YMMV / Moriarty the Patriot

• Alternative Character Interpretation: William and his brothers kill corrupt, evil nobles and their Eat the Rich desire to tear down the social class system in their country led to many people calling him a Marxist-style communist. However, since The Final Problem arc reveals his true plan is to unite the rich and the poor in order to reform British society and he never indicates he's anti-monarchist, other fans argue that term doesn't apply. Some interpret that William's plan as more of a stepping stone to allow socialist ideals within the British society. Of course, the series itself never labels William's politics as any philosophy in particular, although he admires Maximilien Robespierre.
• Awesome Art: Hikaru Miyoshi's art in the manga and artwork bonuses is absolutely incredible not only in the character designs, but the visual effects and chapter covers and scenery.
• Bishōnen Jump Syndrome: The series is published in Jump SQ, a shonen magazine, but has a huge female fanbase because the characters are pretty men full of Ship Tease.
• Catharsis Factor:
  • After hunting innocent children, the deaths of Moires Baskerville and his minions are totally satisfying.
  • The deaths of all of Moriarity's targets are this. Each episode/chapter is dedicated to explaining and emphasizing exactly how heartless they are, which makes Moriarity enacting their Humiliation Congas and Karmic Deaths all the more satisfying.
• Complete Monster: These are the worst of the corrupt aristocracy that Moriarty faces:
  • Charles Augustus Milverton, the self-styled King of blackmailers, is the mastermind of the Ripper murders, forging the local fanatics into a serial killing unit to butcher the lower classes of society, all so he can cause a mass conflict and seize control in the ensuing chaos. Delighting in corrupting people into monsters and destroying their lives, Milverton targets a good-hearted reformer, Parliament member Adam Whiteley, by blackmailing a man into killing his brother and servants so Whiteley will murder the killer, after eliminating anyone who could possibly trace the crime to Milverton. Milverton ends up threatening Mary, the fiancée of Sherlock Holmes's best friend Watson, to turn Holmes and Moriarty against one another, relishing in referencing to himself as "evil itself" to contrast Moriarty.
  • Manga only:
    • "A Study in 'S'": Duke Enoch J. Drebber is a prolific Serial Killer and Serial Rapist of women who delights in torturing and breaking his victims. Using his noble status to dodge any repercussions, Drebber kidnaps women from his area who take his fancy and subjects them to horrors, including forcing the wife of Jonathan Hope into being his latest victim.
    • "The Hunting of the Baskervilles": Charles Baskerville is a creepily jovial noble who orders manhunts of children. Charming street children into coming into his carriage, Baskerville kidnaps them and then removes vital body parts from them before having them hunted down alongside his gang using his dogs and killed in horrific ways, with Baskerville having an entire collection of the skeletons and heads of the children he's killed as an exhibit. On one occasion, Baskerville forces a brother to take out his own eye if he wanted to save his sister before lying and forcing them to participate anyway and killing them both anyway. Disgusting Moriarty himself with his acts of horror, Baskerville is taken down just as he gleefully plans to kill a new pair of child siblings for his collection, which already numbers in the dozens if not hundreds.
    • "The Man with the Golden Army": Daryl is the psychopathic right-hand man of Duke Graham Dunderdale who assists him in prolonging the war in Afghanistan in order to prevent a direct war between Britain and Russia. Years before, Daryl infiltrated Moran's troop and lured them to be slaughtered by Afghan soldiers, personally killing one of them. Daryl helps his boss in his plan to kill the new Afghan king at a party the Duke organised, taking out all other attendees as Collateral Damage, and blaming it on terrorists in order to continue the war. Daryl captures Miss Moneypenny when she and Moran infiltrate the party, trying to make Moran kill her when he seems to defect to their side. While claiming that he is only doing what is necessary to preserve world peace, Daryl shows himself to be a sadistic coward who relishes in getting people killed, trying to kill Moran when the latter calls him out on it.
    • "The Valley of Fellows": Jack McGinty is a corrupt businessman and the vicious leader of the Scrowers gang. McGinty makes his profit by buying up land from people and has no issue killing or intimidating anyone who gets in his way. With entire towns destroyed by McGinty, the sheriff of the town of Vermissa, Pat Garrett, attempts to save his town by offering his own life. In response, McGinty has his men beat Garrett to death and his body posed in the center of Vermissa as a mocking warning. McGinty terrorises the citizens of a church discussing whether they should sell or fight into submitting to him. When one citizen objects to McGinty not treating them as human beings, McGinty has him stabbed to death and has the entire crowd massacred. McGinty later decides to wipe out Vermissa himself. McGinty is also a terrible boss and has no issue killing or endangering his own men, even forcing one to clear a minefield while unarmed. Facing off against Garrett's friend Henry Antrim, aka Billy the Kid, McGinty mocks his death and underhandedly tries to kill Henry twice, once during the fight and once when he's spared.
