That Mcspirk Feeling When

Star Trek side-blog Mostly The Original Series & Alternate Original Series Mcspirk, Spirk, Spones and Mckirk (actual OTP is Spirk but Bones needs love, dammit).

[2mo3cm-man]

[homemadesterekpie]

read this and went DAMN out loud lmfao

[homemadesterekpie]

the world building is actually really interesting but the story is more than 500k words (so far because its still ongoing) so i hope the author holds up to all of that building for the whole thing 😅

the aliens basically “conquered” earth but according to intergalactic standards the snake aliens are being hella soft on the humans lol and its because humans and the snake aliens are compatible sexually and for reproduction. humans can bear their eggs.

so the aliens made sure to have a peace treaty but all in all according to intergalactic laws the aliens conquered earth and could just do wtv they want with the planet and its inhabitants.

im such a sucker for this shit lol give me weird relationships, power dynamics, some decent world building and some political intrigue and you got me fully engaged.

[athenao7]

Just found a old theory saying the reason women(and men/others) like Spock so much is that he's just different enough from a regular human our monkey brains are like "Oooo new gene pool!" Instead for weirded out about him being a different species.

[frogayyyy]

i think the thing i love about tos and spirk is that spock’s feelings for jim are a recurring actual subplot (the naked time, bread and circuses, basically all of the films, etc.)

yes you can argue about whether the feelings are platonic or romantic, but it’s not just subtext. spock canonically and explicitly has strong feelings for his captain and it’s a struggle he faces throughout the entire series and especially in the movies. i would go as far as saying it’s his whole character arc (along with just feeling emotions in general)

you don’t have to look for any subtext (although there is A Lot) because it’s quite a significant, real part of the show

[adrenaline-revolver]

“Eridians dislike earth because they abandoned Grace.” *Incorrect Buzzer Sound* ya missed the point of the story buddy! It’s not about someone being ‘bad’ it’s about the incredible power of love and that love being worth dying for!

Gimmie Eridians who are absolutely heartbroken to hear that humans where so desperate and so scared that they where willing to part with not just one Grace, there were three of them! Gimmie Eridians touched to find that the humans planned a way for their sacrifices to be as comfortable as possible. Gimmie Eridians who send earth a message saying “We know it must have hurt to send your heroes to die, but one made it and he’s safe here. We lost 22 good Eridians on the journey we would have lost 23 if not for your Grace.”

Give me humans sitting on Earth slowly coming to the conclusion that when we look up not only are we not alone, someone out there is alive because of one of us. That no matter what we think of ourselves a whole species thinks highly of us because we helped save the galaxy. Give me humans who figure out how to send a probe to Erid filled to the brim with messages for Grace and footage of a monument being raised that reads his name, his crews names, and then “in memory of the 22 Eridians who lost their lives on the journey to save the stars.”

[i-draw-sp]

screaming crying throwing up this is beautiful

[forcekenobi]

as a child being told "the moon controls the tides" with no additional explanation was like. oh okay. you want me to believe in magic? you're talking about magic right now? okay. fine

[forcekenobi]

sorry. only semi-related but i simply wasn't ready for "the sun is a distant gorilla". thank you NASA

[hyperchaotix]

[icarus-suraki]

[anghraine]

So, TOS famously does this thing with the many attractive women of the show of filming them in soft, flattering light and illuminating their eyes with hints of sparkles or stars. The context often doesn't even matter, this can be any attractive woman at all (or sometimes Kirk, who is far and away the one eroticized most similarly to sexy ladies of the week). Sometimes it's jarring in context, sometimes it adds to the atmosphere, but it's mostly just a silly relic of the era like the musical sting that goes with it.

However, I had actually forgotten that one of my favorite early scenes involves the whole soft-lit gorgeous lady with the starry-eyed close up shtick, and is actually my favorite instance of it in the whole show. Unsurprisingly, it's Uhura.

More specifically, it's the scene in "The Naked Time" where they're trying to get control back from a drunken Riley before he endangers the whole ship, and Kirk (unfairly) snaps at Uhura out of general frustration and tension. Uhura (quite fairly) snaps back:

Sir, if I could cut him off, don't you think I—!

And she's right, and he knows she's right, and he immediately apologizes to her on the bridge with very evident sincerity. Uhura is so startled and touched by his immediate apology that the episode halts mid-disaster for a moment just to linger on her reaction. Her expression goes from indignant to soft with full starry-eyed glamorous lighting:

It then backs away so we can see them pausing to exchange tense but warmly affectionate smiles in the middle of everything:

What I had also forgotten is that this heartwarming scene of platonic respect and affection (all the more by 1966 standards) immediately cuts to the inhibition-stripped Chapel hitting on a viscerally uncomfortable Spock as he pulls away multiple times, while increasingly infected by the virus.

