Regularly scheduled reminder: all of TOS Kirk's known exes are authoritative, sophisticated career women near his own age whom he was deeply in love with and had long-term, meaningful relationships with. He is never framed in the show's narratives as someone who has avoided commitment in his past relationships, or held back in some way when it came to truly loving his partner.
We know of no former partners for which his lack of commitment or investment in the relationship or depth of feeling was actually the problem. On the contrary, when we meet Kirk's former girlfriends, they give every indication that having the Jim Kirk concentrated intensity beam trained on them in the context of a serious, ongoing, mutually voluntary and heartfelt romantic relationship was an incredibly heady experience that was difficult to give up, and remains difficult not to try for again.
It's also repeatedly suggested that, if anything, he was more committed in his past relationships than his partners were, though his girlfriends' feelings and motives were by no means casual either. We know of multiple times he's remained in obviously doomed relationships longer than was wise, trying to make them work anyway.
I actually do get that a 30-something male protagonist who, onscreen, has a revolving door of "love interests" (though ranging from ex-girlfriends to people he actually falls in love with to people he seductively flirts with as a tactic of survival to people sexually threatening, coercing, or outright assaulting him) is easy in some respects to assume must be averse to commitment or never all that seriously in love. But his ruthlessly utilitarian relationship with his own sex appeal when trapped or endangered + occasional harassment and/or assault is not the same thing as a small number of uncomplicatedly voluntary, heartfelt romantic relationships over the course of some 15 years, and his behavior when he's using his wiles "on the clock" is conspicuously very unlike how he behaves in his uncomplicatedly spontaneous, heartfelt romantic relationships.
I adore K/S and I fully believe that falling for Spock is very fundamentally different from Kirk's previous relationships in many ways. But "actually being in love for real" is not one of those ways and we have no reason to think he's shied away from commitment or love in his genuine relationships with other people.
one of my favorite bits in lord of the rings is something the movies didn't really try to do because it's entirely internal, but sam's carrying the ring and it starts trying to do its work on him, so he's having these intrusive visions of himself marching at the head of a vast and terrible army, and he just starts laughing because, me? samwise gamgee? sam gamgee the general sam gamgee the dark lord are you for real? man i just want to go home and do some gardening. and the ring gets frustrated and it starts trying to figure out other stuff that would actually tempt sam and it's finally like, okay, but hear me out: imagine if you could have...A REALLY REALLY BIG GARDEN
I think there's sometimes a bit of a misconception in TOS spaces that a Vulcan's options during pon farr are fuck, kill, or die, but like. correct me if I'm wholly misremembering things, but that's not. actually true. Killing isn't supposed to end pon farr (in TOS canon, at least - idk if they retcon this in later treks). In the event of Spock killing Kirk, what was expected to happen was that Spock would then take T'Pring as his wife and then that would end his pon farr. It was a shock that he could just reject T'Pring! She was expecting that, in the event that Spock won, he would still be forced to take her as a wife - but instead Kirk's death just somehow snapped him out of his fever. And that's why amok time is gay. It's not just because they were rolling around in the sand! It's because the fact that Spock's pon farr ended after Kirk "died" implies either:
a) he came a little (which is gay)
or
b) he was so devastated at the thought that he killed his captain that it broke through the supposedly-unbreakable blood fever (which is really gay)
Do you ever think about how canonically there was a camera rolling in the cockpit during the entire Taumoeba Fishing scene, and the footage might've made it onto the Beatles. The people on Earth might've seen it, seen how close it was. "The sky is just slightly on fire." The alarms starting to blare. Rocky screaming in horror as Grace almost dies retrieving the collector. The moment the fuel starts migrating. Grace losing consciousness. Rocky risking everything just to save him. I am going to SCREAM can you imagine watching that and it being real???? Watching with baited breath, knowing it was all okay in the end but not knowing yet how scary it was for them, how dangerous, how it even happened. How much it hurt. I'm gonna be sick.
crazy because weād say to people who have watched the show and stopped some where at s7 hey deans got a gay manās heart and theyād argue lol yall just making shit up for destiel and then youāre like no they literally . s1. faith . episode. they gave him a gay manās heart and they are shocked. they are like but i watched this. yeah not well enough. they gave him a gay manās heart.
