Heget's Blatherings

I got caught up in reblogging and spending time with friends, but anyway: I've posted a few tidbits for the f/f K/S AU set during, around, or in relation to the AU's version of the whole "Amok Time" ... uh, deal. And while it's still very, very much a WIP in many ways, I thought it'd be fun to at least post those parts for the anniversary ... which was a week ago. Anyway!, the first (chronologically earliest) of the set:

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Sa’dzhasifik Raelyek S’paak, only child of Ambassador Sa’dzhasifik Raelyek Sarek, was seven years old when she misjudged the proper placement of her foot as she and her pet sehlat navigated the ravine near Sarek’s house. S’paak’s boot came down hard on I-Chaya’s nearest paw before she fully realized what was happening.

I-Chaya did not turn on her, as S’paak had often been warned he might if she erred. Instead, the sehlat gave a choked whimper, the impractically single-lidded, gold-colored eyes he shared with most of his species flying open in shock and pain as his body jerked away from her.

“I’m sorry!” S’paak cried without thinking. “I’m sorry, I didn’t mean—”

She broke off the illogical outburst. Her words meant nothing to a sehlat, nor to a proper Vulcan, either. A true Vulcan would understand that intentions did not alter already-past results, and wouldn’t feel useless guilt over a misstep that could not be changed. Wouldn’t feel anything at all, she reminded herself. If she was as she should be, S’paak would have immediately chosen action, rather than feeling, to be of actual use to I-Chaya, all the more as sehlats were intelligent for their kind but hardly sapient.

S’paak decided that she could best correct her compounded error by conducting herself calmly towards I-Chaya, hopefully soothing him enough that she could examine the paw for real harm. She reached out to pet him, but I-Chaya backed further away, his rear paws dangerously near to the edge of the rough path they stood on, halfway up the walls of the ravine.

S’paak’s mouth felt dry, her heart pounding in her side. The ravine was not large, at least. I-Chaya would have a … S’paak guessed approximately a 93% chance of surviving the fall.

Ninety-three percent wasn’t good enough.

So, there's a kind of Trekkie that I always found a bit annoying, but the more I encounter their dismissive takes on the female characters of TOS, the more deeply frustrating I find them. They're a bit difficult to describe, but some common traits:

