#i really gotta finish the gordon and henry part ii post don't i

[mean-scarlet-deceiver]

Thank you for your amazing answer. I would love to pick your brain on one other thing. My friend says the Strike Trio(TM) are Gordon's best friends. I think Gordon and James' friendship is sort of shallow so I say All three engines are now great friends(TM) are Gordon's best friends. Thoughts? 

¿Por que no los dos?

Ultimately I think you guys have to define what "best friend" means here.

I do think you raise an interesting point about Gordon and James but there are still... a lot of caveats to consider.

(The tl;dr is gonna be point 6 out of 7 under the readmore.)

1. I would emphasize that, overall, Gordon's most important circle is the other five original engines. In the RWS timeline, Thomas, Edward, Henry, Gordon, James, and Percy went through the Depression together. They went through World War II together. They went through Henry's wreck and rebuild together. They saw the beginning of the RWS books' publication together. They faced the huge unknown of nationalisation together. The only other engine acquired by FC1 was Toby and even Toby arrived late in his tenure, after all those formative experiences. I suspect there are others of the Nameless Eighty who were actually there pre-Toby but it's probably no coincidence that we don't know them—I'm sure they haven't broached Gordon's circle of trust.

It's not that I think Gordon is on the whole ill-disposed to newcomers from Toby on. (That's James's job!) Like I'm sure he counts the other characters we know of as friends too but I doubt he ever bonded with any of the newcomers on the same level. (BoCo is a bit of an exception but there is also some ambiguity there as to how much BoCo is humouring him. I hope it's more than that because Gordon really puts himself out there in that relationship in a way that always amazes me but it's hard to be certain from the text that BoCo is doing more than just being polite.) Almost all the other original six are seen to really be able to integrate comfortably with new characters. But I'm not surprised that Gordon struggles because he has that aloof quality. It's going to be hard going for him to emotionally "overlook" a missing twenty years or more of developing trust...

So I think it's better to think of Gordon's relationship in terms of tiers. The original group is all of a tier, and we are in danger of splitting hairs if we try to rank his relationships within that tier. I'd say these relationships are different but they all very important to him.

2. That said, Gordon's "best friend" is pretty obviously Henry. Like, we all seem to agree on this, yes? Beyond that, you guys seem to be trying to rank James and Edward... And again, I fear it's too easy to start getting into splitting hairs. Like to me ranking all your friends is a bit middle school, you know? There are friends that give me different things, that bring out different parts of me, while not necessarily being better or worse than other friends...

That came out more accusatory than I meant, heh. I just like emphasizing this part. Gordon and Henry's friendship is so THERE and so important. Moments like "Henry's not going" and "That's settled, then" and "Tugboat Annie!" are just. I can't. Literally one of the best and most consistent things about the series. ♥

3. On your side, there is something particularly important about the ATEAGF™ (lol) group. It's just a vibe that is obviously felt pretty widely. I mean the original line came from the first RWS book, with all its Pilot Episode Weirdness, and it would have been easy for Awdry to memoryhole it as he introduced, well, James—but he very much didn't. In Henry's and Edward's later books, there is a story in each dedicated to revisiting the Three Railway Engines dynamic over the years asdfk;ladsf; (Arguably Gordon's book at least flirts with it too, though in that case James is also always in the mix—but we'll tackle James in a moment.) In these showcase stories, there is conflict but they're also still undeniably tight. In the Christopher Awdry books he doesn't focus on this relationship but he does throw in one line showing Gordon speaking of Edward warmly, deliberately assuring us that it lives on. This is also why Gordon's panic at Edward and Henry's departure in "Forever and Ever" will always be Andrew Brenner's most iconic moment (even if it's also his most controversial, lol). Like, we the fandom viewers may not have been on board with the concept, but despite our resistance we felt it. It's not like other TVS what-the-hell moments where you can ignore it—Gordon's characterization there DOES resonate.

As I've discussed before��way back when—he can be really brutal at times to Henry and Edward even after he's supposedly their long-time friend and I diagnose this as Gordon just... letting himself be messier with them, essentially? His crushing commentaries at the beginning of "Gordon's Whistle" and "Edward's Exploit" are totally inappropriate. But I don't think he's conscious of any malice in either case, I think he's scared because he's thinking of his friends' mortality and he doesn't know how to handle it, but. BUT. For whatever reason, in these cases he doesn't choose to put on his usual mask of the gallant hero dismissing danger. Instead he's more... honest, I think, than he usually is. (And frankly, when he is being honest I think we can see why he normally keeps all his shit buried because he clearly does not know how to deal with these emotions.)

