stunt_muppet

The incredulous look Pellew gives Horatio after the latter volunteers to stay on his ship the night after his wedding will never, ever get old.

I watched Duty and Loyalty again tonight while I studied, vacuumed, and did my laundry, since I hadn't watched either in a while and I wanted to know which sections required my careful attention and twitchy screencap-button finger, and while Horatio/Bush is complex, repressed, hey-look-another-excuse-for-Bush-to-share-my-quarters canon, I have a terrible, terrible weakness for Horatio/Pellew and this unfortunate tendency to flail when they have scenes together.

I can't help it! Pellew just looks so proud of him sometimes and almost chokes up that one time when he's talking about Horatio and thinks he might be dead and to top it all off there's those slightly frustrated, I-don't-know-what-to-do-with-you looks Pellew gets when Horatio's being a bit clueless. It's all a bit weirdly incestuous, really, since Horatio is almost explicitly set up as a son-figure to Pellew, but I'm starting to think ambiguously-paternal ships (between adults, of course, because otherwise it's creepy) might be my favorite kind. Well, tied with best-friends ships, anyway (which Horatio/Bush handily fits into, hey). Not sure why, but I love the complications that arise when romantic/erotic interest emerges as an element of an already deep relationship, usually in a homosocial context* but also between two characters of any gender, and the characters have to learn to navigate that. It makes things so multifaceted and interesting.

I don't suppose there is any Horatio/Pellew fic out there? (And while I'm fishing for ships what don't exist, any Orrock/Jack Hammond? Not that there's much time for it to, er, happen, but a girl can dream.) I kind of want to write it myself, but that means a) doing research on naval history at a time when the thought of more research into anything makes me whimper a bit, b) reading the Hornblower books, since writing movieverse Hornblower fic feels a bit like cheating, like writing Shakespeare fic using the Cliffnotes version of the plays, and c) getting involved in another active fandom, which I need at the moment like I need another chainsaw to juggle. I'm barely active in my currently active fandoms.

That said, I do feel very sorry for Maria, and genuinely like her; hers and Horatio's marriage feels a bit pastede on yey, but I think it's supposed to, and the show recognizes the problems with it and the complications in it. It's really just not going to work for either of them. Horatio, at least in the movies, marries Maria mostly out of a sense of duty. And Maria knows that, and is trying to make the best of their marriage anyway, trying to act like she's really gotten what she wants when she hasn't.

It's depressing, really. I mean, yeah, I'm definitely a slasher in this fandom, but still, poor Maria.

* That's when it tends to come up, anyway; in the eras most of my fandoms are set in homoeroticism is still forbidden de jure or de facto and thus male characters would tend to repress or hide it and there's potential for an element of the friend or surrogate-parent relationship being sublimated eroticism/romanticism.

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On a completely different note: I think there might be a bee's nest outside our window. I think this because, every single morning, there's a rather large bumblebee that flies around outside and collides repeatedly into one or both of our windows.

It does this, on and off again, every twenty minutes or so, for a good four hours. It would be funny if it wasn't so bizarrely sad.

And now I have work to do. I will probably be up all night again but I spent most of this weekend unconscious so it serves me right.