house fic: hourglass [house/wilson, pg]

[_starrystarry]

hourglass
house; house, wilson; pg; 1,010 words
house is a man without preamble: "i've never made anything in your life easier, you know," he says. "you're acting like i should have been your personal hero or something, but i've never fixed anything for you." spoilers for "wilson's heart."

Comments

[_starrystarry]

You're welcome, but it's my pleasure. If I get my way I'll spend my time analyzing popular culture movements and tying them to the literary past, hopefully this'll involve some writing and some teaching, but since I just finished my first year at university I think that's a way off yet.

You by no means have to be familiar with Greek epics; I'm aware the above comment does make me sound like quite the literary snob and for that I apologize. But I do love how the notion of "hero" gets transformed over the ages. I'm really partial to nineteenth and twentieth century stuff (and Shakespeare. my love for Shakespeare knows no bounds), and it's great, for instance, to see how people like Dostoevsky or Woolf or, hell, how about someone who's alive and people actually read - García Márquez, Jonathan Safran Foer, Helen Fielding who wrote the Bridget Jones books - craft their heroes to meet the expectations of society. I think literature (and television, which I actually think is the best medium to tell a story in our "information age," but that's really a whole other argument) is societal commentary, and we choose to be captivated by and look up to people like House who are caught between this timeless struggle and ultimately make the right decisions. We are all human. We can't make the choices that were offered to Achilles and Aeneas by their literally divine mothers. But there are such obvious parallels of how to balance career glory with family pressures: would you be a stay-at-home mom? If you've seen the West Wing, the President recuses himself using the twenty-fifth amendment when his daughter is kidnapped. Was that the right call? Would George Bush do that? Is it indicative of our society now - how about Andrew Jackson, or whoever'll be president in fifty years?

We're always looking for heroes, and today's TV heroes really are important - there are people who grow up without role models and need to find someone somewhere to look up to. While House has different values from the Doctor on Doctor Who or Hawkeye on MASH or endless other characters of past and present it's interesting to see what aspects of human nature we always value. God this is starting to sound ridiculous and pseudo-intellectual, so I'll stop now. ;)