anghraine

TOS fandom has some hella takes that, obviously, I disagree with powerfully. And now and then specific fans or small subsets of the fandom have takes that I powerfully agree with, and that is always wildly cathartic (I've had people tell me that they kind of thought they had to be going insane, were doubting their own memory and basic comprehension etc until they tripped over me grumping to myself and were like "oh, so it's not just me!" which is... certainly an experience to have). But because it's such a chatty fandom— that is, people feel moved to directly respond to almost anything with whatever enters their head regardless of relevance, or appropriateness to the subject, or often what seems a basic comprehension of the fact that this is a conversation with a real person, and will strain to come up with something to say even when they obviously don't have anything— occasionally you'll run over responses to even perfectly fine takes that are so phenomenally bad from every possible angle, yet so breathtakingly confident, that you just have to pause to let it sink in.

For me, nothing beats this one:

On one hand, it's just a more open way of phrasing something that's already all over the fandom's extreme weirdness about Kirk (not to mention the truly vile "Patterns of Force") and, sometimes even more, about Shatner. On the other, I try to imagine the level of baseless assurance it takes to look at a second-generation Ukrainian Canadian actor who is completely open about coming from a very Jewish background, and to just say with your whole chest that you keep forgetting he plays a genocide survivor because there's something aggressively not genocide-victim-y about his appearance. I screencapped it so I wouldn't doubt my own memory of just whispering "what the fuck."

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ST fandom is probably the most purely baffling to me of my fandom experiences in terms of just how the various canons get represented in and of themselves ("Kirk is completely genuinely in love in every 'romance' plot he has in TOS" remains my "what the fuck" of ultimate destiny, all the more as Erin Horáková's "Kirk Drift" emphatically argues against that despite being credited for it, but there are many). But sometimes, in fairness, it's rather obviously due to much-later retcons in some other thing because of the franchise of it all.

Like, I was deeply confused by everyone incessantly going on about Kirk never truly facing death/loss/no-win scenarios in TOS given his, uh, entire backstory (not just Tarsus IV, but all of it!) and entire episodes dedicated to him doing that (probably most jarringly contradicted by "Obsession" and "The City on the Edge of Forever") and how often it happens (approximately every third episode). But once we rewatched the films it was, while still deeply annoying, clearly attributable to The Wrath of Khan taking a sledgehammer to TOS to make a sci-fi blockbuster out of ST and project a bunch of 80s masculinity baggage all over the characters while insisting it's how they always were, much like the hyper-militarization of Starfleet in it (space NOAA TOS Starfleet with no officers/enlisted distinctions and actual right and obligation of dissent against unethical orders, you were not perfect but you'll always be famous to me). So sometimes it's not "bizarre take out of nowhere" and it's just a retcon that I'm either unaware of or find implausible and/or appallingly reactionary but at least not manufactured out of whole cloth by fandom.

And sometimes I genuinely don't know. Like, there was a post on my dash the other day that breezily described Sarek as coming from a matriarchal culture, and it was like a bunch of rusty gears screeching to a halt in my head.

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I got caught up in reblogging and spending time with friends, but anyway: I've posted a few tidbits for the f/f K/S AU set during, around, or in relation to the AU's version of the whole "Amok Time" ... uh, deal. And while it's still very, very much a WIP in many ways, I thought it'd be fun to at least post those parts for the anniversary ... which was a week ago. Anyway!, the first (chronologically earliest) of the set:

---

Sa’dzhasifik Raelyek S’paak, only child of Ambassador Sa’dzhasifik Raelyek Sarek, was seven years old when she misjudged the proper placement of her foot as she and her pet sehlat navigated the ravine near Sarek’s house. S’paak’s boot came down hard on I-Chaya’s nearest paw before she fully realized what was happening.

I-Chaya did not turn on her, as S’paak had often been warned he might if she erred. Instead, the sehlat gave a choked whimper, the impractically single-lidded, gold-colored eyes he shared with most of his species flying open in shock and pain as his body jerked away from her.

“I’m sorry!” S’paak cried without thinking. “I’m sorry, I didn’t mean—”

She broke off the illogical outburst. Her words meant nothing to a sehlat, nor to a proper Vulcan, either. A true Vulcan would understand that intentions did not alter already-past results, and wouldn’t feel useless guilt over a misstep that could not be changed. Wouldn’t feel anything at all, she reminded herself. If she was as she should be, S’paak would have immediately chosen action, rather than feeling, to be of actual use to I-Chaya, all the more as sehlats were intelligent for their kind but hardly sapient.

S’paak decided that she could best correct her compounded error by conducting herself calmly towards I-Chaya, hopefully soothing him enough that she could examine the paw for real harm. She reached out to pet him, but I-Chaya backed further away, his rear paws dangerously near to the edge of the rough path they stood on, halfway up the walls of the ravine.