He then runs off to cry about his mom.

This is also the context of his famous confession that he's ashamed of his feelings for Kirk (and for Kirk specifically, not for feeling friendship or affection at all), and desperately wants him to understand why. Kirk's mixture of desperation at the crisis and, pretty obviously, being upset and angry about hearing this (which tbh I find both justifiable and kind of weirdly overlooked as a motive) drive what I can only think of as a fight driven by the thin, thin line between internalized homophobia and violence.

Anyway. I had remembered how intensely stunned and unenthusiastic Spock seemed, and how little this required any "oh no they totally had a consensual relationship in the past" explanation, but I had not remembered that it was spliced right up against Kirk and Uhura platonic bonding because they actually know and respect each other.

And it's doubly interesting because these scenes introduce both the foundation of the largely unspoken Kirk-Uhura friendship and rapport, and Chapel's unrequited fixation on Spock that will last for multiple seasons. And when the latter in particular is finally resolved in "Plato's Stepchildren," through the coerced kisses not only between Spock and Chapel but, much more famously, Kirk and Uhura—with Uhura specifically loathing it because she's always found Kirk a soothing presence, and ultimately refusing to be cowed into fear, vs the particular horror for Chapel of finally getting what she's always wanted from Spock, in a way she never would have wanted it, but realizing at last that some override to his will is the only way it was ever going to happen—it mirrors the splicing of the original Kirk-Uhura + Spock-Chapel scene all the way back in "The Naked Time."

[solrin]

We tried to warn you about the "adult content" bans. Now Kickstarter is starting that shit

[problematic-faves-appreciation]

"It must have serious value!"

Staight up sounds like obscenity law/Miller Test-type crap.

[asaflowerblossoms]

"Fetishized imagery intended to arouse" well it's a good thing oppressed and vulnerable communities are never fetishized.

[solrin]

I know many of you have already liked and reblogged this post, but I'm going to attach a couple of links for resources on how to contact payment processors and whatnot. Hopefully they can get spread around a bit. It includes how to contact the payment processors, scripts, and various links to other (at the time ongoing, these websites haven't been updated in about 8 months and 1 year respectively) petitions and forms that might be useful to you.

Protect Queer Creators and Sex Workers - Tell Payment Processors to STOP

TELL VISA, MASTERCARD, STRIPE, and PayPal to STOP

I'd also like to ask people to be willing to bring this conversation into spaces where things like "politics" aren't welcome and more forcefully draw attention to the ever growing issue of censorship. Some of you may only have those communities to draw on but we've long since run out of peaceful/polite/non-disruptive options.

[stra-tek]

[ittybittymattycommittee]

#raise your shields #because you’re about to get wrecked

[jewishgarygreen]

#this is the star trek i wanna see#like when somebody asked gene roddenberry why piccard was bald#because wouldn’t they have found a cure for male pattern baldness by then?#and he was like ‘no by the 24th century no one will care’#i wanna see that attitude with disability and neurodiversity#it’s not that we’ll have a magic cure for everything#there’ll always be something new#but disabilities and neurodiversity will be celebrated and seen as part of the norm#it will be accomodated#so blind people can serve in star fleet#and so can people in wheelchairs and autistic people and people with prosthetics and people with chronic illnesses (via @hunterinabrowncoat)

[kiapet2]

This episode ends with Geordi saving the planet by using something derived from the technology found in his visor (an adaptive device that lets him sense things around him). So a disabled man literally saved the lives of an entire culture that wouldn’t have considered his life worth living, using technology they would have never deemed necessary without the presence of his unique needs.

[scholarlypidgeot]

I don’t watch Star Trek, but I can’t stress enough how important this message is

[fictionadventurer]

My favorite thing about this episode is that, while the rest of the characters are taking a more Star Trek philosophical approach to this situation, calmly debating the good and bad points of this colony built upon eugenics, Geordi is just seething. Troi is having a romance with their flippin’ president, but Geordi never hesitates on his morals. He’s always aware that this world’s supposed perfection is built upon the despicable philosophy of killing people like him. He barely even bothers to hide his anger as he has to work alongside their scientists. He’s snappish and short-tempered and bitter, clearly only working with these people because lives are at stake. When he discovers the solution is based on his VISOR, he is viciously triumphant, his joy at saving the people boosted by a bitter sense of righteousness that these people were only saved because someone like him was allowed to survive.

