John married her before he knew she was pregnant. But how does this make a difference?
He married her and she got pregnant, probably by him, perhaps not. Or not pregnant.
This doesn't say something about his love for her or for Sherlock.

Perhaps something like that, yes.

Or perhaps he was not happy with his life and hoped for a change with this marriage. Wouldn't be the first time either.

So many children are being conceived without or without much love between the parents. So a pregnancy is no evidence for a happy or fulfilling relationship.

(Added: Given it's John's child, and given there is a child)


Sorry, the second and third were direct replies to your theory 

Last edited by Harriet (September 11, 2015 8:39 pm)

Harriet wrote:

And I am trying to say that there is the need to show this aspect: John dating women half-heartedly - and it doesn't work.

I think there is a point to it being half-hearted.  John has to value being with Sherlock above all, with other distractions like his work and love life playing second fiddle, and that's what we see.   But if they wanted to show John dating and show this aspect, they could still have made him date men.    It would still be funny and get the point across (and quite nicely make him incidentally gay, with a set up for a romance with Sherlock if wanted). 
 

Last edited by Liberty (September 12, 2015 9:08 am)

Zatoichi wrote:

I'm honestly wondering: would you consider it part of a romantic love-story-arc that one of the partners marries and starts a family with someone else just "to show you"?

It happens a lot in love story telling that one partner marries someone else first, even when the partners know each other already, for whatever reason.
 

I do not think it is a "I'll show you" either. I think John has suffered for two years and has accepted the idea of a suburban life as a GP with a wife, maybe children, everything that is not Sherlock. So we might say, there are months between the return and the wedding, why does he not act on his feelings? The thing is that all the proof of Sherlock's feelings is shown to us but not to John:

- Sherlock being only interested in John after his return
- Sherlock talking about friends and loneliness with Mycroft
- Sherlock constantly hearing John's voice in his head
- His panic at the bonfire
- The Vitruvian Man
- Him looking towards the empty chair
- "Into battle"
- Leaving alone
(and do not get me started on HLV)

IMO John settles for the best he can get in his opinion (wife, work, suburban life) because he thinks that from Sherlock he will never get anything more. 

Last edited by SusiGo (September 12, 2015 11:31 am)

I agree that there are things John doesn't see, but I don't agree in general.   I think that as soon as he returns, Sherlock makes it clear that he wants to have John in his life, and John sees that.  Sherlock practically courts him.  It's John who seems to have difficulties accepting Sherlock back, not the other way around. 

Anyway, marrying Mary while in love with Sherlock is a deceitful thing to do, whatever he thinks about Sherlock's motivations.  It's not like John.

True. And while ACD chose to let her completely disappear on weekend visits and finally wrote her out of the story without a whimper, our writers chose to make her an assassin and nearly kill the hero. The common denominator being that no Watson ever gets a long, happy, fulfilled marriage. 

Well said. IMO it shows that the life he had with Sherlock and which he loved is only possible with Sherlock. He does not want "to see the battlefield" with Mary, that is not what he chose. But sadly this is what he got. 

Last edited by SusiGo (September 12, 2015 1:36 pm)

I agree, Vhanja and Susi.

I think that Mary had to be a female and John dated only females because:
- John might be closeted. Bisexuals don't have to out. They might have choosen to have him out but they didn't and there's little reason asking "why isn't he out?", when being out is not a requisite for being bi.
Other possible reasons:
- Them not knowing their sexual orientation is one of the things that lets them pretend it is just a regular friendship that can't go any further. It's one of the things that keeps the slow-burn romance burning for a long time.
- John might be actively hiding his sexuality to Sherlock because if he thinks Sherlock isn't interested it would only ruin their friendship.
- There's little opportunity in Sherlock for female characters from ACD canon with big parts, when they changed genders, they changed them from male to female for this reason.
- It might be more romantic according to TV standards if Sherlock is the person that makes John realize he could be with a man.
- Taking into account a sexist society, John can't fall for another man when he's in love with Sherlock, because can't fancy any other person and the reason why he could date girls is probably that to him they were just filling a role.

