Anghraine

I tragically can't find the post again, but a few days ago, I ran over one of the most perfect AOS Kirk vs TOS Kirk summations I've seen on Tumblr, re: Pride. I'm extemporizing because I don't remember the phrasing at all, but the overall tenor was:

Okay, the difference between them is not that one Kirk is bi and the other isn't, they are both extremely bi. But if AOS Kirk was at Pride, he'd be wearing a slutty crop top while in the actual parade, and goes out drinking to the local gay bar after it's over. TOS Kirk supportively goes to the parade, gets a headache an hour in, and leaves to watch an all-male Shakespeare in the Park production of Hamlet.

And truly, I'm not sure I've read a better analysis to date :P

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 promisedelperian 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!

So I'm sorting through my many, many notes for the K/S femslash AU jotted down in email drafts and elaborate notes on chronological outlines and grumpy additions to passages where I'm like "actually it needs to happen differently, more like blahblah, especially if I want my version to correspond with this conceptual detail from TOS I really like..."

Between moving across the city, asthma problems, a death in the family, looking for work, etc etc, some notes are hyper-organized and others are all jumbled together with no rhyme or reason. So it can be silly and fun in its own way to impose some kind of order when it's like:

( Read more... )

In response to this poll about TOS characterization details, elperian said:

all of these options are so great!

I replied:

Thank you! There were some it was painful to leave out (like my girl T'Pring having no other access to divorce, Spock's fluffy dangerous pet as a child, Kirk having a strict No Fraternization policy that applies only to him, etc) but I felt these were the most interesting!

heckofabecca responded (on 1 February):

A++++ for Bones being respectful of privacy! Good doctor job!

I replied (on 2 February):

Yes! There's a profound decency to him a lot of the time (unfortunately not all, but I appreciate when they remember it's essential to his character!).

venndaai responded (on 3 February):

That Uhura/Chapel kiss was so important to teenage me.

I replied (on 6 February):

I was completely blindsided that it happened! Like yeah MEANT to be platonic but...

bladeangelx responded (on 24 April):

Op I literally just finished watching what little girls are made of and cant find the kiss. Is it likely that I found a version with it edited out or did I simply miss out on the correct time stamp?

I replied (on 1 May):

You might have just missed it! Uhura kisses Chapel shortly before Chapel beams down to the planet.

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

I wrote more femslash K/S, and spent hours more than I had anticipated on it because this section grew in the telling (i.e. it came to encompass multiple episodes’ worth of S'paak restraining both gay longing and seething hatred of certain individuals). So this is just an excerpt from a considerably longer section.

Also, the context of the episode this section draws from merits a massive warning for sexual coercion that is highly relevant to what happens here.

It’s well past midnight, but I felt like doing another piece of the femslash Spirk AU for WIP Wednesday (surprising no one) and what came out was … T'Pring POV? This is, of course, set in the direct aftermath of S'paak’s pon farr (as sketched out here), but in an AU version of “Amok Time”:

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.

In response to this post about my particular femslash Kirk/Spock concept, smallblueandloud reblogged with my tags attached and then added (on Jan 23rd):

#goddddddddd i am loving this #LOVE the thought you put into kirk’s name #i can see why deborah was your first choice but i’m excited to see where jessica goes! #the idea of kirk as an odysseus archetype is something i’m really fascinated by and i want to think about that more so

I replied:

Thank you on all fronts!

I actually put even more elaborate thought into Kirk’s name and cut most of the explanation out lol, so I’m glad it works and that you’re enjoying this deeply Anghraine™ dive into ST feelings.

In response to this post, yavieriel said:

I don't have particularly strong K/S feelings - TOS Shatner has Dad Vibes too strong for me to overcome - but this has been a delightful journey to watch you take.

I replied:

Interesting, I see that more easily from Nimoy than Shatner, but we all feel the Dad Vibes differently, lol. And thanks, haha—I went from "this is just part of the fabric of the universe of me, I'm not passionate but it just kind of IS to me" to "beating my head against the wall to avoid going insane" so fast it feels like whiplash!

yavieriel said:

Oh that is fascinating, Spock is entirely "hot but unapproachable college prof" to me. I can't even slightly imagine him drinking beer while grilling, or mowing the lawn in cheesy tshirts, or coaching t-ball. Whereas I feel like Kirk would be entirely comfortable with those things, and probably somewhat enthusiastic. My own dad's very stereotypical middle class cishet guy-ness is definitely somewhat performative, but it's not insincere, if that makes sense? Which also matches with Kirk's vibes for me.

I replied:

Ah, I see! My own dad is an extremely reserved and intense programmer from LA with zero interest in the various sportsballs and a great value for reason and debate (and board games that require some amount of tactical thinking), and we've always been conspicuously similar and close. Also Spock continually being on the receiving end of microaggressions is pretty true to the ways my dad has been targeted (as a multiracial Mexican-American man), so Nimoy's Spock feels all the more familiar. That said, I think partly the show sexualizes Kirk so much that I personally find it hard to see him as exactly paternal despite the strong Father To His Crew vibes. But I can see that as a way to read, for instance, Uhura saying she finds it soothing to listen to his voice through the intercom when she's nervous—it could be seen as a shippy thing, but obviously isn't intended that way.