Grumping about modern (TOS K/S) art
May. 1st, 2026 11:01 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
anghraineSomething 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:
FWIW, the facial structure issue is only more obvious if you look at earlier productions that William Shatner was in:
*The obvious major reason IMO: virtually every form of Kirk Drift is fundamentally driven by manufacturing contrast between Spock and Kirk, and presenting Kirk as this high-contrast foil to Spock—effectively, as McCoy—which he simply isn't. In fact, I'd argue that Kirk transparently plays favorites when it comes to Spock's and McCoy's perspectives because he's fundamentally more aligned with Spock than with McCoy, and it's pretty much only very shallow reads + racial essentialism that would indicate otherwise.
Kirk values McCoy's perspective enough to consider it, but frankly doesn't give it the same weight as Spock's, certainly not enough to ever want McCoy calling the shots in Kirk's or Spock's absence. Kirk sides with Spock almost every time he has to make a real decision between them, not only out of affection, but because he genuinely agrees with Spock more (even if this inexorably leads him to a terrible decision, like in "The Immunity Syndrome") and is broadly more aligned with him (even when McCoy defends Spock and Kirk suspects him in "The Menagerie," say, Kirk's suspicions are not only correct but based on a highly rationalistic evaluation of evidence that aligns him more with Spock; Kirk's miserable but inevitable "guilty" vote against Spock is exactly the kind of thing that inspires so much admiration from Spock, to the point that he does things like declaring in court that Kirk's cool presence of mind and self-discipline are a force comparable to gravity). So eliding Kirk's role into McCoy's while displacing McCoy himself warps their dynamic far beyond just the McCoy erasure of it all. Kirk and Spock put a lot of effort and control into outwards personas shaped by their cultures and circumstances, but beneath their differing mannerisms, their values, temperaments, and abilities heavily overlap. However, fanon absolutely treats their dynamic more as "opposites attract" than "birds of a feather" (and McCoy as blandly supportive and amorphously essential in a way that sands down all the grit of his character, even though that's ... most of his character, as well as of their sometimes brutally dismissive treatment of him).
And this really forced and bizarre distancing of Kirk and Spock is such a thing even in the interests of shipping them, and even in details that have nothing to do with personality. I was talking awhile back on Tumblr about my initial bafflement with the fanon around Kirk having short hands/fingers, for instance, which shows up with strange regularity despite Kirk having rather long hands (esp for his height), but of course Spock has really long hands, which in some torturous way means Spock can't just have longer hands, Kirk's have to be distinctively short. Kirk can't just be relatively stocky and muscular where Spock is tall and lean; the fandom is obsessed with TOS-era Kirk being some kind of fat representation icon (...). Kirk is the only man whose make-up is explicitly diegetic (and it's certainly visible often), but Spock's is more obvious and therefore Kirk's taste in adornment/style has to be plain rather than decorative (?? Kirk?) and he has to have some insecure hypermasc motive for not wearing it (though he canonically loathes insecure hypermasculinity and has no problem wearing make-up, he just wears subtler styles of it more like Uhura and Sulu than Spock, despite the "oh well it must be Spock's make-up"/"Spock must have chosen it for him" blahblah). The list goes on, but it includes both choices/mannerisms and just straight up physical features.
And Leonard Nimoy had very high, angular, dramatic cheekbones and general facial structure. In Nimoy's case, this is reinforced by his thinness (which tbh I think is a huge factor in modern K/S trends in art—especially femslash art—that I don't have the space or energy to get into). So Kirk is given conspicuously low cheekbones with these kind of round apple cheeks and a much blander, plainer set to his features, perhaps in part because his face genuinely is soft and looks especially so from some angles, but I think it's even more because Kirk can't just not look like Spock. He has to look like the opposite of Spock.
