A herd of teal deer

Elizabeth, femaleish, lesbianish, elder millennial, she/her or they/their; mostly blogs about Austen (primarily P&P), Tolkien (the books), Star Wars (OT+PT+RO), and Star Trek (60s TOS)

[anghraine]

I genuinely love looking up some random production detail for some random TOS episode and just ending up at

Leonard Nimoy objected to the script's directive that Spock "kayoes" Negative Kirk on the head, so he improvised the neck pinch on the spot and demonstrated it on William Shatner for director Leo Penn.

[anghraine]

ngl how I imagine this -

Penn: Okay Leonard, then you'll smack Bill across the head with Spock's super Vulcan strength and Kirk collapses and-

Nimoy: No I won't

Penn: ??

Nimoy: Spock would never 😠

Penn: Um, well, the script -

Nimoy: What he'd do is - hey Bill, come over here so I can touch your neck. Then you're going to swoon.

Shatner: I'm going to what

Nimoy: Like this *pinches his neck*

Shatner:

[anghraine]

I was looking up unrelated ST lore detail on Wikipedia and ended up at this:

Spock possessed the ability to project a unique form of energy through his fingertips. Nimoy explained the idea of putting his hand on his neck and shoulder to Shatner, and they rehearsed it. Nimoy credits Shatner's acting during the "pinch" that sold the idea and made it work on screen.

Well, okay, lol.

[anghraine]

#we all have to get on their level immediately (via @ferociouscharm)

Some truly immaculate "yes and" energy on that set tbh.

[anghraine]

I feel I should also mention the occasionally immaculate "no and" energy on the set as well, particularly with these two. I've heard about it in various contexts, but I think my favorite has to be Roddenberry's ham-handed attempt at making William Shatner and/or Leonard Nimoy of all the cast members vehicles for his product placement.

This was a much more collaborative era of TV in general when it comes to actors, and Roddenberry had personally headhunted both of them in the first place, he'd worked with Nimoy before TOS, he knew perfectly well what kind of prima donna artistes he was working with, and he still tried it after having stepped back from the show for ages. I knew all that, but!

I was searching for an unrelated factoid about "Is There in Truth No Beauty?" (the episode in question) which led to the old blog of the director, Ralph Senensky, who recently died (the last TOS director remaining, at 102 years), where he had a series of genuinely fascinating posts that are basically his memoirs of the episodes he directed (interesting, his baby as far as TOS is concerned was "Metamorphosis", which he felt combined the best work of himself, Jerry Finnerman, William Shatner, and Gene L. Coon all in a single episode). He also had left some great and informative comments/replies to mostly random people, so I'm glad it's still up.

Anyway, I've read several versions of the big conflict over the IDIC in "Is There In Truth No Beauty?" but Senensky's is pretty great. The context is that Gene Roddenberry suddenly decided to actually get involved in the show again for ~merchandising~ purposes, and insisted on adding a full-on product placement ad in the episode for the IDIC pin he had designed to sell as merch. Shatner and Nimoy's artistic sensibilities were so bitterly offended that they threw giant tantrums about the idea until the scene was modified to arise organically out of the actual plot and character dynamics. But Senensky's account is peak Everyone:

Our first day of filming, Tuesday, July 16th, arrived, and I was greeted with a mutiny on the Enterprise. Bill Shatner and Leonard Nimoy had very strong objections to a portion of the scene we were scheduled to do that day and were refusing to film. Since the objection was to dialogue involving a piece of jewelry that Gene Roddenberry had designed, he was summoned to the set. (I have since learned that Leonard Nimoy first phoned producer Fred Freiberger to tell him of the problem. When Freiberger refused to take any action, Leonard called Roddenberry.) The morning was spent in a round table war with the six characters involved in the scene plus Gene and me. But the battle was strictly Bill and Leonard vs Gene. Bill and Leonard felt Gene was using the scene as a promotional commercial for a pin he had designed; the pin was part of Leonard’s costume. Gene vehemently denied these accusations, but the guys were adamant in their refusal to be a part of something they considered to be commercially oriented. The final result of the long morning’s angry combat was that Gene agreed to rewrite the scene.

This is where the IDIC comes from, incidentally, and why it doesn't really track with, um, anything we hear about Vulcan culture in TOS outside this episode. There really is some genuinely great world building in it (and it's a genuinely great episode), but ... well. Good for them, honestly.

