red flag I mean it was a clear sign that the adaptation was trying to one-up the source material, instead of engaging with it with love.

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zephyrantha

#sherlock holmes#finx rambles#this kinda bugged me even when I first watched it and still thought it was a super cool show#and tbh it WAS super cool in a lot of ways#they had such dynamic and exciting editing#good pacing#cool character introductions#great snappy lines#but this was a small thing that rankled even then

You’re so right. I remember watching 1x01 and thinking “wow! they got the texts to pop up on the screen, that’s super cool!” and thinking it was just like. A super well done show and so amazing. But looking back, what I actually liked about it was the snappy editing and the little bit of development that Martin Freeman was allowed to give to his character.

Apart from that, the show is so full of… contempt? Like even from the beginning, there’s this sense that the show thinks you’re probably too stupid to be watching it, but sure, I guess we’ll let you tag along and see what a clever, amazing person Sherlock is. He’s definitely smarter than you though so don’t even try to engage with the source material, a dummy like you could never get anything right.

And then that just stayed the tone of the show until I got fed up and stopped watching.

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aethersea

That’s just it, that thing with the texts on screen was the first time I’d ever seen phones so smoothly and cleverly integrated into the visuals, it was genuinely brilliant, and the Watson we’re introduced to in ep1 is a compelling character. And frankly even the condescension doesn’t jar yet in ep1, because part of the joy of mystery stories (and especially of sherlock holmes adaptations) is watching the detective be so incredibly clever, so it wasn’t immediately apparent that the writers didn’t want us to be able to follow along. They’re just showing off their mystery-writing skills!

And – I think this part was really important actually – because in ep1, Sherlock responds to John actually being impressed by his deductions with the startled vulnerability of someone who’s never before met someone who doesn’t immediately want to either defeat him in battle or never speak to him again. John is truly impressed with Sherlock, but unthreatened by him, and Sherlock doesn’t really know what to do with that but he really doesn’t want to lose it. So he invites John along on his case, and then shows off for him like a peacock flashing his tail in the nervous hope that John might say more nice things, and he’s clearly floored when John does.

And that’s a really good dynamic on which to build a friendship! Closet thrill-seeker who’s extremely secure in his own abilities befriends arrogant mean girl genius who’s spent so long being envied and disliked by everyone he meets that he imprints like a duckling on the first person who doesn’t do that, but he has no clue how friendships work so he just drags this person to crime scenes and worse in the hopes that somehow this’ll do the trick.

But although John is confident in his own abilities, the writers don’t actually want him to have any. My beef with this show actually started in the very next episode, where John and his date get kidnapped by bad guys. They’re tied up and being interrogated, and John is unable to do literally anything but sit there and yell about it, even when they nearly murder his date. Sherlock has to swoop in and save the day.

In ep1 when John meets Mycroft, Mycroft’s parting shot is “fire your therapist,” because she says John’s psychosomatic tremble is a response to danger but Mycroft has been unsubtly threatening him and his tremble has firmed up and gone. John responds to danger with level-headed courage, we are told this explicitly in the text. And then when his date is about to be murdered by bad guys who believe he knows the location of the hidden whatever, he can’t find the presence of mind to fucking lie about it? String them along a little? Come up with SOME way to buy time, convince the bad guys he’s cooperating so they’ll stop paying so much attention and he can figure out a way to send a message, something. Anything.

That’s when I realized the writers didn’t actually want John to be able to do anything, they didn’t want this to be the partnership they set up in the end of ep1, they wanted Sherlock to be the competent one and John to be his fangirl. And the thing is, John is the viewer insert character. He’s the one we’re supposed to be able to identify with so he can hook us into the story. And it turns out the writers just want John – and us – to do exactly what you said: tag along and see what a clever, amazing person Sherlock is.

