Words meme and pairings meme

[jain]

Reply to this post saying 'words' and I will give you five things that I associate with you. Once I've given you the words, make a post in your journal about what they mean to you.

I got rather more loquacious than I was expecting for my own answers. ninhursag asked me my thoughts on:


Kirk/Uhura I went into the movie thinking I was going to emerge all about the Spock/McCoy, which is my TOS OTP, and instead found myself sideswiped by my love for Kirk/Uhura. The scene where she kicks him out into the hallway in his underwear is one of my absolute favorite things, and I really love the evolution of their relationship over the course of the movie. I'm glad that they weren't made canon for a variety of reasons, including 1) the timeline would be all wrong for it; Uhura at the end of the movie respects Kirk as a captain but doesn't really know him as a person, and it'll take them a while to become familiar enough with each other to entertain the idea of a lasting relationship, 2) meta reasons regarding the hints of Spock/Uhura and Kirk/Uhura in TOS, and what it would mean to have the basis of a Reboot relationship lie conceptually in a forced encounter rather than in some light flirtation, and 3) personal selfishness, since I can count the number of canonical relationships that I've continued to be fannish about on three fingers.

But I love exploring them in fanfiction, and I think that they'd be awesome together. They're both smart and gorgeous and determined and dedicated. After some bobbles in the beginning of their relationship, they've come to a place of mutual respect and laid the seeds for a real friendship, as well as transformed their initial friction into the ability to challenge each other in a more productive manner. Not to mention that, as much as I love Spock, I can't see him and Uhura working out longterm. I can definitely see why they would get together--they have a lot in common, from shared interests in linguistics (and possibly music, if that aspect of TOS canon also applies to Reboot canon) to a number of personality traits, including intelligence and ambition. But Spock's not much fun, and while there are people who I think wouldn't mind living with that on a daily basis--McCoy and Chekov both strike me as people who aren't the dancing, partying type--I think it makes him and Uhura less compatible.

Which isn't to say that romantic partners have to share everything (I don't see Uhura as being particularly interested in motorcycles or fast cars, for instance), or that Uhura couldn't have friendships that provide her with what she's missing from her romantic relationship. But I think that Spock's and Uhura's particular differences, along with the fact that she'd have to do most of the emotional heavy lifting in the relationship, place an undue burden on Uhura and are just kind of exhausting. Combine that with my not really seeing any chemistry between her and Spock in the movie, plus my aforementioned obsession with Kirk/Uhura, and I find myself with yet another rare-pair OTP.

Yaoi I've been trying to figure out for several years how and to what extent the yaoi and Asian media slash fandoms overlap, and I still don't really have a good sense of it yet. I've heard people argue that they're synonymous, and I've heard people argue that they're two entirely different beasts; my own feeling is that reality lies somewhere between those two extremes, but I don't have much evidence to back that up. If there is a tangible divide between the two, then I'm definitely in the Asian media slash camp. I don't write and prefer to not read strong seme/uke dynamics, I always write pairings in the same order regardless of who tops in the story, and I don't translate animanga visual conventions into text (e.g. *sweatdropped*). (It's possible that that last is more a feature of bad!fic than of yaoi; I'm not sure. [Not that every author who writes out those conventions is a bad!fic author; I can think of at least two brilliant writers who do that. But they're very much in the minority.])

For that matter, I'm not really actively involved in animanga fandoms anymore, and my participation in Asian pop fandoms has waned considerably. This state of affairs is subject to change should I become less obsessed with Star Trek than I currently am, and there are a few pairings in certain fandoms--Saiyuki, Hikaru no Go, DBSK, and JE--that I think I'll love forever.

Books (reading them) I used to be much more of a reader. Or, more accurately, I'm still a reader, but now I mostly read fanfiction, and when I'm not reading fanfiction my default activity is writing fanfiction, and reading books happens only rarely. As a comparison, before I discovered online fandom in a big way, I probably read 750 to 1,000 books a year. This year (not counting books I read for school) I've read fifty-two. Despite that precipitous decline, I still love books. I'm a fan of genre fiction: fantasy, science fiction, mysteries (especially whodunits), queer lit, historical romances, and children's lit. I've also been participating in 50books_poc, which has prompted me to expand my reading in different directions; I've particularly enjoyed my forays into mid-20th century Japanese literature. And one of my lifetime goals is to read all of the books on the Norwegian Book Clubs 100 Best Books list. (I'm about a quarter of the way there.)

Flying I really like flying. This makes me feel vaguely guilty, since it's bad for the environment and not exactly healthful for me, but it's just so much fun. My favorite part is lift-off, when your stomach floats and your limbs feel a little funny, as though you were on a roller coaster, but I also like flying through the cloud layer into dazzling sunshine, or looking down on clear days to see a patchwork quilt of farms and roads, or waves and strange bubbles surfacing on the ocean. I like getting where I'm going really, really fast. (It takes me less time to fly from Chicago to Philadelphia than to drive from Madison to Chicago. That's extraordinary.) I even like turbulence. (Things rattle! And it generally isn't anywhere near as dangerous as it seems.)

