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

[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!

[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.