I’m beginning to think that the other person in his relationship being anti-social may be important to John.
Throughout the show, we see John framed as the compassionate, nurturing one. The one who holds Sherlock to social standards, who gets him to behave like less of an ass, or at least more…
The important thing here is that John wants to be normal, wants to be proper and fit, but he doesn’t. he is better to fake it and he really care, but he isn’t normal he has a problem a real problem because he isn’t free. Sherlock is free to be himself, even if he is treated as a freak and had a terrible and alone childhood with others. He is free. John isn’t. He needs to fit, it is a compulsion, he loves his dark wild side and he can’t live without it, because he become a dick when he doesn’t have it. But he feels the necessity to be like the others and fit in the hetero-normal job-good buddy-life. So he is upset when he is seen as a homosexual, not normal, etc. Maybe is because of his sister and what happen t his family after that as he is younger all the expectations of a normal future was put on him and he wasn’t normal. John is the master of disguise. so much that he is deluded. And the need of girlfriends and marry is quest for normality, to fit in. why Sherlock and Mary loves him. because he is not normal, and he gets them, he is caring and loving of the different, he fight against it too because he wants to be normal. But he loves to be different inside. so when he is really in the normality he aspire he is caged and unhappy and a dick, because he is frustrated and snappish and in withdraw. But Sherlock and Mary see the love, the caring and the understanding, how he laugh of black humor, he get them, he see them,( even if he doesn’t know) and that is what that save them and make them love him and try to find his approval so try to be more ‘normal’ so John feels more happy. I think John suffer a lot as a child at home, his father was a definitive abusive figure, his sister out of the closet was seen as a failure, as a sin, so John have to be the normal one to save the family, save the family from the father, save the sister from herself. and maybe the mother too. He can let himself be free, he has no right. I think when he was in the military he was really free, far away from his family, from society, he could be himself and even bisexual( I really think he is) but return to London was to return to the prison of his life before. And even with Sherlock he had the society and his family to respond. So a lot of girlfriends, looking for a wife to settle down and pass as normal at last. The disguise would be complete, he could be let in peace. But John Watson would never be happy in a ‘normal life’.John isn’t free, yes! He really has caged himself. He’s almost mutilated himself, with the extent to which he has forced apart what he thinks he’s ‘supposed’ to be and what he wishes he had the freedom to be.
(I also think, at this point, that that mental separation is fairly conscious for him. His downcast glance, when Sherlock calls it an addition “of a sort.” The way he doesn’t argue when Sherlock tells him he’s attracted to dangerous people—he only argues about why Mary has to be one of them. He knows enough to know what he wants, and I’m dying to know how it came about that he feels unable to let himself have it.)
And I like these thoughts on John’s family life and youth. I’m so curious what it was like. Much more than Sherlock, John feels to me like a man who didn’t get things he needed in his childhood.
that is EXACTLY how I pictures John’s home life, and why he represses himself so much. I’m so glad I’m not alone in this. Coming from a similar household, I always kinda worried I was Mary Sue-ing him, but that other people can interpret it like that…. phew.
No, it’s not just you.
Saying that John Watson is closeted is a loaded term, because our minds go straight to the slash and in this case, I’m not necessarily talking sexuality. I’m talking about how to closet yourself is to divide yourself. It’s to hide a part of yourself away and separate it from the rest of your life. It’s a survival tactic, to hide away a part of yourself that you don’t want to get rid of or can’t get rid of, but that you wouldn’t be able to survive with if you let people see it.
But it also hurts. Because if you have to do it, it means that people who are important to you hate a part of what you are. It means that the people whom you love, you can’t trust to love you back unconditionally.
It’s something that comes up most often with sexuality, but not only with sexuality. Mental illness, self-harm, trauma, addiction, hobbies or interests that the mainstream has declared creepy…
John is so definitely, obviously closeted about something. It’s fun for our slasher hearts (and meaningful to some people who struggle with this situation themselves) to decide that it’s his sexuality, but whether it’s that or something else, it means that John has faced that situation. Where the people he needed most, the ones he would otherwise trust, were somehow a threat to him. They taught him that some element of his personality was unacceptable, dangerous, to be cloistered except around certain specific individuals who might be able to understand.
This is something that can happen with returning veterans and PTSD sufferers, but in John’s case we have a few sparse clues that this pattern might have existed earlier. The fact that his sister is queer, and John’s repeated insistence about queerness being okay. The point that, if she’s around his age is old enough that in her youth she may have faced some fairly harsh discrimination and even danger because of it. Her drinking, and their unstable relationship. The reality that sexuality discrimination in a household tends not to stand alone, but often comes with sets of other conservative beliefs and intolerant patterns of behavior.
We don’t have enough to point to specifics, but we’ve got enough to imagine how we might connect the dots.
Anti-social life partners and how John’s kind of a dick too
