Anghraine

J and I have re-watched three seasons of TNG, and the number of times I've felt that Troi or Crusher is 100% correct and Picard in particular is being an incurious asshole are getting... let's say, numerous. And in general, they seem to get out-shouted by the male senior officers in this "we're just being reasonable while you're being emotional" way that I find intensely annoying. Even when the plot ultimately justifies their perspective, they seem to get these vague acknowledgments in a private setting, not the unqualified public apologies they frankly deserve—because, IMO, the show itself doesn't feel they deserve them.

Meanwhile, when we marathoned TOS, I was pretty surprised by how much I ended up liking Kirk, and then I ended up loving him even more on some re-watches, despite the occasional dire writing ("Elaan of Troyius" can't make me hate him; my most beloathèd writer on TOS just decided that, in addition to writing Elaan as an unholy combination of Katharina from The Taming of the Shrew and just a racist caricature in general, Kirk was going to be Petruchio for a day and also that it'd be hot if France Nuyen roofied and had sex with him, which is, um, rape, but the episode doesn't understand its own plot the way e.g. "Wink of an Eye" or even freaking "Catspaw" understand what's wrong—and it was written by the same guy who wrote the virulently antisemitic "Patterns of Force" that goes out of its way to put Kirk and Spock in Nazi uniforms—just them among the main cast for most of the episode, for some reason, though it's unusual for them to be placed on a mission alone—and the script includes extra antisemitism directed individually at both Nimoy and Shatner on different occasions). There are a lot of reasons that TOS Kirk in particular ended up as my peak ST blorbo, even surpassing Spock's hold on my heart (though I love him deeply), but one of the reasons are scenes like these that TNG has very definitely brought back to mind:

KIRK: At least try cutting him off!
UHURA: Sir, if I could cut him off, don’t you think I—!
RILEY: ♪ I’ll take you home again, Kathleen— ♪
UHURA: Yes, sir, I’ll keep trying.
KIRK [apologetically]: Sorry.

KIRK: Yes, I’m aware of that, Mr. Scott.
CHEKOV: And, sir, the fact Earth took twelve centuries doesn’t mean they had to.
UHURA: We’ve seen different development rates on different planets.
SCOTT: And were the Klingons behind it, why didn’t they give them breechloaders?
CHEKOV: Or machine guns?
UHURA: Or old-style hand lasers?
KIRK [sharply]: I did not invite a debate. [pause] I’m sorry. I’m worried about Spock and concerned about what’s happened.

These apologies are quite simple, not emotional or dramatic or detailed at all, but that's fine. Just the acknowledgment that he was in the wrong and apologizing for it without hesitation or taking it to a face-saving private location or whatever, just saying it right there in front of everyone, is incredibly refreshing. In both of these, also, Uhura is one of the people he's responding to—it's possible that he's readier to apologize in such an open and unambiguous way because Uhura is involved and they're particularly close (their obvious and consistent mutual affection was another of the big TOS surprises!). I don't really think so (McCoy also freely apologizes on the spot multiple times, if less often than his behavior merits), but maybe Kirk's apologies are prompted by Uhura's involvement. However, if so, TOS going out of its way to show a very white-coded male hero publicly and correctly apologizing to the competent and justified Black woman who answers to him in front of his other subordinates doesn't make it any less welcome tbh.

(I'm definitely enjoying parts of TNG, but if several of the TOS movies frustrated me by moving towards 80s space explosions blockbuster when I was invested in the Having Things to Say Even if They're Deeply Flawed approach of TOS along with the visual experimentation, generally unexpected nuances of the characters, and sheer joyous camp of it all, TNG has seemed so painfully complacent 80s and essentially cautious in its fundamental perspective that I miss TOS all the more, its many faults notwithstanding.)

The household Star Trek movie watch just hit The Wrath of Khan! I’ve seen it multiple times before, but it was really different to watch it so shortly after watching TOS and TMP.

My feelings are … more complex now. Where Spock’s character growth was randomly rewound in TMP for unexplained reasons, Wrath of Khan!Spock feels more of a projection into the future. He’s older, steadier, and less repressed, while still retaining the composure and dignity that are so personally and culturally important to him. His sense of humor is still dry but less buried and harsh, he’s reserved and unflinching in a very Spock way, but it feels healthier and more integrated than he was capable of before. I don’t get the impression that he’s at all ashamed of what he feels for Kirk at this point, nor ashamed of much at all.