S’paak’s mouth felt dry, her heart pounding in her side. The ravine was not large, at least. I-Chaya would have a … S’paak guessed approximately a 93% chance of surviving the fall.

Ninety-three percent wasn’t good enough.

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So, there's a kind of Trekkie that I always found a bit annoying, but the more I encounter their dismissive takes on the female characters of TOS, the more deeply frustrating I find them. They're a bit difficult to describe, but some common traits:

male feminist (generally not just as a gimmick, but more or less well intentioned about gender—at least consciously)
grew up on Berman-era Trek (like me!) and, while they'll condemn Berman himself, they find it pretty easy to separate him as an individual from TNG/DS9/VOY and approach them with both affection and nuance that they won't even slightly attempt with Roddenberry/TOS (never mind that by pretty much all accounts, Roddenberry stepped back significantly after Gene L. Coon and Dorothy Fontana in particular took on much of the day-to-day work of running/editing the show and heavily shaped what it became where Berman was much more directly involved, or that Fontana was treated far more poorly on TNG, or that other bigots than Roddenberry had their own impacts on misogyny in the show, for that matter ~~John Meredyth Lucas, I just want to talk~~)
speaking of which, these men will use Roddenberry as a pretext for dismissing anything worthwhile or compelling about any of the female characters of TOS (like, there must be hundreds, I'm guessing? some are actually great!), which get reduced to nothing but thin avatars of Roddenberry's personal misogyny and unworthy of any deeper consideration or value. for feminism!
actually: in general these guys attribute almost anything about how TOS handles gender to bleedover from Roddenberry's personal beliefs, whether for better or worse. This, perhaps unintentionally, tends to particularly deny credit, artistry, deliberation, and nuance to women and queer men who worked on the show and often moderated the producers' worst mandates while heavily contributing to where it's insightful and compelling wrt issues around gender and sexuality—the most obvious figures in this respect are Fontana, Sturgeon, and Theiss, who in these dudes' imagining of the production, become little but handmaidens to Roddenberry with no vision of their own or at least no success in enacting it. This also, more obviously, disregards the heavy influences of the actors as well, who despite the many labor violations were given a lot more latitude in interpreting and defining their characters (not unusual for theatre actors at the time) than on TNG, with particular ramifications for Gates McFadden immediately after S1. She was replaced by Diana Muldaur, who had played two major and great "woman of the week" roles on TOS in Dr. Ann Mulhall (equal in rank to McCoy and Scotty) and Dr. Miranda Jones, and was then given the thankless task of playing f!McCoy (I'd argue Pulaski's arc moves forward a lot more organically than McCoy's and her behavior is less egregious, but Sharing a Man's Faults is obviously the worst evil a female character can commit, so). Muldaur specifically insisted that the TNG production treated the actors far worse than TOS had.
these guys tend to be confused and frustrated with both the RL women who worked on TOS and many female fans not accepting their zero-nuance condemnation of how it handles its female characters, and instead seeing some aspects of its treatment of them genuinely insightful or hopeful compared to actual life in the 60s; I recently saw one of these guys throwing a giant screed at women who found something very recognizable in the depiction of Marla McGivers as already a fashy proto-tradwife type before Khan ever showed up, because HDUUUUU obviously the real reason back then was that no one could imagine respecting women as professionals, it was just impossible, it was The Times, and never mind the multiple times Kirk jumps in to be like "she is doing her job unlike you" to a man, much less many other great professional women in the show.
these guys have also very obviously never read and quite possibly never heard of Erin Horáková's "Kirk Drift" (which among many other things specifically tears apart the lazy dismissals of everything going on with gender in TOS in distinctly sexist ways in the present, under a thin fig leaf of tut-tutting at the show's 60s misogyny, while forgetting almost everything else going on in the 60s and in TOS itself). Broadly, they are much more familiar with not just 90s Trek itself but with "the discourse" around it, but are ... let's say, not terribly interested in digging further than fannish osmosis wrt TOS. And they will authoritatively correct others based on it with some truly fathomless assurance about whether this will be accurate or welcome.
they'll often mention the rape of Grace Lee Whitney in the context of dismissing Rand among all other female characters, but seem to have never once checked what Whitney herself had to say about Rand, TOS, or even "The Enemy Within" specifically (a dire "women really want to be assaulted" as scripted, which Whitney and Shatner simply opted not to perform that way and instead chose to play against the script as a genuinely harrowing near-rape that is deeply traumatic for Janice and a horrific shock to the part of Kirk that can understand it. When Spock suggests Janice really wanted the brutish evil Kirk to assault her, Whitney as Janice gives him a look of (justifiably) angry disgust before she turns away to a layered, understated interaction with normal Kirk in which she's gracious and he's grateful—the director loved their spin on it, and while Whitney (also justifiably) loathed Spock's line as wildly OOC and generally vile, she loved her work on "The Enemy Within" and getting to work with Shatner on something really meaty for their characters, and she thought that what they made out of it ended up being a great episode for Janice's character and her dynamic with Kirk).
their views of 60s TOS are heavily and uncritically filtered through the 80s films, particularly The Wrath of Khan (the most effective as a stand-alone 80s SF/F film and, relatedly, the most disjointed from previous ST characterizations and theme/genre), and probably the most uncritically gender essentialist in its politics of the original cast films.
they're often as affronted by depictions of misogyny as by overtly misogynistic writing or treatment of actual RL women, even when in-universe misogyny is sharply criticized both in-story and narratively, even on the occasions when the show is thoughtful and curious about how structural misogyny informs the experiences, motives, and priorities of Federation women, and denying the context of misogyny hollows out their motives and characters. (Let's be real, Theodore Sturgeon, DC Fontana, Arlene Martel, and Gene L. Coon accomplished far more with with original flavor T'Pring as a compelling, ambiguous woman who is entirely successful in freeing herself and ultimately Spock than "lalalala of course she could just get a divorce and of course she wouldn't have really been Spock's property, and of course they had a real romance and weren't near-total strangers steamrollered into a comphet child marriage at age 7 with no other sense of each other's personhood as adults, beyond reputation and pictures of each other from the last time they actually met aka as tiny children, and of course she wasn't really going to be subsumed into The Legend of Spock in their society, teehee it's so funny that T'Pring and Spock could have solved everything if they'd just talked" ever will.)

