dsudis:

jacquez45:

plaidadder:

plaidadder:

oceaxereturns:

plaidadder:

I was thinking about Jake Peralta and Charles Boyle from B99 vis a vis Holmes and Watson and I formed a hypothesis which I have just tested. My hypothesis was correct…but I don’t know why.

Hypothesis: B99 has actually successfully prevented viewers from reading the primary m/m partnership homoerotically. To put it more simply: people by and large do not slash Jake and Boyle.

I did a search on AO3. Would you like to know how many pics show up in the Charles Boyle/Jake Peralta tag?

THREE.

For purposes of comparison, there are 1692 Jake/Amy pics on AO3 and 172 Jake /Rosas, as well as over a hundred Rosa/Ginas.

This is amazing. It’s an author-intent miracle. Yeah, I know the show doesn’t ship them, but that never stopped ANYONE. How, Moffat and Gatiss must surely be wondering, did they manage to keep Eros out of that bromance?

I have formed a few theories.

1. The inclusion of openly gay characters makes people stop looking for coded gay characters.

2. Viewers are protecting the canon ship (Jake/Amy). Plausible but does not explain the much larger number of Jake/Rosas and Amy/Rosas.

3. Both characters are given multiple heterosexual relationships. True; again, never stopped anyone before.

4. It is precisely the absurdly self-abasing intensity of Charles’s devotion that stops people from reading it romantically. Variant: it is so obvious that Charles desires to BE Jake that we don’t ask whether he wants to DO Jake.

5. Nobody wants to imagine Charles Boyle having sex. This one has merit. Despite all the girlfriends he has, his sex life is always kind of disgusting to the other characters, as is his way of introducing it very inappropriately I to conversation.

I dunno. It’s fascinating.

Is it possibly because the bromance is so tender and so very much requited?? There’s not a lot of read into there because they’re both very comfortable with it.

Excellent theory! Yes, I like this: the relationship as is is so fulfilling for Boyle that there is nothing left for him to desire. And although Jake isn’t as…full Boyle about it, he also is getting everything out of it that he wants in a friendship.

I propose a refinement of the above theory:

Because Jake and Boyle are both largely comfortable with the intensity of the relationship, they do not appear to be repressing anything. In other words there is no level of bromanticism that either of them would deny or disavow. Therefore, the viewer actually believes that what you see is what you get: nothing is hidden or latent. So nobody has to write the fic that brings it to the surface.

I thought about this, and about the other intense, unrepressed bromance I can think of on television: J.D. & Turk (Scrubs). Of the 314 Scrubs stories on AO3, only 12 are JD/Turk (by contrast, Perry Cox/JD has 142 stories, and Turk’s most common partner is his wife Carla) . Like Boyle & Jake, they are repressing nothing, completely open about the intensity of their friendship, and emotionally secure with each other. So, I think there may be something to this theory. 

I feel like the JD & Turk example is not exactly comparable because their slash representation is probably suppressed below what it would otherwise be by the White Guy and Black Guy Are Best Friends effect (also why there’s more Shawn/Lassiter than Shawn/Gus in Psych, why there’s more Loki/Tony or Bucky/Tony than Tony/Rhodey in the MCU, etc.)

Jake/Boyle should be an unreasonably massive pairing relative to the size of the fandom, going by the dynamics of… every other fandom… because they are The Two White Guys Who Talk To Each Other, but it’s NOT! That’s actually possibly an even bigger accomplishment than just convincing people not to slash best friends!

My guess on this part of the phenomenon is that 

1) The show offers an actually really interesting and healthy het relationship in Jake/Amy, and as a part of that,

2) The Two White Guys Who Talk To Each Other are not even CLOSE to being the most attractive or interesting people on the show! Their emotional development, individually and in relation to each other, is not emphasized to the detriment/exclusion of all other characters and relationships! NOT EVEN CLOSE. They are SO DRAMATICALLY not the most interesting or attractive or emotionally-developed characters on the show that PEOPLE WRITE HET AND FEMSLASH ABOUT A SHOW WHERE THERE ARE TWO WHITE DUDES WHO TALK TO EACH OTHER! 

!!!!!!!