Why Sherlock goes crazy after the "I love you" scene with Molly 

 (Sherlock meta by pafdoot)

Q: Sherlolly is destroying me, I can't stop thinking about them ;__; I'm curious, why do you think sherlock goes crazy after the "i love you" scene with Molly? I believe it is because it is destroying him knowing how much he has hurt Molly. Just wondering what your analysis of it is :)

 A: Ugh Nonny you and me both. I have done NOTHING productive all week. I JUST mustered up the attention span to clean my kitchen and as soon as I finished I’m back here lol.

I honestly think Sherlock destroying that coffin the way he did was a release of a lot of different emotions, the biggest one being obviously that he’s hurt Molly. However he’s hurt Molly a dozen times in the past in a similar way (think ASiB) and we’d never seen such an explosive reaction from him. At worst he’s been oblivious to hurting her, and at best he’s been ashamed because he understands that what he’s done is wrong.

Ugh I love Sherlock as a character so much because there’s just so freaking much to him and his psychology so allow me to get super nerdy for a minute here and explain my thoughts on what I just said:

The times we’ve seen Sherlock hurt Molly, specifically over her unrequited feelings towards him he’s reacted two ways. At first he was oblivious to having hurt her. When she introduces Jim to them Sherlock unknowingly humiliates Molly by deducing that he’s gay and before that he’d already slightly insulted her telling her she’d gained 3 pounds. When Molly runs away upset, Sherlock genuinely doesn’t know what he did wrong; in fact he thinks he did Molly a service by saving her the trouble of finding out for herself that Jim was gay. John has to explain it to him.

Then during ASiB, when their relationship is more established, this is where Sherlock is fascinating to me. He knows he’s hurt Molly. He understands that he’s embarrassed her and belittled her attempts at attracting him and he’s made himself look like a complete ass in the process. The thing is though, this early Sherlock is a sociopath. Sociopaths know how they should behave but it doesn’t come from instinct. At this point, though Sherlock is regretful for treating Molly the way he did and he sincerely apologizes, I think these are cues he’s taken from the relationships he’s developed with the people around him (mainly John). He hurts Molly and he knows he should be sorry, but chalk it up to the fact that he thinks Molly’s dating life/rituals (and by extension John’s -since we also saw him treat his date horribly RIP) are silly, or his being distracted by Irene and the case, or simply because he just didn’t have any feelings for Molly at this time, Sherlock understands that what he did was wrong, but he doesn’t truly feel the repercussions of it and how deeply he’s hurt Molly because he hasn’t ever allowed himself to be vulnerable enough to experience them.

It makes my soul shrivel up when people condemn Molly for being in love with someone who for years refused to love her back. Or call her weak for it. The moral of this show is that opening your heart up to others, making yourself vulnerable to loving others, is a door you can never close once you open it and it takes a lot of courage to do so because you get to take in the good parts, yes, and also the ones that tear you apart. We see it every single time Sherlock breaks Molly’s heart. We see it when Mary dies.

So after all of that long rambling essay…to answer your question Nonny:

I see Sherlock’s reaction as finally, actually understanding how much he hurt Molly. He finally understands the pain and the agony and the helplessness that comes with being in love that Molly has felt all of the years she’s been in love with him. He explodes because he feels it now. Sherlock has used Molly’s feelings before and he’s hurt her before and the only factor that’s different now is his reaction to it and the fact that the entire point of season 4 was to give Sherlock the most humanizing emotion he cannot run away from: romantic love.