Why they put the mary plot line:
Wrong Guy First is a romantic trope.
Something in stories has to happen, and as the website puts it "Why does the young woman choose the wrong guy first? Because if she picked the right guy first, there wouldn't be a plot."
If they didn't use this trope they would have had to do something else anyway. Something had to be in the plot and since the marriage was in ACD Canon they followed that.

As for romantic tropes being used for friendship:
TV Tropes website definition of romantic arc: “The journey of two characters from strangers to lovers”.  During a romance arc a multitude of romantic tropes will be used.
Tropes are devices with the purpose of coding shot term or long term situations inside a work of fiction, in order to influence the mood or the expectations of the spectator.
As far as romantic tropes are concerned, it doesn’t really matter if in real life those circumstances could be also applied friendship, because tropes are widely recognised codes, not impartial plot pieces; works of fiction have different rules from reality and when a large number of romantic tropes is used, the situation is coded like a romance.
Failure to recognise this code gender-blindly is the result of heteronormativity. If the situation doesn’t evolve into a romance, those who recognised the code have being baited, because "why should they have known the universal code wouldn't be used?".
As an example, one or two French words might be used while speaking English and you would be still speaking English, but if you use mosly French words you're speaking French.

As to why John being closeted is not against the BBC report, nor the need for incidental characters:
The BBC Report on Portrayal of Lesbian, Gay, and Bisexual People on the BBC of September 2010 states the need for this kind of coming out stories:
“A portrayal of the full spectrum of LGB people, their key ‘life-stages’ and moments, including older people coming out, the ‘out and established’ in long term loving relationships and more portrayal of bisexual people. It needs to be recognised however, that a lack of visual stereotypes makes portrayal of bisexual people more challenging in many respects.” 

As for John Watson not being visibly bisexual, bisexuality is not visible. On the subject, the BBC report also states that heteronormative people may have trouble recognising bisexual characters that lack queer stereotypes:
“The uncomfortable heterosexual people in the qualitative research were very confused by the concept of bisexual sexual orientation and were uncertain as how to categorize bisexual people. They did not have the stereotypes to latch onto with the bisexual community as they did with gay men or lesbian women, and their lack of understanding or ability to identify bisexual people caused discomfort.”

Another interesting thing from the report is that the BBC wants to make: 
“the most of creative opportunities in:  
a) incidental LGB portrayal across all genres, fairly representing and reflecting the full and varied everyday lives of LGB people 
b) overt and/or landmark content tailored to people who are hungry for more portrayal of LGB people, and for that to sometimes be challenging and iconic”
While Sherlock’s sexuality is incidental, John Watson’s bisexuality perfectly fits BBC’s intentions of offering more representation of bisexuality, more representation of older people coming out and landmark content in one of their most famous shows. All this without being the focus of the show and in a show that is not about “being a closeted bisexual”, so even John’s closeted sexuality is treated as incidentally as possible for his kind of situation, it is not made the center the attention, he just would happen to be a closeted bisexual that starts dating a man. It is just a landmark because it never happens in television, non because it is not incidental.  

As for the possibility that the relationship will remain ambiguous:
If the authors are purposefully playing with the ambiguity, because it’s entertaining, and never intend to deliver a romance, it is still baiting, because ambiguity is usually never the result of a romantic coding.
Some might find that the ambiguity is just fine, but ambiguity is especially not fun for queer people, for which it has always being used as a device for censorship, to attract queer viewers but not offend uncomfortable heterosexuals (as the BBC calls them in the BBC Report on Portrayal of Lesbian, Gay, and Bisexual People on the BBC of September 2010).   
It reminds queer people that they cannot be queer and leads and that the comfort of uncomfortable heterosexuals, who wish not to see queer people on screen, is more important then their representation.
In my experience with TV shows, the most ambiguous romantically-coded heterosexual couples are at least unmistakably declared as a romantic couple by the end of the show. 

Why not make them incidentally queer from the start?
They might be queer from the start, it is just not visible because the are not in a relationship. But their attraction to each other is visible and troped.
 

Last edited by Ho Yay (September 12, 2015 5:34 pm)