application.
P L A Y E R I N F O R M A T I O N
Your Name: Melissa
OOC Journal:![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
kreugan
Under 18? If yes, what is your age?: Nope
Email + IM: yogilates @ gmail/kreugan @ aim
Characters Played at Ataraxion: Josh Levison, Hal Yorke, Scott McCall
C H A R A C T E R I N F O R M A T I O N
Name: Sherlock Holmes
Canon: Elementary
Original or Alternate Universe: Original
Canon Point: Post S1
Number: RNG!
SETTING. Vanilla, modern-day Earth! Specifically New York. Wiki page here.
HISTORY.
In the interest of not going insane, this history will focus on Sherlock’s personal history without much rehashing of the individual cases featured on the show (procedurals gosh). The details of Sherlock’s childhood are slim on the show, but it’s (probably) safe to say he had an older brother – Mycroft Holmes – and that he had a complicated relationship with his father. It’s said that his father shipped him off to boarding school when he was eight years old. The implication is that he and his father weren’t very close, but it’s difficult to say the cause. Sherlock tends to keep his personal history close to his chest, and he has a habit of outright lying. We learn from others that he was a pretty weird kid (setting his own broken bones, connecting with people not remotely his own age) and probably grew up super wealthy, judging by his father's reputation.
One thing he does say is that he’d trade his father for a Tic-Tac, so it’s probably safe to assume that Sherlock, for his part, does not think highly of their bond. What we do know is that Sherlock has a very nebulous sense of self-worth. He acts cocky, and he’s certainly confident in his abilities, but he doesn’t seem to have much regard for himself as a human being – something that may have developed from dealing with an unsupportive or emotionally undermining parent. Sherlock describes himself as having been a “know-it-all” as a child. While speaking with a young suspect who was kidnapped and manipulated by a killer, Sherlock’s able to relate to the boy’s bond with his kidnapper by relating it to his own unhealthy codependence on a school bully – the only person who paid him any real attention as a child. He convinced himself that he deserved the abuse, and that it was given as a form of affection to help him straighten himself out. Despite Sherlock’s inability to connect with people, he was desperate for it, and he was quick to latch onto the first connection he could despite it being incredibly negative and unhealthy.
It's important to note that Sherlock says he made this all up to get in good with the suspect, but given what we know of his childhood and his reluctance to open up, he may have said that in an effort to keep Joan out. This was still fairly early in their relationship, and Sherlock's seen lying to Joan multiple times thereafter about his father and his past with Irene. Even if it was all complete bullshit, Sherlock was able to put himself in that mindset extremely easily and extremely convincingly; meaning even if the details aren't a sure thing, the emotions behind them and his personal experience with similar issues can't be ignored.
The next semi-solid evidence we have about Sherlock’s past is his stint with New Scotland Yard. His professional career has mostly been in homicide, but Gregson states that Sherlock consulted on anti-terrorism investigations post-9/11. Sometime while living and working in London, he met Irene Adler. Sherlock was smitten with her immediately. She reeled him in with her mind and kept him there, drawing him into a deeply emotional and dependent romantic relationship. It’s later revealed that this was a front on Irene’s part. Turns out Irene was, in fact, the crime lord Moriarty. Sherlock had become a nuisance to her crime network, so she decided to seduce him to distract him from his work. From Sherlock’s perspective, he was deeply in love with an amazing woman. He was happy. Then Irene faked her own death, blaming it on “Moriarty”, and Sherlock fell into a violent downward spiral of addiction and self-destruction. His friend Alistair tells Joan that when Irene died, Sherlock shut down, turning to drugs to drown out his reality.
It doesn’t work, or at least not the way he’s expecting. The cases themselves don’t offer him anything, but the connections he makes with other people along the way begin to slowly draw him out of the reclusive and angry shell he’s built around himself. His developing bond with Joan is top among them, but Sherlock is affected in various ways by each person they encounter during their investigations. His sympathy for victims and criminals alike forces him to confront myriad emotions in himself, and slowly but surely, he begins to work through his insecurities and open up to others. Things get a bit messy when he comes face-to-face with Moran, the theoretical murderer of Irene. Sherlock digresses: his emotional stability falls in the face of a blind thirst for revenge. He tortures Moran in an attempt to get information on Moriarty, and it causes friction between himself and his friends at the police department.