[anghraine]

#really funny considering all the commercials shatner's done since then lmao

So, I was morbidly curious even before I posted this last night about how long it would take before someone brought the commercials up to suggest that being in commercials that make no pretense to being anything else is somehow at odds with having artistic principles about product placement in ambitious projects that very much are not commercials. I had guessed it would take around a day, but it looks like it was less than half of one.

Even at the time, Nimoy and Shatner weren't arguing that they were too good for commercials, but that Star Trek was. Commercials or no commercials, neither of them budged on that point at any era of their lives, even long afterwards. This incident was basically the beginning of the end of their respect for Roddenberry and they were still pissed about it many years later. Nimoy wrote that it influenced his complete falling out with Roddenberry (and he's generally described as the more hostile to Roddenberry of the lead actors), while in 2008, Shatner summed up his opinion of Roddenberry as:

After the first thirteen episodes writer/producer Gene Coon was brought in and Roddenberry became the executive producer, meaning he was more of a supervisor than working on the show day-to-day. After that his primary job seemed to be exploiting Star Trek in every possible way.

[anghraine]

#anghraine we don't chat much but I love that you single-handedly keep me supplied with st nostalgia <3 (via @jotctumb)

Oh, thank you! Discovering theeeee fandom in late 2024 and trying to catch up on everything (often with increasing bafflement!) has definitely been an experience.

[anghraine]

I do not recommend my fraught relationship with my health to anyone, but: the Vitamin for me is the weird satisfaction of a 92-93% SpO2 level when I'm not at the level of wheezing but do feel just kind of low-grade shitty.

(The Vitamin in an asthma context is oxygen, to be clear. An important one! But when most people's responses to not immediately dangerous asthma problems are "eh, you look fine and aren't wheezing, you're fine. are you even sure you're asthmatic?" and "are you DYING?!" it's kind of refreshing to get "you feel like shit for a real reason but no, you're not dying. Where's your inhaler?")

[anghraine]

>>>took my inhaler

>>>spent an hour emotionally bonding with my air filter inside and gradually feeling more human and less ragebeast

>>>took my SpO2 again: 97%

me: see! the Vitamin :)

[anghraine]

Actually, in regard to the S'paak away mission costumes (and attitude) care of Louise Brooks, I kind of love the idea of S'paak and Jess getting stranded during a mission on some world where class hierarchy is very real and also for some reason everyone wears 30s-60s-era clothes in their streets that are totally not a Paramount back lot. Due to shenanigans (mostly involving the first hat she's able to find), S'paak ends up having to pass herself off as a poor servant working for Jess, the rich stranger to town.

S'paak: yes I am very strong. from all my years of grueling physical labor

Jess (seductively): hello fellow capitalists

[anghraine]

#okay this is an absolutely perfect combination (as always incredibly well-chosen photo cards!) #i can honestly easily imagine this episode and 60 more with the two of them #and this is the series i'd really like to see!!! (via @betty-fran)

Thank you <333

It's so much fun to imagine scenarios that are very much "TOS" style to me, lighting and camp and all, but not actually TOS plots (as well as analogues of the ones that are, of course). Shenanigans! Brazen lying for fun and (non-monetary) profit! Dramatic shadows! Gay yearning!

[anghraine]

I do not recommend my fraught relationship with my health to anyone, but: the Vitamin for me is the weird satisfaction of a 92-93% SpO2 level when I'm not at the level of wheezing but do feel just kind of low-grade shitty.

(The Vitamin in an asthma context is oxygen, to be clear. An important one! But when most people's responses to not immediately dangerous asthma problems are "eh, you look fine and aren't wheezing, you're fine. are you even sure you're asthmatic?" and "are you DYING?!" it's kind of refreshing to get "you feel like shit for a real reason but no, you're not dying. Where's your inhaler?")

[ohwhatagloomyshow]

do you remember why you followed prev

yes :)

no :)

Remaining time: 4 days 14 hours

[anghraine]

I've also been thinking about the f/f AU and teenage overachieving cadets Jess and S'paak (whose paths coincidentally didn't cross though their time there slightly overlapped) not only being bullied but bullied while in striped silver glitter velour miniskirt uniforms.

S'paak has just gone full Gender Renegade by aristocratic Vulcan lady standards and had the tall elaborate coiffures chopped off into a defiant 30s bob that makes her look more purely Sarek's offspring than ever, Jess has started experimenting with silver make-up palettes while elaborately styling her hair—showing up the boys men isn't quite as fun if she can't toss her hair and swish around with intense Cher Horowitz energy at the same time—and I really think the silver glitter velour miniskirt look with the starflower blossom insignia adds a certain something for both of them.

