ace eccentric

I tragically can't find the post again, but a few days ago, I ran over one of the most perfect AOS Kirk vs TOS Kirk summations I've seen on Tumblr, re: Pride. I'm extemporizing because I don't remember the phrasing at all, but the overall tenor was:

Okay, the difference between them is not that one Kirk is bi and the other isn't, they are both extremely bi. But if AOS Kirk was at Pride, he'd be wearing a slutty crop top while in the actual parade, and goes out drinking to the local gay bar after it's over. TOS Kirk supportively goes to the parade, gets a headache an hour in, and leaves to watch an all-male Shakespeare in the Park production of Hamlet.

And truly, I'm not sure I've read a better analysis to date :P

35 minutes into watching Star Trek: The Motion Picture:

• We’ve heard the full theme suite twice (at least).
• Spock, for unknown reasons, has regressed all character development and is back to pursuing “pure logic” and cultural acceptance, but like in every episode of TOS, is still facing constant microaggressions.
• Don’t like the Vulcan lady immediately invading his mind with barely a word of warning and no choice in the matter on his end. Very “the life of Spock in dealings with women,” in fairness.
• Something in me hates the idea of Kirk as an admiral, but I have the comfort of knowing that Kirk hates it, too.
• The aesthetic is glossier but much less vibrant (much much less vibrant—“bright green uniforms looking like gold” is not nearly as annoying as just going with beige).
• McCoy has a mountain man beard and has been forcibly unretired, but comes across as very him thus far.
• The annoying Decker from TOS now has a more annoying son [ETA 6/19/2025: or brother, I guess, since I gather we're expected to believe this is only a few years after the five-year mission and some details don't make a lot of sense if as much time has passed as had IRL] who just got demoted because Kirk, a literal admiral, has far more experience with this particular kind of problem and they’re facing an existential threat.
• Black women get to have natural hair!
• Shout out to the many competent background characters (especially the base who died getting as much data out as possible).
• San Francisco and Vulcan look fantastic!
• Random obligatory hot lady responds to Kirk effectively saying “hi” with “I’m celibate” and he’s like “o…kay, how about you just do your job” which is, in fairness, a very TOS Kirk response to weird sexual stuff from women.

Despite stumbling into passionately shipping the original Star Trek ship of ultimate destiny that spawned fandom as we know it, I've found my interests and preferences a bit at odds with general ST fandom, which naturally has meant that I had to make my own silly TOS icons reflecting what I'm personally into. I promisedelperian that I'd get around to posting them here—they're up for grabs for anyone who wants them, and I'm sick and miserable for asthma reasons, so it's something that doesn't take a lot of brain power.

1. You know the infamous scene from S3 where the terribly written alien spawns a terribly written Kirk meltdown only for it to become one of the most incredible and certainly gayest scenes in all of TOS ft. Kirk and Spock's shadows leaning in and eventually overlapping? I definitely needed that one:



2. Perhaps the most purely surprising and purely delightful revelation from the TOS watch was that Uhura doesn't do much more with Spock than hit on him a few times in some early episodes, but she and Kirk have a really charming platonic friendship where they're only ever on a last name/rank basis, yet are genuinely close and are persistently shown to care very deeply about each other. And they're also absolute joys when their subtle background rapport as mutually smooth-talking, stylish, high-strung but controlled professionals gets to flourish into what I can only describe as bisexual guile diva chaos gremlin energy. There are multiple occasions when one of them is finally starting to crumble under the pressure and the other is an absolute rock until the crisis passes (which one takes which role actually varies), but I have a real soft spot for Kirk reminding Uhura of how important and valuable she is in "Mirror, Mirror," so that's the scene I chose for my first Kirk-Uhura brotp icon:



3. The great thing about "Amok Time" is—well, there are many great things, but you know how you sometimes watch something, and you just end up kind of hating everyone and siding with a meteor destroying all concerned? "Amok Time" is the opposite of that. It's one of few episodes of anything where I'm pretty much Team Everyone, and this very much includes one of my absolute favorite Vulcans of all time and one of my favorite women in TOS, my girl T'Pring:



Yes, she did all that, and good for her, too. Spock himself talks about the prospect of having sex with her with about as much enthusiasm as a death sentence and T'Pring doesn't want to be his property/consort, so win/win. Maybe Vulcan should have better divorce laws if they don't want fantastically stylish women scheming for personal autonomy!!