  • Anime premiere "The Earl's Crime": The Earl of Argleton is a sadistic noble who kills children to sate his bloodlust. He has the sons of working-class men whose services he uses kidnapped to be butchered before dumping their bodies on the street. The Earl kills six boys that way, plus another one he has seen performing on the street. When confronted by William Moriarty while in the process of choosing a new victim, the Earl sends his henchman to kill William.
• Estrogen Brigade: A lot of female viewers enjoyed watching the show due to the main cast being composed of handsome men.
• Evil Is Cool: As is commonly the case with a Villain Protagonist, much less a Magnificent Bastard like William, he's fun, he has great friends, and he's a dramatic theatre kid who knows exactly how to create a thrill, and his bucketload of murders are can almost be overlooked by fans.
• Foe Yay Shipping: Like most Sherlock Holmes adaptations, a lot of Yaoi Fangirls love the cat-and-mouse relationship Mind Game Ship between Sherlock and William. The fact that William said, "Catch me if you can, Mr. Holmes" can make a fangirl swoon. Of course, with all the Foe Romantic Subtext in the series and promotional art and manga covers such as this one, it's easy to see why.
• Friendly Fandoms: Given the subject matter, it's probably no surprise that Moriarty the Patriot shares a lot of fans with Death Note (for the warring between a detective and criminal protagonist) and Black Butler (just for the edgy Victorian era Ho Yay aesthetic, although the fact that Mycroft Holmes shares an English voice actor with Sebastian Michaelis doesn't hurt).
• Growing the Beard: The early episodes of the first season of the anime adaptation has a Monster of the Week structure where the Moriarty brothers fight off against evil aristocrats that they encountered. However, as the show goes on, many viewers find this structure very boring and tedious which gives little development to the main characters. It's only when Sherlock Holmes and John Watson showed up that the show becomes more interesting because now, William has finally faced a worthy adversary.
• Magnificent Bastard:
  • William James Moriarty himself is the criminal mastermind behind the "Lord of Crime" terrorizing the British Empire. He officially begins his crime spree at only eleven years old with the murder of original William James Moriarty and his entire family, taking the boy's name, family, and title to further his own goals. Even before he turned his hand to murder, he planned thefts in exchange for money, baked goods, any good turn someone could pass onto him, and cornered a noble in a court of law to threaten a man's life until William was promised all his worldly possessions, only to donate the money entirely to charity. As an adult, he is set on turning all of London into a stage for his great play to reveal the horrors rotting the aristocracy to show the abusive ruling class who the true devils in London are. William consults with those looking to plan a murder of their own if only it's interesting enough, serves his purposes, and they're willing to offer him their life in payment. William even charms the Great Detective, Sherlock Holmes himself into becoming his pawn, stringing him along like a puppet, all to save the country from its own corruption, and he won't be caught until his Failure Gambit comes to fruition and seals his victory.
  • Albert James Moriarty, the eldest son of the noble Moriarty family, may bend his knee to his younger adopted brother, Professor William James Moriarty, but never to the Lord of Crime's many enemies. Whether it's manipulating Mycroft Holmes into giving him the title of "M" to use MI6 for his own nefarious purposes, or killing his own blood family as a teenager with the help of the two devious orphans he adopted as brothers, nothing stands between Albert and his goal of a better world. Clever, dangerous, opportunistic, and so charming he can't keep the ladies away even after a stint in prison and renouncing his title, Albert plays his role as CoDragon to perfection with A Glass of Chianti always in reach.
  • Colonel Sebastian Moran is the charismatic right-hand man of William Moriarty. Moran helps facilitate all of Moriarty's best gambits with stylish grace, such as using his sharpshooting techniques to frame an aristocrat's murder as a suicide/accident or setting fires all across London to unite the city. A brilliant mastermind in his own right, Moran deduces the source of guns being used to fund the Afghan-British war and sets about dismantling the operation. He feigns that he has switched sides to the conspirators and seemingly kills his ally, only to fake her death and get her to evacuate all their potential victims. He then totally breaks the conspirators before Killing them. Even with Moriarty's seeming death, Moran continues to faithfully serve his mission to rid the world of the corrupt aristocracy and when he discovers Moriarty is alive, happily retires to faithfully serve him once more.
  • Sherlock Holmes is a brilliant but eccentric detective acknowledged by William as his equal. He serves as a consulting detective for Scotland Yard, using his brilliant deductive skills and information gathered by the children of Baker Street to solve crimes. Meeting William while cruising Noathic, Sherlock almost immediately figures there was more to the supposed murder committed by a bloodthirsty noble. After being framed for the murder of Duke Drebber, Sherlock quickly clears his name and finds the true culprit while bringing Drebber’s depravities to light. When promised the identity of the mysterious Lord of Crime if he kills Drebber’s true murderer, Sherlock ultimately decides that he wants to solve the crime himself rather than being given the answer. He starts correctly suspecting William as his target while he continues solving high profile cases. Sherlock learns that the fiancée of his partner Watson, Mary, is being blackmailed by the infamous Charles Milverton, and devises a plan to kill him and free Mary. After officially discovering William as the Lord of Crime, Sherlock prevents him from committing suicide and instead convinces him to seek redemption. He spends years in America working as a Pinkerton detective before returning to help MI6 catch a traitor at William’s request. Sherlock joins MI6 alongside William, reuniting with his friends and ready to begin a new life.