[anghraine]

Three details I unironically enjoy about TOS Starfleet and adhere to with all my heart (all the more as I'm fascinated by the TOS-era conception of Starfleet that I think was pretty aggressively disregarded in many ways by later ST):

1— Members of Starfleet assigned to "ground" service rather than space wear a stylized flower as their breast insignia. It's apparently based on the starflower plant, IIRC, which grows down in northern California as well as the rest of the West Coast. We often see the flower insignia on very high-ranking administrative officers as they're been promoted beyond single starships, but it's also worn by those posted to starbases (like Areel Shaw) and cadets at the Academy (you know the really important ground personnel because they get bigger flowers vs the cadets only getting little blossoms as their insignias).

2—Speaking of cadet uniforms, we do see a cadet uniform in TOS! It's kind of awful and I love it. It's distinctly silver and glittery (not grey) striped velour with a black collar and white long-sleeved undershirt that I wish later ST and fanart did more with. This is not because it looks badass, it absolutely does not. Look at this silver velour situation:

I'm nevertheless charmed at the idea of an Academy-era Spock and Kirk who actually look like young Leonard Nimoy and William Shatner—

—in those uniforms. Sorry JJ Abrams and whomever else, you will never take our heroes as baby-faced Starfleet teens in sparkles from me.

3— There is no officer/enlisted distinction in TOS outside of the Terran Empire of "Mirror, Mirror." Everyone on the Enterprise is an officer.

There's a pretty good discussion of it here, apart from minimizing the glaring differences from the real US Navy and, relatedly, the rather franchise-poisoned contortions around continuity/lore at the end. Its own evidence indicates that this is a very deliberate world building/thematic choice driven by the writers' and creators' grievances with their own experience of the US military and not just the Enterprise being special; they were pretty obviously trying to envision a half-familiar but better world, as far as their audience as they thought of it and themselves were concerned, one where the closest thing to a standing military is something like NOAA (then very recently consolidated into ESSA) rather than a full navy.

That definitely doesn't exclude WWII, the Cold War, and US policy in general militarizing the marine research agencies, and then expecting them to go back to normal but also be ready for combat at any time, but it's a different idea of the Starfleet "normal" than something purely naval—and, incidentally, NOAA's corps does not have an officer/enlisted distinction either (for context, NOAA has ~300 officers in the corps and ~12,000 civilians). The fact that we don't see the officer/enlisted distinction in any other Starfleet context in TOS except very specifically the Mirror Universe is, uh, a pretty standard TOS level of subtlety.

All of that said, the linked article very thoroughly covers pretty much all the arguments and counter-arguments around enlisted in TOS, esp on the Enterprise.

(There is also no distinction between cadets and midshipmen, btw; the terms are used completely interchangeably depending on, as far as I can tell, vibes.)

[anghraine]

#I feel like the cadet uniform could actually be very pretty if it didn't suffer from bad materials like a lot of TOS costuming does.#I do really love the silver look and the stripes. It's so unfortunate a lot of their designs I adore but the fabric choices look awful.#Not everything of course there's a few costumes I remarked on the fabric of but.. a lot of it does.

In all honesty, I adore many of the TOS fabrics (even if the velour's shrinking was unfortunate over time) and the IMO magnificent lead costume designer's approaches to style and design were specifically inspired by the fabrics themselves, rather than the fabrics as mediocre vehicles for the design, with an eye to the contemporary and futuristic (by contrast to the film costumes, which after the dire TMP costumes played it safe by looking to the past for their primary inspirations and leaning on much more overtly militaristic nostalgia and much more conservative choices around both style and materials).

Sometimes the TOS costuming was working on a shoestring budget (esp in S3), and the crews, actors, etc were always being worked at an unjustifiable pace to turn out the sheer quantities they did, but Theiss and his team also just re-purposed all kinds of things regardless of budget in ways that I think make them look all the more imaginative and fantastically zany (like the shower curtains used for the space Hazmat suits!). The TOS fabrics also seem to have been much more comfortable for the actors than a lot of later uniforms tbh—but either way, the styles are inextricable from the fabrics.

