TOS S01E12 "The Conscience of the King": ( S-suddenly Shakespeare )

Halfway 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.

Star Trek TOS: 1/3 of the way through the first season. I've been finding this mentally taxing - I keep losing track of the first few minutes of each episode gawking at the "tech", the outfits and the general decor, and the acting is hard to parse. One assumes TV acting was more theatrical back then but sometimes I'm not even sure what I'm supposed to be getting, and I can't tell if it's the actors or the scripts at issue (particularly in these early eps where everyone involved was sounding things out, incl. q. obv. the costume dept XD;), or the intervening 40(!) years of shifts in mores and convention. Or, why not, the editing: come to think of it one of the things that's throwing me off is that by 21st-century standards reaction shots are too long. And the things they do with dramatic lighting. XD

Anyhow I think all of it is starting to come together slowly, Charlie X was the first ep where I felt I was rolling with the punches the way I was meant to at any given moment. It's a good story, too.

The decor comes across as less cheesy now than when my friend made fun of it during the 90s. Everything was sleek molded black plastic then, remember? But Apple singlehandedly brought candy colours back, then a sort of retro analog cool mentality took hold, 60s classics became the new antique furniture, and faux-budget-brand functional minimalism is now cutting-edge design thanks to the economic crisis (the generic solution seems to be colour blocks + explanatory text in big font - if you can get a number series in there so much the better). One of the things I find hard to tell is if the conference and recreation rooms and such are supposed to look futuristic too, because they look like normal (and slightly depressing) office spaces on earth today. SF FULFILLS ITS OWN PROPHECY?!

Meanwhile the new movie is all soft white floor lighting and transparent freestanding screens that I suspect will look dated in a decade because they're too now!cool, like the pics I took of that marketing agency in São Paulo - I think it's even got the same flooring. XD; The yellow is very Jeffries tube as well. Love the yellow. That was the first time I saw a rug like that and now they're in all the Urban Outfitters.

The navigator is like the DADD professor of the Enterprise bridge. XD;

Proxemics by penguinparity
McCoy/Kirk. Otherwise known as "The 5 times Bones and Kirk accidentally got married and the one time they did it on purpose." Because more people should de-anon, perma-archive, and give their fics proper titles, for the MLIS in all of us. XD;

Captain Awesome and His Amazing Enterprise by vaingirlfic
Spock/Uhura. Band AU is a sanity test for sentai dynamics, sort of TV tropes style. Also you just know Spock was winning Vulcan classical music competitions as a kid, unless - wait, I can feel it - he wuz robbed by the judges cos of conveying excess emotion in his playing.

Nothing Lay Between by jantra and dancing_mercury
Kirk/Spock, Pike/Spock, prolly other pairings? The AU in which Spock actually is a courtesan. And a science officer. And a tour guide. And a massage therapist. If you need to look at the tag on that shit you can't afford it, know what I'm sayin'. (WIP)

Case Study: The Pon Farr Project by Jungle Kitty
Kirk/Spock. And you know what, there's been stuff only marginally less out there published in the Harvard Business Review.

Good Man by brighteyed_jill
George/Jim. Yeah, imma cry in a corner now, but OTOH this isn't remotely as fucked up as the Winona/Jim one I read (you will note that I have not been reccing any "Jim was horribly abused as a child" stories, even though I read tons of them and they are not all bad by any means). In fact it's kind of sweet. In a fucked up sort of way.

Trust What You Can't Explain by curiouslyfic
Kirk/Sulu. Sulu is stuck with a baby, but it's not mpreg and not a plot device; bad things happened to the planet, Sulu is a dude and in over his head, and the baby has alien physiology. Great ensemble characterization, but (I suspect) slept on due to being lost in the cavernous depths of the kink meme. Pass it on!

James T. Kirk Does Not Believe in the No-Lesbian Scenario by Please Reveal Your Genius Anon
Kirk/It Would Be Spoilers. The one in which Kirk turns into a girl and... ahfugeddaboutit I'll be at the bar.

TwitterEnterprise by misfit_fandoms
Gen, self-explanatory. Remember to read it from bottom to top, and where do I get that skin for Twitter? (I haven't found the Enterprise's Facebook newsfeed, although there's been FB fic. You'd think, etc.)