There should have been a moment in s4 where Dean slipped and said to a character he was re-meeting for the first time post hell
āI canāt believe you still look so youngā
Because itās been 40 years for him and he sure as hell feels older. He has to consciously remember that for everyone else it hasnāt been that long, but he occasionally slips
hard launch this, soft launch that...has anyone written hollanov going full gaslighting with their coming out? just straight up going "we've been together for years? why are you acting like this is news?"
double points if they don't even plan to do it. they decide to soft launch via no longer actively hiding their relationship, just slowly acting more like a couple around other people. they're both at some event and ilya finds shane and just wraps his arm across his shoulders, which maybe that could just be ilya being ilya, but then shane just leans into it? like this is fine and normal? and when someone questions it shane panics and is just like "why wouldn't i? he's my boyfriend" and whoever they're talking to is like "what? since when?" and ilya is immediately onboard with this game "since 2017."
they just keep doubling down "you don't remember me sneaking out to go visit him every time we played in boston? you were all chirping me about it."
"wait, did you two drive here together?" "why would we take separate cars, we live together?" "you WHAT?"
when someone thinks they're joking they bring up the group chat with shane's parents, ilya scrolls back to a text where yuna calls him her favorite son. they bring up a video clip jackie sent of the twins saying "we love you uncle ilya!" shane brings up his thread with svetlana where she sends him russian words and phrases she thinks he should know.
they quickly enlist everyone who already knew, get them all onboard to pretend like their relationship wasn't ever top secret information. shane posts a picture of him with anya, when someone comments "that looks just like ilya rozanov's dog?" he just replies "yeah, we adopted her several months ago" and ilya replies "love our daughter ā¤ļø"
the more people act like this is revelatory news the more they inisist that it's not. "we started a charity together!" "i moved to canada for him!" meanwhile everyone else is slowly losing their minds.
Isn't it crazy that we got the "Infinite Diversity from Infinity Combination" philosophy from Roddenberry trying to fucking sell merch, no wonder the Vulcans don't act according to IDIC at all lmao
TOS K/S headcanon for the characterizations of the show (not films), ft. an established relationship formed shortly after the five-year mission:
Spock's second pon farr makes it pretty much impossible to conceal the nature of his relationship with Kirk from Vulcan. I subscribe to "his menarche first pon farr was unusually late, enough that he'd started to hope his human blood had prevented it from ever happening, and his later pon farr schedule might be irregular in other ways," so this could occur right after they get together after the mission, several years afterwards, etc; it doesn't terribly matter for the headcanon's purposes.
Anyway, no matter when it happens, my headcanon is that the revelation that Spock spontaneously formed a deep psychic bond with his human best friend, and the re-contextualization of evidence that already existed (T'Pau remembering Spock only introducing Kirk to her, and not his other friend until prompted, and implying he's considering suicide after the kal-i-fee: ...ah), isn't that surprising to the Vulcans. It's like, oh, the half-human among us who has chosen to align himself with human groups at every opportunity where a choice could be madeāeven within Starfleetāformed an irregular bond without a ceremony, to a human? Once again, we have discovered a fork in the kitchen.
Admittedly, nobody was expecting he'd go so far as bonding with a human male, but that's why the proper bonding process at an early age to an appropriate partner is important. But [grimly] what is done, is done, and there is no logic in attempting to alter what is already past and cannot be affected. Besides, a disruptive rebel choosing to rebel yet again hardly disrupts expectation.
Spock's legendary status notwithstanding, I definitely suspect that Spock Secretly Bonded With a Human (Man) coming out (as it were) only confirms the idea that Spock, however Vulcan his abilities, is as fundamentally human-aligned and scandalous and as much a loose-cannon renegade as always expected. The James Dean of Vulcan strikes again, etc.
Anyway. My more specific headcanon is that ... well, this is not the sole reason Kirk learns Vulcan. He's a humanities guy, he loves languages and he's good with them, and he adores Spock and will do anything within the bounds of his ethics that he can to support whatever Spock's relationship with his culture needs to look like for him to be happy. (Spock may not call it happiness, but they both know the truth.)
And, okay, Kirk is not someone who uses "babe"/"baby" or similar types of breezy endearments with any real sincerity; he just finds them hilarious (most conspicuously in "A Piece of the Action" and "The Mantrap"). Even an unironic "sweetheart" is iffy unless it's important to the other person, I think. In his handful of spontaneous, unambiguously heartfelt romances, he turns the other person's name into an endearment just by how he says it and the look in his eyes and how he touches their hands, not through the extra step of an endearment/pet name he would find unserious.
On the other hand, if it was significant to Spock for Kirk to use deeply serious, heavily weighted Vulcan endearments (aka logical terms to describe the role one person occupies in another's life with greater clarity)? That would be different, not silly or trivializing at all, but precise and meaningful. And besides, Kirk himself is profoundly rootless apart from the Enterprise in TOS (I think this is actually really important to how the show handles him, in ways the films and thus the accumulation of quote unquote lore forgot), but Spockāwhatever other Vulcans may thinkāis deeply grounded in Vulcan culture and identity.
