John's and Sherlock's relationship 

(Sherlock Meta by Ivy Blossom)

Question: 

Hi. Wonderful analysis of Sherlock and John's relationship! However there is something that is bugging me. You said that prior to John telling Sherlock that he's his best friend and that he loves him, Sherlock didn't know that John loves him. However do you think that Sherlock was aware of John's attraction and obsession with him right from the start anyway, without realising it was actual love? Was Sherlock's wedding epiphany about his own feelings towards John? And how much is John aware of?

Ivy Blossom:

Based on these questions, I think you’re asking me to refute the arguments of another fandomer. I love loudest-subtext-in-television! Brilliant analyses, excellent endgame proposals! Very inspiring, and a joy to have in fandom! I desperately want to take that one out for a drink or five, let me assure you. That would be a hell of a night.

So, your questions:

Step by step, then: 1) how much does Sherlock know about John’s feelings for him, 2) what’s the story about a wedding epiphany, and 3) how much does John know (about his own feelings, or about Sherlock’s? I’ll assume Sherlock’s)?

1) Sherlock’s knowledge and understanding about John’s feelings for him?  When Sherlock’s own emotions are in play, he is terrible at working out what’s going on with other people emotionally. He fails to read Mary properly, and he fails to read John properly, entirely because he is overcome with emotion for John. He is in love and can’t see straight, basically.

Sherlock never understood how much John loved him. Remember the scene leading up to the fall when John was outraged at how people were representing Sherlock in the papers.

"Why do you care?" Sherlock asked him. Innocently. He really didn’t understand. Why would John care what people say about Sherlock? And we know the answer. It’s written all over John’s face, but he doesn’t say it. Because I love you. It’s so obvious, but it’s not obvious to Sherlock, and John doesn’t tell him the truth. He calls him a dick. Sherlock genuinely doesn’t know how important he is to John, even though he absolutely should know.

Sherlock thinks that John is “obsessed” with him. He knows that John is his friend. (Remember that John never tells Sherlock he’s his best friend to his face until he asks Sherlock to be best man. Even when Sherlock was on the pavement at Barts, John said, “He’s my friend.” It’s only to his therapist that he frames Sherlock as his best friend, and to be fair, that’s not the right term given the volume and variety of feelings John has for Sherlock. The only appropriate word is soulmate. But that’s another discussion.)

I think the idea of obsession is important there, because rather than reading love from John, Sherlock sees a kind of fannish obsession, not entirely unlike Anderson. Part of that may come from Sherlock’s own understanding of what’s valuable about himself, since he strives to be as rational and brilliant as he can, and he know John admires that about him. So I think he understands his relationship with John to be based on his deductive abilities and intelligence, not about him a whole human being.

Sherlock doesn’t value himself as a whole human being, so I don’t think he imagines for a second that John would, either. He’s terrible at being a whole human being, as he well knows. There’s nothing loveable about him as a whole, and he articulates that himself at the wedding. And John has stated as much multiple times on his blog, to others, and to Sherlock’s face. That might go some way toward explaining why he thought it would be fun to surprise John with his return; John, here’s your lost toy! Whee here I am! The fun has returned! The game is on! You and me against the world!

Sherlock’s understanding of his relationship with John is very flat and primitive, which isn’t too surprising given how flat and primitive Sherlock’s emotional life actually is. He’s been repressing it and ignoring it for years. He can think logically and clearly in terms of the motives of strangers, and he’s usually able to objectively observe when his emotional motives aren’t at play, but caring really isn’t an advantage to Sherlock.

I think if Sherlock were a looking at his relationship with John as an outsider, he would deduce the whole thing as a desperately unspoken love affair (just like we do!). But he doesn’t have the right perspective, and cares too much, and he can’t see it. He gets in his own way there.

I don’t think Sherlock is aware of John’s attraction to him in a complete or realistic way, and I don’t think he entirely understands his own feelings for John, either.

I don’t think Sherlock actually understands what he wants. I think it’s safe to say that he’s aware by the end of series three that he loves John in a way that we are meant to read as platonic at the wedding, and I’d say that he is aware that has a crush on him as well.

I think things were definitely edging into the flirtatious in 221b during the stag night, but flirtatious in a very pre-teen kind of way. I think that’s the level he’s reached by that point, which is way further than he was when he met Irene. So we have to give him some credit for progressing!  But he’s not at the full-on my bedroom is just over here, Dr Watson level of maturity. (Not quite yet.) I think we have to see Sherlock as a child emotionally, and he has to go through a sort of emotional puberty. He’s at the blush and giggle stage of sexuality, not the get your kit off, John Watson stage.

Sherlock fully shut down on learning that John considers him his best friend, above Mike Stamford. He didn’t expect that at all. That is one of the saddest things in the whole series, though it’s played as a joke. (The writers know it’s sad too. They clearly do.) In series three he is so massively stoked that John loves him as a human being, as a friend, that it drives him through all the wedding planning, the actual wedding, the speech, and prompts him to shoot a man in the head.

I think Sherlock is trying to keep pace with John emotionally, because he has been misreading him up until now and suddenly becomes aware of it. If he knew that John calling Sherlock his best friend is actually a very mild description of John’s actual feelings, I think Sherlock’s brain might explode. He still doesn’t understand, and John is in no way helping him to understand.