Writing I was one of those children who was convinced that she would grow up to be a published writer. Sometime in college I realized that that wasn't really what I wanted to do. Writing stories? Yes, absolutely, I love it. Writing my own stories, with my own characters? Not so much. I am unashamedly a fanfiction writer who has almost no desire to break into pro fiction, and I think I'm much happier for that. (The "almost" is because I am in theory working on a gay historical romance novel with one of my friends. So far, however, she's done most of the writing, while I flit from fannish interest to fannish interest.)


Pairings meme
One True Pairing ship: Kirk/Uhura
Alternate OTP ships: Kirk/McCoy, Kirk/Sulu, Pike/Kirk
One True Threesome ship: Kirk/Uhura/Sulu
Alternate OT3 ships: Kirk/Spock/Uhura, Spock/Uhura/Chekov
Canon ship: Sarek/Amanda
"Not Quite Canon but Should Be" ship: Kirk/OMC
"If This Happens I'll Stab My Eyes Out with a Spork" ship: Sarek/Spock, Amanda/Spock
"I Dabble a Little" ship: Kirk/Gaila, Uhura/Gaila, McCoy/Chekov
"It's Like a Car Crash" ship: Scotty/Chekov. (I don't particularly like the pairing, but somehow I just keep reading it.)
"Tickles My Fancy but Not Sold Quite Yet" ship: Sulu/Chekov, Scotty/McCoy
"Makes No Canon Sense but Why the Hell Not" ship: Pike/Gaila
"Everyone Else Loves It but I Just Don't Feel It" ship: Kirk/Spock, Spock/Uhura
Guilty Pleasure ship: George/Kirk, Winona/Kirk
"I Can't Believe I Read It and Liked It" ship: McCoy/Chapel
Favorite Older/Younger ship: Pike/Kirk
Favorite Never-Met ship: Keenser/Chekov
My First "I Could Never Abandon You" ship: Spock/McCoy

Obviously, I favor a loose interpretation of the term OTP. In a similar vein, if anyone's interested in writing/illustrating/reading for a Star Trek rare pairs fic exchange (meaning pairings other than Kirk/McCoy, Kirk/Spock, Spock/Uhura, and Sulu/Chekov), you should fill out the poll that gblvr is conducting here. I really want this exchange to happen, so please weigh in on it if this sounds like something you might also enjoy.

Comments

[uminohikari.livejournal.com]

XDD I like turbulence too! But everyone else hates it.

B-but what about K/S.

[jain]

You're the first person I've met who shares my feelings on turbulence. It's nice to know I'm not alone in this. :-)

As for Kirk/Spock: I definitely see their intense friendship in TOS, and I think it's mostly because Kirk is played by Shatner that I just can't picture the two of them together romantically.

That particular problem doesn't apply to ST XI; my difficulty with the pairing in the Reboot universe is more 1) they don't have that intense connection, and--Spock Prime's matchmaking aside--I'm not sure that they ever will. I'm sure they'll become friends, but the two of them have other supportive relationships (Kirk with McCoy and Spock with Uhura, and both of them in different ways with Pike) and don't have the same need to rely on each other that they do in TOS.

And 2) I think that most of the issues I have with Spock/Uhura as a longterm relationship apply equally to Kirk/Spock. The major differences are that I think Kirk would be almost as bad at talking about and dealing with emotions as Spock--although I think Kirk would need that in a relationship and feel as though something were missing that he felt helpless to fix--and that they don't even have the shared interests that Spock and Uhura have.

That said, I've read a dozen or so AOS Kirk/Spock stories that I have enjoyed, and I'm sure there are a lot more excellent stories that I've not had the chance to enjoy because I read the pairing so infrequently. But it does tend to take a really great author writing a particular type of story for me to be fully persuaded by the relationship.

your fics and rare pair exchange

[delta-vegalily.livejournal.com]

Just posting to say I love your Kirk/Uhura fics and thanks for that link to the rare pairs fics exchange. I went and voted to support it. I'm new to lj, but I've written some NCIS fics over at FFnet and I'm interested in writing Kirk/Uhura fics/art for the exchange. I'm surprised that the pairing has such a small group of supporters as I agree with everything you said about them in this post. I loved the chemistry between them in the bar and I think there's amazing potential in the pairing.

Re: your fics and rare pair exchange

[jain]

This was such a great comment to receive! Thanks for filling out the poll, and I'm so glad you've been enjoying my stories. It's always especially exciting to meet another Kirk/Uhura shipper since, as you pointed out, there are so very few of us.

And, yeah, I'm completely baffled by the lack of Kirk/Uhura love. I've read secondhand accounts of people feeling cheated by the canonical Spock/Uhura because they were certain that the movie would end Kirk/Uhura, but I haven't encountered anyone with those views in fandom, and the amount of fic for the pairing is vanishingly small. I'd had some hopes earlier that the pairing would experience a renaissance, but at this point it doesn't seem likely. :-(

[agaysexicon.livejournal.com]

Words. I'm curious.

[jain]

Rocky, cats, marriage, science fiction and fantasy, English major.

[ninety6tears.livejournal.com]

So don't ask me how I ended up poking around randomly in your journal, but I think I have to friend you on the basis of our shared love of Kirk/Uhura and how spot-on your thoughts on Spock/Uhura are to me. K/U is way too much fun to be had, and I don't know why more people don't see it.