fandomsecrets | [ SECRET POST #2776 ]

[ SECRET POST #2776 ]

⌈ Secret Post #2776 ⌋

Warning: Some secrets are NOT worksafe and may contain SPOILERS.

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Notes:

Secrets Left to Post: 04 pages, 085 secrets from Secret Submission Post #397.
Secrets Not Posted: [ 0 - broken links ], [ 1 - not!secrets ], [ 0 - not!fandom ], [ 0 - too big ], [ 0 - repeat ].
Current Secret Submissions Post: here.
Suggestions, comments, and concerns should go here.

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For me, it's not so much that the destruction of the Kelvin is a direct line to Spock having different characterization. But who was on the Kelvin who may have interacted with him or his parents, perhaps even in subtle ways, that affected his thinking or personality. Maybe even someone he would have served with at the start of his Starfleet career. What did the Kelvin discover, what aspects of their mission that never happened might have informed Spock or his parents in some way? His character changes were the most fascinating for me. I love seeing the other side of the coin. Instead of having a Spock who is so entrenched (at first at least) in that shame you mention, we've got one who is willing to embrace the human part of himself much earlier.

I think I see TOS McCoy very differently from you. He's a very funny guy; it's deadpan, but it's funny.

I think this is just YMMV stuff. Because for me, what I would have really intensely disliked is a group of young actors trying to be *exactly like* their original iterations. They would invariably have failed, and it would have been extremely annoying.

I'm also one of those people who hates note-for-note song covers, though. I believe if you're going to cover a song, you oughta do something different with it. If that makes sense.

But NONE of that is addressed in the film. There's no suggestion ever made that Spock's parents may have known someone on the Kelvin or that Spock spent time on Earth and gained a different perspective.

Instead, the audience is just supposed to buy that a crucial and central part of Spock's character is suddenly gone because…REASONS!

Spock's shame for his emotions is centrally tied to the bullying and discrimination he experienced growing up on Vulcan -- both of which are the only things about him we're shown before the romance is revealed. He shuts down his emotions and is ashamed because he's desperately trying to be the "perfect" Vulcan to prove those who disparaged him wrong. He's overcompensating and it took DECADES for him in TOS to address this. To make such a huge change to his character in the reboots and not address WHY it happened is, to me, OOC and it is not honoring what the character of Spock means.

And, to be honest, it just feels like they put the romance in for cheap shock value. Which is why there's no real buildup to it at all.

I'm not asking that the young actors be exactly the same -- I'm asking that they stay true to the characters and, when they diverge, for there to be a reason WHY.

Having Kirk insult Spock over his heritage when he's explicitly shown not to tolerate bigotry in TOS pisses me off, especially.

You can do something different, but it has to make sense and be true to the original as well.

Otherwise, why reboot the work in the first place? Why not just make up completely new characters in a completely new setting?

I completely agree with you that I'd like for those reasons to be articulated more clearly. I really, really love what fandom has done in exploring how the roads have forked.

I'm sorry you weren't able to enjoy the movies. :(

I'm glad you liked them. I'm not saying your reasons for liking it are illegitimate or anything.

It's just that these things about the characters are really important to me and I'm not against changing them up, but I feel the writers needed to spend a lot more time fleshing them out and developing them for it to work.

But I do agree with you that I love what the fandom has done in exploring the differences and meanings. The aftermath of Vulcan's destruction was terribly handled in canon (in my opinion) but there's a ton of great fan fictions that address it.

Oh no. I didn't take it that way at all. :)

And I think that you're making some legitimate points. There should have been more fleshing out of a lot of things and reasons given for divergence.

da
I'm also one of those people who hates note-for-note song covers, though. I believe if you're going to cover a song, you oughta do something different with it. If that makes sense.
I don't dislike the reboot movies because they're not exactly the same as the original (I also hate note-for-note covers), but because Abrams' own take of the characters is pretty much making them angry, reckless, and unlikable. And he does do the note-for-note thing. The audience is just supposed to buy that Kirk and Spock are best friends, solely because they were best friends in the original series. Abrams did nothing to build their friendship up.
I enjoy the reboot movies. But the only compliment you can give them is that they're fun. There's nothing else to them. So I get why fans hate them.

I think I see the evolution of their friendship a little differently. They weren't friends in the first movie but respect each other by the end. I don't think they're friends in the beginning of the second movie, but I think Kirk wants to be, and I think that by the movie's end, they are. It doesn't feel like there's no build-up to me because there's been a passage of time between the first movie and the second.

But again, YMMV. :)

I agree there is a buildup of their friendship, but Abrams basically copies iconic Kirk and Spock friendship moments from the original canon (the 'dying in the engine room' scene comes to mind), and expects them to hold similar emotional weight? It's just bad writing on his part.

Ironically, I found that doing this kind of ramped up the "Spirkishness" of the reboots WAY more quickly.

Because I kept thinking, WHY is Spock so emotionally affected? And the answer I came up with was that it's because he's realized he's in love with Kirk at the moment that Kirk is dying.

Which TOTALLY ISN'T what the director/writers were going for, but that's how it comes off to me.

This is pretty much what I thought too.

With added headcanon that the mind meld from Spock!Prime showed Kirk the epic love of Kirk/Spock in the original verse and so colored his perception/expectation for his relationship with Spock in the AU.

You have a point. ;) But see, 'reading between the lines' and personal interpretation is required to give that scene its due emotional levity.

And maybe that's the difference in how we viewed the movie. Because even on the first watch, I've got in the back of mind that even though we don't know them, there are reasons why the characterization is different and etc. I think I'm reading between the lines for a lot of it.

