From Fan History Wiki

[edit] Introduction

Ben/Charlie is a slash ship of Ben Wade and Charlie Prince, two characters in 3:10 to Yuma. Some fans have given this pairing the portmanteau name of "Barlie".

[edit] About

Ben Wade (Russell Crowe) is the leader of an outlaw band roaming Arizona, Mexico and environs sometime during the late 1800s--definitely after the American Civil War, though the movie itself supplies no fixed date. (The FAQ at imdb.com claims that the first page of 3:10 to Yuma 2007's shooting script places it as 1884.) Charlie Prince (Ben Foster) is his second-in-command.

What we know about them both in canon (WARNING, SOME SPOILERS):

Ben, who seems to be in his early 40s, dresses in black and has his gun ("The Hand of God") tricked out with crosses on either side of its handle, likes to quote the Bible to justify his own actions, sketch things and rob stage-coaches carrying Southern Pacific Railway pay-packets; he's a fast shot and a hard task-master, perfectly willing to kill one of his own for being "weak [and] stupid." He also has a fetish for green-eyed women (or possibly just people with green eyes), a Machiavellian turn of mind, a born Tempter's interest in moral dialectic and a bad background--late Pinkerton Detective Agency man Byron McEllroy (Peter Fonda) claims his father was a "drunken gravedigger" and his mother a "diseased whore".

Ben himself tells Dan Evans (Christian Bale) that his mother left him at a train station when he was a child, told him to read the Bible until she came back, and then didn't. He came to Dodge City when he was as young as Dan's son William, and seems to have been a wanted man pretty much ever since. Ben is infamous and proud of it, seems (self-)educated beyond both his means and his profession, and calls himself "rotten as Hell." Yet he eventually does decide to give himself up and get on the 3:10 train to Yuma prison, perhaps due to Evans' influence.

Charlie, who could be 25, is a vain, proud and vicious young man whose sole redeeming feature is his unwavering, near-fanatical loyalty to his "boss". He takes every given opportunity to remind people who he is and who he works for, and thinks nothing of shooting disarmed men in cold blood, burning a sheriff's deputy alive after he's already given him the information he wanted (perhaps because stopping to let him out would slow the process of rescuing Ben down), and offering "$200 cash dollars" to any person in Contention, Arizona who'll kill one of Ben's captors; he also eventually shoots Dan Evans in the back until he runs of of bullets, a crime for which he himself is shot (along with the rest of Ben's gang) by Ben, first in the chest from a distance, then right through the heart at close range with one of his own guns.

Charlie has a noted dislike for Pinkertons and posses, is fashionable to a fault (purple shirt and vet, orange cowhide chaps, off-white leather jacket) and sports two guns which he holsters backwards, for easier cross-draw action. Though it seems unlikely he was old enough to fight in the War, the imdb.com FAQ also notes that his jacket is a copy of a Confederate officer's dress uniform shell-jacket, which seems pertinent; he certainly treats Ben as though he's a combination of father-figure and military commander, and refers to those gang-members killed in the movie's initial robbery as "the four we lost in battle." (One of the more fun aspects of this ship, and of 3:10 to Yuma fanfic generally, has since become tracking various authors' attempts to create a background for Charlie, and/or explain how he and Ben might have met.)

Aside from basic personal charisma and proximity on the part of the actors, the case for Ben/Charlie seems far more canonically borne out than one for Ben/Dan Evans, the fandom's main slash ship. As mentioned, Charlie remains fiercely loyal to Ben throughout, ready to risk life, limb and the lives and limbs of everybody around him in order to break Ben out of custody. Ben, on the other hand, may treat him somewhat like an affectionate dog when they're together (he seems particularly amused by Charlie imitating a yokel ranch-hand in order to get the authorities out of Bisbee, fifteen minutes into the film), but later tells William Evans that his gang is "a bunch of animals, all of 'em"...Charlie obviously included.

Throughout, they have a symbiotic cameraderie in which all the power is slotted towards Ben's side, and Charlie seems happy to keep it that way--though he'll shoot McEllroy in the stomach for calling him "a balled-up whore name of Charlie Princess...is that you, missy?" and smack a man twice his size down with the butt of his gun for suggesting Ben being arrested is "his own damn fault", he'll take almost anything Ben dishes out. Indeed, when Ben seems publicly happy he rescued his hat from the sheriff's deputy, Charlie looks down, grins and all but blushes with pleasure.

The attraction of this pairing? Mordant humor, potential for action setpieces, perverse power dynamics, great opportunity for dialogue exchanges--Foster and Crowe's characterizations (wild and strangely innocent sociopath vs. wicked manipulator of vaguely grey morality) have given writers a cornucopia of angst and hotness to play with; shame about the ending, though. But that's what you get for playing in a bottle universe.