you asked for lore questions so. do you have any particular starhab Thoughts today

HI I MISSED THIS SOMEHOW but yes the answer to this question is always yes. i always have Them thots

recently, i’ve mostly been rotating what i’ve been uncreatively calling Good AU (AU where Starbuck actually Talks To ahab and they have a proper conversation and convinces him to turn around but not before at least 3 therapy sessions which may or may not involve passive-to-active suicidality on both their parts wahoo)

which is generally the AU i’m always rotating; @coulson-is-an-avenger have been talking abt it for literally 9+ months (n they have made some related fics before me, bc i’m slow <3 /positive) — but right now specifically, since i’ve finally started Actually writing it in the past couple weeks, i’m thinking a lot abt the beginning/setup of the au, which is aforementioned conversations/therapy sessions/breakdowns

more specifically, i’m thinking lots about how melville writes both ahab and starbuck as such deeply, intrinsically lonely people in different ways, and about how some of that loneliness is self inflicted and some of it isn’t. w starbuck especially… (i’ve talked abt this in the comments of a comic page before but) there’s the obvious element of loneliness that comes from losing most of his family to whaling, and having to be away from his wife and child for so long, and being seemingly the only person for a while on this boat who thinks there might be something wrong with ahab, but there is also an element of self-inflicted loneliness too: in Dusk, he specifically mentions the “heathen crew” and how much he feels apart from them. “Oh, God! to sail with such a heathen crew that have small touch of human mothers in them! Whelped somewhere by the sharkish sea. The white whale is their demigorgon.” his whiteness (and racism) and christianity is an element of isolation for him.

melville very regularly and deliberately highlights whiteness as a tool of isolation. ishmael only heals and becomes less lonely when he eschews christian “kindness” — “I’ll try a pagan friend, thought I, since Christian kindness has proved but hollow courtesy.” ahab is excluded and isolated from this world, for various untold reasons, though we can infer that some of them result from his disability (and, if you’re like me, an argument for reading ahab as nonwhite): “socially, Ahab was inaccessible. Though nominally included in the census of Christendom, he was still an alien to it.”

and starbuck—starbuck is of this world, this world of hollow courtesy and alienation, this world of nantucket quakers, which ishmael so poignantly describes as stifling and insular and strict. it is this — this whiteness, this hollow christianity, this learned racism — which prevents Starbuck from meaningfully emotionally connecting with his ‘pagan’ / ‘heathen’ crew, even as we know he is generally in other ways good to them. it is also this worldview which prevents him from meaningfully getting through to ahab.

like, ahab is obviously a traumatized specimen of a man (affectionate), but starbuck is also so deeply entrenched in his hyper specific worldview, just as much as ahab is. he can't connect with ahab more because he's so entrenched in seventeen layers of protestant guilt & conditioning, which is partially just the gay thing, but also like. being unable of conceiving ahab's pain through another framework. bc xtianity and protestantism and whiteness and all these things so wildly distort your concepts of what suffering is and who experiences it and who even has the Right to it, and what the right and wrong ways to experience pain are.

all his reasoning for why ahab giving himself so wholly to vengeance and eschewing all human connection is like… “bc god said it’s bad.” in all the times starbuck (in some ways rightly) gets at ahab for what he's doing, he doesn't ever really get to the point of trying to understand why it's happening? or where ahab is coming from? when what ahab needs is to be met where he’s at, in all his messy ugly pain and trauma

so w/ these conversations in the au it's like. part of it is starbuck letting go of this moral judgment and just coming to ahab with a genuine desire to understand hey. why are you doing this. tell me why this is so important to you. why this whale. why so hard. what is driving you to this. and like. understanding the very real amount of pain that ahab is in. the very real mess of a world that is constantly traumatizing and retraumatizing him. a world of whiteness and christianity and capitalism that has so thoroughly abandoned him to his trauma and his pain that he legitimately sees no other way out, no other alternative for alleviating that pain, than this quest.

basically in order to cure ahab’s loneliness starbuck needs to break his own. he cannot break down the walls around ahab without first reaching out beyond his own. and that’s why he fucking doesn’t in canon and tdjdhdhshdjwhdsjdhsj this is why i am so fucking mentally unwell about these two gay losers hfhehdhdhdhehddh