I've already heard of at least a few of the stories you mentioned from your time aboard the Pride of Baltimore (I think), but I'm very intrigued by the mention of the nightmare guest?
Oh.
GOD.
(Long post incoming)
So this guy was a retired ex-navy guy, and he'd signed up both to go on the transit up the coast, and on the transit home, because of his belief in "symmetry and balance." He sure loved to hear himself talk. Mostly about himself, or things he was interested in that weren't necessarily things other people were interested in. If the person he was talking to moved away, he would keep on talking. He walked around constantly in swim trunks, or even just his underwear.
So far, so annoying, but not any worse than your standard annoying guy, right?
Shipmates, it gets worse.
We were delayed a day getting out of port due to a tropical storm, but once we got going, this man's complaints started. Mainly, that he couldn't sleep because the timbers of the boat were creaking. He said it was louder than the Navy rifle ranges, and that he was now "on strike" and would no longer be doing any guest crew activities. (It was not louder than a Navy rifle range. It was normal boat noises.)
...sir, this is a wooden ship. The timbers are going to creak. You should have known this when you signed up.
Anyway, old man yells at cloud, whatever, but one afternoon during the trip, my watchmates and I are on deck, and we see this man emerge from the main hatchway, in his swim trunks, and open the engine room hatch. NO ONE should be going through that hatch except the chief engineer and whichever crew/guest crew members are doing boat checks, and since he wasn't on watch, we had no idea what he was doing. He reaches in, pulls out a pair of the noise-canceling headphones that hang on the engine room ladder for use in the engine room when the engines are on, and heads back down the main hatchway to his berth. All of us hanging out by the helm just kind of look at each other and shrug.
(I wasn't around for this part, but the chief engineer told me later that when she realized the headphones were missing and went to ask him for them back, he went ballistic on her, threatened to call OSHA on the ship, blamed her for all the noises, and threatened vandalism. Lovely.)
Anyway, fast forward about 12 hours, I'm on watch again! One of my watchmates offers to go below and get us some snacks. On this particular vessel, snacks are stored under the captain's seat (aka the "snack settee") at the head of the mess table. But my watchmate comes up empty-handed, and tells us that one of the guests (guess which one) is currently passed out on the snack settee, which we all think is really weird, but we don't want to be the people to wake him up.
WELL.
Sometime in the wee hours of the morning, after we'd been relieved on watch and fallen back into our bunks asleep, the captain found this man pissing himself and projectile vomiting all over his berth and the main salon. I woke up for lunch (0-4 and 12-16 watch, eyyyy) to find the captain sitting on the floor with this man, who is bemoaning everything that led him to this, and the trash bags full of all his piss and vomit-covered belongings. Right before I go up for watch, I'm asked if this man's former bunkmate, another Boat Owning Old Guy, can berth with me instead, so I say, "yeah, sure," because what else could I do? I wouldn't want to stay in a berth where all of that had happened, either.
Anyway, after this, nightmare guest doesn't interact much with the rest of us, which is honestly... fine, but the real kicker comes after a fast transit and an unfavorable wind to our eventual destination, which results in us spending a two nights in the delightful queer resort town of Provincetown. On our second night, mindful that we're going to be mustering all hands to sail out at 5 AM, I come back to the ship at around midnight, and get a text from the first mate asking if I've seen the nightmare guest, since now that I'm back he's the only one missing. I tell her I haven't seen him since lunch, since that's true. My now-bunkmate is still up, so I ask him. He says he and two other Boat Owning Old Guys (including the nightmare guest) had gone to a country music bar, and when he and one guy left, the nightmare guest didn't want to go. As I drift off to sleep, I notice the captain and the first mate taking turns checking the main salon, checking up on deck, seeing if he's shown up without their noticing. No luck.
Well, 5 AM rolls around, we're about to take down the gangway, pull in the hawsers, and leave, but the nightmare guest still hasn't returned to the ship. The captain and the first mate are openly talking about leaving him behind. And then they get a call: he's in the drunk tank at the local jail. He apparently stayed at the bar where the other guests had left him until closing time, and then was too intoxicated to leave under his own power, so they had to take him to jail to sleep it off.
