2.5 rounded up to 3

I had such high hopes for this series. Coming on the heels of the likes of 'Black Butler' and 'Godchild', and the sundry other Victorian noir manga starring morally ambiguous twinks with great fashion sense, I thought, 'well heck, Sherlock Holmes fanfiction starring an anime-boyified Moriarity is the perfect choice for this niche subgenre.'

I was mistaken.

Now listen: as a leftist in my 20s, I am all for the catharsis of seeing the Victorian artistocracy eat crow and maybe even getting murdered a little, but if you're going to give me that wrapped in a T+ rating, then treat me like I'm a T+ reader, not someone just coming into a sense of class consciousness. And frankly, even if I were, I wouldn't need every other page (and I do not exaggerate) to remind me that rich people are leeches lounging about with their feet up while the underclass suffers. I get it. But what about some poor little rich kid? If they picked this up and got the lecture of how much they suck in every third panel, don't you think they'd be a little defensive? It's just words, after all.

But imagine if this were shown. It's not like there are no examples (opression of the working class being a real thing and all) of genuine injustice -- use them. Have young master Moriarity witness these things and come to question the validity of this class stratification, go on a little internal journey, have an existential crisis. Something.

But no, no. From page one, our boy gets it, and from his mansion, I tell you what, he's gonna do something about it. Interpersonally.

Cuz that's the thing, see. The big problem with just having every single aristocrat (except our titular white knight, of course) be a massive jerk is that it makes it a 'bad person' problem rather than a 'bad system' problem. Moriarity and his brothers are good landowners and don't tax the peasants to the point that they starve. Love that for them. Meanwhile, their neighbor is a big meanie who even refused to let a lowely member of the hoi poloi bring her dying child to see his doctor because... because he's just not a nice person ???

The message here being: we're going to break the system by... being nicer aristocrats than the ones who are...not nice.

Why, if I so disliked the execution, did I give this 3 stars then, you might ask.

Two reasons. One, as much as I deeply dislike the execution, the idea of Moriarity being re-imagined as a kind of Robinhood-esque figure is neat, and it could have been quite interesting to see how that would have changed the framing of Sherlock Holmes in a narrative about class warfare.

It's not what we got, but there was a good idea in there somewhere.

Two, the artwork by Hikaru Miyoshi is really, really gorgeous. Granted, many of her characters look frustratingly similar, but the backgrounds: stunning. The aesthetic: sublime.

If only I could say the same about the plot and writing.

Ah, well. I suppose that's what AO3 is for, amirite?