Alternate universe is alternate
Oct. 24th, 2009 05:06 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
petroniaHalfway through TOS first season: Kirk is definitely the most different, which... isn't weird, it makes total sense given why AU is AU. XD; It just feels weird because one would think he's the main character. (Except Spock is really Kinomoto Sakura the main character, so.)
tos!Spock and xi!Spock are believably the same person. That is, tos!Spock is a grownup but (as with many grownups) one can believe he's experienced an emo smash rage phase in a distant adolescent past. Which is not to say xi!Spock is going to grow up to be tos!Spock exactly, because events of movie will ensure far greater payload of suppressed emo smash rage to burn through lol. Meanwhile xi!McCoy is pretty much just (supposed to be) tos!McCoy, as far as I can tell, allowing for actor. (And you realize how little you comparatively see of xi!McCoy.)
Kirk OTOH is not the same person, i.e. tos!Kirk had never been xi!Kirk at any point. It's difficult to judge because by the time you meet him the captaincy is a huge part of tos!Kirk's personality makeup while it's only an incipient factor in xi!Kirk's, but at this point I feel safe making the call - and of the two, it's tos!Kirk who comes off as more inward-stress-y, even introverted (or fake!extroverted). He's internalized a truckload of untenably perfectionist expectations that... he lives up to. (xi!Kirk internalized a slightly different set of untenably perfectionist expectations and picked the "why bother trying" approach at first, but the productive path stresses him less IMO just because he's tried it both ways, whereas one suspects tos!Kirk just lived up, and up.) One gets the impression he was awkward and swotty in school, and that awkwardness fell away with command and creeps back in non-command situations such that he conflates command with being comfortable in his own skin. He knows he can project the power of his personality onto others, that's integral to his self-image as captain. He knows he's attractive, but that's not integral to his self-image, he just knows how to use it. (It is an integral part of xi!Kirk's self-image bless'im, probably just because he discovered it earlier in life.) They have the same coping mechanisms (punching something, gooping over Bones) but tos!Kirk opts for the latter comparatively more often, probably just because he's more used to having friends.
If I forgot STxi and everything else I know about the 'verse and just extrapolated from the eps of TOS I've watched in isolation, I'd say that the reason Kirk and Spock get on so well is because they're similar. XD; Like, Kirk will never be all "grawr why are you not like other ppl" to Spock because he's not like other ppl! Spock is emotionally unavailable because he's married to Logic, Kirk is emotionally unavailable because he's married to the Enterprise. They grok each other on that level instinctively and that makes their time together a refuge from the demands and incomprehension that otherwise arise. So they naturally spend more time together, and. WHAT COULD POSSIBLY GO WRONG I ASK OF YOU.
Sulu, weirdly, is also not at all the same person. Kudos to George Takei but he projects a huge personality without actually doing very much; Spock says he's basically the protagonist of his own swashbuckling romance, and this is COMPLETELY ON THE MARK. (Which btw should put a spike through the idea that Spock doesn't get humanity. And were that script now the referent would probably be "jianghu"... is that better or worse?) He's got this sort of fatalistic gaiety. Whereas John Cho's version is the Cool Asian Guy Next Door, the one who's not faily/dorky/uncool in any of the myriad ways Asians can be uncool. Everyone knows that guy. That one Asian guy who's really cool! But he's not out of a swashbuckling romance.
Chekov is... not even genetically the same person, right. XD;; Uhura's different too (tos!Uhura might have turned Kirk down, but she wouldn't have macheted him off bloodily at the knees the way xi!Uhura did), but brain's too mush now to take it apart properly. To sum up:
From least different to most different, McCoy - Spock/Uhura - Sulu/Kirk - Chekov
Total sense given AU, like I said.
tos!Spock and xi!Spock are believably the same person. That is, tos!Spock is a grownup but (as with many grownups) one can believe he's experienced an emo smash rage phase in a distant adolescent past. Which is not to say xi!Spock is going to grow up to be tos!Spock exactly, because events of movie will ensure far greater payload of suppressed emo smash rage to burn through lol. Meanwhile xi!McCoy is pretty much just (supposed to be) tos!McCoy, as far as I can tell, allowing for actor. (And you realize how little you comparatively see of xi!McCoy.)