The rest of the season deals with various hired assassins and misdirects as Sherlock tries to track down Moriarty. Unexpectedly, he finds Irene instead – only to find out that she is Moriarty, and that he’d been played all along. Sherlock doesn’t take it well, but he doesn’t keep pining. Moriarty is a killer, and Sherlock’s sense of right and wrong is strong enough to leave very little room for a gray zone once the truth’s out. That doesn’t mean he’s on his game – he’s emotionally compromised, and his tactics fall apart. In the end, it’s Watson who helps Sherlock accept that he can’t see the forest through the trees, and he trusts her to take the lead. It works. Watson outsmarts Moriarty, and Moriarty is taken into custody. It’s a bitter victory for Sherlock, and it’s not remotely the outcome he’d expected, but there is finally a sense of resolution to Irene’s "death". More importantly, the entire ordeal cements the fact that Sherlock can trust Watson completely, and it’s her influence that has made Sherlock confident and stable enough to survive the emotional maelstrom left in Moriarty’s wake.
Ultimately: the mystery of Irene is solved, if in a truly awful way. It opens up new wounds to deal with, but it lays to rest Sherlock’s thirst for vengeance - or at the very least makes such a confused mess of it that it becomes hard for him to properly express, and it loses its forward momentum. His relationship with Watson is rock solid, and they’ve become professional partners. More importantly, he’s slowly learning to accept his own self-worth, as well as how to properly embrace and cope with his own tumultuous emotions. He’s still eccentric, and he still has tons of baggage, but the man who started as a bitter shell is very close to becoming a healthy whole.
PERSONALITY.
While he's very passionately driven to help people in need, ranging from the homeless to victims of violent crimes, it wouldn't be accurate to say he's a strictly good person. He's willing to fight dirty if he needs to, and if he thinks someone's a jerk, he's quick to be an even bigger jerk back. He seems to have no problem judging others. He can also be insulting, deliberately or not, due to his own shallow ego and intelligence, though he arguably thinks people are being overly sensitive if they get offended at him pointing out simple facts. If he says he's smarter than someone, he tends to think he's just stating the obvious. The influence of Watson, Bell and Gregson opens him up to the realization that everyone has their own strengths, just as he's got many weaknesses. While this improves his appreciation for others on a deeper level, he's still fairly unapologetically blunt on the surface.
At the core, he’s a truly kind individual. He feels deeply for others, sometimes to a degree that he struggles with, and his apparent detachment is in many ways simply a coping mechanism. He reacts badly when his failure on a case ends in people getting hurt, taking personal responsibility for it. Another coping mechanism is his reliance on logic. If it’s illogical to dwell on something, he won’t (or he’ll certainly try not to, or put up an admirable front of it). In the case of Irene/Moriarty, this is taken to extremes. When he discovers Irene is Moriarty and has been manipulating him all this time, he a) has a meltdown and b) detaches himself from the situation, treating her as a simple criminal. There’s no obvious pity or sympathy in his behavior towards her, though there’s no pretending his feelings towards Moriarty are in any way simple.
Sherlock’s not a robot. He’s a genius, and he tends to approach things in methodical (if seemingly extremely random) ways, but his biggest fault is his inability to keep his emotions in check. When he figures out a man killed a woman and took advantage of his position as a medical professional to frame a clinically insane man, Sherlock goes to him personally to throw the accusation in his face. When the result is the man’s confident statement that Sherlock has no solid evidence against him, Sherlock loses his temper and drives Joan’s car into the murderer’s. It’s impulsive and stupid, and while it can be said that some of his impulsive decisions are driven by a competitive and arrogant need to solve his cases, this decision is purely down to his emotional and personal investment in the crimes that have been committed. Joan calls it a “temper tantrum”, and Sherlock doesn’t even pretend to argue the point.
