Entries tagged with cw: genocide

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Icons! :D

Despite stumbling into passionately shipping the original Star Trek ship of ultimate destiny that spawned fandom as we know it, I've found my interests and preferences a bit at odds with general ST fandom, which naturally has meant that I had to make my own silly TOS icons reflecting what I'm personally into. I promised

elperian that I'd get around to posting them here—they're up for grabs for anyone who wants them, and I'm sick and miserable for asthma reasons, so it's something that doesn't take a lot of brain power.

1. You know the infamous scene from S3 where the terribly written alien spawns a terribly written Kirk meltdown only for it to become one of the most incredible and certainly gayest scenes in all of TOS ft. Kirk and Spock's shadows leaning in and eventually overlapping? I definitely needed that one:

2. Perhaps the most purely surprising and purely delightful revelation from the TOS watch was that Uhura doesn't do much more with Spock than hit on him a few times in some early episodes, but she and Kirk have a really charming platonic friendship where they're only ever on a last name/rank basis, yet are genuinely close and are persistently shown to care very deeply about each other. And they're also absolute joys when their subtle background rapport as mutually smooth-talking, stylish, high-strung but controlled professionals gets to flourish into what I can only describe as bisexual guile diva chaos gremlin energy. There are multiple occasions when one of them is finally starting to crumble under the pressure and the other is an absolute rock until the crisis passes (which one takes which role actually varies), but I have a real soft spot for Kirk reminding Uhura of how important and valuable she is in "Mirror, Mirror," so that's the scene I chose for my first Kirk-Uhura brotp icon:

3. The great thing about "Amok Time" is—well, there are many great things, but you know how you sometimes watch something, and you just end up kind of hating everyone and siding with a meteor destroying all concerned? "Amok Time" is the opposite of that. It's one of few episodes of anything where I'm pretty much Team Everyone, and this very much includes one of my absolute favorite Vulcans of all time and one of my favorite women in TOS, my girl T'Pring:

Yes, she did all that, and good for her, too. Spock himself talks about the prospect of having sex with her with about as much enthusiasm as a death sentence and T'Pring doesn't want to be his property/consort, so win/win. Maybe Vulcan should have better divorce laws if they don't want fantastically stylish women scheming for personal autonomy!!

4. There was no way in hell I wasn't going to have an icon for my beloved episode of episodes, "The Conscience of the King" (a fantastically acted and structured episode in general, obviously a great Kirk episode specifically, with an intense and intriguing villain in Kodos/Karidian, but also in true TOS fashion about the then-highly topical subject matter of what to do with elderly ~~Nazis~~ escaped eugenicist war criminals, an emphasis on Spock immediately recognizing the strangeness of Kirk's behavior and quickly grasping the weight of genocide for the survivors where McCoy desperately wants to filter Kirk's actions through familiar, relatable, pedestrian motives right up to the end, all interlaced with early modern revenge tragedy aka my academic specialization and other great love—truly, no episode could be more perfect for me specifically). So I went with an icon for one of my absolute favorite scenes from the whole damn thing, the magnificent confrontation between Kirk and Kodos:

"You're an actor now. What were you twenty years ago?"
"Younger, captain. Much younger."
"So was I. But I remember."

5. I really wanted a gay Spock icon that was not necessarily a Kirk/Spock icon (he is mostly Kirksexual, sure, but he's also so aggressively Not Into Women on so many occasions that I felt it deserved its own separate icon). And so many of those scenes don't really get across the level of bitchy indifference without the movement of his head tilt or shrug or whatnot... but I found one that I felt truly encapsulated the particular gay energy of Spock:

6. While I was at it, I couldn't resist the other supremely bitchy gay Spock scene (this is when Kirk invites him to join a party of dudes going to a hot lady cafe and Spock very slowly tilts his head and projects intensely passive-aggressive confusion at the idea that he could possibly find this appealing):