I think the cadet uniform in particular is one of the less exceptional looks without the silver glitter velour and the undershirt, for sure—those make it fun! I genuinely love the idea of teen Spock and Kirk in it, no tongue in cheek, as much as I think they'd look very young and very silly. A Starfleet cadet should look sparkly and silly in a world with glitter bandages.

[anghraine]

Three details I unironically enjoy about TOS Starfleet and adhere to with all my heart (all the more as I'm fascinated by the TOS-era conception of Starfleet that I think was pretty aggressively disregarded in many ways by later ST):

1— Members of Starfleet assigned to "ground" service rather than space wear a stylized flower as their breast insignia. It's apparently based on the starflower plant, IIRC, which grows down in northern California as well as the rest of the West Coast. We often see the flower insignia on very high-ranking administrative officers as they're been promoted beyond single starships, but it's also worn by those posted to starbases (like Areel Shaw) and cadets at the Academy (you know the really important ground personnel because they get bigger flowers vs the cadets only getting little blossoms as their insignias).

2—Speaking of cadet uniforms, we do see a cadet uniform in TOS! It's kind of awful and I love it. It's distinctly silver and glittery (not grey) striped velour with a black collar and white long-sleeved undershirt that I wish later ST and fanart did more with. This is not because it looks badass, it absolutely does not. Look at this silver velour situation:

I'm nevertheless charmed at the idea of an Academy-era Spock and Kirk who actually look like young Leonard Nimoy and William Shatner—

—in those uniforms. Sorry JJ Abrams and whomever else, you will never take our heroes as baby-faced Starfleet teens in sparkles from me.

3— There is no officer/enlisted distinction in TOS outside of the Terran Empire of "Mirror, Mirror." Everyone on the Enterprise is an officer.

There's a pretty good discussion of it here, apart from minimizing the glaring differences from the real US Navy and, relatedly, the rather franchise-poisoned contortions around continuity/lore at the end. Its own evidence indicates that this is a very deliberate world building/thematic choice driven by the writers' and creators' grievances with their own experience of the US military and not just the Enterprise being special; they were pretty obviously trying to envision a half-familiar but better world, as far as their audience as they thought of it and themselves were concerned, one where the closest thing to a standing military is something like NOAA (then very recently consolidated into ESSA) rather than a full navy.

That definitely doesn't exclude WWII, the Cold War, and US policy in general militarizing the marine research agencies, and then expecting them to go back to normal but also be ready for combat at any time, but it's a different idea of the Starfleet "normal" than something purely naval—and, incidentally, NOAA's corps does not have an officer/enlisted distinction either (for context, NOAA has ~300 officers in the corps and ~12,000 civilians). The fact that we don't see the officer/enlisted distinction in any other Starfleet context in TOS except very specifically the Mirror Universe is, uh, a pretty standard TOS level of subtlety.

All of that said, the linked article very thoroughly covers pretty much all the arguments and counter-arguments around enlisted in TOS, esp on the Enterprise.

(There is also no distinction between cadets and midshipmen, btw; the terms are used completely interchangeably depending on, as far as I can tell, vibes.)

[heyfruitcake]

Reasons to boycott Nolan's The Odyssey (that I know of so far):

They shot in the illegally occupied Western Sahara as reported by Middle East Eye (thanks to @fuckyeahdavidandyonatan for bringing that up)

They dumped their props into a protected area of the Italian sea after shooting (thanks to @godslop for finding the article in English)

Zendaya wearing looted 3000 years old Iranian earrings for the premiere of the movie + having her stylist fly on a private jet just to get her a dress for the premiere in London

No Greek actors in a movie about Greek heritage

While people mentioned that Anne Hathaway was flown in to the set every day, apparently it was not on a private jet but on a helicopter that was being used anyway to fly in equipment.

None of these things are new in Hollywood or exclusive to the Odyssey, its director or its actors, but I do think we as audience should start holding Hollywood accountable when it disrespects our culture, heritage, environment, especially when it's movies that are this big and have a huge budged that would allow for more conscious choices.

Please do add anything else I missed.

[nivialku7]

Some very good and reasonable points, but for as much as I recognize the Iliad and Odyssey as extremely important works of literature for Greece I think it not having an all Greek cast is forgivable. No Greek actors, not even one? Yeah, that shows they probably didn’t care about including any in the first place. Is that a serious problem? Probably in the same League as giving the characters pants and filming in Iceland.

Still, if they were filming Beowulf and the cast was a bunch of Australians? I think the nords could survive such a wound.

