Here’s an unpopular opinion, but I have to confess this.  I kind of hate Sherlock.

Not…in a way that makes me enjoy him any less.  I mean, I adore him too.  He’s brilliant, and cool, and interesting, and he and John—yeah, all the hearts.  But he can be such a dick, so cold, so selfish, he insists on grandstanding and doing everything on his own even when there’s no good reason and when in fact he may be leaving people in the lurch or endangering them by doing so.  And I don’t really buy into the “He can’t understand feels” argument.  I think he just doesn’t want to.  ’Petty’ emotional investment gets in his way, so he dismisses it.

And the Reichenbach thing…  The initial death-faking?  Yeah, sure, we know his reasons.  Which have nothing to do with his staying dead.  Why should anybody in what’s left of Moriarty’s organization give a fuck about obsessive assassination orders after the Head Psychopath is dead?  They’ve got a power vacuum to deal with.  

In ACD, Holmes was like, “Oh, hey, the opportunity presented itself, so I just let everybody grieve over me and faffed off to Tibet for a couple of years, and then chased down a few of Moriarty’s lieutenants.  Y’know.  ’Cause I could.”  (And he faked his death so that the criminals wouldn’t know to come after him, which is thoroughly undercut by the fact that Moran knows he’s alive the entire time, but whatever, we all know ACD pretty much wrote that story out of spite anyway.)

But yeah, so basically, till proven otherwise, I blame Sherlock.  I like blaming Sherlock.  I don’t want to feel sorry for him for all his horrible self-inflicted ordeals during the Hiatus.  Ideally, I hope there aren’t any ordeals at all and that he was out there having the time of his life.  I devoutly hope that Moftiss give him crap, selfish reasons for staying dead which have nothing to do with him protecting anybody else, because Christ imagery?  Sherlock?  Hell no.  I don’t for a second argue that he’s less than a fundamentally good person, but I do want him to remain a jackass you kind of want to kick in the ‘nads.  There aren’t enough hateable heroes out there, especially not ones you can hate and yet still like.