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So, I made a light-hearted addition to my old TOS Kirk vs AOS Kirk theory over on Tumblr, involving a bunch of screencaps—I just used old ones I already had for TOS, but I had to search for AOS Kirk ones since the films made basically no impression on me except in retrospect when I started marathoning TOS, and I only had a couple images saved (one for an ancient Star Wars photoset in which I used Saldaña's Uhura as my f!Lando dreamcast).

And in the course of dredging up the right length of screenshots for my silly Pride post, I encountered some exceptionally dreary takes on the greatness of AOS Kirk totally capturing the classic character (/eyeroll), but also occasionally "we had a question about the films and felt the need to ask William Shatner about it, person notably Not Appearing in These Films." In the course of these, I just ended up laughing because... I mean, what did they expect? Literally the first time I read an interview with him, I had to drastically re-evaluate almost every detail I'd fandom osmosed except "chaos gremlin, for love of the game."

Anyway, the main three Shatner AOS opinions I encountered in my search for screenshots, because as far as I could tell people literally just kept asking:

1) One reporter breathlessly asked him if he didn't think AOS perfectly captured his Kirk back in TOS. He trollishly pretended to contemplate this for a few seconds, then very deliberately enunciated: "Bullshit."

(Genuinely kind of cathartic as a TOS Kirk stan who absolutely despises the constant attempts to cannibalize TOS as a whole for the benefit of the franchise and insist each ensuing set of retcons and dubious-interpretations-asserted-as-obvious-facts aren't fundamentally distinct from the original. Pine does great work with a drastically different character beyond anything about the premise.)

2) Also, he was asked what actor he'd choose to play him if there was going to be a biopic or something (I can only imagine what a Shatner biopic would even look like, honestly—the man has lived a lot of life and the tone would have to be incredibly grim without his own layer of zany over it all or exclude a lot). Anyway, he said "Chris Pine" and presumably didn't break into maniacal cackling by sheer force of will.

3) Another time, he was asked how he thinks Chris Pine should handle the pay dispute preventing the fourth AOS film. His opinion was that Pine shouldn't bend an inch, because he's talented and attractive and so identified with his role that they can't really make those movies without him, but Pine can do plenty of things other than Star Trek. So if Paramount's going to make that much money, Pine should absolutely see his fair share and if not, walk, and good for him.

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One of the critiques of trends in K/S fic I've seen pretty often, and which apparently goes back decades, is that K/S fans don't write them acting like men but all clingy and overwrought and melodramatic, these are military professionals, that's not how Real Manly Gays act even if they are, if they had those kinds of emoting happening onscreen they couldn't do their jobs.