• male feminist (generally not just as a gimmick, but more or less well intentioned about gender—at least consciously)
• grew up on Berman-era Trek (like me!) and, while they'll condemn Berman himself, they find it pretty easy to separate him as an individual from TNG/DS9/VOY and approach them with both affection and nuance that they won't even slightly attempt with Roddenberry/TOS (never mind that by pretty much all accounts, Roddenberry stepped back significantly after Gene L. Coon and Dorothy Fontana in particular took on much of the day-to-day work of running/editing the show and heavily shaped what it became where Berman was much more directly involved, or that Fontana was treated far more poorly on TNG, or that other bigots than Roddenberry had their own impacts on misogyny in the show, for that matter John Meredyth Lucas, I just want to talk)
• speaking of which, these men will use Roddenberry as a pretext for dismissing anything worthwhile or compelling about any of the female characters of TOS (like, there must be hundreds, I'm guessing? some are actually great!), which get reduced to nothing but thin avatars of Roddenberry's personal misogyny and unworthy of any deeper consideration or value. for feminism!
• actually: in general these guys attribute almost anything about how TOS handles gender to bleedover from Roddenberry's personal beliefs, whether for better or worse. This, perhaps unintentionally, tends to particularly deny credit, artistry, deliberation, and nuance to women and queer men who worked on the show and often moderated the producers' worst mandates while heavily contributing to where it's insightful and compelling wrt issues around gender and sexuality—the most obvious figures in this respect are Fontana, Sturgeon, and Theiss, who in these dudes' imagining of the production, become little but handmaidens to Roddenberry with no vision of their own or at least no success in enacting it. This also, more obviously, disregards the heavy influences of the actors as well, who despite the many labor violations were given a lot more latitude in interpreting and defining their characters (not unusual for theatre actors at the time) than on TNG, with particular ramifications for Gates McFadden immediately after S1. She was replaced by Diana Muldaur, who had played two major and great "woman of the week" roles on TOS in Dr. Ann Mulhall (equal in rank to McCoy and Scotty) and Dr. Miranda Jones, and was then given the thankless task of playing f!McCoy (I'd argue Pulaski's arc moves forward a lot more organically than McCoy's and her behavior is less egregious, but Sharing a Man's Faults is obviously the worst evil a female character can commit, so). Muldaur specifically insisted that the TNG production treated the actors far worse than TOS had.
• these guys tend to be confused and frustrated with both the RL women who worked on TOS and many female fans not accepting their zero-nuance condemnation of how it handles its female characters, and instead seeing some aspects of its treatment of them genuinely insightful or hopeful compared to actual life in the 60s; I recently saw one of these guys throwing a giant screed at women who found something very recognizable in the depiction of Marla McGivers as already a fashy proto-tradwife type before Khan ever showed up, because HDUUUUU obviously the real reason back then was that no one could imagine respecting women as professionals, it was just impossible, it was The Times, and never mind the multiple times Kirk jumps in to be like "she is doing her job unlike you" to a man, much less many other great professional women in the show.
• these guys have also very obviously never read and quite possibly never heard of Erin Horáková's "Kirk Drift" (which among many other things specifically tears apart the lazy dismissals of everything going on with gender in TOS in distinctly sexist ways in the present, under a thin fig leaf of tut-tutting at the show's 60s misogyny, while forgetting almost everything else going on in the 60s and in TOS itself). Broadly, they are much more familiar with not just 90s Trek itself but with "the discourse" around it, but are ... let's say, not terribly interested in digging further than fannish osmosis wrt TOS. And they will authoritatively correct others based on it with some truly fathomless assurance about whether this will be accurate or welcome.
• they'll often mention the rape of Grace Lee Whitney in the context of dismissing Rand among all other female characters, but seem to have never once checked what Whitney herself had to say about Rand, TOS, or even "The Enemy Within" specifically (a dire "women really want to be assaulted" as scripted, which Whitney and Shatner simply opted not to perform that way and instead chose to play against the script as a genuinely harrowing near-rape that is deeply traumatic for Janice and a horrific shock to the part of Kirk that can understand it. When Spock suggests Janice really wanted the brutish evil Kirk to assault her, Whitney as Janice gives him a look of (justifiably) angry disgust before she turns away to a layered, understated interaction with normal Kirk in which she's gracious and he's grateful—the director loved their spin on it, and while Whitney (also justifiably) loathed Spock's line as wildly OOC and generally vile, she loved her work on "The Enemy Within" and getting to work with Shatner on something really meaty for their characters, and she thought that what they made out of it ended up being a great episode for Janice's character and her dynamic with Kirk).
• their views of 60s TOS are heavily and uncritically filtered through the 80s films, particularly The Wrath of Khan (the most effective as a stand-alone 80s SF/F film and, relatedly, the most disjointed from previous ST characterizations and theme/genre), and probably the most uncritically gender essentialist in its politics of the original cast films.
• they're often as affronted by depictions of misogyny as by overtly misogynistic writing or treatment of actual RL women, even when in-universe misogyny is sharply criticized both in-story and narratively, even on the occasions when the show is thoughtful and curious about how structural misogyny informs the experiences, motives, and priorities of Federation women, and denying the context of misogyny hollows out their motives and characters. (Let's be real, Theodore Sturgeon, DC Fontana, Arlene Martel, and Gene L. Coon accomplished far more with with original flavor T'Pring as a compelling, ambiguous woman who is entirely successful in freeing herself and ultimately Spock than "lalalala of course she could just get a divorce and of course she wouldn't have really been Spock's property, and of course they had a real romance and weren't near-total strangers steamrollered into a comphet child marriage at age 7 with no other sense of each other's personhood as adults, beyond reputation and pictures of each other from the last time they actually met aka as tiny children, and of course she wasn't really going to be subsumed into The Legend of Spock in their society, teehee it's so funny that T'Pring and Spock could have solved everything if they'd just talked" ever will.)