DarkHawk

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Pairing
Pairing: Ross Poldark/Jim Hawkins
Alternative name(s): JimmyDark, DarkHawk, Poldark/Hawkins
Gender category: slash, M/M
Fandom: Poldark / Return to Treasure Island crossover
Canonical?: no
Prevalence: rare
Archives:
Other: Fili/Kili, Britchell
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DarkHawk is the ship name for a crossover pairing that became popular in 2015 with the release of the series Poldark, starring actor Aidan Turner in the lead role of Ross Poldark. Some fans of Aidan Turner and Dean O'Gorman started shipping Turner's character Poldark with O'Gorman's character Jim Hawkins from the 1996 television movie Return to Treasure Island.

DarkHawk is an example of an actor-based crossover pairing. It was part of a trend of fans who shipped Fili/Kili from The Hobbit writing crossovers between other characters played by Fili's actor Dean O'Gorman and Kili's actor Aidan Turner. (Another Aidan/Dean adjacent pairing is Britchell. Fans also wrote a substantial number of Aidean RPF fics, shipping the actors themselves.)

Fans showed their love for the new fandom quickly, with some even gloating that there were more people in the fandom also shipping this couple:

[halehathnofury]
Yay, a fellow JimmyDark/DarkHawk shipper! I’m starting to think we are an endangered species.[1]
[thegreensorceress]
I love this. Great collaboration, both of you. And I love how the Hobbit fandom has found yet another crossover for our lovely boys. I didn’t even think of this pairing but I am hooked on it just from this! So thank you both![2]

The DarkHawk ship got its start when azulgrana-fcb posted a gifset that matched Jim Hawkins and Ross Poldark in Tumblr and my-trex-has-fleas saw it and started to write for this pairing.[note 1] Others followed like tweak-girl-stuff who created numerous fanarts along with rillils who wrote inspired by them.

This fandom had its greatest apex of strength in 2015, being in some periods of hiatus oscillating between high and low activity. As it is a piece of a larger fandom, it was quickly embraced by fans of its other offshoots and in February 2022 was the centerpiece of most fanworks made for the Gathering Fiki's WINTER FREE 2022 Event.[4]

Some fans tried to contextualize the historical period of the two works, looking for references of age and possibilities of nurture the canonization of the ship, even though it is a crossover.

let’s just assume that Jim’s ship was the one that brought Ross back to England (1783, just for my own convenience).

#jimmydark #am i even using the right tag #but who cares GUYS I DID IT I KINDA COULDN'T RESIST IT YO #and i freaked out a bit when i realized that jim is supposed to be older than ross #because 'return to treasure island' is set in 1775 #but in 1775 ross was 15 #while jim was definitely older than that #but that doesn't matter 'cause in four or five years he would have joined the army and fought in america soooo #i've got all the feels #also weird sad headcanons which i'm trying to turn into happy ones[5]

rillils

Tumblr may be the center of this fandom, with fanart, gifsets, playlists, meta and fanfic. However, the DarkHawk tag also contains content about the Marvel superhero Darkhawk. Due to this juxtaposition, many fans later thinking to using the jimmydark tag[6], but few are the publications that actually used it.

The Archive Of Our Own has a Jim Hawkins/Ross Poldark pairing tag, which had 63 fanworks as of January 21, 2016. As of September 2022, the DarkHawk tag has 205 works, the Poldark fandom tag has 866 works, and the Return to Treasure Island fandom tag has 212 works. Nearly all of the Return to Treasure Island fanworks feature DarkHawk.

Example Fanworks

Fanfiction

Fanart

Gallery

Fannish Resources

Note & References

Notes

  1. ^ darkhawkflying tumblr reblog [dated 2017-09-05]: Two years and 2.5 million words later…you have no idea how happy I am that I found your gif.[3]

References