And even though this anger and bitterness are very un-Star-Trek-like approaches to diplomacy–it works. The scientist who works alongside him is the first person who decides to jump ship and leave the colony behind. She sees the stagnation of their bland “’‘‘‘‘utopia’‘‘‘‘‘ and realizes that diversity and adaptation create a much better society. And while the other Enterprise crew members have some wishy-washy lament over how this will destroy this planet’s ‘‘‘culture’‘‘, Geordi never waffles. He has far too personal a stake in this to lose sight of the fact that peoples’ lives are more important than any high-falutin’ philosophical justifications. The episode might waffle over the Prime Directive points of this society’s decline, but Geordi’s perspective is the one showing clearly why it needs to die.

[anghraine]

I find Gary Mitchell morbidly interesting because he's such a deeply mediocre person, but a kind of great character for illuminating a lot about the people around him.

Some significant details that remain relevant throughout TOS that we find out in the first pilot of TOS as we know it, because of Gary Mitchell:

Kirk has been known for years as a bookish nerd; those, like Gary, who know him more personally know that Kirk particularly likes "longhair" writers.

People whom Kirk has a personal relationship with call him Jim.

Women in Federation cultures do still have to navigate institutional misogyny and it informs their motives, something we'll see many times again.

Humans can have natural telepathic abilities to varying degrees (though most don't), enough to be measured and recorded in medical records and family histories. (TOS follows this up in S3 with one of the greatest women of the week of TOS, Miranda Jones, and a really intriguing expansion of the world building around human telepaths.)

Kirk and Gary were not fellow cadets; Gary (against then-upperclassmen's advice) took Kirk's notorious "think or sink" class when Kirk was a lieutenant known as a strict and demanding Academy teacher, and Gary was a cadet, likely in his first year. Gary was a fairly poor student, to the point that Kirk is unflatteringly suspicious of Gary now being able to read someone like Spinoza that he couldn't as Kirk's student (this is the first of many implications that behind all the sci-fi paraphernalia, Kirk's core specialty is philosophy).

The show is deeply hostile towards pretenses to divinity, even backed by real power, all the more if the power is not accompanied by ethics and compassion (the nature of this kind of power is that it generally won't be).

Spock has served on the Enterprise for years alongside people like Gary.

Behind whatever front Kirk puts up, his overriding priority within the privacy of his mind is his mama bear fixation on protecting his crew/ship.

Figures in Kirk's life tend to be a bit creepily obsessed with him below the surface or to find him fundamentally off-putting and cold; Gary is very much one of the former.

Dehner is flawed and can be impulsively reactive in the way of many human characters, but she's basically governed by highly cerebral professional ethics in a way that's fundamentally more similar to Kirk than Gary's manly physical heroism without thought. That fundamental rapport (the first of many instances of it between Kirk and various women, from young to ancient) is what allows Kirk to reach her in a way he has never been able to reach Gary, his former student turned friend and protégé he's tried to guide onto more thoughtful paths.

Spock is coolly analytical in his judgment and will accept the deaths of his own colleagues for the common good (though not Kirk's, really) and is full-on Team Murder at times.

The Enterprise is not Kirk's first command, brilliant prodigy though he is; he requested Gary for the crew of his first command, Gary nearly died for him, and Gary served for years on the Enterprise while Kirk's star was rising.

Despite his charm and ready use of it, Kirk is in reality much less libido-driven and hedonistic about sex and pursuing women than more typical men of the future like Gary; where Gary favors casual (even if unwise) shore leave flings and hitting on his co-workers, Kirk strongly prefers serious romantic relationships and has been increasingly alarmed about Gary's habits including the shore leave flings. Back at the Academy, Gary had to plot with a technician who had a crush on Kirk to get him (Kirk) to notice her, though she was enough his type that they had a very serious relationship and nearly got married (the relationship was happy enough that this had the intended secondary benefit of Kirk slightly lightening up as a teacher, though he retained his stack of books with legs reputation, and he feels somewhat betrayed by discovering Gary's involvement even after the fact).

Kirk is determined to exhaust other alternatives before simply assuming someone is lost and there's no option but accepting death; however, while he'll try and buy time and figure out alternatives, he will accept loss and death that are truly inevitable, even if it means personally sacrificing someone he cares about.

[miyudeesper]

I love the rainbow aesthetic they had going on... extremely colourful and queer of them frfr!!!

[hellodarjeeling]

no dating we jump straight into the touching of two minds which the old poets of Vulcan proclaim as superior even to the wild physical love of pon farr

[katoujuri-deactivated20140304]

“this shirt doesn’t show off my glistening biceps and i miss your dashing goatee what kind of hell is this”

[straightpeoplereceipts]

This is Captain Kirk of the USS Enterprise speaking. We’ve entered the orbit of a planet not terribly unlike our own… save that it is exclusively populated by petty old queens.