And it's like, setting aside the rather surprising reality that approximately 90% of the assumptions about Starfleet Military Professionalism are retcons from 10-20 years after it ended, getting projected onto the characters no matter how blatantly contradicted by the much looser depiction of Starfleet in TOS (which was entirely intentional—probably the single strongest influence on the world-building of TOS was Gene L. Coon, a veteran and war reporter in the Korean War who had, let's say, Notes) + doctrinaire ideas about how Real Men Who Are Queer (But Real Men) would behave and feel in a quasi-military hierarchical organization. But as far as I'm concerned, those will always be a far distant consideration to what characters ... you know, do and are shown to feel onscreen. I don't care what real military men are like, I care about the specific characters we're talking about. Remember when Kirk's pretty yeoman started massaging out a kink in his back because he hasn't been taking care of his health after going through the wringer multiple times, and Kirk just assumed it had to be Spock giving him an impromptu massage right there on the bridge, and started going, "That's it...A little higher, please. Push ... Push hard ... Dig it in there, Mr. S—" and then Spock pointedly stepped forwards so Kirk would realize it wasn't him since apparently nobody was going to actually say anything?

Or! There's the time superpowered god aliens were livestreaming Kirk saving his own life by spontaneously re-inventing gunpowder and building a DIY bazooka (I love describing Star Trek episodes ngl) and Spock, as acting captain, could only watch and he helpfully monologues what's going on because he's the only one enough on Kirk's wavelength to understand his thought processes in real time, but also for TOS reasons does it like this:

SPOCK: Fascinating…
SPOCK [clearly putting something important together that nobody else is getting as Kirk cuts vines against a rock]: Good ... good.
SPOCK [to a baffled McCoy]: He knows, doctor. He has reasoned it out.
MCCOY [along with everyone else on the bridge]: ?????????
[Kirk starts shoving the potassium nitrate into the bamboo]
SPOCK: Yes.
SPOCK [going from standing to sitting in Kirk’s chair, showing open delight]: Yes.

Also, Kirk rather conspicuously finds the insecurity baked into hypermasculine military dogmatism extremely grating and contemptible, and responds with flamboyantly aggressive effeminacy anyway. But also

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Current Music: Don't Stop Me Now (Queen)

It's still May 15th here! 10 PM, here we go:

1. Take five books off your bookshelf.
2. Book #1 -- first sentence: "Every female wants to be loved by a male."
3. Book #2 -- last sentence on page fifty: "This says you were born in 1963."
4. Book #3 -- second sentence on page one hundred: "He said, No."
5. Book #4 -- next to the last sentence on page one hundred fifty: "I determined, therefore, to be carefully upon my guard, not to betray the imposition, which could now answer no other purpose, than occasioning an irreparable breach between her and the Captain."
6. Book #5 -- final sentence of the book: "If we meet now and in the future, we writers and readers of SF, to give each other prizes and see each other's faces and renew old feuds and discuss new books and hold our celebration, it will be in entire freedom—because we choose to do so—because, to put it simply, we like each other."
7. Make the five sentences into a paragraph: lol probably should have at least selected only fiction or non-fiction for this. Oh well! Let's see, interpreting "paragraph" loosely, but:

If we meet now and in the future, we writers and readers of SF, to give each other prizes and see each other's faces and renew old feuds and discuss new books and hold our celebration, it will be in entire freedom—because we choose to do so—because, to put it simply, we like each other. I determined, therefore, to be carefully upon my guard, not to betray the imposition, which could now answer no other purpose, than occasioning an irreparable breach between her and the Captain. Every female wants to be loved by a male.

"This says you were born in 1963."

He said, No.

For the record, the books in the original numbering order: Book #1 = The Language of the Night (Ursula K. Le Guin), Book #2 = Evelina (Frances Burney), Book #3 = Black Water Sister (Zen Cho), Book #4 = Essais (Michel de Montaigne), Book #5 = The Will to Change: Men, Masculinity, and Love (bell hooks).

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Reply to this post saying "icon," and I will tell you my favorite icon of yours. Then post this to your own journal using your own favorite icon, if you're one of those inhuman things that are actually capable of choosing between ~~YOUR PRECIOUS BABIES!~~ userpics.

(I am not one of those inhuman things, lol, even narrowing down to icons I myself hacked together, but this one speaks to me quite a bit these days.)

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Current Music: Radio Ga Ga (Queen)

I don't know how pertinent this one will be to you all, but I found it intriguing, so adding it to the (metaphorical) queue!

Everyone has things they blog about. Everyone has things they don't blog about. Challenge me out of my comfort zone by telling me something I don't blog about, but you'd like to hear about, and I'll write a post about it. Ask for anything: latest movie watched, last book read, political leanings, thoughts on yaoi, favorite type of underwear, graphic techniques, etc. Repost in your own journal so that we can all learn more about each other.

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Current Music: Bad Reputation (Joan Jett & the Blackhearts)

Give me a character from one of my fandoms, and I'll tell you how they survived the robot apocalypse—if, indeed, they did survive.