It's basically the same way he's made a shallow romantic/fuckboy flake driven by gut emotion. It can't just be that Kirk pursues unforced romance more often than Spock (though not especially often, and he's repeatedly shown to be contemptuous and/or unenthusiastic about casual flings for no purpose but gratification), or that he uses his appearance and flirty charm as a tool in a way Spock is more uncomfortable doing but still does, or even that Kirk has his own hang-ups around sex for both SINNER REPENT reasons and much more experience of sexualized harassment and assault. Spock is the one with sexual hang-ups and who has the most overt closeted energy, so Kirk can't be that even in a different way, that's Spock's thing, Kirk has to be the opposite. So even when there's pushback against the fuckboy thing, it swerves into him being a flaky romantic or casual but ethical slut, denying the many occasions of all kinds of consent issues or any possible hang-ups on his side, the seriousness of his past relationships, his repeated signs of aversion to shore leave away from his friends, his slut-shaming of other men, his total lack of "a reputation" at the Academy, etc to create an opposition that, again, is much more pronounced between either Kirk or Spock and McCoy (who actually is the one who's presented as a healthily hedonistic man of the future).
So Kirk's depiction, even in art, ends up defined less by any details of his actual appearance and more about being not Spock. Since, in reality, he actually does have pretty striking cheekbones—just not as much as Spock or in exactly the same way—the guiding principle of high-contrast distancing Kirk from Spock gets especially jarring there.
Also, I think the overall Not-Spock effect is not only inaccurate, but perhaps unintentionally, makes Kirk look more like a generic Western white guy hero than he does in the show, in both affect (he tends to lose his very marked campy theatricality and bitchy edge) and actual physical appearance. People are always going on about how he's the one who looks like a conventionally attractive white man, so why is his face so ineffably strange and difficult to capture compared to most conventionally attractive white guy heroes or "sooo was anyone going to mention that Captain Kirk looks like he walked out of an eastern European gay porn," etc—the fandom is quite weird about this, honestly, and the generic-ized art trend where Kirk can't simply not look like Spock but has to be the opposite in every way (no matter how little this resembles him) does ... not help.
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:
FWIW, the facial structure issue is only more obvious if you look at earlier productions that William Shatner was in:
*The obvious major reason IMO: virtually every form of Kirk Drift is fundamentally driven by manufacturing contrast between Spock and Kirk, and presenting Kirk as this high-contrast foil to Spock—effectively, as McCoy—which he simply isn't. In fact, I'd argue that Kirk transparently plays favorites when it comes to Spock's and McCoy's perspectives because he's fundamentally more aligned with Spock than with McCoy, and it's pretty much only very shallow reads + racial essentialism that would indicate otherwise.
Kirk values McCoy's perspective enough to consider it, but frankly doesn't give it the same weight as Spock's, certainly not enough to ever want McCoy calling the shots in Kirk's or Spock's absence. Kirk sides with Spock almost every time he has to make a real decision between them, not only out of affection, but because he genuinely agrees with Spock more (even if this inexorably leads him to a terrible decision, like in "The Immunity Syndrome") and is broadly more aligned with him (even when McCoy defends Spock and Kirk suspects him in "The Menagerie," say, Kirk's suspicions are not only correct but based on a highly rationalistic evaluation of evidence that aligns him more with Spock; Kirk's miserable but inevitable "guilty" vote against Spock is exactly the kind of thing that inspires so much admiration from Spock, to the point that he does things like declaring in court that Kirk's cool presence of mind and self-discipline are a force comparable to gravity). So eliding Kirk's role into McCoy's while displacing McCoy himself warps their dynamic far beyond just the McCoy erasure of it all. Kirk and Spock put a lot of effort and control into outwards personas shaped by their cultures and circumstances, but beneath their differing mannerisms, their values, temperaments, and abilities heavily overlap. However, fanon absolutely treats their dynamic more as "opposites attract" than "birds of a feather" (and McCoy as blandly supportive and amorphously essential in a way that sands down all the grit of his character, even though that's ... most of his character, as well as of their sometimes brutally dismissive treatment of him).
