Also how can Arthur Conan Doyle write a character like Irene Adler 1891 and have her 1. Outsmart Sherlock Holmes and get away with it and 2. Be in no way a damsel or love interest to Sherlock.. But every modern retelling not only has her be a sexual /love interest character but she is posed as being very very smart… But never smart enough to just outwit him, get away with it and move on? Women can be smart, sure, but no one is allowed to be smarter than Sherlock.
It’s been over 120 years and Irene is, at her best, never as decently treated as the original.
Arthur Conan Doyle: Here’s a story about male insecurity where the police underestimate her for being a woman and feel the need to get her because she’s a woman and Sherlock is ultimately beaten by a woman and in a bit of character development accepts it and acknowledges her intellect.
Sherlock fans: Uh no way Sherlock is smart Sherlock is so so smart she must have used her feminine wiles or her sexy things or her love to undermine him but he gets her in the end i feel a strange catharsis at changing this ending but I’m sure Doyle always meant to be this way, it just feels right.
Doyle was literally so scared of Irene that he killed her off in the same story in which she was introduced. Doyle sucks too, it’s not just the fanboys
Irene wasn’t killed off in her own original story, tho, as far as I remember.
She got to leave and head off to start a new life, far away from the King, with her new husband whom she loved very much.
The start of the story begins with a paragraph which states ‘’… the late Irene Adler, of dubious and questionable memory.’’
The beginning of the story posits that she is dead. Late could also refer to the fact that her last name changed with her marriage, but it seems an odd way of putting it.
I don’t think Conan Doyle was scared of Irene though, I just imagine that it’s more convenient. He always wrote his stories with few returning characters and many people in the course of his stories die as a side note.
I do get really fucking tired of Irene Adler always being a fucking tease for Sherlock Holmes though. It’s tiring and inaccurate. She beat Sherlock at his own game and taught him not to underestimate women. She married Mr. Godfrey Norton and sailed away from England never to return and Holmes was lucky that the King of Bohemia was willing to take Irene’s word that she would not share the photograph otherwise Holmes would be in Deep. Fucking. Shit.
The original canon had few female characters, but several of them were quite good — I also like Violet Hunter, who solved most of the mystery on her own with only a slight assist from Holmes and Watson at the end, and Watson was literally hoping that she and Holmes would end up together but she went off and ran a girls’s school instead (I’m going to headcannon that young Jane Marple was one of her pupils.)
Mooncustafer 