after watching modern tv star trek (1966) is just like pouring buckets and buckets of cunt off the screen every second you don’t even understand what’s possible with visual art and faggotry until you see star trek (1966)
spock is also a cunt and cuntier than you have ever imagined. ive seen this before and my memory downplayed it. if you’ve seen any newer trek with spock, you don’t know. you do Not know the magnitude of the cunt
Laura knew Cooper before Cooper knew Laura because she told him the secret in a dream but Cooper knew Laura before Laura knew Cooper because he saw a vision of her and told her about the ring but Cooper was in the lodge well before she died and Laura was in the lodge well before he arrived and she asked for his help and trusted him but he was old man that's been stuck there for 25 years and he tried to help her but she was already dead but neither of that matters because no matter what they were always in the room together. Laura turns 12, she's dead, she's whispering in his ear, Cooper turns 20, he has gray hair and wrinkles, he's asking if she's really Laura Palmer for the billionth time. She takes the ring, he arrives in town, she lives in Texas, he's lost in Vegas, he lives in Philly, she's going to Homecoming, he's in a hospital bed, they're both in the woods, theyre both bleeding on the floor, she's floating down a river, he's standing all alone and looking at his empty hand, but they were - and are - always always in that room together
what really gets to me about Denise Bryson is that like, wherever else the show kind of fumbles with her there’s still Cooper’s immense love and joy for his friend. there’s Cooper accidentally deadnaming her and then apologizing. for her entire on screen presence Cooper is respecting and loving her and eager to educate himself and thats worth so much. unconditional love and support!! aaaaa!!
#every time i read a fic where kirk is like 'hands aren't really a big deal for me but i can be affected by it for spock'#i'm like whomst!!!! his private feelings leak out more through his hands than anything else including his face#because he's controlled & values his composure but is also very tense and comforts himself by touching/fiddling with/holding his OWN hands#i think it gives such a sense of both how high-strung he is in general (like uhura) and how deeply lonely and isolated he is#but also. we do see spock grab his wrist/hands on a few very tense occasions and it's a big deal and clearly desired & comforting#let them both be neurotic and freaky about their hands <3#(also the very slow hesitant fiddling in 'conscience of the king' as he listens to the watered down official version of the genocide#that he survived - whereas his anxious hand movements tend to be much more overt and pronounced in other cases - hmmm.#at any rate i do think a lot about how he's an anxious intense over-controlled person who's so often self soothing & never cries) (X)
So I just discovered a cool conversation that spun off from one of my tag monologues on a gifset—I'd seen the initial tag peer review, but hadn't realized they'd gone further than that until @ladytharen tagged me. Yet again I didn't want to pester the original gifmaker too much, so I decided to respond separately to the part I found especially interesting.
For context, these were my original tags on the "This little thing? Just something I slipped on :)" Kirk captivity scene from "Tomorrow is Yesterday":
#captain gender strikes again! #i appreciate the read on this scene as 'captain kirk is a queer guy flirting with random 20th cent dudes holding him captive. bicon' #but personally my read is 'captain kirk is a queer guy deliberately leaning into effeminacy to fuck with hypermasc douchebros #from the very era in which the show was made irl. bicon' #it's definitely flirty but it is an aggressively feminine-coded flirtiness that's going to triply bother these kinds of guys #ngl i feel like kirk enjoys fucking with gender norms in all directions just because of who he is as a person (his true gender: diva) #but it's extra fun when it lets him troll ultra-military assholes neurotic about their own masculinity who are trying to intimidate HIM #(these guys aren't his type at all - christopher is much more that - but as usual that's not the point of the flirtation #k/s is nerd4nerd but also troll4troll)
I was really intrigued by this response from @mycroftrh, and thinking about it again on this inauguration of Pride month.
#yeah#in a certain context queerness and effeminacy are power#these are also unfortunately often the same contexts where queerness can get you hate crimed#but if you’re gonna be beat up/killed anyway…#you might as well make the homophobes maximally uncomfortable first
Yep, exactly. You can absolutely see the moment when he decides on exactly which side of his personality he's going to use for maximum effect on these gender policing, homophobic, ultra-military, paranoid bigots from the 60s:
I do think it's interesting that the full scene includes not only Kirk's bisexual chaos gremlin diva genderfuckery (enrichment for him!) but moments of fear and defiance:
He doesn't drop the flamboyance until he wants to, though. And the framing, lighting, angles etc only serve to emphasize their attempts to loom even more over him, aggressively get into his space, gesture right at his face to unsettle him, and his refusal to be intimidated by these fundamentally pathetic responses that are by no means free from real danger, just silly and contemptible nevertheless. It's not that he's too disdainful or amused at his own hijinks to understand how easily this could go very wrong. He simply has no respect for these men and enjoys leveraging their own hang-ups against them.
His eye make-up is also more than usually noticeable in the close-ups in this scene—even compared to other scenes in the same episode—which seems maybe not unrelated!
I think it's also worth pointing out that, TOS make-up aside, Kirk's navigation of gender performance in the original series is ... let's say, idiosyncratic. Most of the 23rd-century male characters are far more inflexible and singular about what gendered roles they're willing or able to inhabit. Kirk specifically is very deliberately fluid and versatile and theatrical about a lot of things, very much including gender performance and sexuality.