100 Watchers Picture Book Webcomic by trek_crack
Jim seeks his tribble.

As Morning Shows the Day by jade_dragoness (WIP)
K/S pre-slash. On the really-really off-chance someone hasn't encountered it yet, probably the best of all the "aliens chibified them" stories the kink meme grew (why??). Though IMO actual Kirk, Spock and McCoy watching The Princess Bride would be a bit more, je ne sais quoi, MST3K?

The 80/20 Theory As Applied to Cats on the Bed by lazulisong
K/S pre-slash. It took me an unreasonably long time to realize the cat's name was "Tribble". XD

Similar Activities by mithrigil and puella_nerdii
A Wrong Turn at Albuquerque
The Watch Cycle 1 | 2 (WIP)
Kirk/Spock/Uhura. Mith and Puel are the only ones thus far who went about extrapolating how shiz would go down if T'Pring survived (but not gonna lie: the #1 reason I'm reccing this is the Old Spock Beams Aboard scene, which is A++ WOULD LOL AGAIN).

(Though this is a take on the episode proper, w/ soup. BTW I'm sure I'm not the 5,409th person to point this out, but the canon ending made no sense.)

It's the Grammar of Skin 1 | 2 by vaingirlfic (WIP)
Kirk/Spock/Uhura, not the direct-to-Hell one (that would be this).

K/S/U is interesting because the dominant fanon dynamic is, basically, poly; I think because one assumes Spock and Uhura would canonically have that communication style anyway. Now poly stories that intend as such (as opposed to ~*O HAI OT3 SPARKLY*~) often slip into a sort of didacticism reminiscent of zine-era slash (there is a joke here somewhere re slippery slopes) that I've always found a tad off-putting, but I don't get that sense with the K/S/U fics I've read.

And Years Went By by keelywolfe
Wished Me Well (WIP? getting to be a theme)
...And K/S/Mc fics tend not to have that communication style to begin with. XD;

City Lights by atomicskull
Kirk/McCoy, the-Enterprise-is-a-NYC-fashion-mag AU. IDEK ok, there are illustrations. XD;

You Know he Looks so Good Tonight by curiouslyfic
Kirk/Sulu, Sulu/everyone, yes it's a sex pollen fic, the original request (what I linked to) is pure genius as proven by the fact that THE FILLS KEEP COMING. "Cupcake" is an underrated character tbh. Also completely lost my shit at Cannabis kumaris.*

Genesis by Eclectic Muse
Spock/Uhura. This is pretty much how I think it would've gone down.

Conditional Tense, Subjunctive Mood by ineptshieldmaid
I have to say this, though: I dug Spock/Uhura in the movie, but by the same token the fic makes me uncomfortable. XD; OSHI TOO CLOSE TO REALITY BRING BACK THE SEX POLLEN

Penal as in Penalty by subterrain
Janice Rand/Helen Noel, based on a TOS episode I haven't reached. I've developed a fondness for Janice "we're going to die horribly in ten minutes so I made coffee with a phaser" Rand though: like the animu OL neesan who seems like a sane normal until you realize she's probably as nuts as the rest of the cast, or why else would she be there. Also she looks EERILY LIKE CHLOE OUT OF 24. If Chloe out of 24 were in Mad Men. In space.

The reboot movie would actually have passed Bechdel if Kirk hadn't been under the bed, which pretty much says everything ever.

For Stars by ayalesca (art by arboretum!)
Kirk+McCoy gen. Not that I really need to rec this but. In order what I find amazing about this fic is 1) the characterization; reading the STvi novelization as a kid I was terrified by McCoy's reactions of NEGATIVITY MORASS** on Rura Penthe, this brings the flashback big-time, 2) the granularity of the planetary setting, which ficcers seem to ignore on their way to the sex pollen (to be fair atmospherics are not what the kink meme is for, and the original series is all foam rocks and silk plants), and 3) THE STARS.

Iowa Was No Place for Heroes by blcwriter
Kirk, Uhura, that alien sitting between them at the bar, gen. It's hilarious to me that someone would have written this fic, because even the first time I watched the scene in question I was looking at that alien and thinking s/he had hir "you've gotta be kidding me" face on.


* I keep wondering if there's, like, a Harold and Kumar macro that says One of these stoners is in the Obama administration, the other one is piloting the starship Enterprise, what have you done with your life lately.

** Always sort of wondered if I'd be one of those people hugging a plank in the freezing water until sunrise, or if I'd give up. I don't think you can know until it happens. I'd bet on give up, except for aforementioned instinctive upset.


