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King Diamond posted:So what is your question? I guess my question would be, why is the public conception of the character so different than the character? Is it just the whole "Kirk v Picard" thing that Cythereal mentions, or at least, Next Generation being a slower, more "talky" show on average than TOS, which influences our conception of Kirk and Picard?
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Mar 7, 2018 23:21
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Epicurius posted:In other words, the Captain Kirk of the TV show is pretty much the opposite of the Captain Kirk of the public imagination. There's a great article about this from last year, called "Kirk Drift": http://strangehorizons.com/non-fiction/columns/freshly-rememberd-kirk-drift/ Erin Horáková posted:There is no other way to put this: essentially everything about Popular Consciousness Kirk is bullshit. Kirk, as received through mass culture memory and reflected in its productive imaginary (and subsequent franchise output, including the reboot movies), has little or no basis in Shatner’s performance and the television show as aired. Macho, brash Kirk is a mass hallucination. The thing that bums me out most is that the version of Kirk we got in the Kelvin movies was this pop culture caricature of Kirk, and that really sucks, cause the real one was far more interesting. Didn't Gary Mitchell or Finnegan describe him as a walking stack of books...?
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Mar 7, 2018 23:22
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I'm not deep in the discourse here, but compared to, e.g., Spock, Kirk was a Maverick Ladies' Man. Context matters.
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Mar 7, 2018 23:29
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Epicurius posted:I guess my question would be, why is the public conception of the character so different than the character? Is it just the whole "Kirk v Picard" thing that Cythereal mentions, or at least, Next Generation being a slower, more "talky" show on average than TOS, which influences our conception of Kirk and Picard? Because people who aren't actually familiar with a thing (as in, haven't seen TOS) only pick up the broad strokes from cultural osmosis, and often somewhat inaccurate broad strokes. Also the parodies of Kirk and Star Trek over the years kept hammering in how much he was a playboy and a rogue and a maverick and etc
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Mar 7, 2018 23:33
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Epicurius posted:I've got a Captain Kirk question. Captain Kirk, in popular culture is this devil may care, gung-ho, violent impulsive maverick, thinking the rules don't apply to him, and quick with his fists and phaser pistol. All TOS characterization and quotes actually originate from Star Trekkin' https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FCARADb9asE
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Mar 7, 2018 23:36
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speakhard posted:There's a great article about this from last year, called "Kirk Drift": http://strangehorizons.com/non-fiction/columns/freshly-rememberd-kirk-drift/ This article feels like it's wishing really hard for TOS to be other than what it is in some areas. "Kirk is not a lady's man, all those relationships ended amicably!"  It's not an attempt to assess TOS and Kirk culturally on a TV show in 1967, it's yet another attempt to force Star Trek into a vast internal consistency, which is a fool's errand. Six movies about Kirk being precisely the character the writer claims he isn't are just hand-waved as "a re-work." The writer clearly takes Zapp Brannigan personally and can't figure out where people could get the idea for this parody, in a show where Kirk has a new love interest every week and has to tear his shirt off to fight to the death several times.It's really not healthy to deny this. At it's best TOS is about much more than Kirk, such as the litany of great first-season episodes someone mentioned upthread. This is why it has lasting staying power. It's also very, very cheesy at times, and many of the episodes are some flavor of bad ("boring" I think is the worst insult you can throw at Trek; cheesy is great). The JJ films are not really disappointing because they lead with Brash Sexykirk, they're disappointing because every character is a caricature of their most famous traits, when in fact they worked a surprising amount of complexity in there during that original run of shows and movies. Now Bones does a Bones voice; Spock is a huge logic dumbass and overall the worst part of those movies, given that Quinto doesn't have 10% of Nimoy's gravitas. Star Trek should be looked at critically, not mythologized.
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Mar 7, 2018 23:42
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Just finished The Fifty Year Mission part one and jumped right into part two. What the gently caress was with Gene? I knew he was a bit off, but drat!
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Mar 7, 2018 23:47
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Cingulate posted:I'm not deep in the discourse here, but compared to, e.g., Spock, Kirk was a Maverick Ladies' Man. Context matters. I really don’t think that’s true, to be honest. That article is even more insufferable than I remembered, but the point it makes is that we often remember Kirk’s entanglements with the girl of the week as cases of Kirk being a maverick ladies’ man when that just isn’t what is happening at all. Kirk obviously enjoys having sexual relationships with women, but he doesn’t pursue them excessively or in inappropriate contexts, and his priority is always his ship and his crew. He’s highly professional and reasonably heterosexual, in that order. Like Spock, he winds up entangled with the girl of the week a bit suspiciously often; this is not because either of them are space horn dogs cruising the galaxy for bitches, but because a bit of sex and violence is part of the appeal of the show.
