And thus 90% of you go ' . . . whut? Why HER?'
Hear me out . . .
I never know what to feel about Sally Donovan. She, I think, is one of Mofftiss' most provoking characters and I am as guilty as all of you in wanting to see her, if not actively harmed, then certainly humiliated and ostracised for her treatment of Sherlock.
However, I came across a short defence of her the other day, only a tiny one, and it got me to thinking. And I think now it's time for someone to REALLY think about Sally Donovan and try to be a bit fairer.
What do we know about Sally Donovan? Really?
Nothing. Other than she greatly dislikes Sherlock and has slept with Anderson at least once.
Now, the sexual affair with Anderson is a distasteful notion to us for two reasons A) dishonesty, he is married and B) We all love Sherlock and it's the old the friend of my enemy is my enemy thing (Yes, I did it backwards deliberately.) Who knows? Maybe Anderson is desperately unhappily married and they are actually deeply, deeply in love and are meant to be together, however we probably will never know.
Her impatience and slightly curtness with people can easily be attributed to the long, unsociable hours inherent in her work. Also, imagine the things she has seen in the course of her work as a homicide detective. Precisely how nice to people would YOU be able to be after that?
And now, for the crux of the problem. The reason why we are meant to dislike her.
She greatly dislikes Sherlock.
There are several things we need to consider here.
A) She knew Sherlock before John civilised him. And he HAS civilised him, that much is plain to see from watching the show. Does he EVER belittle Greg for needing his help in the second series? Can you imagine the Sherlock of Series 1 making apology coffee for someone?
B) Sherlock can be an utter dick at times. For most of the time, actually. This is undeniable. The only reason WE don't hate him is because we know that he IS capable of being sweet on rare occasions. BUT, only where John and Mrs Hudson (And very rarely Greg) are concerned. Everyone else is treated like they are nothing. Imagine working in close proximity with Sherlock when he is in a horrible mood, for case after case, trying to do your best, only to be outshone by this eccentric, rude man who seems to be tap-dancing along that fine line between lucidity and madness. And this man who can see every tiny shameful secret in your life just by taking a good long look at you and who is not above revealing them in front of all your colleagues and co-workers . . . I assume she scrubbed your floors going by the state of her knees . . .
C) I know we all wish we knew Sherlock. Because he is brilliant and who hates brilliance? BUT, imagine meeting him in real life.
Imagine those people you see in the streets, at bus-stops, that one in every school year who never blinks enough and looks at you with that empty expression like they're on the outside and the world is just a game and they're the one holding the controller. The ones who talk about the more macabre things in life, not with a matter-of-fact realism, but with that strange tone of calm acceptance that sends shivers down your spine. The ones that are impulsive, unpredictable, and you're never quite sure whether they are all there mentally.
Now, chances are they are all there. They're just a little bit different, and that's fine. BUT, don't lie to yourself and pretend they don't unnerve you. But, how different are they from Sherlock, really? They're generally more intelligent than average. Have a tendency towards the macabre. But where we love Sherlock, they creep us out a bit.
We accept Sherlock because he is SHERLOCK HOLMES, beloved literary icon and because we know that his pathetic excuse for a heart is not so pathetic and he would willingly give his life to protect Dr. John Watson. We also accept him because, unlike the ones in real life who freak us out who are generally smelly, mouth-breathers who tuck their t-shirts into their jogging bottoms and are unacquainted with basic hygiene, Sherlock is clean, presentable and - seeing as how he is played by Benedict Cumberbatch - a highly respectable example of male beauty and we are conditioned to associate good looks with good hearts. But, looks are ultimately meaningless.
So, if you will. Close your eyes and empty your mind.
Imagine a man, without any distinct features. He speaks too fast. Moves erratically. Darts from place to place. Ignores people, seems oblivious at times as though in the middle of a mental black-out. Which are symptoms of a lot of serious mental illnesses.
He has a history of narcotics abuse. He actively seeks out situations which would give most ordinary people nightmares. He is dismissive, superior, rude and will respond with aggression if challenged. Nevertheless, he also displays a dangerous ability to charm people wherever necessary.
