To continue my periodic Tumblr TOS!K/S fandom pet peeves: I keep periodically running into comments on gifs or meta wrt Kirk and Spock's unhinged mutual jealousy of each other's love interests (or just. interests) that go something to the effect of: "well I like a Kirk and Spock who are a healthy, open-minded poly couple who don't get jealous at all." Every time, I can't help thinking, "Okay, so you don't actually like Kirk and Spock, then."

I mean, it's possible to like most of a character and headcanon away some specific detail that you think doesn't work or is OOC in the wider context of something that long and complicated (me with "Elaan of Troyius"; forcing Taming of the Shrew onto the TOS cast is a terrible and indeed OOC idea to begin with, but it simultaneously manages to be racist towards Elaan while shrugging off her drugging the previously repulsed Kirk into sex, and unsurprisingly shares a writer with the ragingly antisemitic "Patterns of Force"). But you have to ignore such a major component of their dynamic and characterizations to deny their jealousy wrt each other that this seems like ... not an offensive misreading, really, and there are others that bother me more on that level, but few strike me as so absolutely wrong. Every time I see it, I wonder if the person has even seen the show, at least at all recently, because it's just ... it's not even that it's baseless as an interpretation, it's actively contradicted so flagrantly, so often, that it seems completely disengaged from the show.

(Kirk's heartfelt, melancholy description of love is extremely and explicitly monogamous, well beyond the casual defaults of what you'd expect from the era, and he's ... I mean, Kirk spends almost the entire show fully aware that Spock is ashamed of his feelings for him, and after the first shock, is incredibly tolerant and unconcerned about Spock dealing with this angst via repression and blatant lies. But Kirk's easy, patient assurance around this dries up the instant he gets the slightest glimmer of a suspicion that someone or something else could conceivably dislodge his position at the center of Spock's world. He seethes with extremely visible jealousy and hostility whenever that happens and swings to the opposite extreme of getting unhappy and insecure. And Spock's jealousy is even more incredibly conspicuous and persistent throughout most of the series, especially in episodes like "The City on the Edge of Forever." By S3, Spock has hit such an intensity of envy that when Bones is like "you just couldn't understand love triangles, or love at all, all the desperate things it drives people to do, the ecstasies and agonies... anyway g'night" Spock immediately responds by mind-melding with the unconscious Kirk to remove his latest love interest from his memory after bleeding jealousy of her the whole episode. Kirk and Spock are many things, but healthily poly people free from jealousy and insecurity is certainly not among them!)

I finished TOS today :’(

From J’s loathing of the series finale, I thought it would be worse tbh. It is not good, to be clear! Obviously the whole conceit of the episode is intensely misogynistic (and transphobic, though I think that was less intentional). And Janice is so completely identified with Gender Rage while also being so mediocre as a person that her characterization is somewhere between insulting and comically stupid, but with a bit of generosity there are some things I still find intriguing about it.

Further contemplated the femslash Spirk concept while I was going to sleep, inevitably, and concluded:

