This can't possibly go wrong at all...

[nineveh_uk]

I have just seen a rec for a fic with the following summary:

Ireland, 1920. There's a war on, but no one seems to be playing by the rules. John Watson, injured and unemployed after his time at the Front, joins up with the special forces sent over to keep the peace, but when he meets Sherlock Holmes, the second son of the local lord, he begins to lose track of which side he is on.

It is difficult to believe that it is going to go well. Maybe the author has done an absolutely brilliant job and successfully avoided the many pitfalls involved in setting their c.120,000 words fandom AU in another country during a war that has numerous rumbles extending into the present-day. If so, good for them! But on the balance of probabilities, probably not.

To some extent I sympathise with the author, having been involved in a recent discussion on FFA about the total lack of fandom activity associated with The Jewel in the Crown*. But even less than my qualifications to write TJitC fic that isn't prequel or future-fic for Sarah Layton set in England, is the chance of success in, for example, writing a Sherlock AU set in British India during WWII with Sherlock taking the role of Ronald Merrick.**

It's not that I think there is material that fandom shouldn't touch. I do think that there is material that if fandom touches it, the chances of doing it well are probably quite small for lots of people. Especially when they lack personal engagement with, or high level academic study in, the subjects concerned.

[ETA: There's something to be added here about genre, ambition, the genre-tourism element potentially involved in AU (tropey or otherwise), comedic licence, the nature of the original canon, and how they all complicate things.

Also, I am now imagining a wide variety of ludicrous crossovers with TJitC. Merrick is definitely one of Crowley's successes. It's practically canon. Barbie has probably met Aziraphale.]

*Challenge number one, it's long and dense.

**I am suddenly imagining a Jewel in the Crown bakery AU, in which Merrick is the son of a corner shop keeper who has risen to regional manager in a supermarket chain and who can't stand their bread sales being challenged by an upstart Polish version of Greggs.

Comments

Re: sorry I seem to have accidentally tl:dr because Ireland

[nineveh_uk]

Oh gosh, that really is rubbish. Has anyone been suggested as having contact with the fairies yet?

Re: sorry I seem to have accidentally tl:dr because Ireland

[legionseagle]

Lady Violet Holmes.

Re: sorry I seem to have accidentally tl:dr because Ireland

[lilliburlero]

Why yes:

“A shame. We go to opening nights at the Abbey regularly, of course. And then there are the galleries. So much, really, to do in the city these days, one need hardly go to London!”

John catches a soft, annoyed sigh from down the table – Mycroft, if he’d had to wager, but he doesn’t look to check – and stifles a smile.

“The Abbey’s good, if provincial,” Smyth chimes in. “Shaw, Synge, Yeats – they all cut their teeth there. The Irish do know how to weave a tale, I will give you that.”

“See?” Lady Holmes says, pleased. She ignores the dig. “We Irish aren’t all heathens.” John looks at her, startled. Across the table, Mycroft looks pained.

“Mummy, we’re hardly –” he starts, before Lady Holmes fixes him with a stare.“Constable Watson,” she says, still looking at her eldest son, “Norbury has been my family’s home for five generations. I was born within these very walls. Surely that entitles me to claim my birthright from Hibernia.” Her gaze, finally, slides over to John, who straightens his shoulders uncomfortably.

“I, um – I’m sure I don’t, um –”

“Mummy fancies herself a child of the aes sídhe,” Mycroft says impassively. “The fairy-folk. Myths and childish stories; no place outside of a nursery.”

So to recap. John's chauffeuring an officer who's been invited to lunch by the Holmes family, and because there are no servants except for the butler and a maid, there's no-one to give him a cuppa in the kitchen so Sherlock has hauled him into the dining room (this is registered as a shocking thing to do in class terms, but otherwise doesn't seem to have any effect on the conversation, which aykbob is absolutely my favourite sort of Getting It Wrong in Fanfic.) The rest of it I present without comment. Astonishingly, this writer has read The Last September.

Re: sorry I seem to have accidentally tl:dr because Ireland

[nineveh_uk]

Why do people not get that if you can be pluckily defiant with no consequences, then you aren't in fact being pluckily defiant, unless you are two.* And why on earth has Mummy permitted John to remain in the dining room and not just said, "Fine, Sherlock, go and eat bread and marge with him in the kitchen?"