7. There's a post that periodically goes around about Shatner's wildly erratic positions on Kirk's sexuality over the last 50-odd years that's like... dude, you're the one who kept looking at Nimoy like you wanted to eat him, you're the one who played Kirk as the queerest dude in space, you did this, Bill, and—yeah, it's not wrong. One of the other big surprises from watching all of TOS was realizing that the intense queer vibes of K/S has every bit as much to do with Shatner's performance as Nimoy's, along with the framing and writing and so on. No other Kirk actor (and few ST actors period) has even remotely approached the off-the-charts queer energy of the original, and so I made a silly icon about it:

8. I wanted a K/S icon that captured how much of their dynamic is like—

Kirk: I'll admit that part of me seeks the blood of my enemies and every day I choose not to murder
Spock: um, I ... have questions
Kirk: well it's just - LOOK A FLOWER!!!!!!
Spock: Jim please stop sniffing flowers they keep trying to kill you

Truly, no one's doing it like them.

9. One of my other favorite Kirk-Uhura brotp moments is when he casually promotes her to the local racist's position controlling the Enterprise's weapons and navigation in the middle of the Romulan crisis in "Balance of Terror." Kirk and Uhura are visually framed together a lot in that episode and lit very similarly, so I wanted to pair Uhura confidently stepping up in that episode with his affirmation of her importance in "Mirror, Mirror":

10. I had been talking with

elperian about the hunt for Kirk icons, and we both hadn't found any that used the much-quoted description of him from the pilot as "a stack of books with legs" and his notoriety at the Academy as the demanding teacher of a course (implied to be a philosophy class) in which cadets would either "think or sink." Despite his more easy-going manner in the present, his conviction that noping out of critical thinking and creativity is not an option, ethically, remains absolutely non-negotiable and central to his worldview in TOS, so I wanted to come up with a "think or sink" icon. However, when I was collecting some screenshots from "Court Martial" for unrelated meta, one of them was so perfect for "stack of books with legs" that I couldn't resist going with that one instead!

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Tumblr crosspost (1 February 2025)

Characterization poll responses part 2!

The original Tumblr poll got over 500 notes and over 1000 votes, so I can't realistically compile everything, but I did want to include some that I particularly appreciated. I'm organizing them by subject for convenience.

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Tumblr crosspost (31 January 2025)

Poll #33056 TOS characterization details

This poll is anonymous.
Open to: Registered Users, detailed results viewable to: All, participants: 7

Which is your favorite character detail from TOS?

View Answers

Kirk used to teach an infamously tough class at the Academy.
2 (28.6%)

Spock is ashamed of his affection for Kirk and guilty about being ashamed.
0 (0.0%)

Technically, Kirk isn't the first white person Uhura kisses; Nurse Chapel is.
0 (0.0%)

Kirk's only stated religious beliefs are that he's a strict monotheist, a god needs compassion, and he particularly rejects Hellenic polytheism.
0 (0.0%)

McCoy avoids revealing Dr. Jones's blindness out of respect for her privacy.
1 (14.3%)

Uhura finds Kirk's voice soothing and hates kissing him for that reason.
0 (0.0%)

The original Gorn were just trying to protect their homes from colonization.
0 (0.0%)

Spock hasn't been on familial terms with Sarek for 18 years by S2.
0 (0.0%)

Sulu and Chekov refuse to fly the Enterprise when given unethical orders.
2 (28.6%)

Kirk was 13 when he survived starvation and genocide.
1 (14.3%)

McCoy marries a high priestess who survives and retains her political authority.
1 (14.3%)

Spock is a firm vegetarian who dislikes meat.
0 (0.0%)