  • "A Scandal In British Empire" arc: Maximilien Robespierre, infamous French revolutionary and architect of the Reign of Terror, was actually a British agent in charge of a social experiment meant to demonstrate what would happen if power was swiftly and violently given to the people. Real name Sherrinford Holmes, he took the identity of Robespierre and become the main strategist of the French Revolution. When his scapegoating of the noble class resulted in people demanding all of them be executed, Robespierre organized the Reign of Terror, killing countless nobles and common people alike, in order to redirect the people’s hatred towards himself. He secretly goaded the revolutionary leadership into executing him with seemingly nonsensical talk about traitors in revolutionary mists, eventually becoming the final victim of revolutionary bloodshed.
• Narm: Toward the end of The Final Problem, William's plan to set fire to London and convince the nobles and commoners to work together is proven effective by featuring an entire two page spread devoted to showing a commoner and nobleman joining hands together on a pail of water...which may have been poignant if not for the number of times London has been on fire without fixing the class system and the absolute ludicrousness of the idea that passing a bucket of water together would heal class divides as deep and abusive as the ones portrayed in the series. Instead, it can come off as so over-the-top simplistic that the only possible reaction is laughter.
• Narm Charm: When Scotland Yard brought out a Gatling gun to kill Jack, Bond uses a coin flip which was accurately shot by Moran and his bullet jams the Gatling gun's rotating barrel, causing it to explode. That scene is so ridiculous that it even broke the laws of physics! Still, viewers find it awesome which can be compared to the infamous "Matrix Boobs" from Highschool of the Dead.
• Older Than They Think:
  • This is not the first time Moriarty became a POV protagonist and an Anti-Hero. Michael Kurland is one of the first who wrote about it entitled The Infernal Device back in 1978. It even spawned three sequels.
  • This is also not the first time the events of "The Final Problem" are fabricated. Nicholas Meyer's The Seven-Per-Cent Solution predates it back in 1974 though the circumstances are very different where Watson wrote "The Final Problem" to cover up Holmes' descent into drug addiction and recovery and Moriarty is really just an ordinary maths tutor.
  • A crossover between Sherlock Holmes and James Bond? This actually happened before with Alan Moore's The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen which has "M" being Moriarty until the end of Volume 1 after Mycroft takes his position.
• One True Pairing: The fandom massively favors the pairing of Sherlock and William. So much so that the normal OTP of Sherlock Holmes adaptations, John/Sherlock, is practically nonexistent. Since the series is emphasizing it close to canon, this is not entirely unexpected.
• Theme Pairing: The fandom is dominated by people shipping William and Sherlock, who are emphasized in the series to be very similar people constantly and are two sides of the same annoying, brilliant, hyper-competitive, justice-seeking coin who are also the exact same age and height.
• They Changed It, Now It Sucks!:
  • A lot of manga readers didn't like how the anime didn't adapted certain chapters which shows more characterization of the side characters and the relationship between Sherlock and William. In fact, many manga readers find not including "The Adventure of the One Student" was a huge mistake because it made many anime-only viewers confused by Sherlock suddenly seeing William as a friend despite not meeting with each other in the entire second cour until their showdown with Milverton. It's no surprise since the show ended, many manga readers have been encouraging the anime-only viewers to read the manga so they can get a better context on the characters and Sherlock and William's relationship.
  • VIZ Media changed Sherlock calling William "Liam" into simply "William," frustrating and disappointing fans very attached to the affectionate nickname Sherlock used for his rival. The Spanish translations changed "Liam" to "Will" which also annoyed fans.
• Unexpected Character: Billy the Kid was not a name almost anyone (if anyone at all) expected to see appear in a Sherlock Holmes/James Bond adaptation.
• Unintentionally Unsympathetic: Albert stabbed his younger brother and then burned down his house with his family inside. His family are horrifically classist Jerkasses who abused William and Louis, but even as nasty as his biological younger brother is, he's still a young teenager. His mother is awful, but while his father is shown to be an arrogant man who only adopted the orphans for female attention, he's still nowhere as cruel as the other two. As Albert's family were not abusive in the same way to him, his actions may come across as very callous and hard to stomach and may seem like Disproportionate Retribution. While Albert does get an explanation for his reasons rooted in religion and mental health issues, it comes very late, and after the anime storyline had already ended.

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