[straightpeoplereceipts]

They seem to have accepted Commander Spock as one of their own.

[stra-tek]

A costume test for Star Trek (2009), with Zachary Quinto in a yellow uniform with a higher collar, looking much more like they were considering going for Spock's "Where No Man Has Gone Before" look

[trek-tracks]

The funny thing is, I think the Kobayashi Maru is a very odd test, psychologically, depending on what it’s actually trying to determine. It changes over time.

Particularly after it’s been around for a while, you know it’s unwinnable going into it. Not only does that promote a sense of fatalism, but it paradoxically absolves the participant of any responsibility. If you can’t win, then you can rest secure that it wasn’t your fault, your choices didn’t matter, and the system was rigged against you. It’s not an especially good lesson to teach, though I suppose it does get you ready for evil Starfleet admirals and bureaucracy.

In a way, what Kirk did was more than change the conditions of the test for himself; by opening up the possibility of winning, he changed the psychological value of the test for everyone who came after him.

This raises the question: what is the Kobayashi Maru test really trying to measure, and what kind of captain is Starfleet really looking for? Someone who will accept an unwinnable situation with grace, or someone who knows the situation can’t be won, but fights anyway?

…or, possibly, someone who can change the parameters of a situation before it even happens?

[onsomekindofstartrek]

I always took it as a kind of institutional hazing, though the way they dress it up in ST:III is that it’s less about what you do and more about experiencing a failure scenario. They of course confound this meaning by also talking about “passing” or “failing” the scenario which seems to be nonsense.

Kirk believed he was being tested on how he “accepts” the scenario, and so he reprogrammed it to show that he doesn’t believe in such a scenario, or at least doesn’t believe in accepting it, or that he can think in a larger context.

But in that, at least, he’s actually missing the point... whether that makes him a great captain or not is debatable.

[trek-tracks]

These are both very good points, but I guess my question remains: is it really a failure scenario or lesson if you are put into an artificially-created situation where nothing you do matters, and you know that going into it? That you could be replaced by a stuffed animal, whose decisions would have equal impact on the outcome? If we completely divorce cause from effect, what lesson is that teaching? I realize that, sometimes, what we do doesn’t matter. I suppose one aspect of the test is to see if the participant truly believes it’s unbeatable or not, which will shape their behaviour and participation going in.

Hazing seems a likely option. Maybe the real value of the Kobayashi Maru is the philosophical discussions we can have about its construction and usefulness afterward.

[onsomekindofstartrek]

Well, it's not that you could be replaced by an inanimate object, really... you can affect things, it's just that you always fail and die in the end. Do you try to save the innocents? Do you try to fight? How do you respond to each thing in turn? I think there is some official secrecy about the nature of the exercise, but I think it's also an open secret among cadets. Not that I care about Star Trek 2009, but it does seem to indicate that the cadets aren't supposed to know it's unwinnable a priori, but that they all know through the grapevine that it is. I think, it's been a long time since I've seen it. Saavik in ST:III also seems surprised that it's fully unwinnable, not just practically but fully. It seems to take her much of the movie to grasp the meaning of the scenario, leading to her asking Kirk about his solution. But I think in the moment, you're meant to know that you're facing fearful odds, unwinnable ones in fact... you're a command-level cadet, your situational awareness and training should tell you that in the moment. And like all the scenarios in astronaut training where very intelligent simulator technicians killed the astronauts in all sorts of unexpected ways... it's useful to look down the barrel of failure, I guess, and at least not freeze up. Maybe they say it's graded so that you take it seriously, idk.

[trek-tracks]

You can affect things, but it’s an illusion of an effect, because the ultimate result is the same. If you know that, the test or lesson, I think, becomes a different one than the one that was originally intended, similar to a test where you are forced to walk into a room to be greeted by people yelling, “Surprise! You failed!” If it’s such an open secret, my main question is whether Starfleet believes it’s teaching the same lesson as it was before people knew it was unwinnable, or whether the philosophy behind it has been adapted to take this additional factor into consideration.

Since Starfleet is so full of Badmirals and upper-level corruption, I suppose the lesson might be, partially, not to trust institutions blindly, including your own. I don’t know if that’s what they really intended.

In a way, Kirk really did Starfleet a favour by “beating” the test and reintroducing the element of hope for a solution into it. No wonder they gave him a commendation!

[trek-tracks]

Or just this tbh