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.
“The only picture I have of my childhood is the picture of me in kindergarten, I have this expression on my face — it’s not a smile, it’s not a frown. I swear to you, that’s the girl who wakes up in the morning and who looks around her house and her life saying, ‘I cannot believe how God has blessed me.’ “
“I would jump in trash bins with maggots looking for food, and I would steal from the corner store because I was hungry, I never had any kids come to my house because my house was a condemned building, it was boarded up, it was infested with rats. I was one of those kids who were poor and knew it.”
“I was the kind of poor where I knew right away I had less than everyone around me. We had nothing, I cannot believe my life, I just can’t, I’m so blessed. I would jump in trash bins with maggots looking for food, and I would steal from the corner store because I was hungry, I never had any kids come to my house because my house was a condemned building, it was boarded up, it was infested with rats. I was one of those kids who were poor and knew it.”
“It became a motivation as opposed to something else — the thing about poverty is that it starts affecting your mind and your spirit because people don’t see you, I chose from a very young age that I didn’t want that for my life. And it very much has helped me appreciate and value the things that are in my life now because I never had it. A yard, a house, great plumbing, a full refrigerator, things that people take for granted, I don’t.”
“I first envisioned myself as an actor after I watched Cicely Tyson in The Autobiography of Miss Jane Pittman when I was a child.”
“It wasn’t until then that I had a visual manifestation of the target I wanted to hit, It also gave me hope for the future and a different life for myself, she helped me have a very specific drive of how I was going to crawl, walk, run from that environment.”
“I became an artist, and thank God I did, because we are the only profession that celebrates what it means to live a life,”
As it turns out, this is more like a halfway house. Prisoners usually begin their term in a prison more like one we’d typically recognize – bars on the windows, locked in their cells. But the emphasis there is on successful reintegration into society.
As their sentence progresses, with good behavior, they can move into a facility more like this, where their freedoms are still restricted, but they can do things like network with people outside of prison, search for employment, cook and clean and look after themselves, and begin making plans for their reintegration into society.
As a result, Norway has one of the lowest rates of recidisvism. 20% as opposed to America’s 76%.
It seems like a shocking idea to us because of where and how we live, but apparently, Norwegians are addressing the real problem. When you take people who can’t function well in society, and then…help them do that?…they….do. Without the crime-ing.
Turns out treating people like human beings makes them more likely to act like human beings….
But won’t that incentivize some people to go back there since they get treated so well and get a nice room versus the streets?
If you read the post above, it says Norway’s recidivism rate – that is, the rate of released criminals who go on to be arrested again – is 20% versus 76% in the United States, so for the most part, no.
Isn’t that white-lined black cross on a red field flag a Nazi flag? Are we going to talk about how wonderful it is a Nazi gets a nice halfway house?
Sirius: I am offended. I am angry. I am very tired…
Sirius: So I’m going to take a nap, but when I wake up, oh you are in for it.
[four hours later]
Sirius: How dare you?