Joan, meanwhile, is an emotional anchor: she’s made a career out of dissecting complicated emotional responses, denial top among them. Though she sometimes fails to deal with her own emotional faults, she’s the perfect counterbalance to Sherlock’s chaotic and irresponsible approach to his own. He’s called out on his cruel and petty behavior by her almost immediately. The result is that thanks to Joan’s interference, Sherlock is forced to confront his detachment as what it is – a weakness, for starters, and a complete lie. He’s not half as detached as he thinks, and his efforts to pretend he is have resulted in his failure to recognize his own unchecked emotions and deal with them in a way that’s healthier for him and the people around him.
Although he starts out as a fairly unmitigated asshole, there are constant reminders that he cares about others. He reacts strongly to cases, often giving knee-jerk and protective reactions when he personally sees others in harm’s way. When he’s not feeling defensive, he does seem to show some social tact: if he pushes social boundaries, it’s usually done deliberately in order to shock people into confessions and further the case. For example, when he identifies that a suspect’s turned to drugs, he first corners him – pressuring him into honesty regarding the case – then follows it up with a genuine attempt to encourage the man into rehab. Sherlock himself seems somewhat shocked by the gesture, barreling into it as though he’ll wuss out if he doesn’t, but he does it without hesitation. He sympathizes with the man's struggle with addiction, and it's clear that he feels exposed and unsure in the act of admitting that; but he still does it, and he doesn't appear to regret it.
Which brings us to his past: boy meets girl, boy falls in love, girl dies tragically. In theory, anyway. The last part turned out to be a ruse, but it was real enough for Sherlock. Sherlock’s love for Irene Adler is a perfect summary of his contradictory parts. He falls for her because she’s clinical, and clever, and an unsolvable riddle: all things that appeal to his intelligence and his arrogance, providing him with a challenge worthy of his time. He falls apart without her because he gives her everything, relies on her completely, and trusts her unwaveringly: evidence of the fact that Sherlock is, despite his affinity for statistics, fueled by his emotions. His desire for vengeance against her “murderer” further hammers this home, and time and again Sherlock makes selfish and irrational decisions in his pursuit of it.
When it’s revealed that Irene faked the whole thing, he processes it and accepts the facts quickly, with very little effort, because that’s what he does: he trusts facts. Sherlock takes a step back and attempts to view it objectively, making quick work of what really happened - she seduced him and destroyed him just to get him off her trail. That doesn't last long, and he quickly begins to fall into old habits; he becomes reckless, lashing out at those around him. Instead of confronting his feelings he denies them violently, and he very nearly self-destructs because of it.
Luckily for him, he's not alone this time around - Joan recognizes what's happening quickly. She calls him on it, and he listens. The last time Irene tore the rug out from under Sherlock, she'd been his grounding force, and there'd been nothing to keep him from spiraling out of control. Since then, Joan’s given him something else to live for - the realization that he has reasons to stay alive, and stay healthy, and that he has people he wants to stay with. While his dynamic with Irene had been an unhealthy and uneven infatuation, the loss of himself in another person, his dynamic with Joan has restored his faith in himself and others. While there's no pretending he's come out of the Irene/Moriarty situation remotely okay, there's a good chance he'll get there eventually.
ABILITIES, WEAKNESSES, AND POWER LIMITATIONS.
the good. Sherlock's super smart. He's got decent training with various weapons and hand-to-hand combat, and he's exceptionally observant. He can read situations and people very quickly, and is capable of approaching difficult situations very rationally and effectively when focused. He has a very accurate memory, and apparently he spends a lot of time sniffing things, because he's good at identifying various substances by scent. He speaks multiple languages and can do various accents. These are all pretty useless in space, but he's a cool dude ok!!
the bad. Only human. Can be irrational and give himself over to his emotions. Sometimes socially awful. Has a hard time trusting others and can be stupidly competitive, or sometimes disinterested and not competitive enough. He has a history of drug abuse that could theoretically be dredged up again, though it would require extreme circumstances. That said, it does speak to an addictive personality and the potential for mood swings.
INVENTORY.
( 1 ) dead bee.
( 1 ) hideous outfit.
( 3 ) hideous sweaters!!
( 1 ) hypodermic needle.
( 1 ) bottle gamboge pigment.
APPEARANCE.
The dashing Jonny Lee Miller + embarrassing shirts and sweaters!!
5'11", fit. Lots of tattoos. Body language usually gives off a childish lack of self-awareness.