Here's my take on it C&Ped from my movie review:

Of course, the biggest throwback to the original series is Kirk’s death scene. I honestly would have paid full price for a two hour loop of that handful of minutes because it hits every single emotional and intellectual kink I have ever had for those two characters. I love that the scene used lines of original dialogue without going overboard with it (although I think I totally could have done without Spock screaming Khan’s name LOL). I love that their roles were inverted. I love Kirk’s admission of fear, their hands pressed together with the glass between them, Spock getting choked up. OMG I AM MAKING MYSELF CRY TYPING THIS BECAUSE IT WAS PRETTY MUCH A PERFECT SCENE! That moment feels like the culmination of the disciplinary hearing scene at the beginning of the first movie—the one where Spock can so nonchalantly lecture Kirk about choosing between terrible options and accepting death and facing fear because he’s never been in that situation himself. It remains an intellectual exercise for him at that point. As Kirk is dying, Spock has to actually grapple with what it means to lose a friend, to be completely impotent, to be filled with righteous indignation and a driving need for justice. Conversely, Kirk is put in the same position as his father; he has to sacrifice himself in order to save his crew (his family, his friends). This is the Kobayashi Maru without a computer hack. This is Kirk’s realization that a captain sometimes only has really shitty options to choose from. Luck runs out; the stars don’t always align. Sometimes somebody has to die, and Kirk would so much rather the sacrifice be his than anyone else’s. SERIOUSLY, I NEED A TISSUE BADLY OMG!

For me, outside of the Khan scream, it did resonate emotionally and not just because of the call-back to TOS. It felt like character growth for both of them.

Also, I like the idea that even though this is an AU, some things still have to happen, like places where the threads of fate still interweave in the same way even though the big picture of the tapestry has changed.

Anyways, not saying you're wrong, Nonny. Most of my friends also really hated this movie LOL and I think there are valid criticisms to be made of the movies.

The Spirk factor was actually one thing I did like because, well, it's always nice to see characters stop being at each other's throats when they're supposed to be friends. I thought the scene worked as well (minus the Khan scream) but it was just HORRIDLY undercut by how blatantly obvious it was that Kirk wasn't going to stay dead. The tribble telegraphed the ending so that, while I agree with a lot of what you wrote, the impact just wasn't there nearly as much because I could already see what was coming.

The "a captain cannot cheat death" line would have meant so much more if we didn't know that Kirk was going to do exactly that in ten minutes. Once again, the rules don't apply to him.

I think I'm okay with that because it's a call-back to the original canon for me. I mean, Spock puts his consciousness in McCoy and gets to be reborn! I think cheating death is kinda par for the course in the franchise. Except for Jadzia Dax, which I find to be a criminal exception.

/bitter bitter bitter Jadzia stan rage

That's cool. :)

See, I don't mind that they brought Kirk back (I can't really hold it against them considering the same thing was done with Spock). I just wish they had been more…subtle about it, you know? After Vulcan's destruction, there was a real potential that people would believe Kirk might actually kick the bucket and it would have tremendously increased the emotional resonance of that scene.

I get that they didn't want his revival to come across as an asspull, but I think they overshot and just made it way, way too obvious.

*nods nods*

I think most times when you've got a movie adaptation of an established source material, that it's hard to generate real "OMG hero in peril that might actually result in death!" moments because you know there's more material left to film. LOL

Like in the Iron Man movies. It doesnt' matter how much danger Tony is in, you know he's not going to die.

I think that moment with Kirk suffers for the same reason. You know they're not gonna kill Kirk for reals.

B-but the fans watching Khan didn't know that Spock would be brought back to life. It took like two years until the next movie for it to happen, and Spock didn't get brought back without extreme potential repercussions for everyone, especially McCoy.
One is far better storytelling than the other.

OMG, I remember my mom talking about how upset she was after Wrath of Khan, especially since Nimoy had done some flouncing and it was unclear whether or not he wanted to continue being associated with the franchise. It was definitely unclear whether or not he'd stay dead back in '82 and that must have been heart breaking. My first theater movie was Search for Spock, so I missed out on that angst.

However, I'd argue that there isn't a way to generate a real sense that Kirk might die in the movie. TOS is the Kirk, Spock, McCoy show and they're not going to kill one of them two movies in. Final movie of the franchise? Sure (*sob sob Data*) but not two movies into something they clearly aren't done with. I don't think they could have done anything that would make me think he was actually going to for reals yo die and stay dead in the movie. so that moment wasn't about whether or not he was going to die but how he and Spock reacting to *thinking* he was going to die/stay dead. Does that make sense?

DA

I agree with you. Other than the KHAAAAAAN scream which totally took me out of the scene, I really liked it for all the reasons you've mentioned.

Ok, I do see where you're coming from. I guess for me the 'hand touching through the glass' just did not hold the same emotional levity as it did in Khan, and because it's pretty much the same scene copied, I couldn't help compare the two when I watched it(selling it short for me in STID). And I don't even ship Kirk and Spock!
To me, the reboot movies just felt so shallow, and personal 'between the lines' readings of characters actions are required to make it less so - and honestly, I can't be bothered.
Of course, you're allowed to like the reboot movies and be a TOS fan. I just think there are very legit reasons why a lot of TOS fans hate them.

And I get why it doesn't work for a lot of people. :)

I think the reboot movies are slicker and faster paced and rely on knowledge of the original series and the expectation that your emotions from the original series will carry over into the reboot.

I think that TOS benefits from having several seasons of TV show plus six movies plus cameos in other franchises to develop its characters and that the reboot movie is probably going to look thin and superficial next to those decades of history no matter what it did. However, I completely agree that more character motivation/development would have been a good thing.

Also, thank you and the other nonnies for actually really hashing this out with me. It's nice to get a good meaty convo going. :)

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[ SECRET POST #2776 ]

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