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Mar 7, 2018 23:49
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Mister Kingdom posted:What the gently caress was with Gene? I knew he was a bit off, but drat! Booze and ludes, mostly. Roddemberry was, especially when he got older, pretty heavily under the influence. Here's David Gerrold's take. http://www.syfy.com/syfywire/star-trek-writer-reveals-ugly-side-working-roddenberry-sci-fi-classic Epicurius fucked around with this message at 23:57 on Mar 7, 2018 |
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Mar 7, 2018 23:54
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skasion posted:I really don’t think that’s true, to be honest. That article is even more insufferable than I remembered, but the point it makes is that we often remember Kirk’s entanglements with the girl of the week as cases of Kirk being a maverick ladies’ man when that just isn’t what is happening at all. Kirk obviously enjoys having sexual relationships with women, but he doesn’t pursue them excessively or in inappropriate contexts, and his priority is always his ship and his crew. He’s highly professional and reasonably heterosexual, in that order. Like Spock, he winds up entangled with the girl of the week a bit suspiciously often; this is not because either of them are space horn dogs cruising the galaxy for bitches, but because a bit of sex and violence is part of the appeal of the show.  What I'm saying is that Kirk being a ladies' man is not controversial. There's some second thing you and the author are thinking about where Kirk is being remembered by people as a sexual predator. All Zapp Brannigan is doing is making fun of what's already there. We live in a society that is both heavily sexualized and oddly puritanical, so there's a lot to unpack in our media, but the short of it is that Kirk's sexual escapades were silly and more than a bit embarrassing then and now. Horokova is just doing that thing that many Trek superfans do--mythologizing the "Star Trek universe" as a cohesive thing, set around pre-conceived notions (Good Guy Kirk, Who Never CANONICALLY did anything untoward with the help) instead of looking at it critically on even the most basic level (A show in the 60's that had cheesecake). This eventually gets warped into "Kirk was never rash!" and other weird takeaways that come across as someone who's watching the show to identify inconsistencies in set dressings from show to show and is now lost in the weeds for fear of finding a tree. Like: quote:Let’s start, as people so often do, with those infamous Green Women. I mean, jesus. You'd think there were never green stripper women at all. Let's start, as people so often do, with the first interracial kiss. Yes: They were mind-controlled [1], so it doesn't count [2], and anyway there were previous interracial kisses [3], on shows no one remembers [4][5][6]. There was no on-screen coitus either [7] and to read into anything ever here is dangerous [8][9]. Moving onto things that MATTER...
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Mar 8, 2018 00:33
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Actually,
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Mar 8, 2018 00:38
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I did not expect to see this, but Jason Isaacs (Lorca from Discovery, for those that didn't watch), is headlining the Star Trek Cruise for 2019. I never would have thought he would sign up for that kind of thing. http://www.ign.com/articles/2018/03/07/discoverys-jason-isaacs-to-headline-next-years-star-trek-the-cruise-iii
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Mar 8, 2018 01:07
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FlamingLiberal posted:I did not expect to see this, but Jason Isaacs (Lorca from Discovery, for those that didn't watch), is headlining the Star Trek Cruise for 2019. I never would have thought he would sign up for that kind of thing. he isn't the twitter troll we asked for, but he just might be the twitter troll we need.
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Mar 8, 2018 01:33
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Jason Isaacs doesn't need a meal ticket, does he?
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Mar 8, 2018 01:37
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Isaacs just wants the chance to troll his twitter followers in real life
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Mar 8, 2018 01:46
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You don't need a meal ticket to accept one.
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Mar 8, 2018 01:51
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In my watch of season two episodes I had missed there were two nearly in a row (Who Mourns for Adonis and The Apple) where Kirk got pissed off at one of his officers for being horny on the clock which I thought was funny compared to his public perception
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Mar 8, 2018 02:47
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Kirk's "ladies' man" reputation is a bit overstated but I'd never write a drat essay about it, geez. Stuff tends to get exaggerated and oversimplified over time, that's about all you need to know.
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Mar 8, 2018 02:54
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Who is the wokest star trek character?