Kirk OTOH is not the same person, i.e. tos!Kirk had never been xi!Kirk at any point. It's difficult to judge because by the time you meet him the captaincy is a huge part of tos!Kirk's personality makeup while it's only an incipient factor in xi!Kirk's, but at this point I feel safe making the call - and of the two, it's tos!Kirk who comes off as more inward-stress-y, even introverted (or fake!extroverted). He's internalized a truckload of untenably perfectionist expectations that... he lives up to. (xi!Kirk internalized a slightly different set of untenably perfectionist expectations and picked the "why bother trying" approach at first, but the productive path stresses him less IMO just because he's tried it both ways, whereas one suspects tos!Kirk just lived up, and up.) One gets the impression he was awkward and swotty in school, and that awkwardness fell away with command and creeps back in non-command situations such that he conflates command with being comfortable in his own skin. He knows he can project the power of his personality onto others, that's integral to his self-image as captain. He knows he's attractive, but that's not integral to his self-image, he just knows how to use it. (It is an integral part of xi!Kirk's self-image bless'im, probably just because he discovered it earlier in life.) They have the same coping mechanisms (punching something, gooping over Bones) but tos!Kirk opts for the latter comparatively more often, probably just because he's more used to having friends.
If I forgot STxi and everything else I know about the 'verse and just extrapolated from the eps of TOS I've watched in isolation, I'd say that the reason Kirk and Spock get on so well is because they're similar. XD; Like, Kirk will never be all "grawr why are you not like other ppl" to Spock because he's not like other ppl! Spock is emotionally unavailable because he's married to Logic, Kirk is emotionally unavailable because he's married to the Enterprise. They grok each other on that level instinctively and that makes their time together a refuge from the demands and incomprehension that otherwise arise. So they naturally spend more time together, and. WHAT COULD POSSIBLY GO WRONG I ASK OF YOU.
Sulu, weirdly, is also not at all the same person. Kudos to George Takei but he projects a huge personality without actually doing very much; Spock says he's basically the protagonist of his own swashbuckling romance, and this is COMPLETELY ON THE MARK. (Which btw should put a spike through the idea that Spock doesn't get humanity. And were that script now the referent would probably be "jianghu"... is that better or worse?) He's got this sort of fatalistic gaiety. Whereas John Cho's version is the Cool Asian Guy Next Door, the one who's not faily/dorky/uncool in any of the myriad ways Asians can be uncool. Everyone knows that guy. That one Asian guy who's really cool! But he's not out of a swashbuckling romance.
Chekov is... not even genetically the same person, right. XD;; Uhura's different too (tos!Uhura might have turned Kirk down, but she wouldn't have macheted him off bloodily at the knees the way xi!Uhura did), but brain's too mush now to take it apart properly. To sum up:
From least different to most different, McCoy - Spock/Uhura - Sulu/Kirk - Chekov
Total sense given AU, like I said.
no subject
Date: 2009-10-26 06:45 am (UTC)Pin-pon on George Takei - he plays Sulu as a main character who just doesn't get any screentime, rather than as the secondary character he's written to be. Nichelle Nichols starts doing that later, too, though mostly in the movies.
No take on Scotty? He's one of the most complicated puzzles to me, in terms of comparing the two versions.
no subject
Date: 2009-10-26 07:28 am (UTC)Gah, always forgetting Scotty down in Engineering! ...Actually I started off just writing this about Kirk-Spock-McCoy, then I got onto Sulu, whence I trailed off because I couldn't stay awake any longer. XD; Need to write more about Uhura as well (the impression I vaguely get there is that both Nichols and Saldana were playing themselves to an extent). I think Scotty is the opposite of Sulu, actually, Pegg's version is "bigger" so in TOS I still don't feel like I've got a firm handle on him.
no subject
Date: 2009-10-28 08:40 am (UTC)(Though I'm not sure if this connection shows up in the first half of season 1, I think that Scotty's role really expands as the show goes on.)
This, of course, is no help in deriving an ordering.
[Man, I originally just wanted to comment and say how interesting I thought the Kirk and Sulu observations were; massive sidetrack.]
no subject
Date: 2009-10-28 09:29 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2009-12-04 08:15 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2009-12-04 11:34 pm (UTC)I should update re this post as I keep watching, it's gotten a bit deprecated.