AGE. About 40? Show doesn't say, based on actor's age.
Your Name: Melissa
OOC Journal:
kreuganUnder 18? If yes, what is your age?: Nope
Email + IM: yogilates @ gmail/kreugan @ aim
Characters Played at Ataraxion: Josh Levison, Hal Yorke, Scott McCall
C H A R A C T E R I N F O R M A T I O N
Name: Sherlock Holmes
Canon: Elementary
Original or Alternate Universe: Original
Canon Point: Post S1
Number: RNG!
SETTING. Vanilla, modern-day Earth! Specifically New York. Wiki page here.
HISTORY.
In the interest of not going insane, this history will focus on Sherlock’s personal history without much rehashing of the individual cases featured on the show (procedurals gosh). The details of Sherlock’s childhood are slim on the show, but it’s (probably) safe to say he had an older brother – Mycroft Holmes – and that he had a complicated relationship with his father. It’s said that his father shipped him off to boarding school when he was eight years old. The implication is that he and his father weren’t very close, but it’s difficult to say the cause. Sherlock tends to keep his personal history close to his chest, and he has a habit of outright lying. We learn from others that he was a pretty weird kid (setting his own broken bones, connecting with people not remotely his own age) and probably grew up super wealthy, judging by his father's reputation.
One thing he does say is that he’d trade his father for a Tic-Tac, so it’s probably safe to assume that Sherlock, for his part, does not think highly of their bond. What we do know is that Sherlock has a very nebulous sense of self-worth. He acts cocky, and he’s certainly confident in his abilities, but he doesn’t seem to have much regard for himself as a human being – something that may have developed from dealing with an unsupportive or emotionally undermining parent. Sherlock describes himself as having been a “know-it-all” as a child. While speaking with a young suspect who was kidnapped and manipulated by a killer, Sherlock’s able to relate to the boy’s bond with his kidnapper by relating it to his own unhealthy codependence on a school bully – the only person who paid him any real attention as a child. He convinced himself that he deserved the abuse, and that it was given as a form of affection to help him straighten himself out. Despite Sherlock’s inability to connect with people, he was desperate for it, and he was quick to latch onto the first connection he could despite it being incredibly negative and unhealthy.
It's important to note that Sherlock says he made this all up to get in good with the suspect, but given what we know of his childhood and his reluctance to open up, he may have said that in an effort to keep Joan out. This was still fairly early in their relationship, and Sherlock's seen lying to Joan multiple times thereafter about his father and his past with Irene. Even if it was all complete bullshit, Sherlock was able to put himself in that mindset extremely easily and extremely convincingly; meaning even if the details aren't a sure thing, the emotions behind them and his personal experience with similar issues can't be ignored.
The next semi-solid evidence we have about Sherlock’s past is his stint with New Scotland Yard. His professional career has mostly been in homicide, but Gregson states that Sherlock consulted on anti-terrorism investigations post-9/11. Sometime while living and working in London, he met Irene Adler. Sherlock was smitten with her immediately. She reeled him in with her mind and kept him there, drawing him into a deeply emotional and dependent romantic relationship. It’s later revealed that this was a front on Irene’s part. Turns out Irene was, in fact, the crime lord Moriarty. Sherlock had become a nuisance to her crime network, so she decided to seduce him to distract him from his work. From Sherlock’s perspective, he was deeply in love with an amazing woman. He was happy. Then Irene faked her own death, blaming it on “Moriarty”, and Sherlock fell into a violent downward spiral of addiction and self-destruction. His friend Alistair tells Joan that when Irene died, Sherlock shut down, turning to drugs to drown out his reality.
She died. We were quite close. I did not take her passing well.Fast forward to Sherlock entering rehab – it would seem he doesn’t take it very seriously at the start, considering the way he breaks out before his official release and is deliberately rude to Watson when she’s assigned as his sober companion, but it becomes increasingly clear that his resistance is more an issue of his own pride. He’s not proud of his addiction, or of his inability to deal with it himself; but as soon as he starts to accept help from others, he’s able to show genuine appreciation for what the rehabilitation center and Joan’s commitment has done for him. As soon as he's out, he begins taking cases with the local police. He dives back into work like it’s a lifeline, desperate to justify his worth and give his life a purpose again in the wake of Irene’s death and his personal failure in turning to drugs.
