loudest-subtext-in-television-d:
Mostly I think it’s just that Sherlock doesn’t have any concept of John having privacy or being a separate person from him. Sherlock doesn’t know who he is anymore in series three once John doesn’t live with him: he doesn’t know what it means to be Sherlock Holmes, and he doesn’t remember what his international reputation was for. One of the Mayfly Man mirroring lines is the fact that the Mayfly Man moves into a man’s home and “steals his identity.” John lives in Sherlock’s head even when John leaves the flat; Sherlock keeps talking to him. It’s suggested in The Empty Hearse that Sherlock probably had John’s voice in his head the whole 2 years he was gone. Then Sherlock feels entitled to John’s laptop and guesses his passwords and reads his e-mails to his girlfriends and apparently checks his browsing history for porn.
In short, I think that some part of Sherlock really feels like John has willingly told him these things if he leaves all this stuff out where Sherlock can easily — for Sherlock — get to it. To someone like Sherlock, that’s as good as “confiding” something. And as far as Sherlock is concerned, John is a part of him.
I ended up partly addressing the same incident in this post, too, about why Sherlock says “years” when it couldn’t have been… here is the excerpt:
“In TSoT Sherlock says it took John “years to confide in me” about his middle name, but we already know this statement is heavily colored by Sherlock’s perception of the situation because John didn’t ‘confide’ in him at all: Sherlock had to get his birth certificate. What felt like years to Sherlock was in actuality between April 1st (Sherlock doesn’t get obsessed with John and start smoking until after TGG because of the pool scene, but before Irene Adler) and September 15th. Five and a half months felt like “years” to Sherlock because that’s how bad he had it for John. He looks back on the memory and thinks, ‘Oh my GOD I didn’t know FOREVER and EVER and like YEARS LATER I FINALLY found out it was Hamish!’ And duh, obviously Sherlock had it crazy-bad if he was obsessing over something as trivial as John’s middle name.”
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