Sorry to hear that Sherlock is causing an inferiority complex. I thought the writers were actually quite clever in using ACD to show Sherlock's limits of knowledge and in casting BC, who's at once beautiful and very odd-looking.

I don't normally write Sherlock as neurotic (canonically he looks more to enjoy being a pain in the arse), but the prompt was a neat way of writing about some of my own past insecurities. I probably make John a bit too good to be true in this, though I have met a few men who are both mentally very robust themselves *and* sympathetic to the depressives among us.

My first degree was at Oxford (and if you find the right one of my fics you might even work out which college), another at Cambridge. And yes, I realised fairly early on that if I couldn't learn to cope with friends who were impossibly brighter than me I'd expire in a puddle of envy and despair. I found the same when I first got into fanfic as well - it took a long time to adjust to people who were simply better writers than I was. (More resigned to it now, as I've learnt to accept my own strengths and weaknesses as an author).