...Anyway, he had to be informed that he was not going to be making the return journey with the ship, and would have to find his own way back home. I'm not sorry to have seen the last of him.
oh hmm i like this one A Lot but only in the sense of like... them being pair bonded like parrots or two rabbits that have to be adopted together. i don't think dundy is into Anything At All tbh (which really started as me joking about him pretending not to know what was going on with the lieutenants when they were on king william island) but fitzjames is still His Other Person.
1 thing I want to know about you: What would some of your top reccomendations of classic literature be? (I've just been consuming that recently. Fervently. For some reason.)
The Top "Classical Literature" I like to encourage others to read? Oh dear that's a large large list. However, I think given the season, I think William Blake's poetry is a wonderful thing for this time of year.
But in other texts and literature...
Master and Margarita by Mikhail Bulgakov is an incredible read.
Mervyn Peake's Gormenghast is a Brilliant read!
Doktor Faustus: Das Leben des deutschen Tonsetzers Adrian Leverkühn, erzählt von einem Freunde by Thomas Mann
Братья Карамазовы (Brat'ya Karamazovy) (The Brothers Karamazov) by Fyodor Dostoevsky of course! As well as my Personal Delight is Crime and Punishment.
Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde by Robert Louis Stevenson.
Stanisław Lem's Solaris is incredible as well.
Do let me know if you've read any of these or if you do read any of these! They're all wonderful!
fuck jopson, he would beg so very prettily
marry bridgens, so he can hold me tenderly for the rest of our lives
kill gibson, because honestly, i am so sorry gibson-posters, but i do not see it
💚 for the Terror. 💖🧡 and 📖 (but chapter(s) instead of entire book(s)) for Moby Dick
💚: What does everyone else get wrong about your favorite character?
Ooh, it's time to make some enemies.
I really, really dislike the popular fanon characterizations of James Fitzjames. Depending on what particular flavor of queer a fanwork is depicting him as, the kind of... shallow femininity that gets forced on him makes me MASSIVELY uncomfortable. It often comes across as somewhere between homophobic and misogynistic caricature, personality stripped away and replaced with a pretty dress.
I can see where this started, though—the pre-Carnivale dress scene is something that's very important to a lot of Terror fans, and perhaps something that endeared them to a character whose Empire-loving, glory-hounding, "the atrocities I've committed are fun table conversation"-believing ways are (hopefully) unsympathetic to a modern audience. Still, I'd like to see more fanworks engage with that side of James Fitzjames—the tool of an empire that can never love him back.
This isn't to say I don't love queer or trans readings of Fitzjames! I just want to see the character still be a glory-hounding veteran of an imperialist war, and someone I can still believe would shoot rockets at bears.
💖: Already answered here!
🧡: What is a popular (serious) theory you disagree with?
I had to think about this one for a bit. I'd say it's the take that I see floating around on the Internet a lot that Moby-Dick is cosmic horror. If we're taking cosmic horror to mean the horror of the incomprehensible, the impossibly alien, the Things Man Was Not Meant To Know, then there is exactly one chapter that fits the bill—"The Castaway", which includes maybe my favorite passage of the whole book.
However, almost the entire rest of the book is our narrator-protagonist making sense of the whale, as if knowing everything he can about it is his way of coping with the devastating trauma of losing everyone he spent two years of his life living with.
It's almost reverse cosmic horror—rather than a sane man going mad from coming face to face with an incomprehensible monstrosity, our mentally ill (traumatized/depressed/bipolar/open to interpretation) protagonist makes meaning for himself by learning to comprehend the monstrosity.
📖: If you had to remove one chapter from the book, which would you choose?
Ooh, that's a good question. And a hard one.
