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laurashapiro 's post linking to an SF Chronicle piece celebrating not the slashiness but rather the bromance of Kirk and Spock, and it got me thinking.Here's my question:
Did the new movie's Kirk and Spock simply inherit the original series' slashiness as part of Star Trek's DNA, so that they don't even need to generate their own subtext or UST and can just live off of the legacy of the original characters' aura, like the slash pairing version of a trust fund kid?
Or did Chris Pine's Kirk and Zachary Quinto's Spock go out and earn their slashiness the old-fashioned way, refusing to ride on the slashy coattails of Shatner & Nimoy?
Maybe a little of each? Or do you see the slashiness of Pine!Kirk and Quinto!Spock as different than that of Shatner!Kirk and Nimoy!Spock -- a K/S 2.0, maybe?
I'm asking because I can't tell -- I don't actually remember whether there was any dialogue, any moments, any lingering glances or "weird about each other"-ness between Kirk and Spock that an ST:TOS-naive baby slasher or proto-slasher would pick up on if they were discovering slash for the first time.
Though hey, who knows what goes on with kids these days! Maybe slashiness itself is just different now than it was 40 years ago?
Comments
I don't know the first thing about TOS, except what's just defused into in US culture--I came into STXI with high slashy expectations for Kirk/Spock and was very disappointed. Kirk/McCoy and Kirk/Sulu had more going on. Pine!Kirk had a lot of chemistry with everyone, but like the above poster said, they were apart for a lot of it! And the whole Uhura thing. If I ran the world, Chekov would have been a woman and they would have had a 'two smart women on the top of their games' femslashy vibe going on, but alas.
I can't think of a way slashiness would be different in the past.
It's funny how the idea of Kirk and Spock's bond was so central to the plot of the film, but it was mostly a case of telling and not showing via Spock Prime.
I was saying in the comments to the LJ cross-post that I'd always gotten the impression that the Captain/First Officer dynamic really defined the classic Kirk-Spock relationship, both in canon and as K/S. But in STXI, they hadn't settled into those roles yet. It'll be interesting to see whether the next movie jumps forward a couple of years, or picks up where this one leaves off and continues the "early adventures" mode. Either way, they'd better bring in more female roles, now that they've reintroduced the original crew.
I have this vague idea that contemporary slash is less subtext-dependent than original flavor -- that it's comfortable embracing all kinds of slash pairing regardless of canon basis. At least, that was my theory: that for modern tastes, STXI don't need to be slashy in the classic sense in order to be slashable, if that makes any sense.
a lot of stuff that stayed hidden in the writer, the text and the culture is now truly discussable. it's on the table.