• I am perfectly aware this has been done before in the last, you know, nearly 60 years of this ship’s towering fandom influence; I’ve definitely seen art and cosplay. However, I’m deliberately insulating myself from reading any other versions until the finer details are more nailed down in my own head.
• McCoy is definitely still a man (specifically DeForest Kelley c. TOS) because it only later occurred to me that 1) thematically, I definitely prefer this trio as a mixed gender group and 2) the advocate for emotion and instinct and human warmth being a male doctor and the voice of logic and discipline being a woman and technically his superior pleases me greatly. I also like the McCoy-Kirk brotp as a male-female friendship that is intense, complex, and 100% platonic.
• I’m still figuring out how Kirk being repeatedly menaced by the woman of the week would pan out with f!Kirk. With m!Kirk, it feels like the show pushes him having an irresistible appeal to women in general (regardless of the woman’s morality) that is in part where this ultimately comes from, but a) the show is also very concerned with matters of autonomy/violation mainly mediated through him as protagonist, and b) he’s got a lot of Odysseus tropes to him (among others) as a character that make his femme fatale allure and willingness to use it as a tool more interesting than as the inevitable fate of a female space captain. Also, even in a femslash context, it feels homophobic for it to always be women sexually harassing f!Kirk, especially considering just how far it goes in S3 (I think his first basically consensual kiss, in terms of both consent and all his faculties being online, is 16 episodes into the season, and that one is a result of deliberate deception; 18 episodes in, he has an actual if underwritten romance, but he's also being dangled by a third party before his love interest as a sort of glorified sex toy, though both he and the woman in question are allegedly truly in love, and at that point he's been raped at least once and I would argue twice, and had a purely non-con kiss and another that's dubcon at best).
• Kirk’s going to be Jessica instead of my original idea of Deborah. I was thinking of what would be a sturdy, ordinary name in the Midwest comparable to James that would also abbreviate conveniently to a common short form (Jim / Deb / Jess). I wanted the shortened version to be something that could carry the emotional weight of Spock’s very occasional “Jim” without feeling that the nickname itself is more significant (gender-wise) than Jim is for a dude from Iowa. I also wanted to avoid the -y/-ie endings of so many English nicknames (sorry, Francophones). Deb seemed to work well, except I’d forgotten that I have a considerably older family friend who not only uses Deb (and is named Deborah) but happens to have very similar coloring and background to young Shatner. As I was plotting the femslash, the association with her felt increasingly weird and uncomfortable, so I switched to Jessica (chosen for reasons largely unrelated to it also beginning with J, but that helps!).
• Does Jessica Kirk wear the miniskirt and go-go boots while issuing non-negotiable orders from her captain’s chair? Definitely.

Tagged: #i feel like jessica unironically loves the uniform and s'paak finds it deeply impractical for both of their positions #also the aesthetic is vaguely romulan and she doesn't care for that at all. except on kirk specifically for mysterious reasons #a mystery requiring further study obviously. lots of further study.

If you follow me on Tumblr, you've seen me trip into an unexpected (for me) Kirk/Spock spiral. I knew, of course, that the ship is the granddaddy of modern western slash fandom—and fandom as many of us know it wouldn't exist without the ship's passionate early fandom—but given that a) ships can be wildly popular without me personally finding them compelling and b) I don't tend to be into m/m in general, I really didn't expect I would fall head over heels for it.

I think partly it's because sometimes I was watching with people who strain to ignore all hints of homoerotic subtext between anyone when it's not explicitly spelled out, and I was annoyed at the refusal to even consider any other possibility than The Holy Bond of Totally Platonic Heterosexual Dude Friendship despite the truly copious amount of material in this case. But even apart from that, I went from being a bit surprised the foundational slash fandom juggernaut wasn't "more or less typical bromance filtered through fandom goggles" but actually the real super homoerotic deal to "losing my mind about this" due to some particular, uh, incidents in TOS. The final straw for me was actually the season 3 episode "Requiem for Methuselah" (in which Kirk has a decidedly mediocre het romance Spock visibly dislikes, leading to a final scene in which McCoy claims Spock can't understand love triangles or the victories or agonies of love that Kirk has experienced, and without so much as a scene break Spock just waits for McCoy to leave and then wipes his rival from Kirk's memory. unhinged gay shit is what I needed to truly succumb, I guess!). But there were also three major S1 episodes that heavily contributed to my eventual "AHHHHHH MY SHIPPP" downfall. These weren't the only wildly shippy moments in the season (hahahahahaha), just the ones that were the emotional equivalent of being punched in the stomach:

1) "The Naked Time": I love this episode for many reasons, not only K/S ones (in fact, more for Spock feelings in general). However. This is the episode where everyone gets space drunk and loses all their inhibitions, so they just start doing whatever their repressed instincts and fantasies and emotions drive them towards (the fantastic "I'll rescue you, fair maiden!" -> "Sorry, neither" Sulu-Uhura scene happens in that context). Most people are just kind of silly. However, there's a point where Nurse Chapel passionately declares her feelings for Spock, and he gently rejects her but is deeply upset about it. The next time we see inhibition-free Spock, he's jumped from feeling terrible about Chapel to feeling terrible about his mother's emotional isolation on Vulcan, and his own participation in it. Kirk tries to shake him out of it, and an increasingly anxious Spock confesses, "Jim, when I feel friendship for you, I'm ashamed." Kirk keeps trying to shake him back to his senses and he just says in agony, "Understand, Jim. I've spent a whole lifetime learning to hide my feelings..."