It doesn’t work, or at least not the way he’s expecting. The cases themselves don’t offer him anything, but the connections he makes with other people along the way begin to slowly draw him out of the reclusive and angry shell he’s built around himself. His developing bond with Joan is top among them, but Sherlock is affected in various ways by each person they encounter during their investigations. His sympathy for victims and criminals alike forces him to confront myriad emotions in himself, and slowly but surely, he begins to work through his insecurities and open up to others. Things get a bit messy when he comes face-to-face with Moran, the theoretical murderer of Irene. Sherlock digresses: his emotional stability falls in the face of a blind thirst for revenge. He tortures Moran in an attempt to get information on Moriarty, and it causes friction between himself and his friends at the police department.
The rest of the season deals with various hired assassins and misdirects as Sherlock tries to track down Moriarty. Unexpectedly, he finds Irene instead – only to find out that she is Moriarty, and that he’d been played all along. Sherlock doesn’t take it well, but he doesn’t keep pining. Moriarty is a killer, and Sherlock’s sense of right and wrong is strong enough to leave very little room for a gray zone once the truth’s out. That doesn’t mean he’s on his game – he’s emotionally compromised, and his tactics fall apart. In the end, it’s Watson who helps Sherlock accept that he can’t see the forest through the trees, and he trusts her to take the lead. It works. Watson outsmarts Moriarty, and Moriarty is taken into custody. It’s a bitter victory for Sherlock, and it’s not remotely the outcome he’d expected, but there is finally a sense of resolution to Irene’s "death". More importantly, the entire ordeal cements the fact that Sherlock can trust Watson completely, and it’s her influence that has made Sherlock confident and stable enough to survive the emotional maelstrom left in Moriarty’s wake.
Ultimately: the mystery of Irene is solved, if in a truly awful way. It opens up new wounds to deal with, but it lays to rest Sherlock’s thirst for vengeance - or at the very least makes such a confused mess of it that it becomes hard for him to properly express, and it loses its forward momentum. His relationship with Watson is rock solid, and they’ve become professional partners. More importantly, he’s slowly learning to accept his own self-worth, as well as how to properly embrace and cope with his own tumultuous emotions. He’s still eccentric, and he still has tons of baggage, but the man who started as a bitter shell is very close to becoming a healthy whole.
PERSONALITY.
You can connect to people. It just frightens you.On the surface, Sherlock’s weird. He’s abrupt. Sometimes he seems insensitive. While he can be a tactless moron, getting caught up in information and forgetting basic manners in the process, it’s also an honest investigative tactic. When people are caught off guard, it’s harder for them to bullshit. When he’s engaged in another person, his ability to understand others and show regard for their feelings is phenomenal. When he’s digging into another person’s emotions, he tends to do so by drawing on his own experience; it’s not just a calculated and detached process, but one that involves a great deal of introspection and vulnerability. When he wants to keep people out, he’s equally talented – he knows how to hit buttons and push people away. He can be childish and defensive.
While he's very passionately driven to help people in need, ranging from the homeless to victims of violent crimes, it wouldn't be accurate to say he's a strictly good person. He's willing to fight dirty if he needs to, and if he thinks someone's a jerk, he's quick to be an even bigger jerk back. He seems to have no problem judging others. He can also be insulting, deliberately or not, due to his own shallow ego and intelligence, though he arguably thinks people are being overly sensitive if they get offended at him pointing out simple facts. If he says he's smarter than someone, he tends to think he's just stating the obvious. The influence of Watson, Bell and Gregson opens him up to the realization that everyone has their own strengths, just as he's got many weaknesses. While this improves his appreciation for others on a deeper level, he's still fairly unapologetically blunt on the surface.
At the core, he’s a truly kind individual. He feels deeply for others, sometimes to a degree that he struggles with, and his apparent detachment is in many ways simply a coping mechanism. He reacts badly when his failure on a case ends in people getting hurt, taking personal responsibility for it. Another coping mechanism is his reliance on logic. If it’s illogical to dwell on something, he won’t (or he’ll certainly try not to, or put up an admirable front of it). In the case of Irene/Moriarty, this is taken to extremes. When he discovers Irene is Moriarty and has been manipulating him all this time, he a) has a meltdown and b) detaches himself from the situation, treating her as a simple criminal. There’s no obvious pity or sympathy in his behavior towards her, though there’s no pretending his feelings towards Moriarty are in any way simple.