Moby-Dick is, rather famously, full of chapters upon chapters of whale facts, some of which are even true. I will not be getting rid of any of those. Those are load-bearing whale facts. You pull them out, and the book collapses into a respectable revenge tragedy, rather than the earth-shattering psychological epic that it is. The whale facts represent both the fact that for long stretches of a sea voyage, nothing particularly exciting is going on, and you have time to contemplate things like the immense scarred brow of the whale, and also that this story is being told by a traumatized man who's going off on tangents because he really doesn't want to get around to the part of the story where he loses everything and all of his friends die.
If I had to get rid of one chapter, it would probably be "The Town Ho's Story". Of all the ill omens and tales of woe that the Pequod's crew encounter on their fateful final voyage, this one drags out longest and (to me) was one of the less memorable. However, I'm sure it's probably someone's favorite chapter. Many of them are.
Thank you so much, @georges-chambers/@alienmythologist! You gave me much to think about.
Ask me for my unpopular opinions about boat stories!
i don't remember my FIRST first impression when i first watched the show back in 2021 but when i watched it last year i had been... a bit influenced shall we say (friend posting about how jopson definitely tops and crozier doesn't finally persuaded me). so it was "are they... you know?
Impression now
That's My Guy! i do not necessarily think that he is as weird/haunted as the fandom gives him credit for, however. i think he is just a victorian guy with a job that does not translate very neatly into a modern setting, but who is ultimately living his life.
Favorite moment
how can i choose tbh? i will always have a fondness for him and hickey having a catfight over crozier.
Idea for a story
ngl jopson is not a character that i really know what to do with fic-wise. he is sometimes there in the background while my Chosen Men are off doing stuff but i don't really know how to write him.
currently in stuff i'm working on (or working-ish on) he gets to be a lightning rod for little's Maladaptive Depression (finds him just as he is about to go and walk off the ship with Obvious Intentions). i also wrote hodgson having a go at him once but again not out of any personal dislike for him. (or not really.)
Unpopular opinion
i was born without jopson/little perceptors. sorry. i do not think that they are really aware of each other before jopson gets promoted and after that i fear that little has too much on for a star-crossed romance. and even if that weren't the case.............. honestly i saw enough of it when i was early in Getting Interested In The Terror and was like "??? don't really get it" that i now have a visceral "DON'T LIKE THAT >:(" reaction to it. alas, or whatever.
Favorite relationship
i think he and crozier at least thought about it.
Favorite headcanon
i feel like, while hodgson ends up actively disliking him and little is at best ambivalent, irving actually really likes jopson. just like, "oh fuck yeah now it's socially acceptable for us to hang out." or it would be if hodgson wasn't like. seething worryingly in a corner.
For the character ask game, Jopson for 4, Crozier for 21, and Fitzjames for 22
Hello and always a pleasure to see you in my inbox!
Jopson for 4:
4. If you could put this character in any other media, be it a book, a movie, anything, what would you put them in?
I would put Jopson in Rękopis znaleziony w Saragossie by Potocki for sure. I would love to see how he does in those.... Scenarios.
Crozier is:
21. If you're a fic writer and have written for this character, what's your favorite thing to do when you're writing for this character? What's something you don't like?
I love to emphasise, explore and observe in tangible ways Crozier's incredible empathy and problem-solving mind. On top of a deeply seated tenderness. The empathy and the intensity with which he does many things is beautiful.
Fitzjames for 22 would be
22. If you're a fic reader, what's something you like in fics when it comes to this character? Something you don't like?
I adore it (and this applies to all these characters), is when they incorporate knowledge and awareness and speculated historical accuracies to a character. I love that so very much. This is definitely seen in Fic Authors that have read May We Be Spard.
Additionally, I really dislike how often some writers drag insecurity through James like it's the main facet. It's not only inaccurate in my opinion due to how nuanced and fluid that James' confidence is, but he's not an insecure individual as an entire whole. It has its place in some scenes but it's so overwashed in so many ways that it's simply annoying and it feels out of character for me and so I struggle to continue to read it after that.