1. Kirk as a notoriously challenging teacher -> "Where No Man Has Gone Before" (S1).
2. Spock's shame over his feelings for Kirk -> "The Naked Time" (S1).
3. The Uhura/Chapel kiss -> "What Are Little Girls Made Of?" (S1).
4. Kirk angrily refusing to convert to Hellenic(/ancient alien) polytheism because he's a firm monotheist -> "Who Mourns for Adonais?" (S2); his insistence that a god needs compassion is from "Where No Man Has Gone Before" (S1).
5. McCoy honoring the privacy of the woman of the week's disability -> "Is There In Truth No Beauty?" (S3).
6. Uhura hating kissing Kirk because she's always found his voice so platonically reassuring -> "Plato's Stepchildren" (S3).
7. The Gorn Did Nothing Wrong -> "Arena" (S1).
8. Spock hasn't had a father-son relationship with Sarek for 18 years, or visited his parents in 4 years -> "Journey to Babel" (S2).
9. Sulu and Chekov don't believe in just following orders (and Starfleet regulations allow for this) -> "Turnabout Intruder" (S3).
10. Kirk was a thirteen-year-old genocide survivor -> "The Conscience of the King" (S1); his age is established in both "Shore Leave" (S1) and "The Deadly Years" (S2).
11. McCoy's marriage to Natira, one of the few female authority figures who is capable and noble and survives and is triumphant, gaining full leadership of her people, and Kirk promises to help McCoy visit her periodically -> "For the World Is Hollow and I Have Touched the Sky" (S3).
12. Spock is a firm vegetarian and dislikes meat, which is a clue to how powerfully the ancestral memory effect is working on him ("All Our Yesterdays," S3).

Tagged: #i had to leave some other interesting or fun ones out sadly. like baby spock's sehlat

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Tumblr crosspost (31 January 2025)

…

Okay, look, I swear I’m doing other things than this fic. I also wrote original fiction yesterday, and spent time with friends, and I’m going to re-certify my repayment plan today, and you know, anyway, here’s a prequel snippet to the one about femslash Spirk emotions after “Conscience of the King.” This is set earlier, as S'paak hunts down the clues about Kirk’s motives during the plot of the episode.

S’paak had been puzzled in her youth at the tales of her barbaric ancestors—the Vulcan ones, not the human ones. They had been a people of unrestrained passions of all kinds, prone to anger, violence, war, irrational attachments, even to hunting animals that presented no danger to them. They had been willing to incinerate their planet before forgetting a wrong to themselves or their clans. Only later had Vulcans found another path, the path of peace and reason to which she had long committed herself. It felt so natural to her that she often found this history of her people difficult to believe, difficult to even imagine, and yet it was so.

It took her until the first year of the Enterprise’s deep-space expedition to understand.

The inexorable activity of her mind had linked the captain’s uncharacteristic abruptness to the murder of Dr. Leighton. S’paak had not forgotten Kirk’s private inquiries about his professional reputation, and this left her all the more intrigued by the captain’s sudden demotion of a blameless Lieutenant Riley, as well as suspicious of their new guests. It was an easy enough task to order the nearest ship computer to correlate all known data on the individuals she thought concerned—Thomas Leighton, Jessica Kirk, Kevin Riley, Anton Karidian—but less easy to hear the results.

S’paak had not known the details of the starvation of the Tarsus IV colony twenty years earlier, nor of the eugenicist policies of its governor in determining who would receive the remaining rations, nor of the scale of slaughter that had taken place as thousands were marched into converted anti-matter chambers. She had certainly not known that Dr. Leighton, Kevin Riley, and Jessica Kirk—Jess, her friend—were among the witnesses and survivors. In addition, these three were on record as having seen the notoriously reclusive governor with their own eyes.

Nine survivors of the massacre had received that dubious honor. After Leighton’s murder, only two of the nine remained alive, Kirk and Riley. Leighton, older than both, might well have recalled Kodos’s face clearly, and now he lay dead. Riley had been a small boy. Jess, though, had been thirteen. Still a child, but old enough to remember. Old enough to be dangerous to the guilty.