I do think this goes beyond "in the future, no one will care about silly backwards ideas about gender and sexuality, but these poor silly people from the 60s are too limited by their time to understand." Other men in TOS might wear more visibly dramatic make-up, but many men in the 23rd century remain deeply caught up in pretty narrow ideas of masculinity and masculine sexuality.
Even among the heroic main three, I think it's obvious that McCoy's characterization is profoundly caught up in an attempt to recuperate the kind of white Southern masculinity that men like Roddenberry were intimately familiar with, to imagine how it could grow towards something better in a drastically improved if still imperfect future society, without completely denying the reality of the baggage attached to white Southern masculinity IRL.
There's a reason the bigotry against Spock as, specifically, a biracial person is so often filtered through the white Southern country doctor. There is no need to #bothsides this or downplay it as gentle insincere ribbing that doesn't seriously bother Spock and has nothing to do with bigotry; Spock is visibly and regularly tense about it in the context of the larger atmosphere of wariness and hostility directed at him because he's biracial and culturally identified with the more alien-to-his-colleagues side of his ancestry. This is placed in the mouth of the resident white Southern guy for a reason.
And there's also a reason that we get an ongoing thread around McCoy's resistance to registering the weight of horrors that are distant or abstracted from his personal experience and gut feelings (especially glaring in "The Conscience of the King" and "The Immunity Factor" but not only there), mingled in with his deep well of decency and strong principles about medical ethics and compassion for suffering he sees before him. TOS in general seems very aware of the limitations of even a profoundly well-meaning man of that kind, while also framing him as invaluably clear-sighted about cutting through sophistry and bullshit.
Spock, meanwhile, is defined against that kind of country wisdom and emotional gut decency for both better and worse (depending on the occasion). His expression of masculinity is deliberate, cerebral, urbane, elegant as well as abrasive, and framed as fundamentally remote and exotic where McCoy's is familiar. Spock is given a lot of sympathy and structural preference in the narrative (Nimoy consistently has about twice as many lines as Kelley throughout the show, despite playing a less talkative character), a favor rooted in his borderline-implacable presentation of himself in terms of gender as well as culture.
Spock is someone who can describe himself as both a man and not a man in the space of a single episode. He's arguably styled more like female Vulcans (like T'Pring and T'Pau) and less like purely masculine ones. But he's simultaneously a man/not a man in a very stable, singular, largely inflexible way. He also possesses the most purely unassailable masculinity of anyone on the Enterprise in the eyes of someone like Charlie Evans, who I think is correct in identifying Spock, rather than Kirk, as the real challenge to him in terms of masculinity (Charlie's desperate attempts to make Spock concede defeat in gendered terms lead to his seething frustration that physically punishing or controlling Spock can't break Spock's masculine superiority, and only serves to antagonize Kirk).
Anyway, I don't think either McCoy or Spock in a million years would play with gender presentation the way Kirk does in something like "Tomorrow is Yesterday." In their different, opposed ways, both are too straightforward and unbending and fundamentally concerned with presenting the truth as they see it. But in this respect, Kirk is different. As I was saying in the above post, his presentation of himself is all about fluidity, performance, responsiveness to circumstance—not only in regard to gender roles, but very much including them. He's versatile, tricky, highly theatrical, difficult to pin down to any one persona.
And of course, Kirk is a lot more prepared than the others to just lie, deceive, scheme, and/or seduce his way out of trouble. This could have been framed as a sort of macho James Bond-type thing, and I think some episodes vaguely make a stab at that, but by and large, the show is very aware that he is not that kind of masculine figure and doesn't want to be. The emphasis on his private ambivalence (and a cold-edged pursuit of his own agenda in more than dialogue), the particular ways the camera frames and eroticizes him, and his delivery and mannerisms make this "mode" feel very much more noir seductress than Bond, even as Kirk's chameleon-like quality is driven by profound convictions about his goals in doing it, his fundamental humanity, what really matters.
I posted these images in a different context a couple of weeks ago, but in terms of the femme fatale comparisons often made, I think it's worth comparing some of the visual language around him to how the literal femme fatale noir icon of Hollywood, Lauren Bacall, was shot in her films:
Yeah.
But in general, I think Kirk cares vastly less about living up to any particular masculine role than most other men, including McCoy and Spock. Instead, he's most bothered by the reverse, having the range of ways he might choose to present himself confined or limited. This is all the more the case when he's forced by a person or situation to take on a role that seeks to define him in narrow, restrictive terms, particularly in terms of gender (something also emphasized as early as "Charlie X," where he's viscerally uncomfortable with the "strong, masculine, paternal authority figure" role he has to be repeatedly pressured into; he's markedly more comfortable and light-hearted around exerting maternal authority in "The Changeling").