(If you want to do this one yourself, the original was "zombie apocalypse," I just don't like zombies.)

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Current Music: This Is War (Thirty Seconds to Mars)

As it's the last day of three weeks for Dreamwidth, I wanted to get in some of the fun "activities" I'd seen and then gotten distracted from. Consider yourself tagged if you see it and also want to do it! If any of the words don't work for you, choose a different word that uses the same letter. That way the meme changes and evolves as it travels around.

The ABCs of me (Anghraine)

A. Age: 40!

B. Bed Size: Queen :)

C. Chore You Really Dislike: Hand-washing the dishes.

D. Dogs: I don't personally have tags, but my family has two elderly dogs, a German shepherd and a lab, Tisha and Beren.

E. Essential Start to Your Day: My tea!! I go full Perfuma without my soothing morning tea ritual.

F. Favorite Color: I vacillate between deep blue and rich red. Both are good!

G. Gold or Silver: I prefer silver jewelry, but gold in many other contexts ... it depends.

H. Height: 5'4", barely.

I. Instruments You Play: piano and flute (the piano much better, though not fantastically, lol).

J. Job: Unemployed currently. Not fired or anything, but my teaching contract was only so long and academia is pretty dire right now, especially when you're tied down locally.

K. Kids: None, thank God.

L. Live: Washington State.

M. Mom’s Name: not saying lol, that's her business.

N. Nicknames: manyyyyy, but my favorite was always Reina.

O. Overnight Hospital Stays: I was hospitalized for a week with an asthma attack that nearly killed me and/or damaged my brain multiple times.

P. Pet Peeve: Oh God, so many. In a fandom context, the Tumblr Bonesfuckers's apologetics/denial around his treatment of Spock and the absolute lack of differentiation between Kirk romances in which he's playing on his in-universe sex appeal in desperation, or falling in love, or being straight-up assaulted (and determined blindness to how markedly different his behavior and feelings are in these) are up there. Also, the Spock gravitational well that prioritizes and props up his feelings as always the most central and angsty in any given situation except when it comes to McCoy's racism. The way that the obsession with denying/minimizing TOS Kirk's comfort with open effeminacy (esp compared to Spock and McCoy) is so very blatantly linked to the obsession with him being fat and depicting him as much less conventionally attractive than he is. Etc. In a non-fandom context, something I find disproportionately frustrating is replies/responses to something I'm saying that basically amount to "why aren't you talking about this fundamentally different other thing" or nitpick some completely minor and trivial aspect without engaging in any way with the main point of what I said (quadruply if the nitpick is wrong).

Q. Quote From A Movie: Father, I won't leave you! always breaks my heart ;_;

R. Right or Left Handed: Right, very.

S. Siblings: None by blood, quite a few foster siblings, though there are only two who have persistently been part of my life. I wouldn't say that I don't think of them as my siblings, but I also do think I'm an only child in some meaningful ways. IDK, it's complicated for all of us.

T. Time You Wake Up: 6:30-8:00 AM, depending. (I don't have to get up that early, I've just evolved into a morning person against my will.)

U. Underwear: Plain and soft.

W. What Makes You Run Late: Navigating public transit because I can't drive. Sometimes this also makes me early, but not usually. Also, sometimes I get distracted and end up having to catch the next bus and blahblah.

X. X-Rays You’ve Had: Over the last year of respiratory hell, I've had many for my lungs. I don't think I've ever had anything else X-Ray'd, actually.

Y. Yummy Food You Make: I make a streusel coffee cake to die for! I can barely cook otherwise and that is ridiculously complex, but there we are.

Z. Zoo - favorite animal: Cats of all kinds as far as land animals go. Orcas are easily my favorite sea animals, probably because they are also cats, spiritually.

Current Location: Washington, USA
Current Music: Barcelona (Freddie Mercury & Montserrat Caballé)

Apropos of my other brotp post, a couple of additional details I love about the Kirk-Uhura friendship that I forgot before!

1— There are two different occasions in TOS where Kirk not only accepts the strong possibility of death, loss, and failure with grace, and not only takes personal responsibility ("I don't believe in no-win scenarios" whomst), but sets aside a moment to record posthumous commendations for particularly exemplary crew members during the crisis, in hopes that even in death those people will be honored. In both cases, he especially singles out Spock as extra special (news at eleven). But in fact, there are only two people, including Spock, whom Kirk mentions in both sets of commendations. You'd think from the fandom's obsession with "the triumvirate" that McCoy would be the other person on both lists, but he's actually only on one of them. The second person Kirk singles out for praise both times is Uhura.

