Sherlock and Irene are mirror images of each other

 (Sherlock Meta by Loudest Subtext In Television)

Anonymous said:

Hello! I've just been binging on your meta blog and I had a small epiphany of my own. I believe that Sherlock and Irene are mirror images of each other. Irene is the sensual and sexy and Sherlock is the cold reason and deduction. They each have elements of the other. When sherlock does come out to John (which I know he will) he'll do it in the same way that Irene did *well I am* there's so much more that I could say but it won't let me. I'd love to hear your opinions on the matter.

Loudest Subtext In Television:

It’s my reading of The Great Game and A Scandal in Belgravia that Moriarty and Irene both are presented as distorted mirror images of Sherlock for the purpose of making John think he’s not what Sherlock is looking for even if Sherlock is capable of feeling something for someone.  Sherlock is always insulting John’s intelligence, after all, and doesn’t even like the blog he keeps about Sherlock.

In The Great Game, we get the first mirror aspect reference when John snaps at Sherlock and says he hopes he’ll be very happy with Moriarty.  (We get the other on the rooftop in The Reichenbach Fall.)  Then Moriarty flirts a lot with Sherlock at the pool scene, Sherlock responds to the is-that-a-gun-or-are-you-just-happy-to-see-me line with “Both,” etc.  John offers to die for Sherlock, Moriarty leaves, and John nervously jokes that people might think they’re a couple — which Sherlock thinks is so funny, of course he does.

In A Scandal in Belgravia, we have Irene Adler, who is like Sherlock mostly in that she’s very clever.  We get the mirror aspect because she literally wears his coat and robe.  Sherlock seems to be obsessed with her, so John thinks he’s just into crazy geniuses, insane people like Irene that drug him and beat him.  (I’m absolutely serious.)  And Sherlock won’t talk about the conversation he overheard, so John feels officially rejected.  Then he seems to maybe be in love with her when he takes her phone, but it wasn’t about that at all.

I’m going to post a big reading of A Scandal in Belgravia hopefully soon, but the episode is a huge, huge massive misunderstanding between John and Sherlock.  I don’t mean they could have gotten together then — Sherlock didn’t want to, he never really thought much about sex or love because they seem destructive to him — but John makes a lot of assumptions you could make about anyone who wasn’t Sherlock.  Sherlock doesn’t realize that him and John being a couple wouldn’t be some weird destructive thing, he just assumes it would be some normal person thing with expectations: he would continually disappoint John because he does that even as a flatmate, and John would leave.  Sherlock’s MO from the start has basically always been to balance John’s expectations of him, and to behave just well enough so that John doesn’t leave.  Not because he’s too lazy to try harder, but it’s really that difficult for him and he doesn’t even know when he’s about to screw up most of the time.  Sherlock realized at the pool that the thought of losing John is unconscionable to him and that’s why he starts trying to act better in series 2.

He really hates how he can’t think clearly when John is in danger, though, or how edgy it makes him when John isn’t around.  He struggles with that a lot in series 2: when he can’t think clearly in Baskerville, he has his epic meltdown and tries to push John away and tell himself he doesn’t have friends.  Sherlock doesn’t want to need anyone but can’t help it.  Whether he can accept the anxiety that comes with caring about another person is the reason for all his hot and cold behavior toward John.

We see that Sherlock rejects both of his mirrors (why he rescued Irene I’ll get into) but John never sees it that way.  Sherlock doesn’t want someone like Moriarty or Irene: those people are puzzles to him, so he seems obsessed with them, but it isn’t sexual.  He couldn’t be with someone like that.  He likes the steadiness John provides because he’s on edge around other people, especially people like Irene who keep trying to manipulate him and drug him and beat him and embarrass him in front of Mycroft and so on.  He can’t just relax around crazy people, they’re always trying to hurt him or John.  When they’re around he has to give them all his focus or he could slip up and John might die.

What Irene represents to Sherlock by series 3 is the unknown of sex, and the conversation he overheard between her and John.  It doesn’t hit Sherlock until the wedding that he’s been in love a long time without realizing it: he thought love would look like something else, something fake and destructive and Irene-y, where people screw each other over.  He had assumed a relationship with John wouldn’t work because he would just fuck everything up and John would be disappointed and leave, but he realizes he’s always fucked everything up and John has just accepted him.  John considered him his best friend despite all that the whole time, and Sherlock hadn’t even realized.  A relationship would have been the same thing as always, just the two of them at Baker Street, except they’d have sex too.  And now John just left him for someone who would have sex with him.  Whoops.

I think it’s plausible Irene would come up, because it’s implied by the soundtrack in The Empty Hearse that John thinks Sherlock was in love with her, if anyone.  That’s what he thought it meant when he wanted the phone.  But Sherlock keeps mementos of all his big cases.  Sherlock genuinely disliked her and wasn’t sexually attracted to her, at least how I read it, and only helped her because John wanted him to save people’s lives more often; in The Great Game, John had nearly refused to help him with the case because Sherlock wasn’t upset enough over some dead people.  If Sherlock had turned Irene away, he’d get an earful about how heartless he was, he expected.  If Irene turned up dead in the end, John would blame him.  (God I need to write up A Scandal in Belgravia), but I think Sherlock thought that Irene got into a witness protection program after he saved her, and he was glad not to have that cloud hanging over his head.  He was happy because Irene never got anything over on him in the end: if her death had made John leave him, she really would have beaten him.)  It would certainly help things a lot if John heard Sherlock explain that.  I get the feeling if John ever saw Sherlock with anyone (especially a guy) the first thing he would ask is, “What about Irene?”  Maybe it would start there.

I think I’ll just go write up A Scandal in Belgravia right now, I’m practically doing it already…