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Tumblr crosspost (25 January 2025)

Femslash Spirk scrap for today (at a point around the end of “The Conscience of the King”):

“I will admit,” said S’paak, “that I do not find the governor’s presumed fate a particularly grievous one, captain. I see no reason that skill at performance should exempt anyone from justice, much less someone guilty of Kodos’s crimes.”

Captain Kirk’s lips curved into an unconvincing approximation of her typical expression. “His skill at performance wasn’t the difficulty, unfortunately.”

S'paak could not help but wonder what Kirk would have done if events had not taken the matter out of her hands. Dr. McCoy could talk with Karidian’s own theatricality about blood and severed heads and vengeance, but Kirk had been cautious to the point of near folly. True, the Jessica Kirk of Tarsus IV had been a girl of thirteen, and the uncertainty of human memory made caution understandable. But the weight of evidence was so clear.

Even so, Kirk—a woman more prone to leveraging emotion than hiding its existence—had not fully succeeded in concealing her true thoughts. At least, not from S’paak. Kirk had gone from uncertain and reluctant to grim, fearless, admirably unfaltering. S’paak guessed that, in the end, Kirk would not have hesitated to personally consign Kodos to the fate he deserved had circumstances allowed for it. That was not an irrational vendetta, however bitter, but deserved and necessary.

“Those difficulties are past,” said S’paak, “thanks to you, with respect to both him and his daughter.”

“Not me alone. But thank you, I think,” said Kirk. She turned slightly away, though not before S’paak observed the uneven inhalation of her next breath, the quick, repeated flicker of her lashes. “Riley deserves more of your sympathy, though. He’s younger than me, lost more, and I ... I’ve always needed challenges to struggle against. Something to overcome.”

“I see no logical reason for starvation to be among those challenges,” said S’paak flatly, “nor the massacre of civilians, least of all when they are sent to death on no pretext except baseless pseudoscience.”

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So, I figured I'd get Star Trek anon hate sooner or later

I 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.

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Tumblr crosspost (22 January 2025)

Speaking of my TOS watch, I’ve noticed that the writing for Kirk in particular has gotten sharply worse overall in S3 (also for other characters, but less obtrusively), yet when it’s good, it’s really satisfying.

I loved both Kirk and Spock in “For the World Is Hollow and I Have Touched the Sky,” for instance. It’s a good episode in general (maybe one of the least awful about women in TOS) and a really nice McCoy episode as well, but I enjoy how Kirk and Spock are kind of confused about McCoy’s marriage but ultimately willing to support their friend. And it ends not only with McCoy’s cool wife surviving and becoming even more of a leader of her people than she was before (and this framed as unambiguously Good), but iirc Kirk and Spock prepared to make the occasional detour to her colony so McCoy can visit her without leaving his career behind. And while Spock was something of a flanderized dick in “That Which Survives” (if in a way that can easily be read in K/S terms), it’s got some very solid Kirk characterization:

MCCOY: Could it be the Enterprise hit the planet?
SULU: Once in Siberia, there was a meteor so great that it flattened whole forests and was felt as far away as—
KIRK: Mr. Sulu, if I'd wanted a Russian history lesson, I'd have brought along Mr. Chekov. This is a matter of survival, gentlemen. Without the Enterprise, we need food, and we need water, and we need them fast. I want a detailed analysis made of this planet, and I want it now.

Kirk [to Sulu]: Your report covers all vegetation?
Sulu: Yes, captain. All vegetation is inedible. Poison to us.
McCoy [to Kirk]: If the Enterprise has been destroyed, you know how long we can survive??
Kirk [grimly]: Yes. [pause] I don’t see any water, but there must be some to grow the vegetation. A source of water would stretch our survival. Did you see any evidence of rainfall?

Shatner doesn’t overplay the moment IMO, but there’s a quiet weight to Kirk being The Starvation Expert of the team given uhhhhh his personal history—and also the fact that this episode is one of few that (in a completely different scene) explicitly acknowledges other TOS episodes.

