tiger_moran | I have a lot of thoughts about this OK

I'm trying to write down what it is about that "Moriarty lived off the suffering and misery of other people" shit that someone (I don't know who) once claimed that really rubs me the wrong way and this does tie into that thing about what's wrong with Moriarty in AGoS is how they made him a bit too upper class, too privileged, Cambridge-educated and all of that, but it's kind of hard to articulate what I mean exactly especially when often I would be absolutely for making the 'bad guys' the wealthy upper class cis straight white guy who basically has every kind of privilege imaginable (though I don't actually think Moriarty is straight in AGoS, not at all) but this is Moriarty and he's just... not all of that canonically, he really isn't, and also it's that... the Victorian era is when capitalism really started to bite deep and really started to exploit people and so many people were killed or maimed or made sick by so many jobs - the mines, the railways, the sweat shops and the factories full of dangerous machinery or stuff that was highly toxic, etc etc. And you had rich people who still thought it was fine to send little kids up chimneys even after that got banned and shit like that. And there was no real compensation from the companies for people who died/got maimed/lost their husbands in their jobs or whatever. There was no real support either from the government for anyone who got injured or sick doing their job. So who's the real villain, Moriarty, who I'm sorry but is not going to for example steal from poor people (if only because, you know, they're poor and don't have shit to steal), who probably actually pays the people who do work for him well, and who canonically almost certainly does not come from a background of extreme wealth and privilege, or the probably already wealthy industrialists, the people who probably largely did come from a background of money and privilege and used that to exploit the poor and vulnerable to make themselves even more money and gain more power? Or the government who allowed shit like that to go on and sided with the industrialists and the capitalists? Or their 'agents', the police, the legal system, which punished people not only for actually serious crimes but also for being queer or for being poor and desperate or for protesting against injustice and oppression? I absolutely maintain my stance that Moriarty isn't the 'most dangerous man in London' because he causes harm to loads of innocent people, he is "dangerous" predominantly because he goes against the ruling classes and those who have power and wealth and even if he doesn't care that much about vulnerable people he is still perfectly capable of seeing how screwed up the whole system is.

I've watched bits of so many different versions of Moriarty meeting Holmes in the past couple of days. You know what's fun though (sarcasm), trying to figure out Moriarty's accent from an over 80 year old film with not very great sound quality when you often can't actually hear accents anyway. Although I'm still pretty sure Moriarty's accent in Silver Blaze (1937) seems to wander between sounding kind of English to sometimes sounding Irish (though Lyn Harding was Welsh so... who knows).