besides i’m awfully self-conscious about being up there alone so…
help?
Hurrah!
And remember, AO3 isn't just for fic! If you've created art/graphics, vids, or any other kind of fanwork for 221B Baker Towers, they're all welcome on AO3.
(Note, though, that images and other multimedia content must be hosted elsewhere - imgur, Youtube, etc. - and embedded, a bit like Tumblr.)
rubato asked 221b-baker-towers:
Hey there! I went ahead and got the okay to make a 221B Baker Towers tag on AO3 to make archiving easier. Now, when you go to post a new work at AO3, "221B Baker Towers" will pop up under the Fandom field; it's also hierarchically under the "Sherlock Holmes & Related Fandoms" tag, so works in 221B Baker Towers will filter there too. AO3 welcomes vids, art, fic, podfic—any media form, really, so feel free to archive whatever you want under the tag :) I've even had friends archive chatfic on AO3.
Like a spider in the centre of its web.
Reichenbach: habitational name from from Old High German rihhi, ‘rich’, ‘powerful’ + bah, ‘stream’.
Some say you’re trouble, boy Just because you like to destroy All the things that bring the idiots joy Well, what’s wrong with a little destruction?
I fell in love with the 221b Baker Towers ‘verse, and I started following the blog, reblogging all the stuff, tracking the tag… So because that’s the point my life has reached, I figured that I could maybe do some bad graphic of mind-tardis’ perfect fancast for Moriarty. Seriously, you guys are brilliant.
I was thinking about John in relation to 221 B Baker Towers and I do think his origin story has potential to be very interesting.
What if he’s an illegal immigrant from Afghanistan?
[...]
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i’m going to go ahead and just leave this here because my brain just spewed out words and i can’t find an AO3 tag.
[...]
[snipped for length - follow link to read fic!]
(borrowing liberally from the life of August Wilson)
Sherlock is brilliant, utterly brilliant, questioning everyone despite himself, despite the punishments his teachers give out for being a “smart-mouth,” for not “knowing his place,” and “how dare that…boy try to tell me he knows more than I do.”
His teachers doubt and mock him all the time: “you can’t really be that smart,” “this isn’t your own work,” “no one who looks like you and sounds like you could be this intelligent.”
So he finally quits school at 15, fed up with trying to learn in a broken, oppressive system. He spends his days at the library from open to close, where no one will bother him, reading voraciously, educating himself on the facts of the world. And he spends his nights filtering from one place to another on his home road—the barbershop, the fish fry place, the pub, the church, the back alleys and front stoops—learning the ways of the world.
…and who she’d be in the 22b baker towers ‘verse.
i’ve seen a few suggestions, mostly keeping with the sherlock change of having her do some sort of sex work - high class escorting, mostly. which could be a really good way to look at the intersectionality of race and sexuality and class and gender and sex work. but, honestly, i (selfishly) would really rather go back to the irene adler from the acd stories and work from there: specifically, i’d love to take her being an opera singer and move that up to this verse.
so, here’s my suggestion:
how about her being an aspiring mc? young, tough, street-wise, really fucking smart and talented, and with a chip on her shoulder. she knows that she’s better than this life that she’s stuck in, and she’s got a lot of attitude ‘problems’ to go with that knowledge.
i’m thinking she’d probably have one white parent and one black? several siblings. poor, obviously, council estate-housed, but music in the house - hip hop, reggae, ska. she grew up a tomboy, always making sure that she was as tough as the boys. getting in trouble all over the place along the way - kicked outta school, harrassed by authority, etc - and getting a worse and worse attitude because of it. predictably, she fucking hates her birth name. (“the woman” as stagename? just as a giant ‘fuck you’ to the overwhelming male-domination of hip hop?) i like the idea, too, of her knowing how to use her female-ness to her advantage. of playing to stereotypes so that she’s perpetually underestimated.
as for why she and holmes cross paths, like i said: she knows she’s better than this. maybe something bad happens to her family, and she’s trying to take care of them, too. maybe she’s wholly, deliciously, self-motivated. either way, she fucking wants out of the world of council estates and asbos and no future. she’s gonna be big, she’s gonna bust the hip hop scene wide open, she’s gonna be recognized as more than just some chav, and secure, and in the meantime she’s gonna do anything she needs to to get there. so she gets into some less-than-legal shit, and she and holmes come into contact through one of his cases. she outsmarts him, and he can’t help but be impressed.
