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anghraineI was actually slightly on edge about getting into a frankly notorious fandom without encountering this kind of thing sooner. After getting a somewhat clearer sense of trends and fun conversations and persistent annoyances (at least on Tumblr), and after monologuing my TOS feelings, I still hadn't received any particular unpleasantnesses on a personal level, and was like ... well, maybe people are nicer now, even to someone like me. But mostly I was just waiting for the other shoe to drop, especially given that I'd found TOS in particular very different from what I'd expected via fandom and pop culture osmosis on many, many levels.
But it would have never occurred to me that my controversial TOS hot take would be "Spock's co-workers are racist to him a lot and this is the main vehicle for TOS's exploration of racism as a thing." But yup, I got anon hate about how "funny" it is that I'd been complaining about bad Kirk takes (specifically, I'd recently seen a conversation about how "TOS Kirk actually doesn't experience angst over anything but challenges to his authority" when I'd been very surprised to discover that a) TOS persistently returns to how lonely and fearful of being left alone he is, and b) TOS Kirk is a genocide survivor struggling with his options of "doing nothing" or "ruthless vengeance", and he was bullied in the Academy for being "grim" (no shit?), and that's not even the only massacre he survived, and a lot of his infamous romances are blatantly coercive towards him). See, it's funny because I'm so biased towards Spock that I don't even realize it and have said people are just always being mean to him.
(I don't think I said "mean." I said racist.)
Anyway, I was so utterly baffled by that of all things being my big controversial ST opinion that I read it to my housemates for shits and giggles, though normally I keep fandom drama away from RL. Since my BFF J is a massive Trekkie and Ash has watched a few TOS episodes with us, they got the context and J was just laughing his head off while a very confused Ash was like, "Has this person seen it?"
On the bright side, we had a whole conversation about the various desperate flailing attempts I've seen to defend the general racism against Spock within the show, or at least to suggest that it's no different from Spock's or Kirk's own behavior, and that ended up being actually interesting, so at least something deeper came of it! But I'm still baffled at how you watch something like "Balance of Terror" and come away thinking the point of Spock's experiences and Kirk's outrage is "Spock gives as good as he gets, though, so it's not REALLY racism."
On top of that, J and I had actually been talking days earlier about how there seems this strange fandom embargo on engaging with, particularly, McCoy's racism in interpreting his character, its function, and especially his relationships with Spock and Kirk. Not only "I prefer to headcanon something different" but indignation over anyone anywhere even acknowledging it's part of the show. J and I are actually really interested in the ways that TOS sets up this Spock vs McCoy tension in which Kirk is either the mediator or battlefield—or the tension rises because he's not there—but this is never really a balanced tension because both Kirk and the narrative itself so obviously favor Spock over McCoy. And Kirk himself is even more favored. There's a reason that Spock gets twice McCoy's share of the overall dialogue even though McCoy is chattier. J actually has a theory that a more balanced version of the triad might have been more effective in a lot of different ways (thematically, their relationships with each other and how those reflect on their individual characters, etc), which I do find interesting to consider, but there's so much defensive dogma about how they're all totally balanced and equally important and favored that it can be difficult to figure out where these interpretations are even coming from. Just about every conversation I've seen about McCoy in any capacity, or about the bigotry directed at Spock, becomes a very strange game of Telephone very fast.
But it would have never occurred to me that my controversial TOS hot take would be "Spock's co-workers are racist to him a lot and this is the main vehicle for TOS's exploration of racism as a thing." But yup, I got anon hate about how "funny" it is that I'd been complaining about bad Kirk takes (specifically, I'd recently seen a conversation about how "TOS Kirk actually doesn't experience angst over anything but challenges to his authority" when I'd been very surprised to discover that a) TOS persistently returns to how lonely and fearful of being left alone he is, and b) TOS Kirk is a genocide survivor struggling with his options of "doing nothing" or "ruthless vengeance", and he was bullied in the Academy for being "grim" (no shit?), and that's not even the only massacre he survived, and a lot of his infamous romances are blatantly coercive towards him). See, it's funny because I'm so biased towards Spock that I don't even realize it and have said people are just always being mean to him.
(I don't think I said "mean." I said racist.)
Anyway, I was so utterly baffled by that of all things being my big controversial ST opinion that I read it to my housemates for shits and giggles, though normally I keep fandom drama away from RL. Since my BFF J is a massive Trekkie and Ash has watched a few TOS episodes with us, they got the context and J was just laughing his head off while a very confused Ash was like, "Has this person seen it?"
