throbbing light machine

I'm just setting sail into Star Trek Discovery -- the reveal about Michelle Yeoh's role in the later part of the first season brought back all the interest I'd originally had in the show with a vengeance! 1 episode in, Michael Burnham/Phillippa Georgiou does appear to be a lovely potential femslash ship, so: I am engaged. Also was interested in the setup of Burnham v. Klingons, and her distinction between prejudice and preparation based on knowledge of culture; potentially a good intervention into the weird identity swing of Klingons between TOS's powerful cod-Russian adversaries and TNG's misunderstood cod-colonialized or Af-Am Klingons?

In the last few weeks, though, I've spent most of my headtime in Westmark. I bought the series for D. for his birthday last September; Prydain was a shared fandom of ours in grade school, and I didn't think he'd made it that far into the odder Alexanders; it felt like a proper place to begin, as an adult reader. I don't know that I realized how much we would both end up relying on the books for a language to talk about politics, power, resistance, grey areas, in this the Age of Trump. We've been reading them out loud; we're nearly done with The Beggar Queen now, after a weekend of furious page-turning. It's been badly needed catharsis; just enough escapism to help, but connected to reality in a way that I'm currently finding necessary, and all of it in an authorial voice that we've both had tagged as "safe" since childhood.

Been jamming on Laura Mvula's music the last month.

anghraine tagged me on tumblr - fifteen things that are making me happy right now:
1. winter is far from over; I have a solid three months of snow left to look forward to
2. the myth-type of Persephone, the rape victim married to her rapist, given a cold power by her trauma and her survival but also fundamentally connected with the renewal of spring. she gets stronger and more dangerous by breaking, and i'm connecting with that
3. soft-aesthetic photos of black men with flowerbeards
4. Jim Kirk's face
5. Lip Gallagher's face
6. Mandy Milkovich's dyejob - so cute! and Debbie's haircut
7. I got to see my best friend and not!sister this week when she came home for her mother's 60th birthday
8. I'm no longer involved in any way shape or form with my ex's endless hopeless drama
9. Jim Kirk genderswaps
10. William Shatner genderswapped is kind of what I look like, except for the eye color
11. Marvel 616 Civil War fix-it fic
12. Cara Loup recently uploaded a bunch of her zine-era Han/Luke to the AO3, and it's glorious - and also imo it's cool to spend time in a SW universe where the PT hadn't been made yet and see what people were doing.
13. Anna (starry_diadem) is publishing some of her amazing Battlestar Galactica 1978 fic as with the serial numbers filed off; her worldbuilding work is tremendous, and also I tracked her down a few years ago after a long break from the fandom by recognizing her very distinctive use of the word "gauche" in fic even after she'd changed pseuds, of which I am unreasonably proud.
14. the water-soluble wax pastels are awesome for coloring my mandalas
15. girl you know i listened to the ESB radio serial again the other night and it is some hot shit; no one else can act at all, but Mark Hamill is there, and he goes pretty hard. the exaggerated-noises style that radio dramas always do work really nicely with the film's plotlines; lots of moaning and heavy breathing and whimpering from Luke, it's all very exciting. also they do the Hoth scene that fanwriters always tackle, with Han and Luke overnight in the shelter. they found the worst voice in the world for Vader tho, which is kind of a problem

four things make a post:

- I love reading oldschool XF MSR work, because of how transparently women's wish-fulfillment it so often is - because there's some whole additional level of hot in knowing that you're reading the work of a powerful independent creative thoughtful woman theorizing her own revolutionary empowered sexuality via media interpretation, laid on top of the ordinary pleasure of the text.

- It consistently wrongfoots me that The X-Files, while a show about aliens and the search for extraterrestrial life, is not about first contact in the trekkie sort of way; not about xenopolitics, strange ways of being, the wonder of the encounter with true vital difference. I keep wanting to know about Reticulan attitudes toward fetal life, their reproductive politics. Or their perspective on contact with our, to them alien, world and worldview - do they have a Prime Directive? but the show isn't doing that, isn't about that.

- As charming as the magical realism of "The Rain King" may be, the episode is guilty of NiceGuyism and romanticization of coerced consent.