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Mar 8, 2018 03:12
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Arglebargle III posted:Who is the wokest star trek character? As the STD thread has been discussing, undoubtedly Benjamin Sisko. Watch Far Beyond the Stars and Past Tense if you have any questions as to why.
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Mar 8, 2018 03:15
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Arglebargle III posted:Who is the wokest star trek character? Dukat. He acknowledges his privilege and wants to open a real, honest dialog with the Bajorans and their labia.
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Mar 8, 2018 03:23
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I think a lot of the "ladies man" persona basically came from interpreting the camera as Kirk's PoV. We got greeted with a lot of Vaseline lens, soft lighting, slow motion, playful music introductions of beautiful women over the years in TOS and I think that got embedded in the public consciousness as how Kirk sees these women.
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Mar 8, 2018 03:33
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Arglebargle III posted:Jason Isaacs doesn't need a meal ticket, does he? "You're going to pay me to gently caress with nerds on a boat for a week?"
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Mar 8, 2018 03:34
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Cythereal posted:As the STD thread has been discussing, undoubtedly Benjamin Sisko. Watch Far Beyond the Stars and Past Tense if you have any questions as to why. He also absolutely refused to go to Vic's for a long time because of how African-Americans were treated in the time period it depicted.
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Mar 8, 2018 03:35
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Arglebargle III posted:Who is the wokest star trek character?
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Mar 8, 2018 03:52
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I am getting the sense that Roddenberry doesn’t like Irish folk
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Mar 8, 2018 04:03
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Windows 98 posted:I am getting the sense that Roddenberry doesn’t like Irish folk I have to wonder what Colm Meaney thought filming that episode. e: wait youre the one watching TOS, never mind
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Mar 8, 2018 04:07
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Arglebargle III posted:Who is the wokest star trek character? My wife says The Grand Nagus.
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Mar 8, 2018 05:57
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Ok I just finished watching TOS. Not bad, but after a while it felt like the episodes all blended together in my brain. 75% of all episodes felt like an all powerful being or garden of eden episode. The more unique episodes were definitely really enjoyable though. Pros: Hot space babes Cons: Repetitive Now on to DS9
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Mar 8, 2018 06:04
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Spoeank posted:He also absolutely refused to go to Vic's for a long time because of how African-Americans were treated in the time period it depicted. Which was kinda ironic, as the Vegas casinos were about the first places in America to broadly be desegregated, after an agreement in 1960. (The rat pack is heavily credited for a lot of this, as they boycotted any casino that segregated) MikeJF fucked around with this message at 06:16 on Mar 8, 2018 |
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Mar 8, 2018 06:12
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Kirk is a terrible character, at least in the first season or two of TOS. He is essentially a Mary Sue for Roddenberry: a military man, but for a morally unimpeachable military. Irresistible to women, he’s handsome and strong, but also scholarly and wise. Characters repeatedly have conversations about how great he is. Unfortunately, all this combined with Shatner’s one-of-kind presence means Kirk comes off as a deeply unlikeable, smug wanker. No wonder fans flocked to Spock. They temper him a little as the show goes on, mainly by having plots focus on other characters. The films (at least from TWOK on) are about the long-term consequences of Kirk’s hubris, while he’s finally gained a little humility with age. Oh, and I’m late to the discussion on this but The Greatest Generation: DS9 is fine? They’re a little down on the show, but that’s because they’ve had to slog through a dozen episodes so boring that Move Along Home is a highlight. But they loved Duet, they like “Vedek” Winn, and are skeptics on Bareil, how more correct opinions do you want on DS9 at this point in the show?
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Mar 8, 2018 07:19
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I don't agree with that assessment at all. Kirk is not a Mary Sue by any stretch; he's repeatedly shown to sometimes fly off the handle before he has all the facts. Errand of Mercy and Arena are two episodes off the top of my head where this is true. A case could also be made for Where No Man Has Gone Before, since Kirk is so wrapped up in his feelings for his friend that he almost doesn't act to save the ship until it's too late. TOS' strength is the fact that it has the courage to not show its main characters as unquestionably perfect, but willing to learn from their mistakes so that they can grow.