I feel like we see how far Spock has come from his early shame and denial, for instance, when Kirk, McCoy, and Saavik go to beam to the research base. There’s this less-repressed-than-formerly-but-still-powerful intensity in Kirk and Spock's farewell that, as ever, gives the distinct sense that everyone else just ceased to exist for them. Spock says outright, “Be careful, Jim” and it’s very adorable and relatively open by Spock standards. And then professional hater McCoy is like … oh, so am I chopped liver? while Saavik is just ????? and it’s hilarious and just feels very recognizable.

[ETA 7/4/25: this is still roughly my opinion after re-watching the other TOS movies, with one large caveat I struggled to fully articulate at first. Both TOS and TMP emphasize that an overwhelmingly Vulcan Spock is not true to the fuller reality of who Spock is and is not psychologically healthy for him. The lifelong pressure he's been under to compress himself into someone who could fit within an acceptably Vulcan identity is the source of his suffering and (gay-coded!) repression. His arc throughout TOS, which is then repeated and finalized in TMP, was all about him finding a path out of this repressed, ashamed existence, a path in which he doesn't need to renounce the ways he's Vulcan, but can accept himself in a healthier, more balanced way than Vulcan culture or his own hang-ups were ever going to allow. The essential tension of TMP pivots on this far more than on anything to do with Kirk, and culminates in Spock refusing to return to seek approval on Vulcan, and instead staying with Kirk and going to Earth—this is symbolic, not just a plot detail. Spock has struggled to prove himself a true Vulcan, even while choosing Earth/humanity at essentially every fork in the road: joining Starfleet instead of the VSA, serving on a human Starfleet vessel instead of the Vulcan ones that exist in TOS, refusing alternative, more Vulcan-typical opportunities like with Kollos because he insists his life is on the Enterprise, breaking his kolinahr when Kirk and V'ger unintentionally reach out, and finally confirming all these decisions in that refusal to go back to Vulcan.

But the two Meyer films, The Wrath of Khan and The Undiscovered Country, are more inclined towards idealizing Spock than the other films (and certainly more than TOS), and idealizing him specifically in Vulcan terms. Both lean into this largely idealized Spock who is essentially the face of Vulcan maturity, driven by Vulcan philosophies he never mentioned and rarely adhered to previously, and don't really engage with how deeply trying to be an ideal Vulcan has been a source of pain and real harm for him, nor with his arc largely involving movement away from overriding identification with Vulcan and towards identification with his relationships to other people, especially Kirk. In both, Spock's relationship with Kirk is more ambiguous than in the other films, despite still being very important. The major exception to this "Vulcanizing" of Spock without much sense of its costs is the death scene, where the glass between Spock and Kirk gives shape to the price of his emotional distance—and honestly, it was unsurprising to discover that the idea for that came from Shatner, not Meyer. As powerful as the death scene is, Spock's side of the dialogue is rather odd to me in characterization terms, especially after TMP; the idea that he'd address Kirk as Admiral at such a moment rather than Jim, the kind of generic "don't grieve" sentiment that has little to do with any particulars of their relationship. Much of the power of the scene comes from the cinematic language and the absolutely superb performances, IMO.

But then, my fandom heresy is that I actually think The Final Frontier does a much better job than The Wrath of Khan of credibly showing a Spock who has come to terms with his hang-ups around his culture and family and feelings and relationships, and can insist on the whole person he is now, while remaining very much recognizable with Spock's distinct quirks. He's still capable of fucking up in very Spock ways and being characteristically petty and defensive about doing so, but he's also grown beyond Sybok and Sarek and proving himself as a Vulcan on a very fundamental level, without cutting out any part of what makes him who he is. Godslayer Spock > perfect Vulcan ideal Spock! In any case, though, I do feel that Meyer's Spock is pretty deeply disengaged from the basic direction of his arc in TMP and TOS and, like with Kirk, much more influenced by the pop culture perception of him than the details of his original characterization. It's not terrible but it is noticeable, and that swerve has strongly influenced the perception of Spock as a character over time, including in his original incarnation. I like seeing Spock live his best life in TWOK, to be sure, but I do think the execution is conceptually flawed.]

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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.

I've been watching the reactions to DA:V in some fascination as someone who has never played any Dragon Age and only understands them in the vaguest way possible. I know the usual Bioware fandom warfare is particularly vicious there (I heard people referring to more batshit BG3 wank as blatantly imported from DA wank rather than usual D&D or Larian discourse, which seemed very credible). I know it's fantasy, with some Mass Effect-y elements mechanically, and... elves are oppressed I think maybe and there is slavery? possibly?? I heard Veilguard is unusually conflict averse for DA and that it traditionally leaned into the main characters being difficulty, messy people with genuine clashes (I don't know if this is true). I also know that qunari are the horned people that produced nonbinary icon Taash and I know some of the character names/designs from earlier games, but without knowing which particular game they come from or what any of their backstories are.

