Why do I ship Raybins, or what makes their canon dynamic interesting? Which do you want to know?
The short answer is that, even though I first read the book over 20 years ago, on revisit the dynamic between Ray and Stebbins got into my head like a snatch of pop music.
The longer answer has a lot to do with the narrative foil dynamic my moots @idlesdays and @rambling-ids discussed in their own analyses.
One aspect of that which I have not yet seen discussed is that the Stebbins-Garraty narrative foil relationship operates in part along the lines of World’s Dumbest Genius vs. World’s Smartest Dipshit.
Stebbins has the analytical apparatus to understand essentially everything except the thing that matters most to his own survival and wellbeing. Stebbins’ intelligence is both his greatest asset and the instrument of his destruction. He was smart enough to understand every facet of the Walk inside and out, but not wise enough to see that his plan was built on a foundation of need he couldn’t acknowledge.
In contrast, Garraty stumbles through the novel in a fog of unexamined feelings and propagandized assumptions, and yet his instincts keep pulling him toward the right people and the right conclusions even when his conscious mind can’t articulate why. Garraty’s relative lack of self-awareness is what keeps him walking in some ways, because if he had Stebbins’ clarity about what the Walk actually is and what survival costs, he might not have the same capacity to keep putting one foot in front of the other.
Another thing I love about their narrative foil dynamic is King’s extraordinary sleight-of-hand regarding which of the two is actually the strange one. When you actually inventory what we know about each of them, Garraty is the one with genuinely disturbing psychology. His sexualized response to witnessing death isn’t incidental. It happens multiple times, which suggests it’s a pattern rather than a shock response, and has been produced by a society that has thoroughly normalized the Walk as spectacle. He’s been conditioned into something deeply aberrant without any framework to recognize it as such. His sexual shame, particularly his suppressed homosexual attraction, adds another layer of internal conflict that he can’t articulate or process. He’s a profoundly fractured person whose perspective almost reads as normal because we as readers only see things from his point of view.
Stebbins, viewed from outside, seems strange. Viewed from inside, to the extent the text allows it, he wants his father to acknowledge him. He wants to belong somewhere. He made a catastrophic miscalculation about someone who had power over him. These are among the most universal human experiences imaginable. Stebbins’ strangeness is almost entirely a projection of Garraty’s limited capacity to understand him. Which, given Garraty’s own unexamined psychological depths, is a fairly rich irony.
Lastly, I love Raybins as a ship because of the mutually obsessive and somewhat dysfunctional relationship between Garraty and Stebbins. We see Garraty’s obsession with Stebbins long before Stebbins interacts with him or even has significant dialogue. Even though we don’t get to see Stebbins’ perspective, it’s safe to say the obsession is mutual. Stebbins prefers to interact with Garraty to the point of ignoring or barely reacting other characters who try to talk to him. For this reason, Raybins is the ONLY Stebbins ship that makes sense if one prefers to stick with canon. And by canon, I mean both the book and the film.
As far as ships based on canon relationships, I love Gavries too, but the inherently unsettling and uncomfortable Raybins dynamic is something I find endlessly fascinating.
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