Irene Adler is Sherlock

 (Sherlock Meta by Ivy Blossom)

This Irene Adler is a female version of Sherlock, so it’s no wonder they’re fascinated with each other. She literally is, I’m not being metaphorical: look at her. She’s rail thin with high cheekbones. They’ve even styled her hair as an echo of Sherlock’s. She puts on his coat and deduces alongside him. Irene is Sherlock.

She’s got a live-in friend who loves her and does her errands for her and takes care of her, but isn’t, it seems, her girlfriend. Though you certainly get the impression that she’d like to be. They are both dangerously clever. They both take care with their appearance and their costumes in order to elicit the reaction they want in the people they meet. Their realms are different, but process and the goals are pretty much the same.

I grant you, dominatrix and consulting detective are a bit far off as professions, but they have some similar elements. Sherlock and Irene are both self-employed, for one. They peer into people’s souls and determine their motives for a living. They walk into a room and take control of it, and the people around them find that irresistibly attractive. People seek them out for their expertise. They are both expert manipulators with big egos and secret emotional lives. They both want you to think they are cold, calculating, brilliant and invulnerable, and they both want to be that, but they’re both lying.

They are both fascinated by Moriarty. And they’re both gay.

Initially I thought Irene was a version of Sherlock before he met John; she’s Sherlock in the past tense, colder, valuing only the game, willing to do more than just flirt with evil. But after series three, it’s clearer that Irene was a premonition of what was to come for Sherlock. She was a bright, blinking light that said: Sherlock will fall in love, and it will very nearly kill him, except that someone will intervene at the last possible moment.

I never thought Sherlock was romantically or sexually interested in Irene, but he is clearly fascinated and disturbed by her. But can you blame him? She’s him. He’s looking in a mirror, and not really sure what to make of what he sees. He loves his reflection and he loathes it at the same time. He rejects himself and all his worst fears about himself, condemns himself to death, but then gives himself another chance in the end. Live to love another day, Sherlock.