Also, I imagine it would make sense in Kirk's mind for him to accommodate Vulcan norms in their relationship a bit more than Spock should accommodate human ones for Kirk, given that Spock is already being 24/7 pressured to assimilate into human norms while living in an otherwise all-human environment that's going to dominate their lives together. And there's substantial overlap between what Spock values as a Vulcan, and what he admires and recognizes beneath the surface in Kirk.
(Kirk talks bleakly about the nightmare of metaphysical separation from one's beloved preventing "the total union of two people" that is how he defines romantic love, he is visibly the most comfortable with mind-melds in "Spectre of the Gun" of the three who have to mind-meld with Spock, and his mind is so welcoming that Spock can easily enter it while Kirk sleeps and Spock no longer needs any words or usual procedure to quickly meld with him by "Turnabout Intruder." They regularly communicate pretty specific information or emotions with exchanged glances and no words, and Kirk evidently finds this stabilizing and comforting, even in early episodes like "Miri" and "Dagger of the Mind.")
But there's another thing. So many Vulcans assuming that of course Spock's scandalous bonding to a human in Starfleet is what was always in some way expected of him, an innate draw to the human rather than Vulcan path due to his mixed blood, would I suspect make it deeply satisfying in the "bitchy scheming queen bee" side of Kirk's brain to strictly adhere to Vulcan marriage norms whenever they're on Vulcan or in a Vulcan social context. He exclusively addresses Spock by name or in Vulcan (usually a very proper adun with all the emotional affect of Lt. James Kirk teaching his notorious think-or-sink philosophy course). Adding "model spouse to a Vulcan male" to his stable of variously gendered, controlled personas he can project as needed is absolutely a good time as far as Jim Kirk is concerned.
Outwardly, it might seem like Kirk makes all the accommodations and concessions within the personal relationship, the very thing Bones was so often concerned about in their friendship, long before he knew what was really going on between themāand he still worries about that, sometimes. It's not actually true, though.
#star trek #you know #you're right #kirk would get an absolute kick out of designing his new persona #and then implementing it perfectly (via @elljayvee)
Thank you! I think so, yes. I feel like... well, K/S + Vulcans sometimes gets much more caught up in Kirk-as-the-human over Kirk-as-Jim-Kirk-the-specific-individual, but both Kirk and Spock actively enjoy disrupting expectations in ways that make assholes uncomfortable and also think each other is the most perfect wonderful smart adorable noble person in existence who deserves every good thing. So I think both the trollish and supportive, affirming parts of Kirk's motives are going to get a day in the sun :D
#and let's not lie spock would find the reactions of other vulcans very funny
Yeah, I think this is a significant contributor to Kirk's maximally correct Vulcan spouse being an ongoing thing. They have quite similar strains of bitchiness but also Spock genuinely cares what Vulcan thinks of him, but also he's well beyond being ashamed of his feelings for Kirkāso I do think Kirk's readiness to accommodate and welcome what's Vulcan as well as human about him is deeply meaningful, and also the look on various childhood nemeses faces are not in accordance with the precepts of Surak, how embarrassing for them.
#jim has made t'pau's jaw muscle twitch twice
In fairness, Kirk is a massive T'Pau fanboy and within an hour of meeting him she was lying to Starfleet for him (and personally, I think she 100% knew he wasn't dead and quite possibly that he'd defied Starfleet orders in the first place to get Spock to Vulcan, hence the lying to Starfleet to protect him). So I imagine Kirk and T'Pau might well have more of a mutual admiration society in the context of all this than he does with Sarek and Amanda; he likes Amanda, but they're very different. I feel like she's internalized more actually harmful perspectives in Vulcan culture from her isolation and active attempts to assimilate than Kirk is likely to share, but also retains some of the Terran-typical patronizing perspectives on Vulcan culture at the same time, both of which powerfully affect Spock. Meanwhile T'Pau observes and is silently congratulating herself on her good judgment (in accordance with the classic Vulcan belief that smugness is not an emotion :D).
(I think Kirk pretty evidently thinks Sarek is a dick towards both Amanda and Spock, but the healing of the Spock-Sarek relationship is important to Spock so fine he will be the most unexpectedly courteous son-in-law EVER. Also he learns several Vulcan games structured intellectual pursuits specifically so Spock will have the joy of seeing him crush Sarek.)
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