A post in which reason gives way to rant

In quite a few of the K/S stories that I’ve read, the day after always begins with disorientation. James or Spock awakens in the other’s bed, and there’s a moment of dizzying uncertainty–they aren’t sure if the night of wild sex they remember really happened, or if it was just a beautiful, vivid dream. Usually, it takes only a touch or a kiss from the other to bring Spock or Jim crashing back to earth, to the happy reality of what they’ve done.

I wonder if I’ll have a similar sense of disorientation tomorrow. My thoughts here seem reasonable now–but I wonder what I’ll wake up with in the morning. This began as a semi-reasoned attempt to further explore the feminism/slash parallels that I’ve been working with–and ended as an angry rant worthy of a royally pissed Leonard McCoy.

At least I can’t type in a southern accent.

Refusing to Cede the Narrative

One of the things I find so fascinating and effective about slash is its ability as a genre to locate and address absences within canon and fanon. Certainly, lots of fanfic (I nearly wrote “manfic”–oh dear) does this as well, but what I think is unique about slash is that it has an agenda–slashers go in looking for absences to fill in in a very specific way (ahem).

The slash that I’ve found most effective are those stories that are able to rush into a gap and build the K/S relationship within it. What I find interesting is that there is a menu of narrative gaps in canon/fanon into which slashers have a tendency to rush: the “lost years” between the end of the Enterprise‘s first five-year mission and the beginning of ST: TMP, for example, or the quick and (for slashers) unsatisfying ending of the TOS episode “Amok Time.”

Praise the joH’a’ and pass the Romulan ale

Two things that bug me about ST VI: The Undiscovered Country:

1) Uhura doesn’t speak Klingon?! Bullshit!

2) Uh, Spock? That whole forced-mind-meld thingy you did to Valaris? Dude, you know that’s considered rape on Vulcan, right? It’s no good pleading ignorance–it’s not my fault you haven’t read the fan fic. But trust me on this–you’re good for 5 years on a rehabilitation colony. Hope you like psychotropic barcaloungers, my friend!