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

[kindkit]

I thought of due South too. I tend to think that Ray V. is more of a Watson figure than Ray K., though, because Ray V. has a bit more of a life outside of Fraser--he's got a family, for example, just as Watson eventually (if temporarily) forms a family without Holmes. Ray K., on the other hand, is as isolated and dysfunctional in his own way as Fraser.

[damned_colonial]

But while Watson *forms* a family with Mary, he's estranged from his family of birth in a way that's kind of reminiscent of RayK I think -- see the bit at the start of SIGN when Holmes deduces things about Watson's father and his alcoholic brother, for instance... and do we ever hear about Watson's birth-family again in canon? (I think not, but I'm not quite sure.) We learn about a couple of university friends of Holmes's in the canon, and of course Mycroft is there, but who do we have from Watson's life? Stamford, briefly, in the opening chapter of A Study in Scarlet... whatsisname from The Naval Treaty, who Watson hasn't seen since school, and ummmm I can't think of anyone else. Am I missing anyone? In any case, that feels more like RayK with his turtle than RayV with his demonstrative, noisy family all living in the same house.

[kindkit]

Hmm, yes, I see what you mean. I think we may be working from different definitions of what the Watson role is. To the extent that Watson keeps Holmes connected to the world (and retains something of his own life apart from Holmes), that seems more like Ray V. than Ray K. to me. Ray K., by contrast, separates himself more and more from the wider world for Fraser's sake, and in the end the two of them go off into the wilderness together. It's as though Watson retired to Sussex with Holmes to help him keep bees.

On the other hand, Ray K. has a much more Watson-ish admiration, whereas Ray V. usually seems to find Fraser just exasperating.