(I am not asserting any of this with confidence, just to be clear. It's what I've osmosed without researching anything at all.)

ANYWAY while seeing the DA:V discourses flying around, I'm busy on Tumblr having my own wanky Bioware opinions, but for ME1 (which came out nearly 20 years ago and which I've seen all the way through nearly three times) despite typically having a strong preference for fantasy over sci-fi. And I do love ME (the trilogy) a ton, so I'm just more into it fannishly than a lot of games, despite my many points of criticism (let's just say that my bff J and I once had a very fun two hour-long car ride in which we spent the whole time discussing how we'd fix the trilogy). So my Bioware fandom friends are having wildly varying strong opinions about DA that I barely understand, and I'm banging my drums in 2025 about how, uh, the Thorian did nothing wrong. Also, the volus are unfortunately an antisemitic stereotype, even though I like them as characters a lot and feel their complaints are justified (J succinctly summed up our mutual position: "could be worse, could be Watto, but they are very obviously stereotypes about Jews in space"). And I'm Team Vorcha (vs Literally Everyone).

It takes all kinds is all I'm saying. And I'm one of those kinds!

I don't even recall who posted this, but apparently at Worldcon, Seanan McGuire presented this simple flowchart to explain what is and is not fanfic:



I have no grievance with McGuire in general, but this is both elegant and quite wrong, IMO. Sorry, my Austen fanfic is very much fanfic (and there's no need to give the P&P "variations" industry any more delusions of grandeur than it already has, lol—those are very much fanfic, too). Some of my fics could also be considered re-imaginings or retellings—First Impressions is the obvious example as a deliberate retelling of P&P with genderswapped leads, rather than a true what-if AU—but they are absolutely fanfic. They're fiction written as a form of fan expression.

Sometimes there is a real sense of difference between fiction of this kind, especially when written in a fandom context that is clearly informed by or in dialogue with other fanworks, wider trends in the fandom or in online fandom in general, etc vs some literary re-imaginings that interrogate the source material but are not really fannish (not even in a fan hatred way). So it's not that I think all fiction of this kind should be defined as fanfic. I think that has to do with the conditions of creation rather than the novelty of the cast, setting, and/or plot. But the defining artistic criteria of fanfic as a form or genre are not determined by externally imposed legal codes or the opinion of the source material's author.

There have been many attempts to develop an authoritative definition for fanfic that ultimately comes down to "can you legally make money off it?" But that is not what fanfic is, and I'm deeply skeptical of conceptualizing genre, any genre, based on whether or when it can be sold. A lot of licensed IP writers seem very invested in distinguishing their work from fanfic—sometimes claiming it's not about superiority (sure, Jan), but it's just very important to them that they not be perceived as fanfic writers. But I'd argue that what makes licensed work fanfic or not isn't actually the license, or it being a professional job for money, but the approach of the work in question. Some IP writers are very much fans and clearly approached the licensed work as a chance to write fanfic about some part of canon they're super into with authorization from a parent company or something (various Star Trek writers seem to be very much of this type, say). Others don't really seem to be approaching their work as a form of fan expression, which is not morally wrong in any way, but definitely different. Going back to P&P, there are some takes that I wouldn't really consider fanfic (unlike the variation industry), just because the authors don't seem to be writing as fans but for some other goal. So you sometimes get P&P sequels that are really different from the fanfic—more literary in some ways, but often less engaged with Pride and Prejudice or its adaptations than the fanfic tends to be and prone to little canon errors that fans don't usually make. It's a little hard to describe but you can usually tell.

In any case: some licensed IP work is fanfic and acknowledged as such by the authors, while some isn't; some fanfic is based on source material that is long out of copyright (and some other things based on the same or similar sources isn't fanfic), and the time since publication does not merit a specific respectable distinction from, idk, normie fanfic by Marvel slash superfans or whoever is the fannish target du jour.

No doubt this merely reflects my own bourgeois morality or whatever the fuck, but I have absolutely zero tolerance for every single post that's like "the only problem with AI is capitalism and you're all just Luddites about it, the measurable environmental harm is NBD, and also data scraping from people without permission, acknowledgment, or recompense is fine actually."

They keep trying to obscure their basic argument that scraping art without credit of any kind to the artists is totally cool by plastering it over with Marx quotes and a lot of buzzwords about communism, neoliberalism, corporations, etc. But let's be real: this is bullshit sophistry. Data scraping without informing the people whose data is used, much less gaining their consent, much less recompensing them in any way at all, much less enough to compensate for this process's profound disrespect for their skills and professions, is unethical. It would be unethical in a communist utopia and it is worse in reality. AI is not bad in any and all cases, but the ways it is being trained and used are wrong, and extremely so, and the environmental harm is both significant and intrusive, which is also bad.