*Speaking of which, this Belfast toddler. I definitely did the "why are you laughing as I am telling you off very seriously as a small child.

Re: sorry I seem to have accidentally tl:dr because Ireland

[legionseagle]

Incidentally, I'm screaming with laughter at the notion of the Abbey being seen as "good, if provincial" - I may be coming at this from the perspective of having read about Mrs Horninam, predominantly in the Manchester context, though I gather she funded the Abbey until the egos got all too much, but my impression was that it was doing experimental stuff well ahead of what was going on in London's West End at the outset. So I'd have thought the person depicted would hate it, if anything.

Re: sorry I seem to have accidentally tl:dr because Ireland

[nineveh_uk]

That's also my impression of the Abbey at the period - I mean, it's a new theatre, set up specifically for new Irish work (I think?), not to do Yet Another Midsummer Night's Dream. And - and here I get really hazy - I have an idea that it's actually a place where Ibsen was far more influential than he was in London, not necessarily because his plays were liked, but because what he was doing in drama was recognised as important for the form.

Re: sorry I seem to have accidentally tl:dr because Ireland

[legionseagle]

The person who would be the real expert on this would be kalypso whose grandfather reviewed Ibsen for the Guardian back in the days when some Ibsen plays had to be done in theatre clubs because of the Lord Chamberlain, but I think so.

Re: sorry I seem to have accidentally tl:dr because Ireland

[lilliburlero]

'Good, if provincial,' is completely wrong. Admittedly, the Abbey lurched pretty much from crisis to crisis after Annie Horniman withdrew, and that period is marked by an increasing conservatism in Yeats's taste by the standard of what was done in its first decade (it was still experimental theatre by any contemporary standard, though), and the flurry of artistic excitement around Sean O'Casey hasn't happened yet. So if that character registered it at all, it would probably be as a lot of degenerate arty-farty types fortunately being driven out of business by infighting and the economic pressures of the times. The notion of an Anglo-Irish peer's wife* feeling validated by the approving comment of an Auxie officer had me honking loud and long, too. Let me say it again: this writer has read Elizabeth Bowen, but apparently another of the same name.

*and let's not even go into the misunderstandings of how the peerage works, for therein lies despair and madness.

Re: sorry I seem to have accidentally tl:dr because Ireland

[legionseagle]

Well, the misunderstanding of how the peerage works is fairly fundamental, I'd have thought. I'm not quite sure if Sherlock is Lord Holmes or not in the early chapters, before his father dies, or if he only gets the courtesy title on becoming heir to the peerage, but even so for an Irish peer to have a seat in the Lords altogether means he's one of a minority even in a minority, so this sort of thing

Sherlock recognised, vaguely, a few names — Carson, Churchill, Asquith — though if he ever had known their positions, he has since scrubbed them from his mind, leaving behind not a single blot on the power of his memory

which is obviously intended to pick up on BBC Sherlock's "why should I care who the Prime Minister is?" falls away, since the most likely answer given the milieu into which she's put Sherlock is "Because you've got to meet him at the station, he's coming to stay."

BBC Sherlock ditches unnecessary knowledge; he's not just terminally ignorant for the sake of it.

Re: sorry I seem to have accidentally tl:dr because Ireland

[lilliburlero]

Is a title ever actually given? (I noped out early but Norbury seems to be a reference to this infamous character as well as the ACD story?)

Anyway, It's an instance I think of ignorance leading to unnecessary complication (see also: Lady Violet's Catholicism) -- the scenario's still I'd argue not really workable, but it would have had a better chance of working had the Holmes family been gentry rather than nobility, and Watson an army officer rather than Black and Tans: that makes the casefic element trickier, maybe--goddammit, I'm not rewriting this story. The stuff about Sherlock not knowing who Asquith or Churchill is is just bloody inane.

Re: sorry I seem to have accidentally tl:dr because Ireland

[legionseagle]

I don't think a title is given; whenever necessary "Lord Holmes" is used for Sherlock.

I don't know why a senior member of the nobility is so down on their uppers that the butler is doing the entire work of the estate, either.

Re: sorry I seem to have accidentally tl:dr because Ireland

[legionseagle]

Found it. Chapter six: "“I’m Sherlock Holmes, Lord of Norbury.” Well, near enough."

Make of it what you will.

Tractatus 7 is a good one for this fic in general

[lilliburlero]

Whereof we cannot speak we must remain silent.