Mattlocked wrote:

I don't understand why you ask that question here and now, but may I remind you that Johnlock isn't all and only about sex.
Let's call it not friendship, but romance. Which, and I hope you agree with me here, is a difference.

This is a bit of a grey area, and where i get confused about what Johnlock actually is!

Of course you can have a friendship with romance.  It can feel very much like a love affair, with the elements you'd associate with that: romance, love, euphoria, jealousy, yearning, intimacy, passion, secret language, etc.  The difference is that it's NOT about sex.   That's the main divider between friends and lovers.  So to me, saying that John and Sherlock's attraction to each other isn't sexual, means that they are friends, however loving. 

Now obviously, there is a bit of middle ground, when sexual attraction comes into a friendship but isn't realised.   That could be due to unconscious repression (they don't recognise that's what they're feeling), deliberate repression (they knowingly try to stop feeling that way), it's unrequited (one feels it and the other doesn't) or it could be out there and acknowledged by both parties but not acted on (for instance, because both parties are attached to others).  I suspect that this is sometimes where Johnlock finds it's place - not with Sherlock and John being fully-fledged lovers behind the scenes, but with them being at some stage of feeling sexual attraction but not acting on it.  (Although I find it difficult to see a really convincing barrier to them going ahead if they both clearly fancy each other).

It's not love that changes it from a friendship to something else, it's sex.  Or sexual attraction.  Not romance, because you can have romance in a friendship, without sexual attraction.

Last edited by Liberty (August 2, 2014 9:11 am)

Yes, of course it is possible, Susi!   Friendship doesn't disappear when you fall in love or have sex, and lovers can be each others friends. 

But .. the need to comparmentalise or categorise it in some way is because Johnlock exists at all.  I'm still not even sure what it is - at first I thought it was just seeing Sherlock and John as lovers in terms of fantasy or fanfiction, in which case I was "for" it even before I watched the series.   But reading more it seems to be something else - saying that they are either lovers in the series as we see it, or are about to become lovers on screen.  That's the one I'm not so sure about. 

The reason sex is important, is because I'm sure everybody sees a beautiful, loving friendship.  There is no argument there.    The debate has to come out of whether it's something more than that, or different to that: i.e. is there sexual attraction as well?   If they have friendship and love but don't fancy each other, it's not Johnlock, is it?  It's just about the special friendship that everybody sees.  Or isn't it?  Enlighten me .

Last edited by Liberty (August 2, 2014 11:11 am)

Thank you.  I hadn't thought much about the "exclusive" aspect.   I think somebody who is married can still have a beautiful, intense friendship with somebody else.  But with those two ... I noticed that when Sherlock is "involved" with Irene, John is shut out.  I didn't think of it in terms of only having one primary relationship at a time - more that Sherlock tends to keep his cards close to his chest anyway, but I'm sure I could be convinced.   I can't say much about Mary, because I still have two episodes to watch (I know, I know, but I don't want to rush!  Should be finished by the end of August). 

John was surprised how Sherlock seemed to react to Irene and wasn't really sure how he felt about her...
I don't think he was ever really jealous, he was just concerned Irene was bad for Sherlock.

SusiGo wrote:

Well, for me his reaction Irene in connection with his reaction to Janine are quite telling. Remember his words "Glad you pulled?" in TSoT? This was still a joke. But when he met her coming from Sherlock's bedroom wearing Sherlock's shirt and not much else and heard her splashing with Sherlock in Sherlock's bathroom before being kissed by Sherlock in front of his eyes … They could have shown a short moment of surprise, a joke or two but chose to make him go on about it nonstop while Sherlock talked about the all-important Magnussen case. 

But I suppose this is one of the examples where you can read scenes in more than one way. 

The way I interpret the scene is John's so jealous his eyes are about to cross.

But that's just me.   
 

Indeed it does.

I think he's just amazed.

Well he always thought girlfriends weren't Sherlock's area!

He is gormless sometimes!

Probably.
Then again, when Irene tells Sherlock to "impress a girl", Sherlock does exactly that - and is looking at John immediately after he deciphered Irene's code. So who's the girl in that scenario?