Anghraine

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.

( Read more... )

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."]

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.

It's wild to me that I had heard of the prime Kirk/Spock content in various TOS episodes long before I saw them, but had never heard of what IMO is the shippiest moment of all thus far, in an interestingly O_o goddamn I do not want whatever you two have but you do you?? holy shit though what a moment way.

I'm of course referring to the otherwise rather mid episode "Requiem for Methuselah," in which Kirk has an underwritten love affair with a clueless woman whose various secrets have to be discovered before her inevitable death.

At one point in this relationship, her.......uh, guardian??? sort of???????? had Spock play the piano while she and Kirk waltzed, which (in-story) Spock did perfectly while somehow managing to silently exude even more intensity than usual. After the plot (and her life) were over, we end not with the usual cheerful bit of snark on the bridge that ends most episodes, but with a weary Kirk falling asleep with his head on his arms, and Spock hovering not far away. McCoy shows up to exposit the last bit of plot detail, and then goes on an unprompted and honestly pretty viciously racist speech about how Spock, unlike Kirk, can't understand love triangles and will never suffer from the joys and agonies of love because of his inherent lack of feeling as a Vulcan. The speech is longer than usual and just really mean-spirited for no reason as McCoy waxes rhapsodic about all the aspects of passionate true love that he claims Spock will not and cannot experience, before he just leaves.

Spock then turns to look at Kirk, and now just bleeding intensity, he takes a few slow, deliberate steps towards sleeping Kirk, lays his hand against Kirk's cheek and neck, and then very obviously mind melds with the unconscious Kirk while murmuring, "Forget."

Is this healthy, respectful behavior that honors Kirk's autonomy? No, obviously. Is it god-tier repressed homoerotic passion between two people who should probably just work their issues out and stop inflicting themselves on anyone else? Yes.

Tagged: #there are a lot of oddly paced slow physical staging bits in the episode so at first i wasn't sure it was significant that spock is so slow #in his approach to kirk at the end - coming right off the mccoy speech about passionate love/love triangles it was something else #but i wasn't sure what he was even going to do until he laid his hand against kirk's face and i was just thinking wait WHAT #and then the - wait is he MIND MELDING with SLEEPING KIRK as a response to the accusation that he is racially incapable of passionate love? #and then realized that this episode - in which he admits to one feeling ('envy') culminates in him wiping his rival from kirk's memory #jesus. what the fuck. i'm sorry if i ever thought the kirk/spock fangirls of the last decades were exaggerating #blandly healthy and supportive spirk is out toxic yaoi spirk is in #(also there's a bad episode in which shatner is forced to give a godawful ramble about losing command! i'm losing command! #and kirk is just melting down as he and spock get into an elevator and it's just going up floors as kirk loses his shit #and it would just be unforgivably awful but his fixation on losing authority of his beloved enterprise is stopped by one word from spock #spock literally murmurs 'jim' and kirk just sort of collapses on him and then immediately relaxes and calms down. wild shit) #mccoy critical #i actually love him in most episodes but this was awful and out of nowhere #in terms of the stakes at that point. but the fact that it's this huge rhapsodic speech about the grand passion of LOOOOOVE #not only talking positively but also about the torments of love that spock allegedly can't feel #and w/o a scene break it leads /directly/ into spock wiping this woman from kirk's memory????? well. i am not blind to the function it serves. let's say.

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.

I've never been the audience for "humorous headcanons that don't quite make sense as part of the joke", and I know that my sense of humor is even more muted than usual because of RL stresses. But even before that, I've been put off by this increasingly common genre of fandom joke post that's like ... "I don't remember/know the canon and I'm not going to check but wouldn't it be hilarious if [thing contradicted by about seven different elements of the story]" that then becomes some inescapably viral fanon. Sometimes the OPs don't acknowledge being unfamiliar with the story (though often they do!), but it's usually fairly clear regardless, and the OPs tend to be aggressively indifferent to the story they're ostensibly talking about. They're not so much in the fandom for that thing as in social media fandom, and it feels like the snarky, joking aspect of these headcanons is partly there to justify neither knowing or caring about the story they're talking about.