He also is frequently in unlawful possession of a fire-arm. And can easily see people's darkest secrets. He is emotionally stunted, finds bloodshed diverting rather than disgusting and is frequently cruel to people for his own amusement.
This, with all the romance stripped away, is Sherlock Holmes. And he IS off-putting and scary and we shouldn't criticise Sally for feeling that way.
True, WE know that Sherlock was set up by Moriarty. But Sally Donovan is a detective and detectives follow the evidence and the evidence led to Sherlock and, if she had leapt to any other conclusion than the one she reached then she would have been guilty of failure of duty. She is not a bad detective, no matter how much it suits some - including me - to imply.
We love Sherlock Holmes. And that's fine. We should. Because he IS Sherlock Holmes and, although he is scary, he is good underneath. However, we should accept that we have the privileged position of being able to view what he's like in the rare moments when he's being human which mostly happen when he's at home with John, moments which Sally won't get to see.
I think the crux of the problem, the REAL reason why we hate Sally Donovan is not because she can't understand how good Sherlock is, but because she doesn't WANT to see how good he is. She is always determined to see the worst in him. But even that's fine. Because the entire world is full of people who refuse to see the truth.
Sally Donovan hates Sherlock, but she'll still work with him if it'll get the job done. She is, I think, one of the most human characters Mofftiss has created and as such she deserves some respect.
So, love Sherlock Holmes - because he IS a good man - and hate Sally Donovan if you wish. There is a lot there to dislike.
But accept she has perfectly valid reasons to dislike Sherlock and that she deserves respect for being human. Even if it's the side of being human we don't want to admit we have.
Journals41
Newest
Hello again! And sort of Goodbye-ish
5 min read
Hey everyone! Apologies, some of you are no doubt going 'Hang on, what's she going back? Seriously, she's been gone so long I thought perhaps aliens had taken her.' And yeah, you're right. Not about the aliens - Although if it were Doctor Who I certainly wouldn't complain - but yeah, I have been gone for a shamefully long time. I have but one excuse. Adulthood! Adulthood has reared its ugly head! Job hunting is taking up a lot of my time and stamping on my inspiration, cackling wildly as it does so.
Some of the eagle-eyed amongst you may have noticed that a lot of old journals and deviations of mine have ceased to exist over the course of the afternoon. (Or maybe none of you have noticed. I'm sure you all have much better things to do with your time. In my imagination at least three of you are on the run from the law, five are ninjas/spies/pirates and one of you runs a llama fight club. With such busy lives, my gallery can hardly be a priority.) I've gone on a massive spree and cleaned up my page.
'But Hugsy!' I hear you cry, 'Why have you done such a thing? What was wrong with the things you deleted? You better not have deleted *insert title here* or I shall send Cthulu to hunt you down!' Questions A and B can be answered thus: There was absolutely nothing wrong with them, they were a perfectly valid example of my artistic progression over the past few years, HOWEVER I have learnt all that there was to learn from the pieces in question and I no longer felt that they accurately represented who I am now as an artist. As a result, for the sake of tidiness, I have given them one last look over for posterity and removed them from my gallery. It is now infinitely less cluttered.
As for the last question, calm yourself Young Skywalker. Chances are the deviations that you are concerned about are still in my gallery, I only deleted things that were very, very old. Most of them had no favourites or comments on at all, or only the barest minimum and I'm sure no one will miss them. Everything else has been stuck in handy folders, so if you want to double check on any of them they should be easy to find. If not, feel free to despatch Cthulu. I'll have a bath of water waiting for him.
I've also deleted most of my old journal entries as a lot of them really were surplus to requirements. I've kept the Random Historical Factoid series though if any one wants to re-read them, also the Me and My Ghost Drabbles. Other than that however, pretty much all of them have gone.
(If anyone is sitting there reading this and thinking 'blimey, this must have taken hours!' . . . yeah, you're right. Blame Sunday Afternoonitis. I had the day off work.)