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aethersea

#also whatever the fuck they did to hounds of baskerville #the orig book is shocking because there really is a monster - there literally is a dog out there tearing people up #holmes waltzes in thinking he’s so smart and these poor traumatized people are just hallucinating to cope #with their fears and that he’s gonna set them all straight but . no they are straight up in a horror movie #so then holmes has to play by horror movie rules and use humans as bait for a rabid monster which is insane and exciting #and then BBC said ohhhh but what if they were hallucinating?? #LIKE COME ON……..# ‘CIA mind control gas’?????? I could scream . where’s the dog

@cafffine​ I hope it’s cool that I’m copying your tags onto this longer version of the post, bc on the surface that’s just the rache/rachel thing writ large – what if we took the thing that it wasn’t in the book and did that instead! – but it’s also part of this deep contempt the writers have for just…people. I was going to say ‘regular people’ but actually there are no people as clever as their version of sherlock, he’s the specialest guy in the whole wide world and he can never be wrong.

And first of all, that’s just so much more boring than a full on genre twist. The brilliance of making the shift into horror “our infallible detective was wrong,” thus signifying that the rules of the detective story no longer apply, and that same realization is also “the rules of reason and civilization we were operating by are useless, the superstitious locals are right, there be monsters here.” That’s the opening to Dracula! That’s classic horror! What a seamless genre transition, what a great way to shock your readers, what excellent suspense and what a cool mystery.

But it requires Sherlock to be wrong. It requires him to be completely wrong, and specifically it requires him to be wrong to have dismissed the locals as superstitious peasants whose fears were silly. It requires him to admit that just because he’s smarter than someone doesn’t mean his worldview is more correct.

Which, I suspect, is something the the writers of bbc sherlock don’t really know how to wrap their heads around.

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pigcatapult
They’re just showing off their mystery-writing skills!

I agree with everything in this post except this one specific sentence, with which I disagree vehemently. They are showing off their contempt for mystery writing as a concept. Mysteries are a dialogue between author and audience, in which the audience is an active participant and collaborator. Crafting an engaging mystery that is difficult but possible for the audience to solve is an artistic feat of incredible skill.

Meanwhile, anyone can hide so much information from the audience that it’s impossible to anticipate what the main character’s solution will be. To the author looking to write a masturbatory Smartest Man power fantasy, the audience is not a collaborator, but a threat.

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unfortunatelyimaginary

"It requires him to admit that just because he's smarter than someone doesn't mean his worldview is more correct." This sentiment also applies to the Sherlock episode that I've never been able to appreciate, back then I was fuming too: A Scandal in Belgravia. The original mystery, A Scandal in Bohemia, is also about pointing out that Holmes is /wrong/ in his valuation of people who have different kinds of intelligence than he does.

At the beginning of the mystery, Sherlock makes a whole speech about how dumb and predictable women are. How they are always driven by their emotions and are easy to see through. He meets his client, a Prince, who tells a story of an evil seductress blackmailing him to prevent his marriage.

You've put your finger on the problem because in Sherlock, that is EXACTLY what Irene Adler is - an evil seductress blackmailer ruled by her emotions and therefore utterly predictable by someone As Smart As Our Special Boy Sherlock.

In the mystery? Sherlock discovers that Irene is actually the victim in the situation, cast aside by her lover for not being "of the right station" and angry enough to tell his new fiance exactly what he did to her. He tries to play her emotions, and she does react emotionally. The only problem is, Sherlock assumed emotions and intelligence were opposites, and he doesn't realize that Irene has both. She is brilliant, cocky, and sees through him in an instant.

This is another instance where Sherlock Holmes is entirely wrong and gets his ass handed to him. Sherlock in the tv show? Well we've reversed the mystery solution, so hey presto, women ARE dumb, predictable, and ruled by their emotions. Let's put her inevitable defeat due to her emotions on a tshirt!

The best thing about og Sherlock Holmes is that he learns from his mistakes. At the end of the mystery Watson writes "I had often heard him make light of the wit of women, but I have not heard him do so of late." If Irene Adler had been the woman from the tv show he wouldn't have learned a thing.

#sherlock holmes#as an autistic teen og sherlock meant the world to me#and taught me so much about valuing and respecting other kinds of intelligence