It’s so incredible, the way that you can solve people just by looking at them. I noticed you don’t have any mirrors around here.We meet Sherlock Holmes fresh out of rehab, and his recovery’s still in progress. He has his trademark intelligence, and an innate ability to read people like puzzles, but he’s got several glaring blindspots. He’s isolated himself from others. He’s developed a bitter and defensive wall around himself that tends to have collateral damage. When Sherlock loses his temper and gets petty, his insight leads to scathing and surgical attacks on those around him. It’s important to note that if he’s cruel to others, it’s not due to a simple lack of empathy. Sherlock empathizes with others – he knows what’s appropriate and what’s crossing the line. The problem is that he’s kind of a hot mess, and sometimes he lashes out; sometimes he’s so hyper-focused on his own problems and goals that he lashes out without doing it intentionally, but it’s still fueled by his own emotional reactions to the things around him, not a disassociation with them.
What’s that supposed to mean?
It means I think you know a lost cause when you see one.
Sherlock’s not a robot. He’s a genius, and he tends to approach things in methodical (if seemingly extremely random) ways, but his biggest fault is his inability to keep his emotions in check. When he figures out a man killed a woman and took advantage of his position as a medical professional to frame a clinically insane man, Sherlock goes to him personally to throw the accusation in his face. When the result is the man’s confident statement that Sherlock has no solid evidence against him, Sherlock loses his temper and drives Joan’s car into the murderer’s. It’s impulsive and stupid, and while it can be said that some of his impulsive decisions are driven by a competitive and arrogant need to solve his cases, this decision is purely down to his emotional and personal investment in the crimes that have been committed. Joan calls it a “temper tantrum”, and Sherlock doesn’t even pretend to argue the point.
Joan, meanwhile, is an emotional anchor: she’s made a career out of dissecting complicated emotional responses, denial top among them. Though she sometimes fails to deal with her own emotional faults, she’s the perfect counterbalance to Sherlock’s chaotic and irresponsible approach to his own. He’s called out on his cruel and petty behavior by her almost immediately. The result is that thanks to Joan’s interference, Sherlock is forced to confront his detachment as what it is – a weakness, for starters, and a complete lie. He’s not half as detached as he thinks, and his efforts to pretend he is have resulted in his failure to recognize his own unchecked emotions and deal with them in a way that’s healthier for him and the people around him.
Although he starts out as a fairly unmitigated asshole, there are constant reminders that he cares about others. He reacts strongly to cases, often giving knee-jerk and protective reactions when he personally sees others in harm’s way. When he’s not feeling defensive, he does seem to show some social tact: if he pushes social boundaries, it’s usually done deliberately in order to shock people into confessions and further the case. For example, when he identifies that a suspect’s turned to drugs, he first corners him – pressuring him into honesty regarding the case – then follows it up with a genuine attempt to encourage the man into rehab. Sherlock himself seems somewhat shocked by the gesture, barreling into it as though he’ll wuss out if he doesn’t, but he does it without hesitation. He sympathizes with the man's struggle with addiction, and it's clear that he feels exposed and unsure in the act of admitting that; but he still does it, and he doesn't appear to regret it.
Do you close yourself off to people and deny yourself things that bring yourself pleasure, not because it makes you a better investigator, but because it’s some sort of penance?As the show progresses, so does Sherlock: his walls crumble episode by episode, letting Joan in. He sheds his bitterness and his jaded desire to prove that he’s right in favor of developing a real enthusiasm for life, and a desire to prove himself to others – not simply as someone who’s smarter, but as a decent human being. He begins to trust Joan to take on increasing responsibility with the cases, and for someone who’s turned his work into a safety net to give his hollow life meaning, it’s a massive show of affection. Letting Joan in on cases is parallel to letting Joan in on his own life, even as he remains defensive about his past. It’s a lot like sharing something you love with someone you care about, if a lot more morbid. It’s a roundabout way of expressing his willingness to rely on Joan, and that’s one of Sherlock’s most intense vulnerabilities. The last time he let someone in it went phenomenally wrong, so any willingness to open up is a remarkable change of pace.
