Holmes/Watson - the pairing as type or trope

[damned_colonial]

This post is riffing off wrabbit's suggestion in the discussion prompt gathering thread, which is still taking suggestions for new discussions if you have them.

Holmes and Watson weren't the first detective/sidekick duo, but they were one of the earliest pairs to achieve enormous popularity. Since then, similar pairings/duos have become a recognisable type in pop culture.

What are the distinctive traits of the Holmes/Watson pairing? Who are some of the more recent pairings/duos that draw on H/W? wrabbit mentions House and Wilson, of course, but it seems to me that the very common pairing of an exceptional/brilliant and possibly anti-social hero with a partner who's a stabilising influence or a source of exposition or both, owes a lot to H/W. There are plenty of detective duos, of course, especially on television. When wrabbit posted her comment I thought of Jim/Blair from the Sentinel (a police detective with an academic partner), and then last night, watching Hornblower with a friend, I realised that Archie is a bit of a Watson in a way: he exists in the TV canon to make Hornblower less solitary and internal and help the story move along, is Horatio's best friend with whom he shares everything, and is loyal and straightforward to Horatio's awkward brilliance. C. S. Forester didn't originally write Archie as a partner for Horatio in the book series, and Bush (who shows up later in the chronology of the series) doesn't fit the H/W pairing mold at all, but perhaps by the 90s when the TV writers came to develop Archie as Horatio's partner, that type of pairing had become more standardised?

H/W has also been called the archetypal slash pairing and the first slash fandom (btw, does anyone know whether anyone was actually publishing H/W slash in zines before Star Trek slash came along?) If the H/W pairing is a discernable "type", is that type inherently slashy or queer? How many H/W-influenced pairings have considerable slash followings?

Comments

[epershand]

The thing I really like about the Aubrey/Maturin relationship is that they take turns wrangling each other. Each of them has an area where they're a genius and an area where they're totally incompetent, and the fact that they're opposites is what makes them fit together like puzzle pieces.

[wychwood]

Oh, man, Poirot and Hastings - I can't believe I forgot to mention them! I think Hastings is actually a source of some of the "Oh, Watson, he's so dumb" ideas people have, because he's so clearly a Watson character while also being offensively stupid.

[geeksdoitbetter]

"the latter being a reference to intercrural sex."

oh my

i didn't know there was a name for that!

[starlady]

Oo, thanks for that link! I am stronger on the Roman than on the Greek side, I have to admit.

[kindkit]

*grins* Who said the internet wasn't educational?

[kindkit]

I know about it because it's mentioned in a couple of Mary Renault's Greek novels (The Mask of Apollo and I think it turns up in Fire From Heaven as well).

[starlady]

See, I haven't read those ones--I read the first Alexander book, hmm, and the one about Theseus that has all the quotes about king-killing. Oh yes, The King Must Die.

I'm kind of surprised, though, that the author of that book you cited is surprised that the classical Athenians cast Achilles as the erastes.

[gloriamundi]

I keep wanting to write McKay/Sheppard in a Holmesian AU. Or possibly vice versa. (One's a genius! One's a military man! though neither Rodney nor John have a full set of social skills

[ilthit]

Argh, in real life that "but he loves me" thing gets my goat so bad. In real life, misogynistic assholes aren't going to stop being misogynistic assholes just because you're so special; it's a lie they're using to get a woman emotionally where they want her so they can better abuse her. It hurts to watch some women fall for it over and over again. And then they have children! D: D:

[ilthit]

I was going to point this out. :D

I wouldn't say Hastings was OFFENSIVELY stupid. He couldn't figure out Poirot's case but, fair enough, neither could I. But Poirot definitely considered him too stupid to be a detective, and he was, and I agree that, along with film adaptations through the ages, Hastings may be one of the reasons for the "stupid Watson" idea.

[hradzka]

In THE WORLD OF STAR TREK, David Gerrold points out that one functional use of the Kirk/Spock/McCoy triad was to dramatize the conflicts that Kirk had to have inside his own head, as a Starfleet Captain. Spock represented the ruthless logic, McCoy the human emotion, Kirk synthesized the two. (Very Freudian, as Gerrold notes: superego, id, and ego.)

By that standard, Holmes and Watson are playing a different game -- the two of them change each other, because Holmes makes Watson think, but Watson makes Holmes more human.

[nnwest]

there's a fairly classic Spock/McCoy fic where they get thrown back in time and Spock and McCoy *are* Holmes and Watson.

Am I allowed to asked where this fic is located? I'd love to read it.

[mackiedockie]

There's a number of Jules Verne stories that use the partnership dynamic--Philias Fogg and Passepartout, Captain Nemo and Professor Aronnax (and/or Ned Land).

Dumas had some strong complementary relationships in the Musketeers series (D'artagnan and Le Comte de Fere, Porthos and Athos).