- Now that I think about it, nu!Trek isn't about first contact in the same way that classic Trek was; nu!Starfleet is presented imo as pretty much always already integrated, although of course actual on-screen representations skews heavily white-dude-wards. But, like, we've known the Vulcans for a long time in that verse; the presence of multiplanetary life forms clearly borders on the passe there. Contrast with TOS, where yes we've made a few interplanetary contacts but closer alliances are only just beginning to form, where Spock serving as first officer on a Federation ship alongside humans actually seems to be something of an anomaly - which, it would have to be, considering that none of the Federation people know about the existence of pon farr. TOS McCoy is constantly having to theorize alien physiology on the fly, because while they're a United Federation of Planets in name, these people are only beginning to really enter into the interplanetary field. I wonder what that shift is about - does more racial integration erase the primacy of the fantasy of difference? and does that erasure benefit or harm goals toward infinite diversity in infinite combinations?

Needle and scissor, scissor and pin (277 words) by lotesse
Chapters: 1/1
Fandom: Star Trek, Star Trek: The Original Series
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Characters: James T. Kirk, Spock, Leonard McCoy
Additional Tags: Stitches, Shore Leave, Spock POV
Summary: Probably needles and sutures. All the pain. They used to hand-cut and sew people like garments. Needles and sutures.

because all I want is a tall ship and a star to steer her by, when you get right down to it :)

( chatter about Star Trek Voyager and the Prime Directive )

( chatter about Battlestar Galactica 1978 )

link of interest: the Hathor Legacy does the full-length version of the Star Trek Into Darkness takedown, and I do mean full-length.

mecurtin just wrote pretty much the definitive "Star Trek in the Twenty-First Century" post, Star Trek Could Use A Hard Reboot (pull quote: The thing about ST:TOS that you whippersnappers may not realize is that it was both radical and transformative. I can talk for hours about Gene Roddenberry's many faults, but he actually had a political vision with Star Trek. He wanted to show a universe -- a future -- in which peace, diversity, and rationality are not only desirable, they are *possible*, we *can* get there from here). She's on fire.

eta: relinked to her public posting at Obsidian Wings, rather than her locked journal entry.

(anyway, I owe mecurtin a huge debt of gratitude for her work on the Foresmutters Project back when, which gave us the ability to read Leslie Fish K/S online, and thus made my life infinitely richer. I super love early K/S because of how creative everyone gets with genitals; there's so much deeply nonheteronormative sex going on, with Fish's floral-metaphor tentacles being a case in point. Not only is it early m/m, it's often actively transcending that label by redefining biological sex.)

I've been really rubbish crazy this week - changed the dosage of my antidepressant and it doesn't seem to be agreeing with me, to the degree that I'm wondering if the lower dose I was taking all last spring wasn't also messing with me, just more subtly. Lord knows it was not a great spring. I have an appointment Monday, so right now I'm just kind of trying to hang tight and get through and working assiduously to distract myself through the consumption of narrative media. I read the first 160 pages of Dan Simmons' The Terror, because musesfool recently mentioned it, and the idea of a supernatural monster story about the (still living! but only just barely!) hand of Franklin reaching for the Beaufort Sea sounded too good to pass up. It is so far eminently readable, although the pastiche style badly wants to be Patrick O'Brian and just really isn't.

But really the thing that I wanted to post about - I've been casting about for a show to cuddle up with, trying various rewatches. And I just now figured out what I need, and I'm so excited. Ladies and ... ladies, I am now about to embark on my first rewatch of "Star Trek: Voyager" since it first aired when I was nine.

I'm doing a workup of Camille Bacon-Smith's Enterprising Women for school - seriously, would you believe I drew it out of a hat? In a general gender-studies course not otherwise affiliated with fan studies? - but anyway, her interpretation of Della Van Hise's Trek tie-in novel Killing Time is giving me all kinds of happy nostalgia. I need to dig up an unexpurgated copy - the one I had as a kid was bowdlerized, but god I loved it anyway. I actually didn't know at the time that she was fen - I just knew that her book was actually, you know, hot. But it's really the exact kind of AU scenario that's made to make me happy.

I have to say, though - I don't miss the analog days. They were a crap time to be a kid. It wasn't the worst age-based oppression I ever experienced - not being able to vote in 2000 was torturous - but my childish lack of ability to get what I wanted rankled like stinging nettles.

Star Trek: TOS, how are you so good? Like, umpty billion times better than anything else?

... I mean, damn that show knows how to construct kinky costumes on a shoestring budget. And, yanno, groundbreaking sf and some really lovely writing and Nyota Uhura kicking infinite ass and obligatory post-adventure K/S flirting on the bridge, but it's really that blessed gold bolero that leaves me gaping.