Nobody could be that clever.

PLAYER INFO

PLAYER NAME » Jansen.
PLAYER JOURNAL » touchstoned
AGE » 21.
EMAIL » jamiemckrimmon [at] gmail.com
INSTANT MESSAGING » ga11imaufry
OTHER METHOD OF CONTACT » plurk: midcirclenine; message on tumblr if nothing else worked.
HOW MANY CHARACTERS DO YOU CURRENTLY PLAY? » N/A.


CHARACTER INFO

CHARACTER NAME » Sherlock Holmes
FANDOM » Sherlock (BBC)
CANON-POINT » Not long after the events in 'The Reichenbach Fall'

HISTORY » Traditional source can be found here, with the adapted cases found here.
AU SETTING/PAST GAME HISTORY » N/A.

PERSONALITY » The obvious joke here would be that while Sherlock Holmes is a master at noticing everything about someone and understanding just as much, you would hardly know it by the way he interacts with them.

Between his misappropriation of both 'deduct' and 'sociopath', one might also conclude he isn't any better with the English language than he is the English. Very early on he claims to be a 'high-functioning sociopath', which is not true. While he does possess a handful of sociopathic traits, he possesses even more that are in direct opposition to such a diagnosis, the main of which being an ability to genuinely care for and love other people. He may be highly selective with such emotions, but the point remains that he has them, regardless of whether he knows what to do with them or even wants them at all. This conclusion does, however, require a lot of getting to know him first, and the claim in itself may very well likely be a defence mechanism to prevent people from bothering to do this, or to simply avoid having to explain himself to people over and over again.

He prefers to think of himself as solely intellectual; all mind and no room for anything else. This, too, is one of his mistakes, as pointed out by James Moriarty: He always wants everything to be clever. In missing the ability to actually understand some aspects of human nature by having bypassed them himself, he occasionally over-analyses things and credits those around him with too much. However, both of these failings are ones that he is able to recognise and attempt to make up for, normally in his friendship with Dr. John Watson.

Continuing the name-dropping and examination of character flaws, it's fairly fun to point out that in the vein of most intellectually gifted individuals, Sherlock can be ridiculously childish. This comes out in particular when he interacts with his brother – given that most people are prone to acting like children around their siblings, one can only imagine how a pair of geniuses manage to keep other people from leaving the room during conversations. Sherlock takes particular delight in annoying his older brother, consistently being inordinately stubborn and not bothering to hide his satisfaction whenever he manages to ruffle the other man's normally composed demeanour. Despite this, it's clear he does actually like Mycroft, though how much of this is due to being immediate family or simply that the other man is capable of having a conversation on the same intellectual level is a little more opaque.

While Sherlock clearly has no qualms about possibly upsetting or even to some degree traumatizing other people, this is normally done to some scale as to the severity of the situation. Granted, this scale of ends-justifying-means can range anywhere from wanting someone to speak quickly, being in an agitated mood, lives being within seconds of coming to an end, or in an effort to get them to reveal information under stress that they normally wouldn't have done otherwise. Frequently his upsetting people is done inadvertently through having said something he felt had no emotional connections, only to find that it was horribly insulting or the like. Almost as frequently, he doesn't show very much remorse about this unless prompted to do so, and on occasion the barbs are meant intentionally, suggesting he is more aware about such things than he either realises or lets on.

On a vaguely related note, Sherlock has the sheer inability to not show off, regardless of the situation or consequences. Rather than risk not letting everyone know precisely how brilliant he is, he's been shown to accept being held in contempt of court and isolating himself from everyone around him. When John Watson remarked about his observation and detective skills being amazing, Sherlock was genuinely surprised to receive the positive reaction, admitting that most people tended to grow angry instead. Indeed, Sherlock responds quite well to flattery and compliments, particularly when they come from the right people.

The man is, at his core, completely unable to handle any period without some sort of stimulation, to the point of resorting to differing methods of recreational drug use to escape boredom. It's very likely that a large portion of his personality was shaped by this growing up, as his peers are unlikely to have provided anything of substance and instead are likely to have held him to some distance, as most children do with anyone who is marginally different. It's obvious that at some point he was at least a somewhat normal boy, given the however fleeting dreams of being a pirate. Even now, with a mind that could do practically anything it was set to, he chooses to be a private detective, something that forces him to not only interact with people on a regular basis – which he tends to avoid – but also understand the manner in which they operate and function – which he isn't always good at. It does, however, provide the very best kind of puzzles on a regular basis, people being the ultimate in variables to any situation.