2— So, when J and I were first marathoning TOS, I didn't know much about Nichelle Nichols outside of ST, but I became increasingly convinced that, like William Shatner, she must have been forged by the stage in some meaningful way. (Spoiler: she was.)

Although their performances are very different in many ways, of course, there seemed some marked similarities in how both inhabit their characters. They both have a kind of "always on" intense stage presence, where even if they're on the sidelines or background without really speaking or having much to do, they are still fully present in their roles; both perform like they're always potentially being seen whether or not they're 100% sure the camera is on them. Both of them do particularly heavy lifting in defining their characters through this kind of intensity of presence (sometimes rather against the grain of the writing or of other agendas at work) but also via very precisely calibrated performances when the writing isn't absolutely godawful/vacuous. TOS is so vibrant and expressionist that I think the precision in the okay-to-great episodes (most of them!) is often overlooked or even denied, but it's all over much of the show IMO; you can especially see it in Nichols' and Shatner's nearly surgical comic timing, but hardly only there.

So both Nichols and Shatner are actors who can be just standing or sitting in a chair, barely speaking or not speaking at all, barely moving and fairly understated, and yet their command of the stage is so effective that it's hard to tear your eyes from them. It's like the visual acting version of the voice that's so good you'd listen to them read the phonebook. I ended up being like, "wow, I'm pretty sure I could just watch Nichelle Nichols or William Shatner sit in a chair for ten minutes straight, those are some hella stage chops."

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Current Music: Stand By Me (Ben E. King)

For as much as I'm a very hardcore Kirk/Spock shipper with big gay!Spock feelings, it probably says something about my tastes that the moment that absolutely sealed TOS Kirk as my Star Trek blorbo was not "he seems a generic dude hero but we love him because he adores Spock so much" but this:

KIRK: At least try cutting him off!
UHURA: Sir, if I could cut him off, don't you think I—!
RILEY: ♪ I'll take you home again, Kathleen— ♪
UHURA: Yes, sir, I'll keep trying.
KIRK [penitently]: Sorry.

"The Naked Time" lingers on this for a few seconds more, mid-crisis, to give the distinct impression that receiving immediate public apologies from a man in power is not an everyday experience for Uhura:

I'm actually reminded of the more famous, fantastic scene from "Balance of Terror" in which Kirk gets progressively more menacing as he shuts down Stiles' racism towards Spock, and Nimoy absolutely plays Spock as having to emotionally process that someone leaping to his defense is a thing that could even happen; Nichols and Nimoy play these reactions properly for their very different characters, but I think the emotional beat is similar.

Also, the single most purely heartwarming time anyone is called beautiful is when Kirk is describing Uhura's *checks hand* facility for brazen lying and trickery in "I, Mudd":

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Current Music: Seven Seas of Rhye (Queen)

Something I've noticed for awhile now is, sure, K/S artists (and TOS artists in general) have found TOS Kirk difficult to depict forever and mentioned it forever, but nevertheless, if you look at things like zine art of yore, he's usually very recognizable, while SO much modern Kirk/Spock art has a very obvious Nimoy!Spock whatever the style, and then a Kirk who is solely recognizable via paraphernalia, Spock's own presence, and fanon. I've been trying to figure out what makes the modern art look so wrong compared to older attempts, and I think I... basically tripped over one of the most common reasons.

Short version: it's his cheekbones. TOS Kirk actually has a more fine-boned and pronounced, angled slope of cheekbones that's fuller and higher (particularly in relation to the bottom of his face) than artists typically allow, even if in the show, this is sometimes obscured by the general softness of his face, expressions, and alternate ways of shooting him (he has very mobile features, so he tends to look very different with slight changes in focus/angles/lighting, but of course his features have not actually changed). Artists' lowering/flattening/straightening of where his cheekbones are in his face (vertically and in terms of width/depth), and broadening of the bones themselves, is super common in modern K/S art and it makes the shape of his face and even his head look really off (in particular, both squished and more generic than his real appearance), even if you can't immediately put your finger on what's wrong.

To be clear, there are multiple things that art (fannish and professional) often changes about TOS Kirk's appearance, for what I'm guessing are multiple reasons (though there's one pertinent reason* that I think is a major engine for many of the ways in which Kirk is bafflingly misrepresented). It's not only this. But more recent art particularly tends to alter the line of his cheekbones. His aren't as high or angular as Spock's, nor as prominent as Sulu's, but definitely more so than usually shows up in TOS art. Some lighting/angles/make-up/camera lenses in the show make this super conspicuous and at other times it's harder to see, but when I was searching through my manyyyyy TOS screenshots for an unrelated post, I was really struck by the gap between the ... artistic fanon? and his basic facial structure.