4. There was no way in hell I wasn't going to have an icon for my beloved episode of episodes, "The Conscience of the King" (a fantastically acted and structured episode in general, obviously a great Kirk episode specifically, with an intense and intriguing villain in Kodos/Karidian, but also in true TOS fashion about the then-highly topical subject matter of what to do with elderly Nazis escaped eugenicist war criminals, an emphasis on Spock immediately recognizing the strangeness of Kirk's behavior and quickly grasping the weight of genocide for the survivors where McCoy desperately wants to filter Kirk's actions through familiar, relatable, pedestrian motives right up to the end, all interlaced with early modern revenge tragedy aka my academic specialization and other great love—truly, no episode could be more perfect for me specifically). So I went with an icon for one of my absolute favorite scenes from the whole damn thing, the magnificent confrontation between Kirk and Kodos:



"You're an actor now. What were you twenty years ago?"
"Younger, captain. Much younger."
"So was I. But I remember."

5. I really wanted a gay Spock icon that was not necessarily a Kirk/Spock icon (he is mostly Kirksexual, sure, but he's also so aggressively Not Into Women on so many occasions that I felt it deserved its own separate icon). And so many of those scenes don't really get across the level of bitchy indifference without the movement of his head tilt or shrug or whatnot... but I found one that I felt truly encapsulated the particular gay energy of Spock:



6. While I was at it, I couldn't resist the other supremely bitchy gay Spock scene (this is when Kirk invites him to join a party of dudes going to a hot lady cafe and Spock very slowly tilts his head and projects intensely passive-aggressive confusion at the idea that he could possibly find this appealing):



7. There's a post that periodically goes around about Shatner's wildly erratic positions on Kirk's sexuality over the last 50-odd years that's like... dude, you're the one who kept looking at Nimoy like you wanted to eat him, you're the one who played Kirk as the queerest dude in space, you did this, Bill, and—yeah, it's not wrong. One of the other big surprises from watching all of TOS was realizing that the intense queer vibes of K/S has every bit as much to do with Shatner's performance as Nimoy's, along with the framing and writing and so on. No other Kirk actor (and few ST actors period) has even remotely approached the off-the-charts queer energy of the original, and so I made a silly icon about it:



8. I wanted a K/S icon that captured how much of their dynamic is like—

Kirk: I'll admit that part of me seeks the blood of my enemies and every day I choose not to murder
Spock: um, I ... have questions
Kirk: well it's just - LOOK A FLOWER!!!!!!
Spock: Jim please stop sniffing flowers they keep trying to kill you



Truly, no one's doing it like them.

9. One of my other favorite Kirk-Uhura brotp moments is when he casually promotes her to the local racist's position controlling the Enterprise's weapons and navigation in the middle of the Romulan crisis in "Balance of Terror." Kirk and Uhura are visually framed together a lot in that episode and lit very similarly, so I wanted to pair Uhura confidently stepping up in that episode with his affirmation of her importance in "Mirror, Mirror":



10. I had been talking with elperian about the hunt for Kirk icons, and we both hadn't found any that used the much-quoted description of him from the pilot as "a stack of books with legs" and his notoriety at the Academy as the demanding teacher of a course (implied to be a philosophy class) in which cadets would either "think or sink." Despite his more easy-going manner in the present, his conviction that noping out of critical thinking and creativity is not an option, ethically, remains absolutely non-negotiable and central to his worldview in TOS, so I wanted to come up with a "think or sink" icon. However, when I was collecting some screenshots from "Court Martial" for unrelated meta, one of them was so perfect for "stack of books with legs" that I couldn't resist going with that one instead!