Advent Calendar??? - Trashy fanfic novels vs trashy fanfic movies

I've been horribly scattered for the past several days, which, in retrospect, is because I've had a migraine off and on the whole time. The wonderful ("wonderful") thing about those is that, in addition to hurting, they also wreck your ability to logic. There's no clear picture of what causes migraines in general, assuming that they are all the same thing, but the ones I get (migraine with aura, preceded by sudden changes in cardiovascular or atmospheric pressure) are associated with cortical spreading depression. Which is essentially a rolling brownout across the outer wrapper of the brain, the part that handles sequential analysis and synthesis. It's a fun combination of an icepick to the eye socket and the nagging feeling that there's something important you really should have picked up on, but haven't. I spent Thursday night at the studio reception desk, trying like hell not to fall off my chair.

Writing is damn near impossible like that, but I did read several books, and make a dressing gown out of a bunch of old chiffon curtain panels. The robe is hilariously overdramatic. The sleeves are full circles and it drags on the ground by seven or eight inches. It really needs some light cording in the hem to move correctly -- usually accomplished on this sort of peignoir by whipping maribou to all the curved edges -- but otherwise I'm quite happy with how it turned out. I have a... uh, "pattern", really more of an algorithm, if anyone wants it.

The books were nothing of consequence, although one of them did please me greatly. I have a confession: I don't like the J J Abrams Star Trek reboots. They're solidly okay as action movies, and I guess I don't object to their existence, but they're awful Star Trek, and particularly awful as interpretations of ST: TOS. A lot of the episode premises were not especially robust, and would not have stood up to more than a 50-minute exploration with commercial breaks, but they worked for that length of time because the central characters in them were believable as a team. You could understand how they worked together, instead of constantly being at each others' throats, and you wanted their plan to succeed, even as both said plan and the problem said plan was trying to solve spiraled into absurdity. It is unusual, then and now, for TV writing to not milk character relations for cheap drama at all times, and it's one of the things people really love about both the series and the movies.

Abrams understood, or at least was informed, that one of the centerpieces of TOS was the interaction of the crew, particularly Kirk and Spock. He has decided to follow the more common trend of slap-slap-kiss (or punch-punch-handshake, I guess). New Kirk and New Spock hate each other on sight. New Uhura spends most of her time yelling at both of them. New Scotty squawks because Kirk is actually demanding he do a lot of stupid shit which would have been completely unnecessary if Kirk's plan hadn't been so over-dramatic in the first place, rather than as a form of symbolic protest to remind Kirk that Scotty is in fact a miracle worker. New Chekov and New Sulu are... there, I guess? And New Bones is present primarily to remind everyone that sanity exists in this universe, but not within a 100-parsec radius of Jim Kirk. I cheered in the second film when Scotty quit, because that was the correct response, and Scotty should have stayed quit and probably run straight to the press with what he knew as soon as he sobered up. They're supposed to be fighting the procedural idiocy of Starfleet Command ("The word is 'no'. I am therefore going anyway." --  Kirk, gearing up to get Spock back, Star Trek III), not each other.

As you can guess, I hate this. I hate everything about this. 

I hate that they've turned a man who quotes classical poetry, knows both diplomacy and military tactics inside and out, and plays chess with his Vulcan XO for fun into a thoughtless fuckup who resorts to punching and property damage because he's bored as hell, and you're not his real dad. 

I hate that they've turned Spock's personal struggle to balance the two halves of his heritage into a problem keeping his temper when he's shoved repeatedly into contact with someone deeply and intentionally aggravating who inexplicably keeps being rewarded for it. 

I hate that Abrams keeps lifting moments from the original work and shoving them into his movies stripped of context. Yes, Kirk did once bait Spock with precision-aimed insults until the other man took a swing at him... while Spock was under the influence of mind-altering alien spores, after many years of friendship that made it clear that Kirk did not believe a word of it himself. And yes, he clearly thought it was clever to take Kirk's infamous "KHAAAAAAN!" and give it to Spock this time around... except Kirk was hamming it up for Khan's benefit, and Spock's scream doesn't make any sense here because they have already established that Admiral Dipshit broke their warp drive and "Khan" had nothing to do with it. And Spock's original sacrifice was logical, heroic, and (so far as anyone knew during filming) permanent. And the two of them got a genuine emotional moment on opposite sides of the containment glass, with multiple callbacks to previous plot points and gestures. And also in the new timeline they still don't fucking like each other.

If you also hate all of those things, I recommend you go read Starfleet Academy: Collision Course, because that book has zero of these problems.