I will say that normally, I am not one of the lesbians who finds much catharsis in m/m or mediates my own feelings about my own marginalized sexuality through it (my main exception to this was Faramir/Aragorn as a teenager). But Spock's "in vino veritas" being not daring escapades or wish-fulfillment fantasies, but misery and shame over both his feelings and his detachment (in the fourth-aired episode of the nearly 80 episodes of the series), and also shame over his lifelong attempts to conceal what, and how much, he truly feels just hit so hard. The fact that we later discover that his cultural norms led to him getting railroaded into a het marriage as a literal child and that he clearly loathes the necessity of sex with his wife only intensifies the sense of déja vu I started getting. Who knew that watching subtextual pining from a science-fiction show aired in 1966 could tear off the scabs on my "lesbian raised Mormon" damage? Not me until this episode!

[ETA: I know some of you are SNW fans, so note that I'm pretty harsh about it under the cut.]

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It's always kind of morbidly fascinating how much online Tolkien fandom is so powerfully shaped by the Jackson LOTR films, widespread Silm fanon based on brief and usually ambiguous scraps (if based on anything other than "stuff fandom BNFs came up with"), and bits and pieces from random documents Tolkien actually wrote (including things he explicitly discarded). And it's like—there's nothing wrong with liking the films, for all my gripes with them. I disagree w/ a lot of particular takes on them and resent their stranglehold on the fandom and the incessant glorification of that stranglehold, but they're powerful movies and I myself likely would have taken much longer to get into the book if not for the atmosphere created by the films.

But the posts about how wonderful it is that Tolkien fandom has moved past those silly days of yore when fanon spliced with the films spliced with decontextualized scraps wasn't the main mode of Tolkien fandom engagement, and how the Peter Jackson filter on everything Tolkien is right and good and maybe even a matter of social justice (?????) and so on are definitely frustrating. Without even getting into specific discourses, Tolkien fandom can be profoundly alienating if you're not into 1) the Jackson films or 2) popular fanon. And yeah, ultimately that's just a fandom misalignment between my personal interests and that of much of the larger fandom, and obviously they can and will do fandom in whatever way makes them happy. That's fine. But the active celebration of fandom pressure to conform to the interpretations of people who had no more impact on Tolkien's work than me is pretty deeply grating, ngl.

And the idea that incorporating popular bits and pieces of Tolkien material to augment the fanon+PJ!LOTR version of Middle-earth just proves that Tolkien fandom has left their movieverse days behind and is really about love for the books these days is like ... what. How does that even make sense? Fandom does not have to be about love for a specific source material and there is plenty to criticize and correct in Tolkien, yes. But there's a way in which I can respect people who say "I'm here more because I love the LOTR movies and the material created by the Tolkien fandom community than for most of what Tolkien actually wrote" (something I have seen people say!) far more than these saccharine celebratory posts about how Tolkien fandom has come so far by driving out book fans and, idk, desperately searching for a woman to blame for everything that goes wrong in the First Age.

(I recently encountered the theory that Celegorm's actions towards Lúthien are not driven by anything stated but by a desire to avenge Aredhel's rape/imprisonment by Eöl. Silm fandom quickly seemed like the Mirror Universe version of the Silmarillion when I got into it years ago, but at that point, I was just like "okay, Celegorm trying to rape Lúthien is actually Aredhel's fault? Sounds like a perfectly typical Silm fandom take.")

Anyway. There are definitely corners of Tolkien fandom that aren't like this and mutual disaffection is how I met most of my friends in the fandom, etc. But BNFs patting themselves on the back over how fantastic the current atmosphere is for everyone who matters :)))) does absolutely set my teeth on edge.

I reblogged this post [cw for rape] and added:

ae;lkdf there’s this “cruel little boy” who reports Proserpina eating the pomegranate, so she can’t go home. She moans, then turns him into a screech owl.

I reblogged this post, and added:

OTOH, “Callisto” is :( :( :( :( :(

Tagged: #i remembered that it was bad but not that jupiter transformed himself into diana to fool her :(