2) what’s the story about a wedding epiphany? This is loudest-subtext-in-television's thing, which is well documented here. I strongly recommend you read it! Lots of great points and arguments there!
When Sherlock is giving his best man speech and goes through his deductions, he gets overwhelmed, and Mycroft harangues him in his brain. He shoves Mycroft out of his head because the pressure was driving him mad. He points to John instead. “You. It’s always you. John Watson, you keep me right.”
You can read this a number of ways. My reading of this is the secondary theme running through this series about Sherlock and his brother, and how Sherlock is the way he is not because of his parents (who are lovely), but because of Mycroft. Mycroft has been his role model, because normal people have not been adequate role models for him.

Sherlock is a deeply emotional person with an extraordinary brain. We know that, left on its own, that extraordinary brain (and his extraordinary volume of emotion) will rip him apart. He’s had to learn to deal with it. He tried chemistry, he tried drugs, and then he found cases, and even that doesn’t entirely do it.

Sherlock is a kind half-formed creature that way, and constantly in agony because of it. The only real peer he’s had to help him through this is his brother, who is, as far as we can tell, more extraordinarily brilliant than Sherlock is, but entirely unemotional. He doesn’t have the inner conflict Sherlock has. He isn’t driven to keep himself from burning to pieces. This series shows us how Sherlock has been asipiring to be what Mycroft is: cold, self-sufficient and brilliant. But he can’t be his brother. He has to forge his own path. His own path will involve friends, because he knows his friends (okay, his friend) make him better.

What Sherlock has learned in working with John is that John is actually a better peer for him than his brother is. Mycroft in his brain makes things race too fast, there’s too much pressure, he can’t perform as well. The past, and his structures and methods from the past, the ones he built for himself with Mycroft’s guidance, and they aren’t working any longer. He can’t engage with the evidence the way he needs to with Mycroft in his head as his model and speaker of his internal house. He needs John.

On so many levels, he needs John. I don’t know if it’s a revelation in that moment, because he says the same thing over a game of Operation. But perhaps it is!  It doesn’t read to me as exclusively romantic or sexual, but it can also be that. In that moment, it’s an encompassing need, it’s about thinking and the work, about making him reach his potential, making him centred enough to make all the connections to save the life. (Sherlock’s life as well as Sholto’s.) With John he can progress and find the right answer. His brain and his heart can work together through John. John is the kernel of his emotional downfall (which Sherlock understands by that point) but also the lynchpin that can save him. “You keep me right.”

Sherlock has come to some sort of understanding about his feelings about John and John’s place in his life. I’m not sure how fully formed they are, but he is aware that John is the centre of his emotional world, and is critical to his intellectual world as well, but that he has just lost him. John has a wife and a baby now. He doesn’t have time to be Sherlock’s conductor of light, and Sherlock knows it.
3) how much does John know? John knows nothing. John genuinely knows absolutely nothing. He was devastated by Sherlock’s mock death, absolutely ruined by it. He’s still ruined by it the day Sherlock returns: he started crying when he visited Baker Street before attempting to propose to Mary. That is pain that would never, ever have left him.

It never occurs to John that Sherlock’s trite return is a mark of how poorly Sherlock understands John’s feelings for him. John assumes Sherlock knows how John feels (because Sherlock knows everything, for one, and because it’s incredibly obvious) and just doesn’t care. Because he’s a sociopath.

John asks Sherlock to be his best man, is stunned that Sherlock doesn’t already know that he’s John’s best friend, and blithely moves on to talk about the speech. Sherlock is not ready to talk about the speech. He’s still in shock that someone so important to him actually loves him. It doesn’t occur to John that that’s a big deal for Sherlock. John is moving on already, and Sherlock is still in start up mode over the revelation. John should have delved here. Sherlock was actually open for the delving, I think. John should have talked to him. But he didn’t. John doesn’t know how emotionally fragile Sherlock is, or how emotionally immature he is.

John must believe that he cares more than Sherlock does, because he’s capable of caring more, and because John didn’t pretend to be dead for shits and giggles and fail care how Sherlock would feel about it. John wrong from start to finish about Sherlock’s emotional life, but he has no way to tell that he’s wrong.

Sherlock repeatedly demonstrates to John that his conclusions about him are correct. The fake relationship with Janine is a case in point. He says loving him is “human error,” as if he himself is not human. He knows when people love him, but doesn’t care. We’re back to the machine comparisons. John has to see Sherlock as fully understanding of human emotion but incapable of real love and sentiment.

John knows Sherlock loves him, but he’s got to parse that love as the kind Sherlock is capable of, which, he must imagine, is different, of a much smaller volume and intensity than John himself is capable of. He could not be more wrong, but he doesn’t have the evidence to indicate that. He has evidence that supports his belief. It’s disappointing to John, but Sherlock is what he is, and John is doing his best to accept that.

John doesn’t fully flirt with Sherlock the way he does with women. But there was the knee grope, and the acknowledgement that he’s fine with groping Sherlock. There’s no question in my mind that John wants Sherlock on ever available level, but also that he’s entirely certain that it’s an unrequited thing, no matter what Sherlock says in best man speeches. Because Sherlock isn’t capable of loving the way John is. Sherlock isn’t an emotional, romantic, or sexual creature as far as John can tell. So it’s not personal.

It’s unclear to me how he understood Sherlock shooting Magnussen in the head for him. He knows that sacrifice is for him. He knows Sherlock loves him as well as he can. I’m not sure how he parses that experience, and I don’t think we’ll be able to really tell until series 4. I’m looking forward to it!