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Mar 8, 2018 07:27
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skasion posted:I think that probably the biggest explanation for this phenomenon, which I don’t think the article touched on, is the TOS movies, which feature a major plot arc about Kirk rebelling against Starfleet and generally being maverickish. The fact that this is the character’s midlife crisis after a pretty exemplary career is ignored. That's a pretty good observation. Also in the movies is the whole deal with him cheating on the Kobayashi Maru. The current interpretation (largely via JJ Trek) seems to be that he cheated because of some supposed devil-may-care, regulation-flauting attitude when it probably had more to do with a simple, stubborn unwillingness to give up against any odds, consistent with that tight-rear end striving cadet Kirk that gets described in TOS.
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Mar 8, 2018 08:57
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It was Picard who was all "gently caress you, I have one life, might as well live it!" as a cadet, anyway. Kirk was too busy studying like a huge nerd, he didn't have the time to get stabbed in the heart by a biker. loving nerd.
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Mar 8, 2018 12:39
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Windows 98 posted:I am getting the sense that Roddenberry doesn’t like Irish folk Yup it comes up strangely often. Though I think Voyager's stupid Irish holodeck town was the worst insult of all. (Was it Irish? Can't remember) Windows 98 posted:Ok I just finished watching TOS. Not bad, but after a while it felt like the episodes all blended together in my brain. 75% of all episodes felt like an all powerful being or garden of eden episode. The more unique episodes were definitely really enjoyable though. Same.
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Mar 8, 2018 12:54
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Never forget that Gene’s “waves and waves of cum” rant was all said in a faux-Irish accent
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Mar 8, 2018 13:56
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F_Shit_Fitzgerald posted:I don't agree with that assessment at all. Kirk is not a Mary Sue by any stretch; he's repeatedly shown to sometimes fly off the handle before he has all the facts. He also gets beat up all the drat time and sulkily follows bad orders like a teenager when he's outranked
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Mar 8, 2018 15:00
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is ds9 worth watching once i finish tng?
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Mar 8, 2018 15:14
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So a week or so ago I finally started watching Enterprise, as that's literally the only ST series I haven't watched AT ALL yet (yes, I've finished TAS). It's... something. I'm on season 2 episode.. something, I don't remember. I think the last episode I watched was the one where Hoshi is in the transporter buffer for 8 seconds but somehow for her it's a whole episodes worth of dealing with her insecurity issues or something. It wasn't very good or memorable, but I guess at least Hoshi is cute. I think I kind of like it so far? I have a lot of complaints, but it doesn't actively make me want to turn it off in disgust. I think I've enjoyed season 1 more than I have season 2 so far, but I couldn't really tell you why. I think their piddly little torpedoes are ridiculous and stupid and I'm glad they at least get some phase cannons relatively quickly. I understand what they were trying to do with it but I just think it looks so janky and dumb. Everytime I see one of their little torpedoes fly out I'm imagining a fart sound accompanying it. I'm currently still intrigued by the temporal cold war storyline and I thought the two parter season finale/starter for season 1/2 was pretty engaging. The Suliban are kind of ridiculous as well though. Silik being so extremely dependant and desperate to contact his little future man really kind of ruined him for me. He wants instructions and I understand that, and he's probably also scared of punishment, but jesus... it was like some 16 year old begging his ex to give him another chance. They at least seemed to be a little more self sufficient than that before this episode. And then Archer takes him as a hostage and leaves him? They still have his ship tho so I guess they just dumped him out into space figuring that his Suliban homies would come by at some point and pick him up? Why even leave him in the first place? You probably could've gotten some INSANELY good information out of him. Yeah yeah it's not standard procedure or whatever bullshit excuse Archer gives when contacting Enterprise but who the gently caress cares? Certainly nobody on the NX-01 should because they don't give a crap about anything else. Piss off some aliens? Sure! Visit a couple pre-warp civilizations with really crappy make up and then also conveniently forget your high tech gadget on the planet? Sure! Take an extremely high value prisoner of war who has tried killing you/your crew multiple times to gather information about something you'll undoubtedly run into again in the future? No can do sir, that would be against our morals! What a load of crap. Also Phlox has the creepiest smile in the history of creepy smiles, but he's grown on me a bit. I'm really not sure what it is about him, but I find him unsettling and weird. A lot of it comes down to his behaviour and how he speaks. He kinda makes me think "Vulcan, but with a creepy smile" sometimes and I have no idea if that was intentional.
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Mar 8, 2018 15:18
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underage at the vape shop posted:is ds9 worth watching once i finish tng? If you ever get anything out of this thread it should be that the answer to that question is gently caress yes
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Mar 8, 2018 15:24
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