And this really forced and bizarre distancing of Kirk and Spock is such a thing even in the interests of shipping them, and even in details that have nothing to do with personality. I was talking awhile back on Tumblr about my initial bafflement with the fanon around Kirk having short hands/fingers, for instance, which shows up with strange regularity despite Kirk having rather long hands (esp for his height), but of course Spock has really long hands, which in some torturous way means Spock can't just have longer hands, Kirk's have to be distinctively short. Kirk can't just be relatively stocky and muscular where Spock is tall and lean; the fandom is obsessed with TOS-era Kirk being some kind of fat representation icon (...). Kirk is the only man whose make-up is explicitly diegetic (and it's certainly visible often), but Spock's is more obvious and therefore Kirk's taste in adornment/style has to be plain rather than decorative (?? Kirk?) and he has to have some insecure hypermasc motive for not wearing it (though he canonically loathes insecure hypermasculinity and has no problem wearing make-up, he just wears subtler styles of it more like Uhura and Sulu than Spock, despite the "oh well it must be Spock's make-up"/"Spock must have chosen it for him" blahblah). The list goes on, but it includes both choices/mannerisms and just straight up physical features.
And Leonard Nimoy had very high, angular, dramatic cheekbones and general facial structure. In Nimoy's case, this is reinforced by his thinness (which tbh I think is a huge factor in modern K/S trends in art—especially femslash art—that I don't have the space or energy to get into). So Kirk is given conspicuously low cheekbones with these kind of round apple cheeks and a much blander, plainer set to his features, perhaps in part because his face genuinely is soft and looks especially so from some angles, but I think it's even more because Kirk can't just not look like Spock. He has to look like the opposite of Spock.
It's basically the same way he's made a shallow romantic/fuckboy flake driven by gut emotion. It can't just be that Kirk pursues unforced romance more often than Spock (though not especially often, and he's repeatedly shown to be contemptuous and/or unenthusiastic about casual flings for no purpose but gratification), or that he uses his appearance and flirty charm as a tool in a way Spock is more uncomfortable doing but still does, or even that Kirk has his own hang-ups around sex for both SINNER REPENT reasons and much more experience of sexualized harassment and assault. Spock is the one with sexual hang-ups and who has the most overt closeted energy, so Kirk can't be that even in a different way, that's Spock's thing, Kirk has to be the opposite. So even when there's pushback against the fuckboy thing, it swerves into him being a flaky romantic or casual but ethical slut, denying the many occasions of all kinds of consent issues or any possible hang-ups on his side, the seriousness of his past relationships, his repeated signs of aversion to shore leave away from his friends, his slut-shaming of other men, his total lack of "a reputation" at the Academy, etc to create an opposition that, again, is much more pronounced between either Kirk or Spock and McCoy (who actually is the one who's presented as a healthily hedonistic man of the future).
So Kirk's depiction, even in art, ends up defined less by any details of his actual appearance and more about being not Spock. Since, in reality, he actually does have pretty striking cheekbones—just not as much as Spock or in exactly the same way—the guiding principle of high-contrast distancing Kirk from Spock gets especially jarring there.
Also, I think the overall Not-Spock effect is not only inaccurate, but perhaps unintentionally, makes Kirk look more like a generic Western white guy hero than he does in the show, in both affect (he tends to lose his very marked campy theatricality and bitchy edge) and actual physical appearance. People are always going on about how he's the one who looks like a conventionally attractive white man, so why is his face so ineffably strange and difficult to capture compared to most conventionally attractive white guy heroes or "sooo was anyone going to mention that Captain Kirk looks like he walked out of an eastern European gay porn," etc—the fandom is quite weird about this, honestly, and the generic-ized art trend where Kirk can't simply not look like Spock but has to be the opposite in every way (no matter how little this resembles him) does ... not help.
no subject
on 2026-05-02 08:34 am (UTC)no subject
on 2026-05-02 12:50 pm (UTC)A thousand times “yes” to this, and to your entire thought-provoking post. So many contemporary TOS creators, whether artists or writers, can’t be bothered to think deeply about the characters’ canonically revealed natures and attributes. They base their portrayals of the characters not on carefully viewed, reflectively analyzed primary-source material, but on sixty years’ worth of other creators’ fanon, lore, and wish fulfillment. We’re seeing increasingly blurred and distorted copies of copies of copies of the original characters.
no subject
on 2026-05-02 01:44 pm (UTC)I have nothing interesting to add, but this is a fascinating analysis.
no subject
on 2026-05-11 01:31 pm (UTC)"sooo was anyone going to mention that Captain Kirk looks like he walked out of an eastern European gay porn," etc—the fandom is quite weird about this, honestly
Um. Yeah, ouch.