Anyway I think the significance for all of this is that Gordon (the Loftiest Creation in All Existence, Doncha Know) has, in his heart if not always in his head, bestowed upon Henry and Edward a sort of honorary equality. Like, he relates to Thomas, Percy, and even James in the role of a benevolent patron (whose long-suffering benevolence is sometimes justly tired!) For Whatever Reasons, Gordon seems to really see Edward and Henry as friends in the sense of the engines that he is the most willing to be vulnerable with. And even that degree of vulnerability is... not a lot. But it's something.

I say for "whatever" reasons as I'm not convinced that just pointing to the events of The Three Railway Engines explains it. Then again, perhaps it does. Perhaps it all comes down to Henry and Edward, elated from their success, were very nice about it when they came back to take Gordon home and it was just the first time in Gordon's ultra-competitive life that he was down and another engine didn't kick him while he was there. I mean, we have a sense of what the other Sodor engines were like and honestly it could well be that the Doncaster Prototype Circuit (Gordon would not have been the only one) was pretty cut-throat. So yeah, maybe that was enough. But then again, maybe there's more to it—not least of which, I don't think it hurt that Henry and Edward were not competition for him at the time the way the other Sodor tender engines were—and, ofc, Gordon melted down a bit once Henry was rebuilt and he was, and come to think of it Duck did cite jealousy of Edward as a reason for everyone acting like asshats, and hmmmm... yeah.

Okay, so in short: Perhaps Gordon let his guard down, way back when, partly because Edward and Henry didn't have a go at him after his burst safety valve and were just generally pretty decent, and also they were safe for him to relax around because it's not like they were going to challenge his primacy.

Not the way that, in a couple short years, James would.

4. Which brings us to James, and therefore to Strike Trio.

But I want to note the foundation of the Gordon and James relationship. Because here there is jealousy from the start:

In 1925, James comes back from overhaul. He's new and improved and in a shiny new color and he immediately starts getting attention from passengers.

We do know that Gordon starts in on James right away—in the RWS version of their double-header, James is already fretting a bit about Gordon, to the point where Edward tells him the story of Gordon getting stuck on the hill as a way to reassure him that Gordon's kinda full of hot air. But Gordon doesn't appear till later in the book, where "[he] and Henry would talk of nothing but bootlaces." But this is brought up in relation to the fact that James is rising again in the Fat Controller's estimation. And Gordon in particular feels the need to talk down to him. "You talk too much, little James... A fine, strong engine like me has something to talk about... [boasting continues]... What are you doing? Odd jobs? Ah well, we all have to begin somewhere, don't we. Run along now..."

It's enough to make anyone want to commit murder tbh. But also, as is pretty typical with Gordon, it's not outright insults. It's patronizing.

And then of course James becomes only the second Sodor engine who can pull the express on his own.

And Gordon immediately—while still being patronizing about it!—switches gears into treating James like a chum.

I am not here accusing Gordon of conscious politicking, especially as I don't even think he's capable of it (certainly he isn't in 1925). I think when he expresses warmth it's because he damn well feels it. He's capable of simply being impressed, and he was. But I said all this to sketch out how, throughout James's book, James is clearly a threat to Gordon.

This makes it hilarious how Gordon never seems to quite get over treating James like a junior friend. "Never mind, little James. I'm going to push behind." Like. In this book, James is clearly in the same category as Thomas (and therefore the same category as Percy!)—"protege" or a "little brother"—a little engine who is needlessly rude and disrespectful but whom Gordon grandly forgives.

The dynamic painted so far—Gordon taking James under his wing; Gordon bestowing on James the honor of being his friend, and furthermore James agreeing to this dynamic—continues in Brenner-penned TVS. The scene in S3 "Trust Thomas" comes especially to mind—Gordon pulls the same evil-mentor shenanigans on James that in RWS he did with Sir Handel: "Now, if you were ill, you couldn't push trucks here, or go to the quarry there, now could you?" And again! James is comfortable with it! "What a good idea, I'll try it..."