Additionally, he takes extremely visible enjoyment in defying and/or escaping any attempts to confine or trap him into specific conventional roles (ideally with as much drama as possible). He gets a kick out of needling the military douchebros in "Tomorrow is Yesterday," obviously, but he clearly has an equally great time outmaneuvering Harry Mudd in "I, Mudd" by flipping the script from frustrated masculine authority to maximum diva:
The crew laughingly ditches Mudd in his self-inflicted extremely gendered nightmare scenario, but Kirk is clearly the ringleader. Even as they all mockingly leave, the only ones to give bitchy little hand waves to Mudd as they go are Kirk and Uhura (Kirk's frequent partner in crime stylish controlled performance).
Even when Kirk isn't having quite so much fun directing an impromptu community theatre trolling production, TOS still makes a point of repeatedly veering away from the distinctive, strong masculinities of McCoy and Spock with him, I think. With Kirk in particular, it keeps swinging back towards the aspirational, freeing quality of just not giving a fuck about living up to contemporary men's masculinity hang-ups without being distant or hostile about women, either (generally the reverse, in fact). There's something intrinsically optimistic about the ever-present possibility of Kirk adopting a different option from his stable of gendered roles as seems appropriate, rather than committing to any particular restrictive ideal of Being a Man.
TOS rarely lets us forget the very male fantasy around his muscular, physical strength and attractiveness, and approximately 80% of all women wanting him regardless of his own feelings (though this is sometimes genuinely, purposefully chilling, and he gets tossed around and beaten up a lot; TOS does go out of its way to homoerotically remind us over and over that Spock is physically much stronger than Kirk). But at the same time, it insistently underscores the ways Kirk escapes the traps of conventional masculinity by being comfortable in his own skin:
And his entire perspective as a person is grounded in the immense value he places on freedom, aspiration, choice, striving, discovery, adaptability. He insists the greatest danger to people is being prevented from these things, either because their agency is somehow curtailed by outside forces (something he tends to regard as fundamentally oppressive and evil) or by their own fear of the unfamiliar (more understandable, but still essentially a failing). This isn't equivalent to his fluid navigation of gender norms and resistance to being defined by any conventional frameworks of masculinity—those are only one part of it—but I think it's pretty clear that these perspectives and preferences are all tightly interwoven in his experience:
We're the same. We share the same history, the same heritage, the same lives. We're tied together beyond any untying. Man or woman, it makes no difference. We're human.
Tl;dr this is not only a vision of the future in general. It's a vision of the future that is decidedly imperfect but better enough to produce someone like this as a starship captain. Basically, I think Kirk as an individual is queer af and no generically masculine totally cishet Kirk could begin to compare to the energy of the original.
#the campy queerness of k/s in particular and tos in general #is about queering conventions around gender performance as well as homoeroticism in itself and not only for vulcans #and the franchise has been especially craven about that and largely running hard from it since at least the wrath of khan #tos was such a revelation in 2024 and 2025 but i'm very glad i discovered it properly at last. great time for it honestly. (via @anghraine)
#i kept this in drafts for a long time thinking i would write some clever comment here#but obviously not now#anyway it's just really! good! to read#because this whole reading of kirk as a strongly masculine character keeps me stuck#like did you guys even watch this show?#and while i now understand better where all this kirk drift came from it's honestly such a lousy story#this is probably one of the most notable misinterpretations of the character /for the worse/ over time (via @betty-fran)
Thank you very much!
Easily one of the biggest surprises for me, when I marathoned the whole show, was what I affectionately think of as the "Captain Gender" scenes scattered throughout it. The fluidity of Kirk's navigation of gender performance in TOS, him being either unconcerned or aggressively deliberate about leaning into feminine conventions when it's either useful or he simply feels like it, is so fun and refreshing after so much modern media that feels like... at best, toothless corporate queernorm that is fundamentally reactionary about gender in a way that TOS couldn't have really imagined even while navigating the iron grip of what could be nationally syndicated in 1966 and their own assumptions.
I especially enjoy that it's one thing if Kirk chooses to adopt a more conventionally masculine role for this or that situation—but if he's pressured into taking on a restrictively gendered role, he's going to be a lot more uncomfortable being cornered into being Charlie's father figure than Nomad's mother figure. Even at his most masculine, that's never all or most of what he is, or how he seems to really even understand gender as a person.
It's not even that his way of understanding/engaging with gender is perfect or anything; it's very true to how he feels, but not by any means for everyone. But I do find the contrast between his theatrical performativity vs the alternative but inflexible supreme masculinity of Spock and the comfortable familiarity of McCoy's just really fascinating—and extremely surprising from their reputations, especially Kirk's.
But even fan spaces that dislike Kirk Drift tend to have a strong preference for binding him tightly to masculinity even beyond what Spock and McCoy get. Some is no doubt influenced by the movies, which work to masculinize him (as the original "Kirk Drift" article pointed out, iirc!), but it was definitely a shock to have so much of a sense of not just the awful pop culture take on him but also even the friendlier, not at all dudebro fannish takes that define him so overwhelmingly with masculinity, and then to watch even sketchy episodes like "Who Mourns for Adonais?" and realize this is the character they're talking about:
izzy806
discoholicmusic
turnnoffyourmind
vaporwave
tangentwithtanner
prguitarman
origamiaround
blakekathryn
