Canon fodder (updated)

One of my favorite ongoing debates within slash is whether K/S is “canon” or not. There seems to be a real desire among some slashers (neatly summed up in the image above) for Kirk and Spock’s romantic relationship to be read as part of Star Trek canon: an immutable, irrefutable “fact” about the ST universe, like dilithium crystals or McCoy’s Southern accent.

Dude!–this argument goes–it’s clearly evident in the text (of canon) that Kirk and Spock totally love each other and/or totally had a complicated and acrobatic sexual relationship. On the one hand, then, K/S is already canon in these slashers’ minds; on the other, only Paramount (who still owns ST, right?) can make K/S “official” (and thus legitimate? Easier to talk about with friends and family? Facilitating slashers’ ability to come out of the textual/sexual closet, as it were? I don’t know).

This desire is complicated, I think, by the presence of Star Trek (2009), which reboots Kirk and Spock and makes an overt case for Spock’s heterosexuality (or penchant for humans, depending upon your perspective). However, the movie also recognizes the most important material object of the original Star Trek–Spock’s body–and carefully retains and protects that object and transports it safely to the new 23rd century. (I went on about Spock’s body-as-object in an earlier post here.)

[The question of K/S in the 2009 new-verse is an interesting one that I need to work with further–as a researcher. As a reader, I don’t buy 2009 K/S, but that’s a long story that has as much to do with where I went to college as my opinions on the film.]

Slash is the sugar that helps ST: TMP go down

So I watched Star Trek: The “Motion” Picture last night at an outdoor showing with 100+ of my fellow ST dorks. Watching it for the umpteenth time didn’t change my basic take on TMP: it’s not a good, entertaining, or even particularly smart film (sorry, ADF, but you’ve done better). It’s tedious, repetitive, and really fucking dull. Also? Everyone in Starfleet other than the Enterprise and her crew are apparently morons who just stare at alien probes as they absorb Klingon birds-of-prey and show no sense of urgency in letting Earth know that they’re about to be attacked yet AGAIN by some alien killing machine that’s wandering lonely as a cloud.

[Look, at least the Federation *tries* to do something about the whale Probe in ST: TVH–they have a command center and everything! Here, nada. It makes me wonder what Starfleet would have done if Kirk hadn’t “volunteered” (i.e. demanded) to take back the Enterprise. Would they have let Will “don’t call me Riker” Decker and co. try to face it? Yikes–I hope Vulcan was ready to become the “capital” of the Federation because Section 001 would have been a pile of angst-y, air-brushed ash.]

But–