So naturally, I went through my zillions of TOS screenshots for a picspam, so you don't have to just trust my opinion:

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Current Location: Washington, USA
Current Music: The Great Pretender (Queen)

So, one of the major inspirations of a major location in my original novel is the Catacombs of pre-Searing Ascalon in Guild Wars: Prophecies, which seem fairly dreary at first (as might be expected!) only for you to discover beams of light filtering through the more ruinous sections, and then areas that are just really mysterious or cool, and then awesome "secret" areas. I wanted to see if I could capture that first experience of going into the Catacombs because you have to, ho hum, that underground dreary quality -> oh there are actually some cool oddities -> WHOA of playing as a teenager.

Screenshots don't really capture the whole experience (especially of the bridge; from a better angle you can see that the bones beneath the latticework are gigantic curved ribs, probably of a dragon or something comparable that goes completely unexplained). Still:

Current Location: Washington, USA
Current Music: Only the Good Die Young (Billy Joel)

I am, of course, referring to my beloved Guild Wars, which rewired my brain back in 2005. My family were early players via a friend of ours and have bought every expansion of every Guild Wars since we started figuring out GW(1) in pre-Searing Ascalon 21 years ago. And now there are actual updates again because the 20th anniversary was so successful last year—it's so fun to see tons of people in pre-Searing Ascalon City again, people chatting and figuring the game out again, etc ever since Reforged "came out". I just saw the anniversary announcement today: they're making GW1 playable on mobile(!!!!) this summer, something I have no desire to do ever and am deeply ambivalent about, but still vaguely support on the principle of doing more with GW1 than maintenance. And they've stuck to the basic principle of once you buy it, You Bought It Forever, even with the mobile game—it has no ads for people who already own GW1 but is F2P with ads if you don't.

Honestly, over 20 years of evading the subscription model for both a MMO-in-name-only in GW1 and the real deal in GW2 has earned a lot of affection beyond my emotional investment in the game and world itself. So I'm glad it's the one that I got obsessed with as a 19-year-old baby gamer.

A taste of the opening of GW1 while I'm here, actually (open in a new tab for full size, if you want):

And here I'm playing with my parents last February to check out all the new updates, with my mother's character in white and mine in black:

Current Location: Washington, USA
Current Music: Gwen's Theme (Jeremy Soule | Guild Wars OST)

Incidentally, my best friend J happened across a copy of the famous novelization of Star Trek: The Motion Picture and gave it to me for Christmas last year. We have been doing dramatic readings of the chapters to each other, complete with air quotes and loudly emphasizing the many, many, many unnecessarily quoted or italicized words/phrases/paragraphs. Although it was fun in its own unhinged way, it was also kind of shocking to realize just how terrible Roddenberry's... like, everything was without being able to lean on good writing/editorial staff like Sturgeon and Fontana, figures like Gene L. Coon to temper his worst impulses, the visual brilliance of people like Jerry Finnerman and William Ware Theiss, and the warmth and charisma brought to even much of the weaker writing by superb theatrical actors like Nichols, Shatner, and Nimoy. For all the novelization's extreme sleaziness, it is one of the coldest and most inhuman-feeling published novels I've ever encountered.

The attempts to salvage the footnote are largely nonsense, IMO—like, yes, it does accidentally imply that Kirk is just a bisexual who rather prefers women rather than a totally super manly straight guy, and his description of Spock and their super special eternal psychic bond does sound incredibly gay, but this is clearly because Roddenberry was constitutionally incapable of writing about any relationships in a non-horny way and loathed women. He was definitely going for desperately recuperating Kirk as the hypermasculine hyper-heterosexual seasoned middle-aged commanding captain figure with a weakness for women but also distaste for them that he'd always envisioned for his ideal of "the captain" (it's all over his writing of April and then Pike), and his resentment of what TOS Kirk actually became in the show is extremely visible (his Kirk dismisses TOS Kirk as a twee fictionalized version he actually hates and TOS in general as terrible and fake, unlike the real story in the novelization, etc). Like, it's 100% an attempt at no-homo and gender essentialism, he's just very bad at no-homo and also at writing people.

But the thing is, the footnote (and the other material straining to find a heterosexual explanation for TOS) may be - and is - homophobic, but this is actually the least of the novelization's problems. It is even more misogynistic, racist, incredibly petty, and so incredibly awkward that I was starting to think "justice for the OG Mary Sue writers, they were far better than this and honestly seem to have understood Star Trek itself rather better," given the weird 70s dystopia aspects he's got going.

( Read more... )

Current Mood: bitchy
Current Location: Washington, USA
Current Music: The Longest Time (Billy Joel)

To my 30s, that is! Today is my last day in this decade :D

Current Location: Washington, USA
Current Music: Strangeness and Charm (Florence + the Machine)

I posted this on AO3 a little while ago, actually, but wanted it here, too!

