Curate, connect, and discover
Definitely not the last time I’m going to talk about this but the relationship that Holmes has to Watson’s writing is so so interesting to me.
He obviously loves the attention to some extent, (Holmes’ relationship with attention seeking is a whole bag of worms) but in addition to his obvious gripes about the way in which Watson writes (tales rather than lectures etc, etc) he seems to have complex feelings on how much they focus on him.
Post retirement Holmes says he wants to reject notoriety altogether, implying that he only allowed Watson to help him gain it because it would be of professional value to him. While I’m not sure I fully believe him there, I can definitely see how that would be the easiest way for him to rationalize the stories and their popularity. But still, this is the same blushing sensitive to flattery Holmes who is constantly putting on a show for Watson and by extension his readers.
Even if Holmes is embarrassed by it, he enjoys it. Full stop. But he also hates it. And there are definitely a bunch of different reasons why he could dislike the stories, but I think the most obvious reason is that Watson can’t seem to decide weather to idolize or humanize him. Holmes dislikes that Watson doesn’t include many of his failures while at the same time hating when his magic tricks are explained. And maybe thats unfair of him, he can’t have it both ways, but if he can’t then why can Watson?
I also can’t help but think about all the times where Watson describes Holmes as cold, machine like, etc. I’m not sure how Holmes feels about that in canon (if he refers to it at some point let me know) but I know that when people have described me in similar ways it really fucking hurt. At the same time it’s tempting to take pride in it, an insult that becomes a complement if you lock enough parts of yourself away.
IDK like I said I’m not done talking about this just wanted to ramble for a second.