damned_colonial: The lamp outside 221B Baker St (221b)
damned_colonial ([personal profile] damned_colonial) wrote in [community profile] queering_holmes2010-05-10 09:57 am

Holmes/Watson - the pairing as type or trope

This post is riffing off [personal profile] 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? [personal profile] 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?
melannen: Commander Valentine of Alpha Squad Seven, a red-haired female Nick Fury in space, smoking contemplatively (Default)

[personal profile] melannen 2010-05-10 05:23 pm (UTC)(link)
I think there's a couple of related tropes here - one is the "genius wrangler" thing that got talked about a bit in meta recently (though I don't remember where), and while that can definitely be done well (like Holmes/Watson or Hornblower/Kennedy) it can also go in really problematic ways.

But there's also the broader trope of "bring in an outsider as audience insert so people can exposit at them" which is most explicitly done by way of the Companions in Doctor Who, but shows up in a lot of genre TV these days. It can also go very badly - especially when the writers get too focused on writing them as audience insert rather than actual people, forgetting that audience is also actual people (see Gwen on Torchwood), but a lot of big slash pairings are built on something that was originally that trope, too, and it can blend into the genius-wrangler thing - I see it really obviously in they way Sheppard was brought in to Stargate, and it's there in Stephen Maturin, too (which is a case where the genius who needs wrangled is also the audience insert outsider.)

...anyway, I wouldn't call Holmes/Watson archetypal or the first now that we have a fairly good account of Gilgamesh/Enkidu fandom. Although of course Enkidu was also more-or-less a "genius wrangler" type! (And I, too, would love to know if there was actual slash for Holmes/Watson going back before modern media slash fandom.)
Edited 2010-05-10 17:24 (UTC)