So while reading the ACD canon, I found a few quotes which caught my attention.
John: ‘He always apologized to me for putting me to this inconvenience.’
’..he usually terminated [his violin solos] by playing in quick succession a whole series of my favourite airs as a slight compensation..’
Sherlock: “.. if I show you too much of my method of working, you will come to the conclusion that I am a very ordinary individual after all.” John: “I shall never do that.”
Sherlock: “But I weary you with my hobby.” John: “ Not at all.”
This shows how much Sherlock feared that John would end up disliking him. He always took care not to offend him, and to apologize again and again if he did. John’s replies were always:
“I shall never do that.”
“Not at all.”
Is it any wonder that Sherlock let him into his life? He was surprised each time when John complimented him instead of being weirded out by his eccentric ways. He probably never expected to find anyone who would accept him for who he was. So when John tells him that he would never get tired of the way he made his deductions, Sherlock actually flushes with pleasure.
John: “My companion flushed up with pleasure at my words, and the earnest way in which I uttered them.”
This shows how much of a sensitive person Sherlock Holmes was underneath the mask of cold reason. He was never a person who did not care.. In fact, he was a smol baby person who cared deeply.
Clever characters who can weasel their way out of any situation go back to the earliest days of western literature, when ancient Greek hero Ulysses, star of the Odyssey, outsmarted the cyclops and figured out how to listen to the sirens’ song without killing himself. In the east, the character Sun Wukong (AKA the Monkey King) plays a similar role, using his trickster cunning to keep the bad guys down. Indeed, most competence porn heroes have an element of the Monkey King’s trickster ways—they may use logic to defeat death, but they’ll tell a few jokes and pull a few beards along the way.
Probably the most important figure in competence porn today is Sherlock Holmes, a character who was born during at the height of scientific industrialism in the nineteenth century. Like the heroes who came in his wake, Sherlock is a master of deduction, social engineering, and getting out of traps by using whatever random items happen to be at hand. He’s also a smartass. It’s tough to be the biggest nerd in the room, especially when you have answers to everything. So Sherlock develops a rather dry, sardonic sense of humor to cope—and to mess with his dimmer colleagues.
With Sherlock’s shadow looming large over the genre, it’s no wonder that many of competence porn’s greatest creations are also detectives or problem-solvers of various kinds. In the latter half of the twentieth century, we had a slew of them in Doctor Who, MacGyver, The Equalizer, Prime Suspect, Aliens and of course every James Bond movie ever made. And let’s not forget the 2010s masterpieceBurn Notice, which always had those incredibly cheesy-yet-satisfying voiceovers where Michael Westen explains how to use an old Commodore 64 to hack the traffic system, or a piece of gum to shut down a nuclear power plant. (OK I made those up, but you know what I mean.)
The point is, these are heroes who treat even action-packed fights as intellectual puzzles. And generally, they never miss a chance to deliver a good quip.
I may end up talking about Sherlock’s love life and the nature of the narrative in BBC Sherlock all the time, but this is actually what draws me to Sherlock Holmes as a character, haha. His squishy center is like the frosting, but the competence kink thing was the cake itself for Big Damn Nerd ten year-old me. I still like competent heroes the most, and I daresay so does Moffat, apparently (since Doctor Who is another variant according to this article). No matter the evidence to the contrary, I still believe Sherlock Holmes can solve anything. The badass competent hero thing combined with the squishy center is my kryptonite. In this too he’s not alone (see: Spock in particular), but BBC Sherlock is so addictive to me because it’s about the innate limitations and conflicts of the character as well as the huge transformative potential.
Essentially, to be a ‘competence porn’ star, you have to be a static character in some sense, because (as many of the entries in the genre, like the Hunger Games books, show), if they have too much growth, they start accumulating trauma. And once the character accumulates enough trauma (like Sherlock in Series 3), it becomes difficult for the audience to really believe they’re superhuman. Once that bubble pops, the allure fades for many of the people who were drawn in by the archetype in the first place (as we see with many Sherlock fans leaving).
What I really think is unique about BBC Sherlock, like I said, is that it explores this tension– and in my opinion, the existence of a character arc that serves to increase competence through a trial by fire, eventually integrating emotion into his facade of reason, makes this incarnation absolutely one of a kind. The character is not static, and so has the freedom to grow and reflect various aspects– both the inner conflict and the untapped potential– of the archetype. I always wanted to read stories like that about Spock, like the second to fourth Star Trek movie arc except more in-depth– because I always knew they were possible. I never accepted the idea that this heroic type was limited by their very strength.
I think the most interesting part is when the character who can know everything and do anything faces his limits, and then learns to transcend them. You can think of this character as the perfect human machine: the apotheosis of technophilic humanity. And learning– learning is the biggest thing that humans excel at, the thing that allows our most impressive leaps. Of course– of course I want to see competence porn, now with less character stasis and more learning. This is Sherlock Holmes going back to his roots as Ulysses: the man who was never content to be the smartest one in the room, but was always the most unexpected. Ulysses learned short-term, through a more meandering Hero’s Journey arc; Sherlock improves on this ancient model, and learns long-term tricks. This, then, is how you build a better human.
At the time the Sherlock Holmes stories were first written by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, the detective’s street address of 221B Baker St. was the literary equivalent of a “555” phone number in a movie today. In other words, it didn’t exist; even then, creators presumably knew that not all their fans had a grasp on reality, and might come calling on a fictional character.
In the 1930s, however, the street numbering changed, and the address became real. And yes, as you’d expect, people have kept writing letters, only now they actually get delivered. So what happens to them? It’s not quite a mystery to try every neuron of Holmes’ intellect, but it was certainly something we didn’t know until now. But thanks to the YouTube channel matter-of-factly known as “Today I Found Out,” well, today we…you know.
Fittingly, it’s not quite as simple as “there’s this guy who gets them.” There’s a bank involved, a museum, a power struggle, and a London government that frankly never wanted to be bothered with the whole thing. If you were hoping Benedict Cumberbatch would write back to you, forget it. But as we learn, responses of a sort are not entirely out of the question. What kind? You’ll have to watch the video and see.
Still subscribing to the idea that Mycroft helped get rid of John’s chair for Sherlock. And he easily put it back when Sherlock asked him to return it.
oh god
Mycroft moved Sherlock’s metaphorical world for him.
help me
… also tell me more
A couple of days after he moves it, he checks back in with Sherlock, to see that while he’s a little bit functional, he’s obviously been sleeping on the floor where the chair use to be. So he helps him up and has him sit on his chair, and Sherlock automatically curls up in it. Mycroft keeps doing this until Sherlock habitually starts to gravitate back towards his chair, curling up in it first before sitting up in it properly.
ohhhhhhhhhhh my god
When Sherlock escapes the hospital, he calls up Mycroft, even though he doesn’t want to.
“I need it back.”
“Are you sure, baby brother?”
“Yes. I need it back. In twenty minutes.”
After a long sigh, Mycroft gives in. “Of course. Twenty minutes. It’ll be returned in ten…”
fffffffffffffffffffff
So he returns the chair, back into it’s proper place, as if he’d never removed it. And he waits to see how long Sherlock’s world is restored and keeps his eye out – just in case he needs to move it around again (and he would, the moment Sherlock asked, he would), to keep Sherlock upright, grounded, and as unscathed as possible.
Because that’s what big brothers are meant to do, correct?