Wow, these writeups are getting longer, aren't they.

That I read the Laurell K. Hamilton Star Trek novel Erin gave me, and it didn't suck. Then again, LKH's problem was never her prose per se. XD; There are no shapeshifting vampiric sex slave crack orgies, just - yanno - Troi and Worf and Picard. You can only derail that shiz so far.

(Orgies aside, LKH does have these... failures of aesthetics, I tend to think of them as, although they're really a form of Poughkeepsie. The imaginative equivalent of ST:TOS's budgetary constraints, trying to make spray-painted Styrofoam look like an alien planet. Maybe the orgies fall under this category too.)

I also found my copy of the novelization of The Undiscovered Country, otherwise known as 1992 BOOK IS 1992, OR, BULLSHIT SPOCK "ONLY NIXON COULD GO TO CHINA" IS NOT AN ANCIENT VULCAN PROVERB. The Klingons will take our jobs because they're willing to work for lower wages, are we for reals having this conversation. I'm going to see District 9 tomorrow, though, which is clearly built along the same lines, which only goes to show.

Other thoughts:

1) if reboot!Spock doesn't mellow out that universe is srsly f*ckd
     1a) I keep worrying about a post-Vulcan-explodey militaristic turn cos like THE PSYCHOLOGICAL SHADOW OF 9/11 IS LONG and I apparently have nothing better to do than bother my head about the future of fictional political spheres
2) what is it with Spocktimus Prime and inappropriate mentor/mentee relationships anyway
     2a) oh gawd what if Jim is finally young enough for him

I keep bookmarking fics for reccing as I have been asked but do I ever rec that is the question.

Was thinking about this due to comments on the last post. In fact, the ST series I watched the most of was Voyager, because that was what was on at the time. I don't remember anything that happened in it, although I remember the characters and that they were trying to get back to Earth. I was dead set against hard SF (i.e. harder than Anne McCaffrey) in my tweens so never watched TNG or DS9, although I came around enough that I caught a couple of the TNG films with my high school best friend. Remember more about said friend's kibitzing than the content of the films themselves. XD;; I don't know why I started watching Voyager. I liked that the captain was female, which... is telling, perhaps. In the later stage of the game I even read a bit of Voyager fic - supacat wrote for it, for instance.

I know I watched some of the original Star Trek series with said friend, too, because I can remember her making fun of that sort of Western-in-space thing it had with Kirk shooting phasers from behind a rock on a soundstage, and explaining the red shirts....... geez, she was a geek wasn't she. Other than that, I don't remember what happened in it. Years earlier, and it is also telling that I didn't think of this as being "the same thing", I'd read a few TOS-based Star Trek novels. As my house is a black hole for books they must still be around somewhere but I don't know where. Stop me if you've heard this before but I don't remember a thing about them. However, ever since I started reading STxi fic I've had this persistent deja-vu-like sinking feeling, which I can only describe as a growing conviction that when I was ten I had MODELLED MYSELF ON SPOCK, adopted whatever descriptions of Vulcan emotional discipline had been in those books for my own use, and promptly forgotten where the shit all that had come from. I've had to consciously dismantle some of those thought patterns in my twenties, and can certainly tell you now why they're suboptimal for real Homo sapiens type people, but for the life of me I cannot reverse my instinctive reaction that Vulcans are perfectly sensible and going about it in the right way.

( So before I forget entirely, obvious spoilers )

Non-spoilers:

5) The fic for the reboot is also a reboot of the fic, so to speak. It was nagging at me, and then I realized: seme/uke. Which is just like class stratification (boy is this entry sociological), in that 1) Americans don't like to cede the concept recognition, 2) but that doesn't mean they don't have it, 3) it's arguably better not to talk about it too much, 4) but to talk about it usefully, you have to run the numbers. Do you know, I've never seen anyone do this kind of simple analysis on slashfic, by pairing or by fandom. XD; I will say that when I hit a KxS story the other day I noticed it, because I'd previously read ~25 that were SxK. Bias is always possible, but I'm going down the undifferentiated public del.icio.us tag stream, so there is some crowdsourced consensus there. This would not be nearly as funny if it were any pairing other than, well, K/S.

6) "Teardrops On My Phaser":

The only people who get this kind of joke made about them in 2009 are Barack Obama and Taylor Swift.