uss-dickflower replied to your post: anonymous asked:hey i've seen you...
i think he started thinking spock/uhura and kirk/rand, then basically ditched long romance arcs apart from spock/chapel later on which was basically a gift to his wife and not something he’d planned originally.
*nods* there is a quote by the actress that played Janice Rand (Grace Lee Whitney) that essentially says she was fired for this reason:
“They wanted William Shatner (Kirk) to have romances in each episode with a different person, because for him to be stuck with one woman was not good for him and it wasn’t good for the audience. That’s what they told me, so I was written out. There were two blonde girls and one black girl. Nichelle was a more important character and couldn’t be written out. Everything’s political in America. One of the blondes had to go. The other one was engaged to the boss, so guess who went? I just about killed myself. I drank, that’s what we do, we drink to get rid of pain. I was really mad. My God, was I bitter.”
"There was a scene that Shatner and I did – and I remember when it happened – that scared the producers, because they said, ‘Uh-oh, they’re getting too close. This is getting too hot. We have to remove her because he’s going to look like he’s cheating when he falls in love with other women on other planets.’ So if she’s waiting for him on the ship and he’s out there cheating, Yeoman Rand would be the sympathetic part on the ship and he’d look like a cad. So they said, ‘Why don’t we just remove the yeoman.’ Of course, this went on behind the scenes.”
(about the actress that played Rand, it should be also mentioned that she was sexually assaulted by one of the producers whose name she never revealed and only called 'the executive'.)
also this from Chapel's memory alpha
Christine Chapel proved to be highly unpopular among some fans of Star Trek's original series. "It was because of her love for Spock and his occasional moments of gentleness toward her that Christine Chapel was largely disliked among the Trekkies who adored Spock," explained David Gerrold. "Female fans saw her as a threat to their own fantasies and male fans saw her as a threat to Spock's Vulcan stoicism."
one way or another Spock and Kirk weren't truly allowed to have a girlfriend. Which was very typical for the era especially shows with a male duo. The sexism (and the racism) in the 60s also was so rampant, making a woman the girlfriend of the main character would mean make her too important in a story where only the dudes could be. You couldn't even have the same platonic friendship between a male character and a female one the way you have between a male duo (some mistake it as 'queer baiting' when it was in fact a sign of sexism and the way dudes were allowed to have something that women couldn't have . Gay people weren't even considered in the 60s no one would question the closeness and camaraderie between two dudes and see sexual undertones in that. But the same interaction with a woman - especially is said woman was a poc - would make the censors scream and automatically perceive everything as sexual even when it was innocent) Also, as I mentioned in another post, Spock's role was perceived as being just the nerdy friend of hero whose popularity would serve to make Kirk more popular, because it was Kirk the star for them and the main purpose of the other characters was help him being that.
