regshoe

Yeah, I'm not surprised you disliked The Happy Return -- I'd rate it as the second-worst of the novels for sheer unpleasantness. I'm a little surprised you got any shippy feelings out of it all, actually, seeing how at this point Forester was still maintaining that Hornblower and Bush had never sailed together before -- this is supposedly their first voyage together, and he doesn't even talk to him if he can help it!

I feel sorry for him, but he does make it difficult!

That's Hornblower for you, especially in the original run, when he has enough autonomy that he presumably could make different choices if he wanted to.

There's an argument that for many of us in the fandom who are attached to him, we are so because we recognize in him our own mental health problems. I can't really argue against the readers who think he's hard to take -- he is a lot, especially in the original run -- but speaking for myself, I have all too much sympathy for how exhausting and demoralizing it is to have a brain that works like that. :-/