I guess this point actually circles back to All Three Engines Are Now Great Friends™. James could challenge Gordon's primacy—I mean he'd probably lose out, but he could—and so it seems to me that Gordon never, ever lets his guard down around James. Puts James in the "little engines I've adopted, to save them from themselves" category, because that allows a version of intimacy... but without Gordon risking the loss of any face. Henry I and Edward could not challenge Gordon's primacy, and therefore I'm inclined to think Gordon did let his guard down around them, in the early years, in a way he never had with anyone else before, and wouldn't again for a very long time—if ever.

Gordon can and will verbally savage Edward and Henry if he starts to feel Feelings when they're at their weak points. But when Thomas and Percy and James are at their weakest points, Gordon would never.

It's just two different kinds of intimacy. But I'm eternally amused at the mental and emotional gymnastics Gordon went through to put James into that second category, back in the '20s.

(And why are we focusing so much on the '20s? Well, because I think Gordon grew from there, but at the same time he's very emotionally conservative so whatever dynamics and habits he fell into in the 1920s are still going to be going pretty strong even now in the 2020s.)

5. All this said, I gotta say, on the other side of things: I would not, I would not, underestimate the strength of the Strike Trio™ friendship.

It's a different kind of friendship but I hesitate to go so far as to say it's "shallow." Actually I think it has a very strong foundation—their friendship was forged in fire (I will never believe for a second Henry and James had even really begun to do more than tolerate each other before) when they took collective action against the Fat Controller, who (as he had already demonstrated before, in pretty dramatic terms) has power of life and death over them.

It doesn't matter here how shallow their reasons for doing so may have been. I'm talking here about the way they came together over their complaints. They shared them, they fed into each other's sense of grievance, the sum of their discontent was much more than the individual annoyance they all brought to the table. They banded together and together they faced the lions.

It's unprecedented in the series, and there's never anything quite like it afterwards. It was gutsy, it was seismic, it was huge. They were also willing physically to turn against Edward, whom they had all been friends with before, and again it's not their shining moment as individuals but let's be for real, dramatically excluding others is a very powerful group-building exercise, it's why so many groups wind up doing something like it, it works so far as establishing a collective identity.

Then they were all basically thrown in locomotive prison for a while, together. It must have sucked but also? It would have also really put the final seal on things. Prior to this James was punished in this way by himself, Henry was tunnelled for a very long time but also by himself, Gordon in particular is noted to have been on hand watching Edward's tenure in the sheds and putting allllllll the distance between that and his own reality. Now the hammer falls again on all three alike—but they face it together.

I'm not the least surprised that they would be firm friends after all this.

There's one other factor that I think gives your friend a very strong case. For all I agree that there's a special, particular bond between 2, 3, and 4... 2 isn't around. Not regularly, at least—not every morning, every afternoon, every evening, all night. 3, 4, and 5 live together. That degree of intimacy, that sheer number of face-time hours—multiplied over what is by now one. hundred. years.—uhhhh yeah. That's going to be hard to overtake. There is going to be a Strike Trio closeness that Gordon will not have with Edward and that's about that.

We have been talking lately about the possibility of the Strike Trio drifting apart over the years, and to what degree they did, and what it signifies... those posts were after your ask, but I'm sure you saw them. And to some degree felt vindicated! But I think it's the same phenomenon of The Three Railway Engines after 1923(?) or whatever—there is a drift, there is distance, the relationship itself is not erased. And if that was true for them, it would be even more true for Strike Trio after decades living and working together so closely.

6. So I guess ultimately I agree with your friend, bwaha.

Mostly, though, I think they're all just really lucky to have so long to grow and develop, and to have newcomers arriving to mix things up and help them grow even more, but most of all to be in a position where no one has to lose touch with the friends who have touched their lives. We should all be so blessed, honestly.

7. (Also, the more I think about it, the more I realize that Wilbert Awdry was kinda full of it. Like, yes, I sympathize with his frustration in that 'Thomas isn't the main character! it's an ENSEMBLE SERIES.' But also, this discussion makes me realize '... yeah, buddy, sure, but it IS amazing how much of your series and its beats we preserve even if we boil down the whole RWS to just 'Gordon the Autistic Aristocrat Engine's Lifelong Adventures in Forming Healthy Relationships with Others and Himself 💙'. )