Right, and now for the main thing. New deviations. Or a lack of. I still keep getting lots of wonderful comments on various deviations, mostly going 'Please write more!' However, it is with no small amount of regret that I inform you guys that it is highly unlikely that I will ever be writing regular pieces for dA again. There will be the odd ficlet or drabble here and there I have no doubt, if a plot bunny bites particularly hard but there will be no more routine series. Part of this is because much of my time is now dedicated to job hunting and, when I am successful, working like an adult human being. But, before you all despair too much, allow me to tell you the MAIN reason why I am calling an unofficial hiatus.
I am writing a novel.
Based loosely on the premise of the Me and My Ghosts stories I have written, but altered to allow for greater flexibility of plot. I've already got a few chapters on the go but it's slow going owing to the aforementioned problem with adulthood. The main reason why I am calling a dA hiatus is simply that I cannot write the story which I really, really want to write if I am feeling pressured to continue churning out fics to be uploaded here.
So yeah, this is a goodbye of sorts. I'll still be on here regularly as checking my inbox is a daily habit, so if you want to talk to me about anything I promise I'll still be here! But, deviations will be few and far between, as will journal entries, so to make life simple I just thought I'd better let you know that this blog is essentially now going dark. If you only want to watch very active blogs then feel free to unwatch me, I won't be offended at all.
Thanks everyone for the wonderful feedback you have left on my work which has given me the courage to throw caution to the wind and decide 'why the bloody hell not!' about writing a proper story. I'll let you know how it goes.
Now, if you'll all please excuse me, I have some writing to do!
Join the community to add your comment. Already a deviant? Log In
Join the community to add your comment. Already a deviant? Log In
Join the community to add your comment. Already a deviant? Log In
Ode to Sally Donovan
8 min read
Join the community to add your comment. Already a deviant? Log In
Beware. This post is long and rambling and I am verging on collapsing from cold and exhaustion so not all of it will make sense.
I am a volunteer at Petworth House. One of England's biggest stately homes. I do it for giggles and a deep and abiding love of bring the one who understands what makes things tick, especially old things. And I will tell you now, when it comes to the volunteers, it's tea and cake. Nothing more complicated. The only thing we hate is the cold. The place is bloody freezing and I always feel very sick once I've left because my temperature has dropped so much. But it's still worth it. The house is old, with some parts of the house dating back to before the Tudor period although the bulk of the building is 16th-17th Century. It is enormous and sits in a park of 700 acres which also contains the largest herd of fallow deer in Britain. Including about four or five albinos as I witnessed today.
It is a house of art. Literally. Turner. Van Dyck. Hieronymous Bosch. But mainly Turner as he spent a lot of time at Petworth. And, in the Somerset Room, there is a copy of Chaucer's Canterbury Tales dating from the 1420s-1440s - exact date unknown. There are hundreds upon hundreds of paintings and sculptures, each with their own little story. Every inch of the house tells a tale. From the Legend of Prometheus and Pandora painted on the ceiling of the Grand Staircase to the copper pans and coffee grinder in the Scullery.
There is so much to love about that house. Like the fact that they have a portrait of a highly depressed looking Napoleon just above a marble bust of a very smug looking Wellington. And the fact that I have stood upon a floor which Frederick the Great of Prussia once walked on when visiting Petworth along with the Prince Regent and the Tsar of Russia in the process of writing a peace treaty. And the one portrait that Turner (A landscape artist) ever did, with it's lopsided eyes and arms without elbows.
But today was special. You see, normally only the ground floor is open to visitors and even then a few rooms are closed because Lord and Lady Egremont still live there and they only open them up twice a week for a few hours at a time. But there are three floors to Petworth. And, even when the maximum amount of the house is open, only about one and a half floors are open for visitor access. Leaving one and a half floors more or less deserted for weeks or months at a time.
But today, I got to see the forgotten bits.
There's so much beauty in the places that get left behind. Made all the more precious by the fact that they ARE neglected I think, because it makes the little attention they do receive all the more special.