So unless Greece is really starved for a win right now, which it very could be since my only reference for Modern Greece is 20th century civil wars and an apparently plummeting GDP, I think a swing and a miss for the Greeks on Nolan’s behalf is just going to have to be a bummer.

I don’t want to be a dick and tell Greek people their awesome folklore isn’t theirs to tell, but up against one of the biggest names in filming ignoring modern colonialism on multiple fronts and committing large scale pollution I think we can forgive a Shakespeare adaptation that isn’t an all English cast.

[anghraine]

This isn't really about the specific take I'm reblogging (offensive as it is), but I'm morbidly fascinated by how virtually every conversation about how there are zero Greek people in the cast—even counting the five million-odd members of the Greek diaspora that a number of very bankable US actors belong to as "Greek people", which the very careful, mildly-worded Guardian article linked does—seems to get conflated with the cast not being entirely Greek as if these are the same argument.

Yes, there are racists making a big deal about how the characters and text are Greek, but a) they don't want an all-Greek cast either, they want an all-white cast, they're fine with all-Anglo representations of Greek people, and b) the complaint isn't about what the entire cast should be anyway. Nolan et al. didn't have to choose between Lupita Nyong'o and Any Greek People At All. That's a pure derailing tactic to trivialize the actual criticism and conflate it with something much easier to dismiss.

It's about the defense that it's representing the entire modern world while managing to exclude Greek people from their image of the modern world in a specifically Greek context— something that goes way, way back, because the ongoing existence of actual living Greek people rather than a long-lost fallen civilization whose works and artifacts are a common property of the world has frequently been deeply inconvenient to broad Western narratives and politics around it.

It's not unrelated to the other incredibly egregious instances of careless US-centric imperialism the OP was correctly highlighting, it's another form of it.

[anghraine]

My household is mostly kind enough not to point out when I'm peak obnoxiously academic-brained, but today was like

A: It feels bad to criticize dead authors, but that novel- J: Well, he was a raging misogynist, so it's fair to criticize that, alive or dead. me, an early modernist: Wait, can we rewind for a moment? Why wouldn't we criticize dead authors??? J: I think she meant dead in this century, Elizabeth :) A: Right, yeah. me: ohhhhh

[anghraine]

Feeling unwell about 60s TOS Jim Kirk starter pack <3333

[anghraine]

One of the reasons I feel that framing Kirk's smiles as always flirty and sincere oversimplifies him is that he has a whole range of smiles, and personally one of my favorite genres of Kirk Smiling Expressions is just utter disdain. It's full on "I hope the ground opens up and devours you whole, but even this would not improve the absolute depths of my contempt":

Fuck off and die :)))) —Jim Kirk

[beatrice-otter]

#'ethically i can't kill you but i can be so intensely annoying you'll wish i had :)'#anghraine babbles

#'you're half savage' 'your life takes resources from more valuable lives' 'you're a lowly barbarian' 'you're just genetically inferior'#is such a thing with kirk antagonists and he's like :))) another successful day of crisis resolution with zero murders :))))))))))

#spock: i have the impression you wanted to commit some murders though#kirk: sure. but i didn't do it! i think i deserve an award honestly

[anghraine]

re: my two-months old tags - he does deserve an award!!

I know he has so many in-story that it's too inconvenient and time-consuming to list them all. but he deserves more. the "zero murders and actually nuanced understanding of the Prime Directive" award specifically tbh

[anghraine]

Speaking of gaming, btw, I hadn't played GW2 for a bit and just remembered I'd made a proper necromancer awhile ago, and in the process discovered they have a new hairstyle in the character creator! Totally forgot how much fun I had with her early leveling up look:

And yes, I've thought through her full backstory and place in the PC!Gwen universe. She might be envisioned as another Orrian (shh) who's even more secretive about it than Xiulan—all the more as she was raised after her parents' deaths in Queen's Heart Orphanage and later in a very normal Krytan home by Andrew the innkeeper, puzzled by the few enigmatic belongings of a family she half-remembers.

Despite her love for him and Petra, she spent years trying to figure out what happened to the birth parents whose stories linger hazily in her mind— it's why she pursued necromancy and the first reason she so fervently worshipped Grenth. Her name is Ana but she's almost sure it was longer once— and once she does discover her parents' fate, she feels lost and rootless apart from her faith, alone in a way that few understand except Grenth himself.

