I definitely don't think there's anything wrong with psychosomatic injuries appearing in fiction in principle. But they're a lot more vulnerable to being inconsistently written and the kind of thing people introduce into stories just because it allows them to make the injury appear and disappear to suit the plot. If they had surprised me and not done that then I wouldn't have had a problem with it, but they did.
If they HAD to have Watson be able to run (and I'm not sure they did, there's ways around it) then they still could have had the injury be variable without playing so completely into the tropes they did. It's not something I can explain very well but to me they clearly wanted to have their cake and eat it too, have Watson be injured but never have that injury inconvenience them as writers. Compare, say, Toph and Teo from "Avatar the Last Airbender", whose disabilities are mostly counteracted in ways that let the writers include them in action scenes etc, but still inconvenience them when it makes sense for them to, not just when the writers want to go "Oh, look at the sad disabled person".
If they wanted to make the limp vanish and be inconsistent for homage reasons then I can kind of see that but it still feels like the "It's ok that this character is a -ist stereotype, it's irony!" defense which rarely convinces me unless it's done in a much more clever and obvious way. Plus that's still no excuse for being all "Oh poor Watson and his limp, having to use a cane is so saaaad" thing.
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If they HAD to have Watson be able to run (and I'm not sure they did, there's ways around it) then they still could have had the injury be variable without playing so completely into the tropes they did. It's not something I can explain very well but to me they clearly wanted to have their cake and eat it too, have Watson be injured but never have that injury inconvenience them as writers. Compare, say, Toph and Teo from "Avatar the Last Airbender", whose disabilities are mostly counteracted in ways that let the writers include them in action scenes etc, but still inconvenience them when it makes sense for them to, not just when the writers want to go "Oh, look at the sad disabled person".
If they wanted to make the limp vanish and be inconsistent for homage reasons then I can kind of see that but it still feels like the "It's ok that this character is a -ist stereotype, it's irony!" defense which rarely convinces me unless it's done in a much more clever and obvious way. Plus that's still no excuse for being all "Oh poor Watson and his limp, having to use a cane is so saaaad" thing.