What Moffat and Gatiss have done with Sherlock’s characterization

(Sherlock meta by rachial)

It’s baffling to me that there are so many people who dislike what Moffat and Gatiss have done with Sherlock’s characterization. One of my favorite things about Sherlock is that it doesn’t have characters with stagnate personalities who never change. Watching Sherlock become more human as the series progresses has been an incredible experience for me, and I would not appreciate Sherlock anywhere near as much as I do now if John and Sherlock had the same characterization as they did in the first episode.

To become a great man, Sherlock needs to become braver, kinder, wiser and more human. (Sherlock admires these characteristics in other people, so it makes sense that he would also desire these traits in himself.) He needs to spend more time trying to understand his emotions instead of suppressing them. He needs to reflect on what he wants in his life and acknowledge the depth of his romantic feelings for John. He needs to realize that his callousness affects other people. He needs to grow up and become an adult, and that what he’s been doing and is going to continue to do.

Emotionality should never be equated with weakness. Sherlock is a better person as a result of the increase in his emotional range that we witnessed in the latest series. Apathy in its extreme form is a pathology, and it’s not something that’s admirable or enviable. You do not want to feel like an emotionless zombie or robot. You do not want to be devoid of all feeling and lack the ability to love. Sherlock’s drug use is an example of how damaging it is to suppress your emotions so effectively that you can’t handle them once they’ve been unleashed, and Sherlock doesn’t want to be a “high-functioning sociopath” no matter what he tells himself or the audience.

What Sherlock truly wants is the capacity to regulate his emotions so that they don’t overwhelm him, and he’s developed a persona to avoid getting hurt by other people even though he deeply desires love and acceptance. Sherlock is capable of feeling empathy, tenderness, love, joy, affection, sadness, grief, longing and every other emotion that the majority of us are capable of feeling. Sherlock’s personality shift did not come out of nowhere, and I would rather watch a well-developed character with strong emotions over a caricature of a cold-hearted genius who’s a “high-functioning sociopath” any day of the week.