Speaking of my coughing baby vs hydrogen bomb perspective on the various obligatory het romance plots in TOS, I’ve been really struck by how many seem dub-con at best. Maybe that’s partly because I’m finishing the third season and it’s especially pronounced there, and it’s also been particularly glaring with Spock in particular (the Kirk dubcon plots tend to be more viscerally horrifying, but he at least gets to consent sometimes).

Spock has a small fraction of the number of romantic (or "romantic") plots that Kirk does, and while I might be misremembering something in the many episodes I’ve seen—

1— “This Side of Paradise”

The premise of this "romance" is that Leila, the softly-lit blonde girl of the episode, was in love with Spock six years earlier, but his issues meant their love could never be, and he rejected any possibility of romance with her. It's not at all clear what past!Spock actually felt about the situation (Leila says "you couldn't give anything of yourself" and he wouldn't even put his arms around her), both because of his general manner when not under the effect of the sex/docility/spore cult pollen, and because her feelings are so much the main driver of both the backstory and the present events.

Early on, lead spore cultist Elias asks Leila if she’d like Spock to join their creepy community. She replies, “There is no choice, Elias. He will stay.” It doesn’t seem like she actually cares about what he’d choose in his right mind, just about using the sex pollen to railroad him into the life she wants with him. This doesn’t mean she was always like that (she herself has been exposed for a long time, though she doesn't change much when the spores lose their hold on her), but her disinterest in his consent to life with her makes this ostensibly sweet romance 100x creepier. Not helped by the sex pollen itself and her avoidance of explanations when Spock is still in his right mind and could decide for himself.

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Technicallyyyyy it’s Thursday (12:28 AM!), but brynnmclean tagged me in WIP Wednesday (thank you!!!) and I dutifully worked on some other projects before giving up and following my heart.

And what my heart wanted was … well. Okay. Look, I know, I know, but nobody can be that surprised:


Tagged: #i would tag people but it's. uh. thursday #ALSO there is a method to the various choices made here i swear #also i am not AS hostile to post-tos sources as i am to the sweu etc but it's been years since i saw any of them #and i'm not concerned with accommodating long after the fact 'canon' material. this sparks joy (for me personally) and that is enough

[ETA 4/18/2025: After watching all the original ST movies, I feel more strongly than ever that ST is really many canons in a trenchcoat—engaging with each other but not actually compatible. This is especially the case with regard to Spock and Kirk, who take the biggest character arc hits via pop culture-ification and the soft reboot in even the original films, and only more over time (cf. the famous "Kirk Drift" article). I think movie Spock's arc is basically completely reset while defining him MUCH more by Vulcan culture throughout the films, but also swapping his and Kirk's TOS priorities pretty substantially. Kirk was often defined by The Good of the Many in TOS—few things infuriated him more than threats or harm to his crew, esp en masse—and I don't think it was TOS Spock's philosophy for a single moment. I also don't think that TOS Spock was truly all that normative as far as Vulcans are concerned; he often went out of his way to emphasize that he's half-human, his navigation of Vulcan identity was extremely fraught, and the function of that aspect of his arc was an attempt, however flawed, to engage with biracial problems specifically. So yeah, I super don't feel any need to bow to the movies or TNG or whatever, they're their own things—sometimes great, certainly engaging with TOS at times, but in an Aeneid to TOS's Iliad sort of way for me. And I do appreciate that ST historically has seemed less obsessed with welding a bunch of wildly disparate and not especially compatible projects into a single "canon."]

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]

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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Just kidding, I've watched a bunch more Star Trek: TOS episodes with my best friend!

7. What Are Little Girls Made Of?

I liked this one! I mean, the phallic stalactite/stalagmite was hilarious, but I actually enjoyed Ruk's design (especially the make-up) and the way the whole episode was shot and lit and everything. I love how vibrant the original series is in general, honestly, but this one stood out. Also, I enjoy how clever and resourceful Kirk is even though he does fuck up at times—he's not just dashing space captain or whatever. Also, the fact that he implants a racist remark to Spock in his android clone as the specific thing that will make it 100% clear that it's not actually him, with the assurance that Spock will understand that He Would Never, is really interesting because it both speaks to what their relationship is like and because Spock (in a very Spock way) asks Kirk to find some other way of signaling problems because it's so distasteful.