Additionally, it seems likes there's really no way to interact with this approach that isn't "yep, hilarious, this is canon to me now" or pedantic nitpicking. I don't even add the pedantic nitpicking in most of these, but some fandoms are more prone to it, and when the OP of this kind of post acknowledges the responses at all, it'll generally be with some tongue-in-cheek "explanation" of why their headcanon actually does work that makes no more sense in terms of the story, but which is presumably funny, and forceful enough to be convincing if you're not particularly into the fandom. Some of them, in fairness, will admit that they simply forgot or don't know the story that well and just thought it'd be funny, or "I choose to reject X because my headcanon is funnier, but I know it's there." But more often, I see half-mocking "actually I'm right [but you're a humorless asshole if you actually engage in any way other than agreement]" defenses.

Of course, nobody appointed me god empress of fandom or anything. There's nothing wrong per se with people making posts without being obsessively into the original material or enjoying fandom in a way I don't. But that form of defensive humor really does not work for me. And there's something about an approach to fandom that's dominated by snide, viral BNF humor that doesn't need to make any sense in terms of what it's ostensibly about, that doesn't even need its audience or author to know what it's about beyond the vaguest pop culture osmosis/online memes and is better if they don't, that I find both obnoxious and just kind of ... sad, I guess? I didn't come into fandom in the truly early days, but it was early enough that everyone I encountered had intense feelings about some aspect of the thing they personally had read or seen or heard. Even people with incredibly bad takes seemed to generally be an emotionally invested fan or hater of the actual story.

Someone on Tumblr left a complaint on one of my posts, in which they went on about how the shy Darcy reading I was discussing (as wrong, but understandable) is so objectionable because it means Elizabeth is not just very mistaken about him, but mistaken about "a poor little shy/autistic man."

Damn, my days of discovering that people who throw fits about autistic Darcy headcanons usually turn out to be seriously gross about autism are certainly reaching a middle.

(My post and the post that inspired it were not about my autistic!Darcy headcanon and did not mention it in any way.)

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)

It's always a bit surreal to read a fic and become increasingly convinced that the author has been influenced by a post or fic of mine even though they never mention it, or me.

This has happened to me in a couple of fandoms. It's one thing when the author freely acknowledges influence, but sometimes it's a weird déja vu where they never mention me, and at first I don't want to assume I'm ground zero for [whatever], but it just becomes increasingly obvious that either they've read my thing or read fic by other people who were strongly influenced by something I said or did.

I've personally run into this the most with Rogue One and The Borgias fic. It's interesting because RO fandom (not SW broadly, just RO) and Borgias fandom are absolutely the nicest and most generally pleasant fandoms I've probably ever been in. They're both fairly low on discourse and high on actually making things and promoting other fans, so although my experiences of them aren't 100% positive, the overall feeling is one of broad good will and friendly exchange. So it's not that I mind seeing ideas and emphases that I'm pretty sure I came up with spreading beyond my own fic/meta/headcanons. It's just a slightly odd feeling when a formulation is so close to mine and so specific that it feels somewhat implausible that it wasn't influenced by me, personally, in some way, even though these fandoms are pretty big.

In Rogue One fandom it's actually fairly easy to trace influence for various reasons (one of them is a tendency for my stuff to spread through specific mutuals). It's harder with The Borgias, but now and then I'll read something and be like "okay, maybe this is egocentric goggles or something, but this really feels like you read we get dark, only to shine."

Like I said, I don't mind this "oh, they definitely read [fic]" experience, it's just a little odd when it's my own fic and it's not acknowledged at all, yet is so specific and obvious that it seems kind of undeniable. Sometimes people do acknowledge the fic that inspired some element (AO3 has a mechanism specifically for this purpose) and that's really sweet and gratifying, but not nearly as surreal—maybe because that's a more old school approach and so more familiar to me personally, but also because the explicit acknowledgment ensures that it's not a gradually dawning realization but known from the first. The "huh, I also used that idea, cool to see it again..." -> "wow, that is actually really close to how I think about it, even in phrasing, interesting..." -> "okay, did this person read my specific fic?" -> "uh, yeah, they definitely read it" thing is a kind of different experience from an AO3 alert, you know?