Tagged: #this single moment just feels so weighty and the way everyone defers to kirk not only as captain but as knowledgeable about survival #and how it's not overblown the way so much of s3 kirk is...whew. nice to see some good character choices here and there too #it /is/ wild to me that the jj abrams star trek gives kirk the most generic Troubled Youth backstory possible #when his canon backstory is infinitely worse. canon kirk survived starvation and the massacre of 4000 people in his colony at age 13 #and afterwards became a bullied nerd (established on multiple occasions!) until he found his true calling of commanding a starship #i get wanting to split into a different timeline etc etc but damn chris pine could have done something great with a more nuanced kirk #OH also. kirk seems to get more obligatory ''''romance'''' scenes than ever before in this season #but these relationships also seem much more often dubiously consensual at best on his side also #he's either a prisoner or an amnesiac or enthralled by a drug or whatever in them until literally episode 21. #in which he falls for rayna the robot #the relationship is terribly written but at least they're both allegedly choosing it (and even there flint is dangling kirk in front of her #like a sexy lure or something. batshit concept but they're definitely being manipulated - and still i think it's the most purely consensual #relationship that kirk has in the whole season thus far) #ngl him stranding deela to die without sharing the antidote and flying away was probably the most cathartic kirk dubcon plot conclusion #i'm predictably very tempted by femslash kirk/spock sometimes but it does feel that this would be more expected for f!kirk #anyway. weird trend in a weird season but it's nice when his backstory is remembered at all

[ETA from 4/6/2025 re: "tempted by femslash kirk/spock sometimes but" hahahahahahahahaha]

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Flash Gordon!

The BFF and I rewatched Flash Gordon (1980) last night!

I always remember the weird art film buried in it (when Zarkov's mind is ostensibly being wiped, the villains play the highlights of his current memory on a ... TV? and along side strange images of cats etc he's revealed to be a Jewish survivor of the Holocaust who was able to escape to the USA, build a career in NASA, unjustly fell into disrepute, and his wife unrelatedly drowned). I had forgotten that one of the villains remarks that Hitler had potential (...) and that Zarkov later reveals that he preserved his mind by reciting the Talmud, the equations of Einstein, works of Shakespeare, and a Beatles song to protect the integrity of his thoughts.

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Whew

I got into a debate with a friend that touched on the Ottoman genocides, I went to do some research to make sure I was remembering details correctly, fell down a rabbit hole of research, and wow I'm not sleeping tonight.

The conversational aside was specifically about the assassination of Talaat Pasha, which also happened on March 15th. My birthday! I mean, not my birthday at the time, obviously—I would not be born until many decades later—but it is certainly a day for the annals of history. I cherish and respect Tumblr's hatred of Julius Caesar, but he's got nothing on Talaat Pasha. I wish I believed in hell specifically so I could believe he's burning in it.

(Fun fact: my grandmother, who is Greek, used to hint darkly about some misdeed of "the Turks" that she's still got a grudge about, and for years, I thought she was just being vaguely Islamophobic. I did eventually get the impression of something happening not long before she was born, maybe. But I was still really unsure about any details until I was digging through some articles on a trip during my master's program and discovered that "vague misdeeds" were entire fucking genocides that my own country, the USA, did not find it politically convenient to acknowledge until years later.)

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Tumblr crosspost (12 July 2020)

I reblogged a infographic about the Greek genocide, and tagged it:

#this was such a genuine shock to learn about

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(no subject)

I was thinking of my most Tumblr(TM) experiences, and tbh, I'm not sure anything will beat the time when I was talking about my undying loathing of the Young Turks (the architects of multiple genocides, not the news people, though I do despise the latter for choosing to honour the former). Naturally, the main response was someone asking if I hated them (the person asking), since they were young and Turkish.

I could see this as either trolling or 100% sincere, but either way, peak Tumblr.