In my whirlwind tour through the labyrinth of forgotten rooms, dodging holes where there were missing floorboards and groping blindly through rooms where there was no light, I believe I found more beauty than in even the most fantastical of rooms open to the public. Although some bits did break my heart a bit to see neglected so much. Such as, in a random wardrobe - an unassuming pine construction abandoned in a corridor in a dusty corner of the house - is a suit of velvet livery. This suit of velvet livery, which I can report is beautifully made and still soft to the touch as it didn't matter if I handled it, was worn by one of the previous Earls of Egremont to the coronation of Edward VII in 1902.
There are books. Thousands upon thousands of books of dead pages, each a tiny dusty work of leather-bound art. That will never be read. How could they? In a library that runs into the tens of thousands, where would you start? And they are there, just sat neatly on shelves, waiting for someone to look at them. Some enormous folio copies that you could scarce fit on a table and some minute little volumes that you could slip into the pocket of your coat and still have room for your mobile.
The best view in the entire house? From a window at the very top of the house, in a tiny cold little room barely big enough to hold the sink which is it's sole feature. It's not a grand lord's bedroom. It's where the scullery maid worked.
I have stood in the studio in which the artist Turner painted, stood in front of an enormous arched window you could probably drive a bus through with translucent white curtains which let in a wonderfully soft light and soothed you like the smell of the undisturbed air which lingered through-out all of these rooms.
But that's not my favourite place.
To get to my favourite place you have to climb a lot of stairs and the lights don't work so you have to use a hand held torch.
The house has been rebuilt several times. To save costs they just built upon the existing structure and cannibalised old parts of the house for use in the building process.
Passing through a tiny forgotten nook above the rest of the house, which was once part of a bedroom in which Henry the Eighth slept, you end up in my favourite place.
The gap between the ceiling and the roof.
The ceiling is beneath your feet and the roof is above your head. And all around you are the hundreds of criss-crossing timbers from throughout the centuries. The earliest are from the 15th century. And so it builds up in layers, passing from century to century until you have a few 21st century steel girders.
I would say it's like being in the ribs of an enormous animal but that's wrong. It's too natural an image. This is like being in the struts of a machine, the tumbled wood of a broken pier, all the triangular ceiling supports crossing each other and passing through each other at angles, slicing through the shadows. It's like being in a pitch-black maze and you can easily imagine things hiding in it, looking back at you.
There are chandeliers up there. Unused. Unwanted. With nowhere else to put them, they were hung from the roof, random splashes of baroque amongst the utilitarian wood. There's so many abandoned things up there. In all of that section of the house.
And that's what makes it beautiful. Because so few people know it's there.
But now I have seen it. And I know it's there. And as long as there are people to remember that they are there, they will never be truly abandoned. They're just tiny little bits of disconnected history to be looked at only fleetingly before being returned to isolation otherwise they will lose their charm. And they always will, because it's not safe to be up there. The floors are rickety and it's dark and precarious. Pretty soon it may not be safe to go up to bits of it at all. It will be lost forever.
To all but people like me who'll remember it.
And that is why I love Petworth House.
I am a volunteer at Petworth House. One of England's biggest stately homes. I do it for giggles and a deep and abiding love of bring the one who understands what makes things tick, especially old things. And I will tell you now, when it comes to the volunteers, it's tea and cake. Nothing more complicated. The only thing we hate is the cold. The place is bloody freezing and I always feel very sick once I've left because my temperature has dropped so much. But it's still worth it. The house is old, with some parts of the house dating back to before the Tudor period although the bulk of the building is 16th-17th Century. It is enormous and sits in a park of 700 acres which also contains the largest herd of fallow deer in Britain. Including about four or five albinos as I witnessed today.
It is a house of art. Literally. Turner. Van Dyck. Hieronymous Bosch. But mainly Turner as he spent a lot of time at Petworth. And, in the Somerset Room, there is a copy of Chaucer's Canterbury Tales dating from the 1420s-1440s - exact date unknown. There are hundreds upon hundreds of paintings and sculptures, each with their own little story. Every inch of the house tells a tale. From the Legend of Prometheus and Pandora painted on the ceiling of the Grand Staircase to the copper pans and coffee grinder in the Scullery.
