I’m sick of Sherlock Holmes.
Let me clarify.
I fell in love with this character several years ago when I
began reading the Sir Arthur Conan Doyle canon. Do you ever have those moments
when you discover a character or a book and you think: this was created for me?
I had that with Sherlock Holmes.
I loved him even with all his flaws, sexism, and drug
addiction. I loved the world he inhabited, I loved Watson, and I was madly in
love with Irene Adler. Even the stories where Conan Doyle was clearly phoning it
in, I enjoyed. And for a while, I loved the fact that pop culture had
rediscovered this character and seemed to create new renditions of him every
year.
I am now sick of what I call Sherlock Holmes Syndrome. I am
sick of eccentric, often neurotic, always brilliant white men who see things
that we mere mortals cannot see. I’m sick of the mass media’s apparent belief
that mental issues, depression, anxiety, psychopathy and neurodevelopmental
disorders are magic. I’m also sick of the blanket use of autism, often
incorrectly, as a signifier for Otherness and as a vague superpower.