Hey, Baker Towers kids, I’m putting Veena Malik forward for Irene Adler. Doesn’t she look perfect?
For those who don’t know, Malik is a Pakistani actress and comedian. She’s a Muslim woman, and while her work isn’t widely known in the Western world, she has done the rounds on Tumblr a few times for this video of her telling off a cleric who made some nasty accusations against her.
Oh, btw, if you’re anything like me, searching for pictures of her may give you the Insane Rage. For SOME STRANGE REASON photographers like to whitewash her until she’s nearly unrecognisable.
Irene as the owner/operator of an afterhours pub. Some dark, cramped place with lots of rich lighting. Hearer and purveyor of secrets of all types. Holmes goes to her for information when he needs it, she finds out the secrets he keeps—a perfect dance back and forth.
So I just downloaded Sony Vegas 11, and I’ve been itching to make a video with it. Looking at the notes of my Sherlock poster, so many people (along with myself) have been commenting and wishing that 221b Baker Towers was real, so, I’ve decided to try my hand at a little imaginary tv trailer. My gift to you all, to say thank you for the wonderful feedback. Enjoy!
d;skfjdaskjdfskalsld;dskfldsfkj;
If the concept of 221B Baker Towers is “What if Holmes and Watson were both black men?” why are there multiple people all up in the tags like “You know what would make it even better? A white character!”? Um, no, no it wouldn’t.
POC can’t even talk about an imaginary show without white people trying to center themselves in the conversation. For fuck’s sake, not everything is about you.
ETA: Some headcanons/discussion re: Irene Adler in the reblogs!
content warnings for mentions of drugs and suicide
So talking about 221b Baker Towers. As a general discloser, I’m not a psychologist, I’m just a kid with a double edged sword.
Gabourey Sidibe for Irene Adler pleeeeeease.
London, that great cesspool into which all the loungers and idlers of the Empire are irresistibly drained.
[…] try to imagine fandom’s reaction if the next big Holmes adaptation to come along had Holmes and Watson as British, yeah - young black British men, living case to case on a council estate in a dodgy area of London. How fandom would react if Sherlock Holmes didn’t employ street kids and homeless people like trained animals to do his bidding, but instead was part of that invisible underclass; if instead of having his eccentricities tolerated~ by Scotland Yard on account of being the Great White Genius, Sherlock Holmes, BME, school dropout, and sometime addict, was regarded by the police as practically a criminal already, one more thug, one more junkie, one more dealer in the making. If he had to choose between buying the week’s groceries or palming a twenty to a bored constable for the chance to spend five minutes on a crime scene, in the hope that whoever’s under enough pressure to deal with crime rates in the neighbourhood will pay him enough for a perp to feed himself and Watson for a month or two. If the greatest threat to his safety were police brutality, or the prospect of being done for a snitch; if his arch enemy weren’t Moriarty, but the systemic poverty and inequality that has him helping out his oppressors just to get by, and that makes the other side of the law look more tempting to someone with his skills every day.
Totally fascinated by this idea.
Predicatibly, as much as I’m interested in the socioeconomic dynamics, I’m even more interested in what it would be like to have a Sherlock Holmes who sounds like a kid from a council estate.
I talk a lot about the tyranny of images— the way that television and movies create a kind of simplified world, a language of limited visual types, so that we come to believe in certain truths of association that don’t exist in reality. But there’s equally a tyranny of sound. When was the last time you heard a TV genius speak with a Southern (U.S.) accent?
One of the very interesting things about the last 25 years of British TV is the very gradual generalization of regional accents, a breaking-up of the stereotypical associations that used to dominate. However, accents that are less strongly associated with geographical regions and more strongly associated with stigmatized social classes still seem linked to the “untouchable” to a certain extent, just as country or hillbilly accents in the U.S. remain signifiers of poverty and lack of education.
Imagine seeing an intelligent and powerful character who spoke with this kind of voice. It would be revolutionary.
The language Sherlock uses with his family vs. in his mind vs. with trusted police vs. with non-trusted police vs. with clients. All these layers of words in his mouth. Connecting it to issues of access and meaning and disguising. Sherlock shifting the rhythm of his language as necessary to connect with people, to solve the case.
