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

[starlady]

Hah, good question!

There's a long tradition of "Alexander romances" that became popular almost from the time of his death up through the medieval era in multiple places and languages. Some of them are really strange, and most are sadly known only by other people talking about them; this is one of the things that makes it hard to know much about Alexander himself, because even people trying to write biographies (or hagiographies, practically) cited details from the romance tradition as fact--such as the idea that Alexander was the son of Zeus (which, to be fair, was a rumor that Alexander himself encouraged during his lifetime). History almost immediately became overlaid with legend. Some of the romances play up Hephaistion's role and others play it down, but it's not quite on the level of slash in fandom today, sadly (or if it was, it didn't survive--what we don't have dwarfs what existed).

That said, though, Alexander and Hephaistion explicitly compared themselves to Achilles and Patroclus, and encouraged others to do the same. On one level the entire epic cycle (which is not completely extant) is just Homer fanfic, or mythology fanfic if you want to look at it that way (since "Homer" himself was drawing on an existing, bilingual [Greek and Hittite] corpus of legends in epic verse). I think in the ancient world the idea that Achilles and Patroclus were a pairing was fairly well understood, and quite frankly I'd be surprised if someone hadn't written something explicit about them somewhere, particularly in the Roman period, but again I don't think anything has survived. Maybe in the graffiti in Pompeii? I don't think that's been completely published yet. ETA: From what little I know, most pornography in the ancient world was visual, because most people couldn't read. There are also issues of class in what survives--the Romance languages grew out of the so-called "vulgar Latin" that was being spoken by poorer, less educated people even in the early imperial period (reign of Augustus onward, I mean), but that was rarely written down by the people who could write, Petronius' The Satyricon being the most notable exception. /eta

[recessional]

That, and most of our survivals are filtered through the explicitly Christian [edit: or Islamic, where some went even further afield] societies that came afterwards, which would not have preserved anything too problematic and, in fact, in at least one of the mediaeval versions of the romances carefully rewrote things to make it very clear that Alexander and Hephaestion were JUST FRIENDS. FRIENDS. TOTALLY NOT SCREWING EACH OTHER, BECAUSE ALEXANDER WAS AWESOME AND THAT WOULD BE SINFUL.

Which, you can't make the argument that because it doesn't exist, it was there! but it makes it even more difficult to even speculate what WAS there before the culture that came afterwards seriously disapproved.

[kindkit]

I'd be surprised if someone hadn't written something explicit about them somewhere, particularly in the Roman period, but again I don't think anything has survived.

I wouldn't call it explicit, but one of the surviving fragments of Aeschylus's The Myrmidons has Achilles speak of "many kisses" and "the holy union of our thighs," the latter being a reference to intercrural sex.

[geeksdoitbetter]

"the latter being a reference to intercrural sex."

oh my

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

[kindkit]

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

[starlady]

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

[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.