Yes, people are prone to jumping to extreme hyperbole about it, or believing said hyperbole, because of the Internet's usual habits and because various forms of "AI" are being imposed on people in a particularly obnoxious way and because the data scraping is genuinely super shitty and because being forced into extremely reluctant complicity with something that harms the noticeably worsening world around us is deeply frustrating. But the AI techbros' practices really are unethical and the idea that you can rationalize and deconstruct and obfuscate this to the point where every moral failing in the world is either a) a problem entirely reducible to capitalism or b) not a problem is beyond absurd, and in some ways, beyond contemptible.

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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She-Ra meets rambling (very rambling) personal/family angst:

So, I’ve mentioned that She-Ra was one of my first fandoms, for a loose value of “fandom.” I was too young for the original show itself (it came out a year before I was born), but my aunt wasn’t, and she gave me all her She-Ra books and figurines, which were the only superhero-ish things I ever loved. And I loved them with my entire five-year-old soul!

In fact, I loved them for several years afterwards, and only reluctantly surrendered the books/figurines when my aunt asked if I still had them. I wasn’t really ever a “now I’m Mature and the things I used to like are Cringy and Bad” person, so I retained a strong affection even when I was older and enjoying more advanced things.

As did my aunt, who is only five and a half years older than I am. She was like my cool older sister for a long time, even though we were very different people, and I vaguely associated this relationship with She-Ra in my head. Regardless, we played together, we shared clothes and toys, she taught me how to ride horses, etc, until we drifted apart.

That happened partly because five years was actually vast at certain ages, partly because my parents moved, but mostly because of our enormous differences in personality and interests. Still, I continued to think of her as Cool Big Sis until various things happened that led to her becoming much more insular and conservative, even for a pretty conservative family (my centrist parents are radical leftists by their standards).

The Bush administration kicked off around the time I started high school, and by the time I graduated, I was determined not to ever vote for any Republican for the rest of my life (I enthusiastically voted for Kerry in my first election and was baffled that so many people I knew hadn’t bothered or, worse, actually voted for Bush out of ~patriotism). End result: I’ve been a firm and reliable Democratic voter for sixteen years, while my aunt gets more far-right every year (…and day, it feels like).

And it’s like … she long ago ceased to be “cool” given that she’s become a raging bigot (by nearly all accounts more than she ever was before, so not just something I missed because I was a kid). She dismisses the racism my father experiences when she's not personally perpetuating it, she’s ~so much for the tolerant left~ about her homophobia (and I’m lesbian), she’s awful and goes off on these asinine screeds to my mother every. single. day. Like, she earnestly argued the other day that Kate Brown is an agent of Satan.

Meanwhile, back when the new She-Ra was about to come out, she heard about it and excitedly forwarded me the link. Whatever else our differences, it’s our thing!

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I've got a lot of P&P hills to die on, but two ideas I will absolutely reject to the end of time:

1. Darcy or Elizabeth has a redemption arc.

Character growth is not redemption. Even while depicting their parallel character arcs, Austen emphasizes the extent to which they remain essentially the same people in terms of their basic flaws (e.g. Elizabeth's continued misjudgments via reductive schemas, Darcy's cold standoffishness upon his return to Hertfordshire), but also that they were always unusually good people despite their fuck-ups and overall arcs of improvement.

2. Darcy/Elizabeth is enemies to lovers.

There's a window of time when Elizabeth genuinely hates Darcy, though even then I don't think she regards him as her enemy. Darcy does not ever hate her or regard her as an enemy, he just initially doesn't like her or find her attractive. One-sided veiled hostility towards a social acquaintance is not enemies to lovers material, sorry.

YouTube keeps reccing “what your favorite [X Fandom] ship says about you” videos, and it’s like … without additional information, your ship says nothing about you! Yes, even if it’s [Ship Someone Really Hates]. Other people don’t know your life and motivations, and it’s patently obvious that people ship the same things for different reasons. It’s how you ship it + other behavior that reveals something of yourself—and even that is easy for strangers to lump into an undifferentiated mass.

I’m completely immovable on this point, so why I keep getting these videos is a mystery.

#i mean #at least the recs evolved from 'racist and misogynistic takes on tolkien' and 'dudebros whining about star wars' #to just inane shit #(okay and she-ra fanvids) #(but that is not a mystery lol)

[ETA 5/9/2024: this has completely disappeared from the algorithm over the last couple of years, which I find mildly interesting as a phenomenon! People asked if I was thinking of one specific YouTuber and I wasn't, I just kept getting recced this kind of thing.]