On the bright side, we had a whole conversation about the various desperate flailing attempts I've seen to defend the general racism against Spock within the show, or at least to suggest that it's no different from Spock's or Kirk's own behavior, and that ended up being actually interesting, so at least something deeper came of it! But I'm still baffled at how you watch something like "Balance of Terror" and come away thinking the point of Spock's experiences and Kirk's outrage is "Spock gives as good as he gets, though, so it's not REALLY racism."
On top of that, J and I had actually been talking days earlier about how there seems this strange fandom embargo on engaging with, particularly, McCoy's racism in interpreting his character, its function, and especially his relationships with Spock and Kirk. Not only "I prefer to headcanon something different" but indignation over anyone anywhere even acknowledging it's part of the show. J and I are actually really interested in the ways that TOS sets up this Spock vs McCoy tension in which Kirk is either the mediator or battlefield—or the tension rises because he's not there—but this is never really a balanced tension because both Kirk and the narrative itself so obviously favor Spock over McCoy. And Kirk himself is even more favored. There's a reason that Spock gets twice McCoy's share of the overall dialogue even though McCoy is chattier. J actually has a theory that a more balanced version of the triad might have been more effective in a lot of different ways (thematically, their relationships with each other and how those reflect on their individual characters, etc), which I do find interesting to consider, but there's so much defensive dogma about how they're all totally balanced and equally important and favored that it can be difficult to figure out where these interpretations are even coming from. Just about every conversation I've seen about McCoy in any capacity, or about the bigotry directed at Spock, becomes a very strange game of Telephone very fast.
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on 2025-04-15 10:38 pm (UTC)So you get something like "The Conscience of the King" that sets up the fundamental issue of "we found someone who was an architect of eugenics-based atrocities 20 years ago, escaped back then, and has led an otherwise blameless life since then and is now an old man... what do we do with him?" Of course, that was a very real and present problem in the 60s wrt elderly Nazis, down to the 20-year timeline, but it also entails a vision of the future which includes genocide, even if society is sufficiently improved that they happen on smaller scales before getting stopped. It's difficult to imagine how a Federation governor could trip into becoming a eugenicist in a true utopia.
TOS's handling of ... most issues is flawed but usually in a way that's at least somewhat compelling on some level. It's felt all the more glaring now that we're watching TNG (which does feel really cautious and anodyne by comparison, despite our elder millennial nostalgia for it). And I think that this weird insistence on ignoring the attempts to engage with racism via Spock (something that happens in virtually every single episode of TOS and sometimes is the entire A-plot of the episode) is just missing a huge part of what's going on with him as a character.
I also think that a lot of the apologia for the racism has to aggressively ignore the fact that Spock is specifically biracial while raised entirely as a Vulcan, and virtually everything about his experience of racism is shaped by those facts. For one, every Starfleet ship we see in TOS appears to be racially segregated by species, so his only option based on TOS seems to have been being outnumbered 400+-to-one on an all-Vulcan ship like the Intrepid or an all-human one like the Enterprise; there is no "not being incredibly outnumbered and subject to continual racialized remarks from his co-workers" option, given the social dynamics on either side. So when people are like "Vulcans aren't an oppressed class though and he lashes out about humans too," it's ... missing some really important details that are established very early.
In all honesty, though, I think the root source of a lot of the It's Not Really Racism discourse, at least on Tumblr, is less about tainting the utopia and more about good old character stanning and ship wars. It almost always seems to quickly become about defending McCoy/framing the more blatantly racist speeches from him as mutually shippy, insisting that he's treated as equally central and sympathetic within the show, and often, forwarding Spones or McSpirk as the superior ship for true understanders of TOS.
And it seems like engaging with just how forgivable or not McCoy's behavior is, what TOS's handling of him says about the show's sense of what is acceptable or sympathetic, the way the whole thing is so much about navigating and semi-recuperating white Southern masculinity in the 60s while digging into at least some of its baggage, is just— so much more of a challenge than flatly denying it happens at all or recasting those scenes as mutual UST in ways that are really puzzling in the context of the show as a whole (for one, the multiple occasions in which Spock chemically is stripped of restraint and immediately goes "I was never okay with the racism btw").
But I think it's very much part of an attempt to compete with the K/S behemoth, and specifically to combat the glaringly obvious ship war trump card of "I don't think Spock would be into someone who calls him racial slurs." I've seen quite a bit of "well, Kirk also makes comments about Spock's humanity" in the Is It Racism Really context as well—which (apart from ignoring the basic importance of Spock's comfort with very different approaches to acknowledging his human heritage) does seem just pure shipwank or "why my fave's most prominent flaw is healthy and good, or at least not different from the flaws of his nearest competitors."
no subject
on 2025-04-15 11:56 pm (UTC)