There is so much to love about that house. Like the fact that they have a portrait of a highly depressed looking Napoleon just above a marble bust of a very smug looking Wellington. And the fact that I have stood upon a floor which Frederick the Great of Prussia once walked on when visiting Petworth along with the Prince Regent and the Tsar of Russia in the process of writing a peace treaty. And the one portrait that Turner (A landscape artist) ever did, with it's lopsided eyes and arms without elbows.
But today was special. You see, normally only the ground floor is open to visitors and even then a few rooms are closed because Lord and Lady Egremont still live there and they only open them up twice a week for a few hours at a time. But there are three floors to Petworth. And, even when the maximum amount of the house is open, only about one and a half floors are open for visitor access. Leaving one and a half floors more or less deserted for weeks or months at a time.
But today, I got to see the forgotten bits.
There's so much beauty in the places that get left behind. Made all the more precious by the fact that they ARE neglected I think, because it makes the little attention they do receive all the more special.
In my whirlwind tour through the labyrinth of forgotten rooms, dodging holes where there were missing floorboards and groping blindly through rooms where there was no light, I believe I found more beauty than in even the most fantastical of rooms open to the public. Although some bits did break my heart a bit to see neglected so much. Such as, in a random wardrobe - an unassuming pine construction abandoned in a corridor in a dusty corner of the house - is a suit of velvet livery. This suit of velvet livery, which I can report is beautifully made and still soft to the touch as it didn't matter if I handled it, was worn by one of the previous Earls of Egremont to the coronation of Edward VII in 1902.
There are books. Thousands upon thousands of books of dead pages, each a tiny dusty work of leather-bound art. That will never be read. How could they? In a library that runs into the tens of thousands, where would you start? And they are there, just sat neatly on shelves, waiting for someone to look at them. Some enormous folio copies that you could scarce fit on a table and some minute little volumes that you could slip into the pocket of your coat and still have room for your mobile.
The best view in the entire house? From a window at the very top of the house, in a tiny cold little room barely big enough to hold the sink which is it's sole feature. It's not a grand lord's bedroom. It's where the scullery maid worked.
I have stood in the studio in which the artist Turner painted, stood in front of an enormous arched window you could probably drive a bus through with translucent white curtains which let in a wonderfully soft light and soothed you like the smell of the undisturbed air which lingered through-out all of these rooms.
But that's not my favourite place.
To get to my favourite place you have to climb a lot of stairs and the lights don't work so you have to use a hand held torch.
The house has been rebuilt several times. To save costs they just built upon the existing structure and cannibalised old parts of the house for use in the building process.
Passing through a tiny forgotten nook above the rest of the house, which was once part of a bedroom in which Henry the Eighth slept, you end up in my favourite place.
The gap between the ceiling and the roof.
The ceiling is beneath your feet and the roof is above your head. And all around you are the hundreds of criss-crossing timbers from throughout the centuries. The earliest are from the 15th century. And so it builds up in layers, passing from century to century until you have a few 21st century steel girders.
I would say it's like being in the ribs of an enormous animal but that's wrong. It's too natural an image. This is like being in the struts of a machine, the tumbled wood of a broken pier, all the triangular ceiling supports crossing each other and passing through each other at angles, slicing through the shadows. It's like being in a pitch-black maze and you can easily imagine things hiding in it, looking back at you.
There are chandeliers up there. Unused. Unwanted. With nowhere else to put them, they were hung from the roof, random splashes of baroque amongst the utilitarian wood. There's so many abandoned things up there. In all of that section of the house.
And that's what makes it beautiful. Because so few people know it's there.
But now I have seen it. And I know it's there. And as long as there are people to remember that they are there, they will never be truly abandoned. They're just tiny little bits of disconnected history to be looked at only fleetingly before being returned to isolation otherwise they will lose their charm. And they always will, because it's not safe to be up there. The floors are rickety and it's dark and precarious. Pretty soon it may not be safe to go up to bits of it at all. It will be lost forever.
To all but people like me who'll remember it.
And that is why I love Petworth House.
Join the community to add your comment. Already a deviant? Log In
Featured