Tumblr crosspost (23 January 2025)

[anghraine]

astarreborn responded to this post:

You should flip some of the women toolike city on the edge of forever, and the ingenue from conscience of the king,

I replied:

I've been thinking about this, because I tend to prefer AUs that take a relatively restricted premise and see where the specific consequences of that premise go rather than adopting a whole bevy of changes, but also I can't really see a way around the implicit homophobia without more changes... hmm. I would probably not switch Edith (that romance is more interesting to me as f/f in that cultural context) but Kodos's child being a son makes a LOT of sense, Charlie X would go really differently with f!Kirk unless Charlie is also a girl...etc. 🤔

astarreborn responded:

You could flip yoeman rand just for the fun changes to the enemy within. On further thought i agree with you on edith.

Is it ok if I come back in a few hours with more thoughts? I don't want to annoy you too much, but I really like this idea

I replied:

No problem! I'm delighted anyone at all is interested :)

[ETA 4/26/25: I ultimately decided not to genderbend anyone else directly, because I really prefer the tight focus on the effects of Spock and Kirk specifically being women within the broader structure of TOS. Instead, sometimes the threat/attraction is sometimes shifted to a man in contexts where that makes sense, for the classic femme fatale vs overconfident dude scenario—Kirk's shock and horror over Uhura in "The Gamesters of Triskelion" is the same, but leads her to try to distract/seduce Lars rather than Shahna; she's captured for Rael rather than Deela in the "Wink of an Eye" plot, though the Kirk-Rael dynamic is somewhat different than Kirk-Deela; since she's the first attractive woman Charlie Evans sees, his fixation on Janice Rand primarily shifts to Kirk while his uncomfortably (to Kirk) hyper-gendered idealization of Kirk in TOS is very, very different with a woman he's attracted to. Other times it does become a f/f scenario: Edith, Rayna, the Romulan commander, Zarabeth, Andrea in an extremely limited way. And sometimes it's navigated platonically, essentially, since Jessica Kirk would have much less reason to assume that most women she encounters are particularly likely to be attracted to women in the first place. But she's certainly got enough of an eye for vulnerability to know what weak spots to target in her necessary charm offensives—she can present herself to other women as a chilling threat, as a silly drama queen, as an alluring love interest, as their new best friend, as helpless and temperamental, whatever works for the desperation of the circumstances and what she's trying to achieve. I think she recognizes that Lenore Karidian is isolated and lonely, for instance, and goes for New Best Friend with a side of confident older-but-still-young mentor, rather than a direct seduction.]