I loved Nimoy's projection of doubt.jpeg while behaving entirely correctly around the android clone, but was also rather impressed by Shatner as the clone. I really liked poor Andrea, too. It's ostensibly a Nurse Chapel episode and it feels weird not to even mention her, but the script didn't give her all that much to do except stick to her values while having feelings (admirably but very repetitively). I did love the way the crew is initially so excited for her and Uhura even kisses her, I think! (This is obviously meant to be platonic "yay your man is back" female bonding, but my mind immediately went to Uhura/Chapel, haha.)

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Rambling about family relationships based on my research for my PhD exams (16th- to 18th-century British literature):

One of the things that came up in my reading for my exams was, inevitably, ~the rise of the companionate marriage~. The usual framing is often over-simplistic and very heterocentric; people sometimes talk as if there was no concept of marriage involving romantic ties (sometimes even exclusive romantic ties!) until the 17th/18th century or something.

That said, IMO there’s something to it, at least in England. As someone who had mostly done research in the 18th and earlier 19th centuries, 16th-century takes on marriage often sound like they come from Earth 2. Over time, there’s more and more emphasis on the ties of marriage, companionship, and parenthood in cultural discourse, with other family relationships increasingly subordinated to those, even while ideas from earlier periods about the importance of those other family relationships persisted in some ways.

Like, there was a lot of talk about how brothers were supposed to care for the interests of their siblings, especially their unmarried sisters, but there’s also a lot of talk about how that was increasingly not happening, and how the ties between brothers and sisters were becoming less important and less reliable as a "net" for unmarried women.

Men increasingly resented their sisters for taking resources that would otherwise go to their wives and children, or simply denied them meaningful resources altogether in favor of focusing on their own wives/children. It was a really well-established dynamic by the time that Wollstonecraft wrote about it in Vindication of the Rights of Woman and Austen in Sense and Sensibility.

One of the things that S&S highlights is that John and Fanny Dashwood’s son does not need the resources that are denied to John’s sisters. He already has a comfortable separate inheritance. John prioritizes Fanny and Harry over his sisters both because of his character and because doing so had become very culturally normalized by then.

By the 20th century (at least in the UK and US), people prioritizing their spouses and children over their siblings or other connections was and is often going to seem "well, of course they would." But the degree to which that is the case is really influenced by cultural norms and expectations. Going back to Austen (surprise), she has an intriguing passage about it that speaks to the shifts in how the sibling tie was seen and experienced:

An advantage this, a strengthener of love, in which even the conjugal tie is beneath the fraternal. Children of the same family, the same blood, with the same first associations and habits, have some means of enjoyment in their power, which no subsequent connections can supply; and it must be by a long and unnatural estrangement, by a divorce which no subsequent connection can justify, if such precious remains of the earliest attachments are ever entirely outlived. Too often, alas! it is so.—Fraternal love, sometimes almost every thing, is at others worse than nothing.

I don’t even have siblings (sort of surrogate siblings, but not people I was actually brought up with), but I do find the evolution and melancholy over this really interesting. And I do think that a lot of the, hmm, enthusiasm over the rise of the “companionate marriage” tends to ignore the cost of it.

Tagged: #i am pretty sure this is why austen keeps returning to darcy's sense of responsibility and deep affection for his sister #and why elizabeth thinks his way of talking about georgiana should have told her about his character #i've seen people be like 'just bc you care about your own family members doesn't mean you're a good person wtf' about that #but it was a big deal at the time! #wickham brings it up as something that people in general praise darcy for too #obviously this was of really immediate concern for austen herself #but plenty of people write about it over the years #and it's just ... idk #complicated

[ETA 5/28/2024: this is actually extremely relevant to my dissertation and something I was literally just writing about today!]