This book has William Shatner's name on the cover, along with Judith and Garfield Reeves-Stevens, a husband and wife team who have done eighty bazillion Star Trek books with and without him. I don't know how much of the story Shatner is responsible for, but I am willing to believe it is a non-zero amount. He has been very candid about the fact that when he was actually shooting the show he saw it as a weekly TV gig, aka "a paycheck", and that a lot of Kirk is based on him working out what idealized version of himself they'd actually put in charge of a starship, because he figured that was the easiest way for him to be that guy twelve hours a day, five days a week. It sounds more pragmatic than artistic, and it was, but that also means he had a lot of very definite ideas about Kirk's character, and was known to be a significant pain in the ass if he thought the scriptwriter had it wrong. (One of the reasons he and Nimoy got on as well as they did on set was that Nimoy was known for being a similar pain in the ass about Spock.) So between that and the fact that the Reeves-Stevenses clearly love the hell out of Star Trek, Starfleet Academy: Collision Course has a far more convincing and enjoyable idea of how Kirk and Spock met than the Abrams movies ever did.

This young Jimmy Kirk is instead an intelligent, literate fuckup who has been kit-bashing electronics since he could walk, and gets into the vast majority of his trouble because the people in authority are being wrong about something, and he needs to prove it before they wreck an innocent person's life. Everyone seems to be in agreement that Kirk had a rough childhood; in the original series, he's shown to be only vaguely in contact with an older brother on a distant colony, no mention of his parents at all, and treats the Enterprise crew much more like a family than any of his relatives. Plus there was that one horrific thing on Tarsus IV that everyone forgot about as soon as that episode was over. This book does not forget about Tarsus IV, and it's a much better justification for how Jimmy acutely doesn't care if he gets himself killed than mere daddy issues, which are more of a pervasive background thing that explains why he refuses to go back to Iowa. 

Young Spock has clearly not gotten his shit together quite yet, and you can see exactly why: Both his father Ambassador Sarek and his mother Amanda give a lot of lip service to the superiority of the Vulcan way, but continually undercut themselves by betraying their emotions in their actions. The book correctly notes that Vulcan stoicism is not a physical trait, but very much a cultural teaching. Spock at age nineteen is not particularly well-equipped to understand the difference between controlling his reactions and not having them in the first place, a problem that's exacerbated by his mother continually translating for and responding to emotional moments from Sarek that literally everyone else insists, thanks to the cultural taboo, are not happening. Fucking none of them have ever thought to explain this to Spock, and consequently he has mastered all the meditation techniques he has ever been given and still feels a failure, because he has to keep actually using them.

One of the reasons I feel the characterization is so accurate here is that Kirk is very like Spock's mother, in that he seems to be able to read Spock's non-verbal reactions quite easily, as if that stoic Vulcan mask isn't even there. It gives Spock the unsettling feeling that Kirk might be able to see right through him, but he's never really sure, because unlike Amanda, who plays into the Vulcan conceit that there is no emotion anywhere, Kirk responds to whatever he's seeing as if it is perfectly reasonable given the context of the conversation. Often any reaction at all gets a smile out of Kirk -- not a nasty one for having broken his composure, but a pleased one, because as far as Kirk's concerned, it means things are suddenly a lot less awkward. Spock finds himself falling comfortably into these exchanges over and over, which in turn scares the snot out of him and makes him think he should get away from this kid as quickly as possible. The plot won't let him, of course, and on top of that keeps reminding him that the weird kid can also follow his train of thought most of the time, which alarms him on a whole new level.

Kirk for his part has never met a Vulcan before and has no idea Spock is even slightly unusual. He's just this guy Kirk runs into while trying to get out of trouble and figures he'll never see again after the cops realize they can't pin anything on either of them. There are apparently some vague general ideas about Vulcans floating around on Earth, as they are the first alien species we came into contact with, but Kirk has met enough other aliens that when this particular Vulcan does anything that might possibly be at odds with what "everybody knows", Kirk is immediately suspicious of common knowledge. He doesn't seem to notice that his ability to think things through logically while flashing through five thousand competing emotional reactions baffles Spock; he does, however, pick up that Spock's Standard is missing a lot of his slang, and that teenage play-punching and horsing around definitely does not land how he thought it would. Rather than using it to needle Spock, Kirk apologizes and doesn't do it again. The punching, at any rate -- the colloquialisms are more a matter of Spock just not having heard any of it before, and Kirk is delighted when he starts picking it up from context.

The two of them start out both confused by and curious about the other, Spock more the former and Kirk the latter. This manifests as Spock trying like hell to figure out what's going on before anyone realizes he's lost the plot, and Kirk asking random questions about Vulcan stuff as soon as they pop into his head, regardless of how much they really need to focus on running for their lives at that particular moment. Spock gets halfway through his answers before any kind of defensive impulse can kick in, because they're real questions, asked by someone who genuinely just wants to know. 

The friendship is not instant, but the rapport is, which very much surprises them both. Kirk is fine following his instincts in the face of the unexpected, but this will only end one of two ways for someone like Spock: Either he will conclude that someone who can read him like a book is a threat and avoid Jim Kirk like the plague for the rest of his natural life, or he'll realize that this is the first person he's ever met who doesn't make him feel like he's existing wrong and he should fight like hell to never be separated. It's a believable setup for where we all know this is going to end up.

If any of you still use Amazon and want to read this thing, here is an affiliate link. If you use it, it costs you nothing extra and kicks money back to me. No, I have no idea why the paperback is so expensive.