Re your tags: in what ways would you not get along with Bush and Hornblower?

Hoo, boy.

A great deal of it is the attitudes and norms of the institution and era. For example, Bush is an enthusiastic supporter of impressment, corporal punishment, and capital punishment, all of which I find reprehensible and horrifying. Hornblower is iffy about the latter two, but even so is more likely to be critical of himself (for the alleged character flaw of squeamishness) than of the institutions themselves. Furthermore, his squeamishness only goes so far: he cold-bloodedly murdered the leader of an entirely justified and failed mutiny, because he felt the authoritarian structures of the Navy must be categorically upheld in all circumstances. (Hornblower could have chosen to miss the shot: the mutiny had failed, the leader was escaping, the guy was literally powerless to further disrupt the Navy and its operations -- but Hornblower viewed it to be critically important that the man be seen to die for the crime of publicly standing up to a murderously abusive captain. There’s a reason Lord Hornblower made me feel dirty to be a part of the fandom.)

More personally, it's not entirely clear to me what those two would make of me being a highly-educated, mathematically trained, and dyke-ish queer woman, but I suspect it wouldn't be flattering, given Hornblower's commentary on Lady Barbara being "mannish" when he first meets her. Bush is a bit more of a cipher re women, but his comment that he likes 'pretty, saucy women' (with the strong implication that he has little time or sympathy for women otherwise) isn't encouraging.

And then there's the fact that I'm Lakota. While the Lakota were too far inland to have had specific beef with the Royal Navy, RN officers considered themselves unquestionably and unjustifiably superior to "the natives" pretty much everywhere they went in the world. The fact that I'm so-called "civilized" would likely be a marginally positive mark in their eyes, but 1) I have few illusions it would translate to actual respect, and 2) it would in no way lessen my contempt for them presuming to judge.

Basically, they're officers in good standing of the Georgian Royal Navy, which was brutal, racist, sexist, classist, and an enforcer of colonialism everywhere it went. Why would we have gotten along?

When you get right down to it, the Hornblower books work for me only to the point that I can imagine myself similar to Hornblower and Bush -- male, white, of a certain class, etc. (Which says a lot about what we’re trained to read as “universal” or “generic.”) It also helps enormously that the books are preoccupied with the French and largely remain in Europe, thus limiting my dissonance about the Royal Navy upholding colonialism. But every once in a while I look at a still or read a passage and have a strong moment of “Hoo, boy, it’s a good thing we’re irrevocably separated by two-centuries-and-counting. It’s a good thing, too, that you’re fictional, and I’m well-practiced in rejecting parts of canon that offend me. Because it’s super clear that if my inconveniently gendered and embodied 2021 self somehow ended up face-to-face with your 1813 self via some magical portal into fictional worlds: we absolutely would not get along.”