In this age of remakes and adaptations (though pretty much all ages are ages of remakes and adaptations tbh), I sometimes imagine adaptations of my childhood/adolescent faves. Off the top of my head and in no particular order:

• Jane Yolen’s Wizard’s Hall (super formative, could make a pretty cool, sometimes creepy, film)
• The Witch of Blackbird Pond (just … great, probably fits a mini-series better)
• Sweet Valley Twins (maybe this already exists? it would be terrible, but I inhaled them as a kid)
• Agatha Christie in general (definitely exists, though the quality is variable … I really disliked the version I saw of Cards on the Table)
• She-Ra (exists, is great)
• The Belgariad and the Elenium (I would prefer the latter, with Liberties taken to deal with some of the Eddingsisms, but the former might be more cinematic. I once had an AU where as a fairly minor background detail, the Elenium was made in place of GOT, but with the same cast, like Lena Headey as Sephrenia, etc …)
• LOTR, esp Gondor (of course there are the movies, but a) their treatment of Gondor is terrible on a lot of fronts, and b) I think LOTR is better suited to TV anyway, and in my dreams, really high-quality animation)
• Wheel of Time (in the works, I’m lowkey terrified)
• Daughter of the Empire (no idea how this would be done)
• Incarnations of Immortality (I don’t really want money going to Piers Anthony, so no, even though it’s conceptually one of my fave takes on Death)
• Pern (??? I would mostly watch this for Lessa. Probably super expensive to make as a series, which it would have to be)
• Valdemar (I DON’T EVEN KNOW)
• Tamora Pierce (I love Emelan best, but Tortall would be cool, too!)
• So You Want to Be a Wizard (it seems like it would be very cinematic in some ways and not at all in others, so I’m not sure, but if someone could make it work, awesome)

Oh, and one of the things I’m really enjoying about S5 (which is definitely my favorite season) is how it’s dialing up the sci-fi elements, but without sacrificing the fantasy and magic side. My general experience of things that mix classic sci-fi and fantasy elements is that one of the sides tends to really dominate the core of the story, but this is not doing that. It’s really uncompromising on both the techy sci-fi and sparkly magical fantasy fronts.

Tagged: #if i had to pick one i'd say it's more fantasy #but there are lasers and holograms and spaceships! #and they're major plot points (and sometimes characters)

My icon has grey eyes and black hair just for Tolkien :P

So. I generally dislike Tolkien fandom's "canonicity discourse" (yes, I'm doing it anyway) and the idea of imposing a specific ranking of texts. That said, it's occurred to me that one of the reasons I feel deeply out of step with Tolkien fandom is that The Silmarillion (as in, the published book, not the in-story accounts) is on a drastically different level of canonicity for me than basically everything else with JRR Tolkien's name on it.

I don't dislike The Silmarillion or anything. I quite enjoy it! But for me, it shows its age—not in ~a man of his time~ sense, but in an editorial sense. Christopher Tolkien did an enormous amount of spectacular editorial work over the course of his life and we are deeply indebted to him. But I think he did pretty clearly get better at it over time, and particularly at presenting his father's mass of notes and documents and so on in a way that makes the texts as accessible as possible. At the same time, in later texts, he clearly differentiates between actual words JRRT wrote (whether in the main body or in notes) and his (CT's) own understanding and explanations as JRRT's confidant and literary heir. I do give a lot of credence to Christopher Tolkien's understanding of his father's work, actually, and I deeply respect (and am grateful for) CT's efforts to carefully and clearly explain things like dates of composition (and how this can be determined), direct context, how a given point relates to his father's broader work, etc, throughout these texts.

(Tangent: Facebook keeps recommending defensive Jackson stans griping about how Christopher Tolkien just didn't get his father's work like Jackson did and was so horribly ungrateful to the filmmakers and such an inferior scholar blahblah for the crime of disliking the films. FLAMES ON THE SIDE OF MY FACE!! I am not uncritical of Christopher Tolkien, and neither was Christopher Tolkien, but I think we owe an immeasurable debt of gratitude to him. Also, even to me, his response to the films seemed harsh at the time, but at this point, I think he was pretty much right, anyway, and correctly judged the films' impact and reflection of pop culture understanding of JRRT's work.)

So what is my issue with the published Silmarillion?

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