Penance?
For what happened in London. Being addicted. I don’t know, I guess it just occurred to me that it might be something someone might do and not even know it.
You always know it, Watson. If you didn’t, it wouldn’t be penance.
Which brings us to his past: boy meets girl, boy falls in love, girl dies tragically. In theory, anyway. The last part turned out to be a ruse, but it was real enough for Sherlock. Sherlock’s love for Irene Adler is a perfect summary of his contradictory parts. He falls for her because she’s clinical, and clever, and an unsolvable riddle: all things that appeal to his intelligence and his arrogance, providing him with a challenge worthy of his time. He falls apart without her because he gives her everything, relies on her completely, and trusts her unwaveringly: evidence of the fact that Sherlock is, despite his affinity for statistics, fueled by his emotions. His desire for vengeance against her “murderer” further hammers this home, and time and again Sherlock makes selfish and irrational decisions in his pursuit of it.
Even after all this time you're something of a blind spot to me. I like that I can't see everything. It's rare.Sherlock's relationship with Irene is an outlier. She's the first person in his life he can't read like an open book. While his arrogance probably plays some role in the initial intrigue - she's a puzzle he can't solve, and that's a challenge he can't pass up - that part of it is secondary. The real reason Sherlock falls for Irene is because for once, with her, he feels normal. For once he doesn't know everything, and rather than feeling insecure at the prospect, he feels safe. He can have conversations with her without having to keep himself in check. He doesn't have to worry about insulting her. She's an equal, or better, and that creates a space in which Sherlock's no longer isolated by his intellect and the arrogance that follows.
When it’s revealed that Irene faked the whole thing, he processes it and accepts the facts quickly, with very little effort, because that’s what he does: he trusts facts. Sherlock takes a step back and attempts to view it objectively, making quick work of what really happened - she seduced him and destroyed him just to get him off her trail. That doesn't last long, and he quickly begins to fall into old habits; he becomes reckless, lashing out at those around him. Instead of confronting his feelings he denies them violently, and he very nearly self-destructs because of it.
Luckily for him, he's not alone this time around - Joan recognizes what's happening quickly. She calls him on it, and he listens. The last time Irene tore the rug out from under Sherlock, she'd been his grounding force, and there'd been nothing to keep him from spiraling out of control. Since then, Joan’s given him something else to live for - the realization that he has reasons to stay alive, and stay healthy, and that he has people he wants to stay with. While his dynamic with Irene had been an unhealthy and uneven infatuation, the loss of himself in another person, his dynamic with Joan has restored his faith in himself and others. While there's no pretending he's come out of the Irene/Moriarty situation remotely okay, there's a good chance he'll get there eventually.
The thing that’s different about me, empirically speaking, is you.
ABILITIES, WEAKNESSES, AND POWER LIMITATIONS.
the good. Sherlock's super smart. He's got decent training with various weapons and hand-to-hand combat, and he's exceptionally observant. He can read situations and people very quickly, and is capable of approaching difficult situations very rationally and effectively when focused. He has a very accurate memory, and apparently he spends a lot of time sniffing things, because he's good at identifying various substances by scent. He speaks multiple languages and can do various accents. These are all pretty useless in space, but he's a cool dude ok!!
the bad. Only human. Can be irrational and give himself over to his emotions. Sometimes socially awful. Has a hard time trusting others and can be stupidly competitive, or sometimes disinterested and not competitive enough. He has a history of drug abuse that could theoretically be dredged up again, though it would require extreme circumstances. That said, it does speak to an addictive personality and the potential for mood swings.
INVENTORY.
( 1 ) dead bee.
( 1 ) hideous outfit.
( 3 ) hideous sweaters!!
( 1 ) hypodermic needle.
( 1 ) bottle gamboge pigment.
APPEARANCE.
The dashing Jonny Lee Miller + embarrassing shirts and sweaters!!
5'11", fit. Lots of tattoos. Body language usually gives off a childish lack of self-awareness.
AGE. About 40? Show doesn't say, based on actor's age.