Fic Rec: The Third Student

[tweedisgood.livejournal.com]

Title: The Third Student
Author: schemingreader
Pairing: None, Gen
Length: 1400 words
Rating: PG
Warnings: None
Verse: ACD canon

Author's summary:This is a story I decided to write after reading The Adventure of the Three Students, after I read a really lovely, sexy slash fan fic, The Greek Tutor, about it. I found the canon story disturbing, and wanted to write a fic in the voice of the one character who doesn't speak a word during the story.

Reccer's comments: Really good gen fic is a treasure that often does not get the recognition, or readership, it deserves. Dealing with some of our negative reactions to and addressing the culture of Victorian England in a way that does not simply berate the past for not being the present, requires empathy, but also a capacity to reflect and a determination to do one's research. This has all that AND a plausible, believable story development and OMC in just a few hundred words. As a big Watson fan, I admit I cringed somewhat at her description of his interaction with the OMC, but in context it is uncomfortably likely that Watson, given his service experiences, would have behaved so.

The Third Student

Comments

this is actually not really any less tl;dr :(

[sussexdowns.livejournal.com]

Well, that wasn't quite what I meant. Let me see if I can condense my earlier tl;dr into something actually readable :\

Okay. Take The Sign of the Four. Highly problematic, imo. It's one of his stories that just makes me facepalm and repeat to myself "it was the 19th century, it was the 19th century..." because it's just so casually racist.

Contrast that with The Three Students which was both written and set about 10-15 years later, where the racial bias functions as a plot device. It's a definite misdirection for both the characters (presumably) as well as the reader who, at least at the time of publication, could be assumed to have the same bias. So essentially, he is kind of showing that up as wrong.

That's kind of what I was wondering about; if anyone else read the story the way I did, or if I'm just way off and everyone agrees with the schemingreader's interpretation.