Despite having increasingly felt "oh, so everything I've heard about how TOS Kirk/Spock was overblown by fandom was just brazen lies, though otherwise I think I might disagree with about 90% of the fandom at all times" as the show went on—and shipping them like crazy—one of the TOS relationships that I found most endearing (and also surprisingly persistent) was actually a platonic friendship. So, in a shocking twist here at Anghraine dot Dreamwidth dot org (>_>), my first posted TOS fic ended up being a ... gen brotp AU one-shot. I've written more of it, but I posted it as a one-shot because the rest would entail a much longer fic that needs to bake in the drawer for a lot more time.

title: the only ones who can do it
characters: Spock, Nyota Uhura, James Kirk; Dr. Piper
length: one-shot, 2k
stuff that happens: Uhura is the captain of the TOS five-year mission, but not because Spock and Kirk aren't there.
notes*: all of my TOS fic is only for TOS; part of why the show clicked so hard for me was that it felt fundamentally different from other ST I'd seen (the original movies, TNG, AOS etc) to the point that I couldn't reconcile them in my head, even when I like them.

“I’ve got a problem,” he announced. “In life sciences, that is, which makes it your problem, too. Starfleet’s transferred dozens of social scientists into the division for this huge exploration they’re sending us on. More archaeologists, xenoanthropologists, psychologists, you name it—a lot more. New people from all over.”

Spock felt very certain that from all over meant humans from various parts of Earth and perhaps some Terran colonies. He had never served on a vessel in which he was not the only alien, and even he owed his post to the impossibility of splitting him between human and Vulcan vessels. He would not have put it beyond the admiralty to try, had there been any possibility of success.

“Assigning an increased number of experts in the social sciences is entirely logical for this endeavor,” he informed Dr. Piper. “A five-year mission into primarily unfamiliar regions of deep space will benefit from their knowledge, and in all likelihood, advance their disciplines.”

Piper waved this aside. “Yes, yes, undoubtedly. The problem is that I’m not exactly a cat herder.”

“A cat herder,” Spock repeated. For the first time in a year, two months, and six days, his bafflement at the idiom was entirely sincere.

( Read more... )

Current Location: Washington
Current Music: Princes of the Universe (Queen)

J and I recently re-watched "The Return of the Archons" (after concluding it was the peak Christmas episode for various silly reasons), and there's this small and wonderfully in-character scene when the away party has found sanctuary with a local ally during the Red Hour. They're able to hide in this private room with some bunks, allowing for all but one of the entire party to sleep in the meanwhile. We don't actually see the decision get made. We just cut to the crew members all in the beds and Kirk having taken off his coat to wrap himself in a blanket, protectively keeping watch over his resting crew members. We just get a few quiet moments of this interspliced with the insanity of the Red Hour outside, which he observes with quiet disgust between pacing quietly around the little room, adding some folded clothes to cushion McCoy's head, making sure the young ones are sleeping in their bunks, and checking on Spock (who is lying on his back and either meditating or simply awake the whole time, not needing the sleep but—given how easy the nonverbal communication between them is in this episode—likely aware that trying to convince Kirk to take the bed is not, let's say, a logical use of his time).

It's very cute, honestly, and the episode is so beautifully made that it has an incredibly warm, pleasant quality on a purely visual level. It's the kind of thing that I think gets the kind of kneejerk "oh he's such a father to his men" despite TOS Kirk's very consistent aversion from anything smacking of fatherhood (very obviously for gender role reasons, not reactionary nuclear-family-meets-gender-essentialism retcons from 20 years later reasons). But I definitely ended up thinking "I can't believe I've seen multiple posts straining to frame Janeway as some kind of maternal figure as captain when she doesn't have a parental bone in her body—she's not Team Mom she's Team Captain—and meanwhile Kirk has 100x more fretful mama energy as captain to the point that his long-suffering maternal authority becomes the actual premise of an actual later episode."

In conclusion:

captain, are we there yettttttttt

Current Location: Washington

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Anghraine

October 2026

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I really need more TOS T'Pring icons

I meant to post these for Amok Time day!

Back with the ST fandom pet peeves: a certain kind of ~feminist guy

Truly, the multitudes celebrity

I have many grievances with TOS K/S fanon, BUT

Three weeks for Dreamwidth: bookshelf meme!

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Kirk & Uhura brotp: addendum

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Grumping about modern (TOS K/S) art

Further GW1 literal tutorial zone stanning

Happy birthday to the game of all time!

I was told the TMP novelization was bad, but not just how bad

THE END IS NIGH

After a year of poking at a half dozen TOS fics I posted one!

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