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

not entirely formulated thoughts, but hey

[recessional]

Due to the movie I saw yesterday, the first one that comes to mind is actually movie!Tony Stark/movie!Pepper Potts (I have no idea how accurate to comic they are because I do not read the comics); I'm also writing a set, although it's slightly stepped to the side (the "stabilizing influence" happens to be a pirate with a highly idiosyncratic sense of morality).

I suspect all H/W pairings, regardless of the gender of people involved, will tend towards being something people will turn into a sexual/romantic relationship just because the emotions and interdependencies tend to be that intense - in part because the antisocial/exceptional hero wouldn't tend to BOTHER with anyone he wasn't Just That Attached To, if that makes any sense.

[wrabbit]

I think someone wrote meta that is applicable here about a "Genius Wrangler" trope and used Cuddy and House as an example?

[melannen]

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.)

[damned_colonial]

It occurs to me that K/S is of course the *other* archetypal slash pairing (Gilgamesh/Enkidu notwithstanding). Spock has the avoiding-emotion thing going on, but I have to say, apart from that, I can't really see echoes of H/W there. Is K/S some other "type" of pairing, or am I talking out of my arse?

In the detective genre

[rydra_wong]

Who are some of the more recent pairings/duos that draw on H/W?

Nero Wolfe/Archie Goodwin: structurally identical to H/W.

A socially-eccentric genius obsessive about details, paired with a first-person narrator who assists, stabilizes (or at least goads Wolfe into working occasionally), and gives the genius someone to explain things to.

*waves at milk_and_orchids*

[wychwood]

Fraser and Ray (either Ray) remind me somewhat of this type; obviously they're not exactly the same, but Fraser is withdrawn and hyper-skilled in weird ways, as well as (of course) being an actual detective.

[schemingreader]

I think H/W has a strong resemblance both to Kirk/Spock and to Aubrey/Maturin. Holmes represses his emotion, valorizes logic and scientific method, and has secrets--like Spock. Maturin isn't much of a represser--he's liable to fly off the handle and challenge someone to a duel--but he does have the same interest in science and the same backstory, full of secrets. (There is a difference in that Maturin is often the POV character in Patrick O'Brian's books, and neither Holmes nor Spock gets to be the POV person.)

Watson, like Captains Kirk and Aubrey, is emotional, interested in women, (well, for some value of interested in women in Watson's case--Kirk and Aubrey have trouble keeping it in their pants!) a man of action (the movie did a great job highlighting this aspect of book canon.) He admires Holmes, as Aubrey admires Maturin. Yes, I know, the doctor thing means that if we had a strict mapping, it should be Maturin who is like Watson. Nope, I don't think so. Kirk also admires Spock, but he's a lot more ironic and teasing in his admiration.

I'm sure I have more to say about this! Good question!

[kindkit]

Who are some of the more recent pairings/duos that draw on H/W?

They're not much more recent, but definitely Raffles and Bunny, whose creator was not merely a Holmes fan but was ACD's brother-in-law. Bunny is a bit too hapless for the genius-wrangler part of the Watson role, and Raffles is much more socially capable than Holmes, but there are still similarities.

More recently I'd cite due South (Benton Fraser is clearly a Holmes figure; Ray Vecchio is more Watson-esque than his eventual replacement Ray Kowalski) and the Middleman (where the sidekick/audience stand-in is actually named Wendy Watson). And Jeeves and Wooster parodies the archetype, I think.

[wrabbit]

I can't say if this fits with every fandom discussed or if it's overly specific, but this is how I would describe the archetype dynamic I see in Holmes/Watson in addition to the other fandoms I know:

The Holmes is an unusually intelligent, sensitive character who breaks and subverts socials mores. (Usually?) pointedly romantically unattached. Highly skilled in a way that makes him very useful to society (or very dangerous). The Watson character is the wrangler, of course, the only person who really "gets" and is able to control the Holmes character, but I think there is often something queer about him as well in a really interesting way that is more subversive than the Holmes' overt queerness.

He is a for-all-appearances a well-adjusted, intelligent, social and successful person, but there's something about the Watson himself (other than the direct influence of the Holmes) that prevents him from being the perfectly socialized specimen that he at first glance seems to be. As discussed above, there is something "special" about him, but I don't think it's in a good sparkly-perfect way, but rather in the sense that there's something odd about him in addition to his sheer idyllic ordinariness. For one thing, he probably doesn't have any close friends besides the Holmes. He may try to leave the Holmes and find a more ordinary life, but he returns not because the Holmes is so dominating, but because he individually failed. He is special to the Holmes precisely because he is so perfect(ly) ordinary and conventional and yet so queer.

I actually think the Master and Doctor are a good example of this. House and Wilson, Rodney and Sheppard (sort of...), Q and Picard, Snape and Harry *g*

thought of one more

[kindkit]

I can't believe I forget to mention this in my earlier comment: Nicholas Angel and Danny Butterman in Hot Fuzz. Angel is a genius police officer with no life outside his job; Butterman is his investigative sidekick who teaches him how to connect with people. And the film's homoerotic subtext is completely intentional.

[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

[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).