It might be noted that despite the extremely dramatic events delineated in the most recent episode, Sherlock's personality doesn't appear to be all that outwardly affected. If anything, in the short absence of his friend, he has regressed to former and familiar habits - although most of these new 'habits' were brought about by continuous prompting from said friend and may or may not actually be legitimately referenced as such. In the wake of any sort of emotional trauma - or indeed, possibly any largely moving emotional movement in either a positive or negative direction - Sherlock tends to retreat into as mental a state as possible. However, he also does this habitually when working on cases, when bored, and various states in between. Given that he really only interacts continuously with either Lestrade, Mrs. Hudson, his brother, and Watson, and that all four of these relationships would have ceased upon his assumed death, there isn't anyone else who would know him well enough to know the difference between his behaviour now as opposed to then anyway.

ABILITIES/WEAKNESSES » It would be a bit of an insult to his intelligence to simply call Sherlock Holmes 'smart', and he would in fact likely be the first to tell you so. Despite this, he has – for the better part of a hundred and twenty-five years – been mixing up the difference between inductive and deductive reasoning. While he utilizes both quite regularly, they are very nearly opposite processes, the both of which seem to be lumped together under the one banner; his consistency in lumping them so remains somewhere around the approximation of 'cake batter' and seems in itself quite an achievement. Aside from that, he has access to vast amounts of highly specific and often very selective knowledge, and the ability to insult you from a hundred metres before you've realised you're even having a conversation.

In terms of less than perfect qualities, as though those haven't been mentioned thus far, Sherlock is, surprisingly, neither the inhuman machine nor the god he aspires or pretends to be. He's very fallible, however much he attempts to hide it, and can actually lose sight of certain things fairly quickly in reaching for something he's deemed more 'worthy' of his attention. One might mention his thus far complete inability to have any sort of voluntary long standing relationship, whether romantic or otherwise, with anyone aside from Dr. Watson to be a weakness, easily attributed to a combination of trust issues, show-offiness, inflexibility, and one hell of a superiority complex that, unfortunately, rarely sees any reason to step down off its gilt golden pedestal of moonbeams and golden sunshine rainbow rays of unicorn blossoms. Ultimately, whether it's an inability or a refusal to do so, Mr. Holmes the younger simply does not relate or connect with approximately 100% of the world's population.

DREAM POWER » So, naturally, empathy. 8D


CHARACTER SAMPLES

NETWORK SAMPLE »

Slight temperature difference, roughly five degrees, colder. Tattooing people - ooh, now that's interesting. Americans, always so direct.

[The tone is lighthearted but the man is majestically displeased. Still, relocation will probably help with that pretending-to-not-exist thing he's working on.]

However, I prefer being contacted on the other end of my abductions, if not properly at the beginning and end of them. Having to do the work at both ends is tedious, and I'm really not in the habit of doing work for people I don't know.


LOG SAMPLE »

Sherlock Holmes is not accustomed to fear. Adrenaline, yes. Living on the 'edge', whatever the 'edge' is supposed to be, yes, however intermittently that may be. Real, legitimate fear? It has no place in rational thought. Disrupts the flow of things, causes you to make mistakes, errors in judgement based purely on an instinctive emotional reaction that more often than not manages to get people killed than actually do anything instinctive to save them. He's wondered on more than one occasion how it happened to become such a dominant trait. There is the knowledge that touching something hot will hurt you, and then there is the fear of pain from hot things. Both keep you away from them, but in his mind it is only the former that results in survival.

Fear causes mistakes, and those are another thing Sherlock Holmes isn't accustomed to. He's got himself in a nice little cycle here; fear caused a mistake, which caused doubt, which lead to fear of more mistakes, becoming a self-fulfilling prophecy and validating the doubt. He wasn't even sure what it was, to begin with, so foreign was the emotion. (He says, as though the idea of an emotion being foreign to him is in itself something new.) It had in fact taken a somewhat juvenile conversation with John and a decent amount of time by himself in that chair by the fire to properly work it out. I don't have friends, he'd said. Which was true. He couldn't remember having ever had proper friends in the manner he'd seen peers have friends. He'd had a few people during school who he talked to more frequently than others, though more often than not the conversations tended to be more along the line of trying to get the answers for that evening's homework; not very difficult when the person you're asking loves to show off. But that didn't bother him. That had never bothered him very much. This – all of this: the conversation, the fear, the doubt – bothered him.

It seemed the good doctor was doing some teaching of his own. He was almost positive he wouldn't have had this strong a reaction a year ago.

He blinks, eyes darting back and forth at things that aren't actually in front of them to see, brain behind them suddenly revving into fifth gear for the first time properly in hours. Tomorrow morning he would have to go to Henry's house, and figure out how to convince Major Barrymore to let him in the lab again. And then he would have a more difficult task to work out.



ANYTHING ELSE? » There is a fun parallel in John and Michael Darling with Mycroft and Sherlock respectively?