She's wavering between becoming a priestess of Grenth or fumbling for some other meaning to her life, when a strange Ascalonian woman in black and red shows up at the inn and offers her the chance to pit herself against a greater foe than she's ever imagined, accomplishing a greater dream than even her parents ever had. We're going to fight Zhaitan and reclaim Orr.

Ana prays that night, and even for a favored servant of Grenth, the answer is cold and clear as ice:

It's time for you to go home.

[anghraine]

Shout-out to one of the many delightful members of one of my absolute favorite Mass Effect species

[anghraine]

I'll always be fascinated by how Spock in "The Conscience of the King" is completely right about everything—something far from inevitable in TOS episodes—but in particular, he is the only character who wasn't on Tarsus IV who seems to emotionally get the full weight of the starvation and genocide.

He doesn't try to minimize or displace what Kirk, Riley, Leighton, and others endured as Kirk's real driving motive. He doesn't close his eyes to the evidence that an almost unimaginably nightmarish sequence of horrors shaped his best friend even though it's painful and uncomfortable to think about him that way. Spock is his usual paranoid jealous self wrt Lenore for about 5 seconds before using his brain, realizing it's fake, and concluding Kirk's real target is likely her father (this is why he discovers the genocide at all). He tries to convince McCoy, does the hard research when that fails, and drums the reality into his head to get him briefly onboard. Spock isn't cowed by Kirk lashing out at him repeatedly, but he also understands that Kirk can't and shouldn't just let it go without his safety and justice assured.

It's obviously much more of a Kirk episode than a Spock-centric one, but Spock is an absolute champ in it.

...That said, I also think having Kirk be the major character whose backstory specifically involves mass starvation and genocide—and in other episodes, shown to very persistently react to hunger/starvation in a visceral way no one else does, and treated as more of an expert on surviving starvation than biologists and doctors—while Spock is the one character who wasn't there and gets it is a truly wild choice when both characters are played by 2nd-gen Ukrainian diaspora actors.

Leonard Nimoy's parents fled Soviet Ukraine separately and had to track each other down in the USA while unable to speak English, and William Shatner's father (the parent who died during the filming of "The Devil in the Dark" btw) had been a teenaged Ukrainian Jewish immigrant from Austria-Hungary to Canada who brought over the rest of his family. Nimoy and Shatner themselves were born in Boston and Montreal (respectively) just before the Holodomor and ~10 years before the Holocaust in Ukraine (CW for pretty much everything); their parents' emigrations spared them from having to survive two genocides to reach adulthood.

North America was no walk in the park for the members of the Ukrainian and/or Jewish diasporas during much of the 20th century, of course (when DeForest Kelley was born, Canada was still actively operating some of the internment camps holding Ukrainian Canadians—incl ones born in Canada—as enemy aliens, and had kept many, many other Ukrainian Canadians under surveillance and more; meanwhile, just listing the USA's and Canada's antisemitic practices in the 40s-60s alone would probably take years). But still, millions of people like Nimoy and Shatner starved and/or were slaughtered where both their fathers had lived: in real life, in their lifetimes.

(Kodos "only" managing to butcher ~4000 starving people before the competence and good will of the Federation's institutions stopped him getting presented as the most successfully, terribly brutal expression of eugenics in recent history speaks more volumes about the better world the fictional characters live in vs the realities of the mid-20th century than "we've evolved past hunger and cruelty :)" ever could. Unfortunately.)

I'm not even sure what my full opinion is on that particular story choice in context, just... huh, sure was a choice.

[paperplateprose]

writing challenge!

open up your document and put words in it

[anghraine]

I think you have the best star trek takes on this website (you're the only one who is normal about McCoy, for one). I especially love your f/f tos au. I've been writing my own gender swap tos fanfic and I realized that some of my characterization came from you, namely Jess' name. I'm getting close to publishing my fic on ao3, would you want to be credited in the author's note? Thank you!

Oh, thank you very much on all fronts! Especially about McCoy (I occasionally feel like I watched the Earth 2 version of him with about five other people I've managed to find) and the AU (my baby <3).

Yes, I appreciate both being asked and cited :) I'm at AO3 under the same username, so you can link to that if you want!

And I definitely support more TOS genderbending that significantly changes the names, on principle— I don't know why this has so aggressively gone out of fashion with genderbending, even when the canon characters have hyper-gendered names entirely aligned with their ostensible genders in the original (I assume there's some tortuous rationale about how giving them comparably feminine names as women is problematic, but idk), so whether you go with my choice or a different one, I do always appreciate seeing people do something with the names!