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emrinalexander's Alternate Jinn story.
I just realized one reason that I like this story so much - in it, Qui-Gon is Sherlock Holmes. Not in the sense that he's being a detective, but in the sense that he is an extremely, indeed frighteningly, intelligent mind and an enigmatic, acerbic, often harsh personality. And that he declares himself opposed to love. And that he is as he is due to a Tragic Incident in the past - not a feature of the Holmes that Conan Doyle wrote, but one found frequently in pastiches. ('Pastiche' being the fancy name that Sherlockians give to their fanfic.)
I fell in love with the Sherlock Holmes stories when I was nine years old. What it was that drew me in I'm not sure - some combination of the intellectual game of unravelling a chain of deductions, the exotic yet cozy world of hansom cabs, coal fires, Baedekers and boat-trains, and the lure of what Dorothy L. Sayers called 'the Great Game' of reconciling apparent contradictions in the canon of four novels and fifty-six short stories. (Somewhere in my parents' house there survives a notebook I had in sixth grade, in which I attempted my own scholarly monograph on the subject of Dr. Watson's wandering wound. Unfortunately I don't remember what position I was arguing, if any.)
Most of all, however, I loved the central character, as cold, arrogant, unreachable and roommate-from-hellish as he is. I've never thought critically about why, but perhaps it was because he was so many things I would have liked to be - 'always right' being a big one. He also got away with things I could never get away with, like calling people in authority stupid.
Since Conan Doyle gave him very little apparent inner life (a fact which led the actor Jeremy Brett to compare playing Holmes to walking on a tightrope made of magnesium 'The line is brilliant but it's very difficult to keep your balance') I, along with a number of generations of readers before me, could project all sorts of things onto the Sage of Baker Street. A large number of us seem to like the idea of the TorturedSensitiveSoulBehindTheSternFacade - even Nicholas Meyer's The Seven-Per-Cent Solution features a tortured past for Holmes that explains, if not excuses, his behavior.
And of course, I made up endless Mary Sue scenarios in which my alter ego would be The One to pierce through the stern facade. I even once began to write down the tale of the hopeless love of Samantha Moriarty (daughter of Professor James Moriarty, the Napoleon of Crime) for her father's arch-enemy... If I recall correctly, she betrayed her father to Holmes before the Reichenbach falls incident, but then she and Holmes ended up taking the Great Hiatus together (except not together together, they had separate bedrooms) for some non-romantic reason that made sense to my thirteen-year-old brain. I think the only scenes I ever actually wrote were Samantha and Holmes moving into rooms somewhere on the continent shortly after Reichenbach, and Samantha standing on the pavement in Baker Street, watching through the window as Holmes is reunited with Watson and settles back into his old life, the life that has no place for her. I believe there was also a truly painful experiment in iambic pentameter that was an inner monologue for Samantha.
The point I was trying to get to is that Professor Jinn in Alternate Jinn has the same appeal of the difficult-to-attain as Sherlock Holmes has.
emrinalexander's Alternate Jinn story.I just realized one reason that I like this story so much - in it, Qui-Gon is Sherlock Holmes. Not in the sense that he's being a detective, but in the sense that he is an extremely, indeed frighteningly, intelligent mind and an enigmatic, acerbic, often harsh personality. And that he declares himself opposed to love. And that he is as he is due to a Tragic Incident in the past - not a feature of the Holmes that Conan Doyle wrote, but one found frequently in pastiches. ('Pastiche' being the fancy name that Sherlockians give to their fanfic.)
I fell in love with the Sherlock Holmes stories when I was nine years old. What it was that drew me in I'm not sure - some combination of the intellectual game of unravelling a chain of deductions, the exotic yet cozy world of hansom cabs, coal fires, Baedekers and boat-trains, and the lure of what Dorothy L. Sayers called 'the Great Game' of reconciling apparent contradictions in the canon of four novels and fifty-six short stories. (Somewhere in my parents' house there survives a notebook I had in sixth grade, in which I attempted my own scholarly monograph on the subject of Dr. Watson's wandering wound. Unfortunately I don't remember what position I was arguing, if any.)
Most of all, however, I loved the central character, as cold, arrogant, unreachable and roommate-from-hellish as he is. I've never thought critically about why, but perhaps it was because he was so many things I would have liked to be - 'always right' being a big one. He also got away with things I could never get away with, like calling people in authority stupid.
Since Conan Doyle gave him very little apparent inner life (a fact which led the actor Jeremy Brett to compare playing Holmes to walking on a tightrope made of magnesium 'The line is brilliant but it's very difficult to keep your balance') I, along with a number of generations of readers before me, could project all sorts of things onto the Sage of Baker Street. A large number of us seem to like the idea of the TorturedSensitiveSoulBehindTheSternFacade - even Nicholas Meyer's The Seven-Per-Cent Solution features a tortured past for Holmes that explains, if not excuses, his behavior.
And of course, I made up endless Mary Sue scenarios in which my alter ego would be The One to pierce through the stern facade. I even once began to write down the tale of the hopeless love of Samantha Moriarty (daughter of Professor James Moriarty, the Napoleon of Crime) for her father's arch-enemy... If I recall correctly, she betrayed her father to Holmes before the Reichenbach falls incident, but then she and Holmes ended up taking the Great Hiatus together (except not together together, they had separate bedrooms) for some non-romantic reason that made sense to my thirteen-year-old brain. I think the only scenes I ever actually wrote were Samantha and Holmes moving into rooms somewhere on the continent shortly after Reichenbach, and Samantha standing on the pavement in Baker Street, watching through the window as Holmes is reunited with Watson and settles back into his old life, the life that has no place for her. I believe there was also a truly painful experiment in iambic pentameter that was an inner monologue for Samantha.
The point I was trying to get to is that Professor Jinn in Alternate Jinn has the same appeal of the difficult-to-attain as Sherlock Holmes has.
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I fell in love with Sherlock Holmes when my Mother gave me the complete works as a 13th Birthday present.
There is no higher compliment you could give me than to compare this Jinn to Sherlock! That's what I was shooting for.
::Happy Dance that would NOT Amuse The Great Detective:: *G*
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That's so cool! And you are most welcome. I'm very much looking forward to more Sherlock Jinn. *g*
Out of curiousity... do you prefer Basil Rathbone or Jeremy Brett? Or neither?