#this is so fucking long so whoops lmao thank u for bearing w my yelling but. ough. ogh. ogh. ogh.

[pocketsizedquasar]

HI please shout about your ahab and fedallah ideas im so curious, what you did say sounds sooo cool and good. theyre... i have my own normal feelings about them general, but its more of a narrative relationship thing than like- them actually interacting?? idk. im fascinated your work has a grasp on my psyche for real

HI YES OK I LOVE THEM SM ok ok so

all of this was kinda just born from me thinking abt what i can do w/ fedallah to fix how shitty & racist he’s treated by the og narrative and just sorta. asking questions abt him and taking those answers to their logical conclusions , and filling in the gaps w my own personal thoughts where needed

ie: why is fedallah on this ship? why would be put his life at risk for this? not just the general deadly risk of whaling, but also the legal/social implications of the fact that he’s a stowaway and the shipowners definitely do not approve of him being on board? he (and the other four of ahab’s oarsmen) certainly is not getting paid by the shipowners for this; did ahab offer them portions of the captain’s pay instead? we know ahab wanted a boat’s crew of his own, but why did he ask for fedallah, specifically? why does he trust fedallah so much — both to be his harpooner, and with his prophecies&foresight? why are they so devoted to each other, such that fedallah is constantly referred to as ahab’s shadow?

the answer to a lot of these came very naturally like: okay, they must’ve been friends. they must’ve been close. they must’ve known each other for some time, and in such a way that ahab would trust fedallah this much, and fedallah would be so willing to massively inconvenience & risk himself for him.

^thats what i can get from the text (wringing it out though i must, since melville refuses to tell us this himself, but it’s what we can infer based on what we know)

the rest of this is my (head)canon territory (aka canon to the comic) and me filling in the blanks:

- ahab saved fedallah’s life, once. i think that’s how they met. in ch 19 “the prophet” elijah tells us ahab was once in a “deadly scrimmage with [a] spaniard;” i’m stealing that to say that that fight was an encounter where aforementioned spaniard was targeting fedallah, and ahab as passerby got a bit caught up in it but, seeing a fellow brown dude tm in trouble, stepped in & saved him.

(also: consider—sexy sword fight ahab. that is all. i know the text just calls it a “scrimmage” without specifics but like. sword fight. swords. ahab w a sword. that’s all)

anyway. they’re in spain maybe? the text says “deadly scrimmage with a spaniard before the altar in Santa,” which i can only assume is referring to holy week in spain / santa semana? and, since we also know this fight was “deadly” and ahab is, ahem, not dead, by this point, obviously the other guy must’ve died, so ahab&fedallah probably skedaddle very quickly. back to ahab’s ship, probably, which was likely just temporarily making port in spain for whatever reason.

- from then, fedallah very much clings to ahab — you saved my life; i owe you a debt; if ever you need anything of me etc etc, you know how it goes. ahab brushes off the offers and claims of a favor in return; you don’t need to do anything for me, i don’t begrudge you this, i don’t feel you owe me anything. it’s fine mdude.

- anyway. they’re besties!! they enjoy each other’s company! fedallah is a frequent (though not necessarily permanent) member of ahab’s ship rosters. they bond over being SWANA in the good ol’ us of a. fedallah teaches ahab how to make chai properly — he never got to learn; his mother died far too early in his life (book canon). they probably fucked once (1) on a drunken night and then mutually decide never to do that again /lh.

fedallah’s also disabled — he wears a knee brace on his right leg, perhaps an aftermath of that fight w the spaniard, perhaps from something before — when ahab gets disableified by The Dickening TM fedallah’s council on how to manage pain and other things like that is extremely helpful.

and ahab never takes fedallah up on that favor. he doesn’t think he needs to; he has no desire to. fedallah is his friend. he doesn’t view their relationship that way; he genuinely doesn’t feel like fedallah owes him anything, for saving him or for anything else.

- & then moby dick happens.

- moby dick happens and ahab loses his leg and spends weeks on his own ship tied and restrained to his own bed because his own crew decided that him — in his newly disabled, unable to walk, but in Pain and “Insane” state — is too much of a threat to be allowed to exist freely. and he spends weeks straitjacketed to his own bed.

and then he gets back to shore and his own prosthetic snaps underneath him and stabs him in the abdomen and nearly kills him and it’s taking him weeks to recover, and those shipowners are talking about sending him out again anyways, even though he’s still in the middle of recovering from That, and if we’re being honest still hasn’t properly recovered or healed from losing his leg in the first place — did you know that the first few months after an amputation are the most important when it comes to long term healing of the scar tissue? and we know he wasn’t able to take care of himself in those critical weeks, lashed to his bed, muscles atrophying and whole body growing sore as it’s forced to stay in one position for god knows how long on end, and oh he’s going to be in pain for the rest of his life because of this, isn’t he.

so they’re putting him back on the pequod while he’s still in recovery. the last time he was on that ship while recovering from a major wound, his officers tied him up like an animal. he doesn’t know if he can trust these new officers, though they weren’t on that voyage. he doesn’t know if he can even trust his own body, his own prosthetic leg, to not fail him, to not break on him and incapacitate him again.

so he needs an ally on this ship. he needs someone he can trust.

so he asks for fedallah. finally calls in that favor, even though he’d never planned to.

- anyway, in terms of how i’d describe their relationship, it’s basically what i said in the tags of that post fjskdjsj they’re not friends they’re not lovers they’re not family but also they’re all of the above and also more; there aren’t words for them to talk about what they are to each other; they trust each other and are devoted to one another and imo losing fedallah on the second day of the chase is the final nail in the coffin of the tragedy that just keeps building.

like, when fedallah tells ahab in chapter 116 that fedallah will die first, and ahab will follow, ahab doesn’t take that as a thing to be worried about: he takes it as another pledge that he will survive this voyage.

and when it actually happens, well. look how ahab responds:

even with melville’s inability to treat fedallah like an actual person, ahab is more panicked than we ever see him when he realizes fedallah is gone. and yeah, you could argue that he’s just panicked that he’s going to die because fedallah died first, but if you listen carefully to a lot of what ahab says throughout the book, he’s not actually that afraid of himself dying. that might still be cause for panic here, sure, but i also very much choose to read this as shocked grief — gone? not gone! not gone! — his friend is fucken dead!!!

- (also worth nothing that immediately between those two passages^ is starbuck begging ahab to turn around once again, saying how many awful things have happened already, and one of the things he says is “thy evil shadow gone” — and immediately after starbuck’s speech, we get ye infamous “of late I’ve felt strangely moved to thee; ever since that hour we both saw—thou know’st what, in one another’s eyes” from ahab immediately followed by him ultimately rejecting starbuck and life and the possibility to turn around and etc etc — and with this context? w the context of having Just lost fedallah only to have yet another person calling him ahab’s “”evil”” shadow in a long litany of people who have spent the entire book hounding fedallah as evil and the devil? i don’t know, it’s hard not to read these lines from ahab as almost spiteful. i once saw something in your eyes. i can’t see anything anymore but this. this was always going to be the outcome — ‘twas rehearsed by thee and me a billion years before this ocean rolled.’)

- ow.

- fedallah makes me ache. we know so little about him and he does nothing tangibly wrong but he spends the entire book being derided by both the narrative and the other characters as some evil hellish monster. and for what. look at him. he’s just a silly little guy. he was ahab’s friend. he had to have been.

- it’s important to me that you know that fedallah is much, much shorter than ahab. he’s a short king

plus bonus fedallah’s full design because i love him: