I’m no longer holding Star Trek or Star Wars “accountable” for their clunky-looking sixties-and-seventies future technology.
Why?
Because the Enterprise is off on a years-long voyage through space. There’s no Verizon store, no Radio Shack, no Geek Squad out there. If the Klingons fire photon torpedoes and the bridge shakes and Spock’s head bangs against the fancy iPad72 touchscreen and cracks the glass, the ship’s toast. If Han Solo’s fingerprints get all over the starchart and the touch-calibration is off by half a centimeter, the Falcon is going right into a star. But if Mister Worf accidentally twists the command knob too hard and pops it off, he can just screw that thing right back on and it will keep working. Dust gets in there? Take it apart and clean it out. All the plugs are big and universal, all the power cells are functional and have a decent battery life, and nothing is built to expire in the next six months so you have to buy a new one.
That tech isn’t anachronistic or suffering a bad case of Zeerust–it’s practical, effective, and it works. Apple tried launching its own space exploration craft, it had to come back for full repairs within three months, and then it had to be upgraded over the next two.
But this? This is just good, long-lasting, fully-functional, and reliable craftsmanship.
The actual real-life space shuttles’ electronics looked pretty much like that for their entire lifespan and this is exactly why.
Oh, wow, sit tight, all of these are entirely predicated on God my life would be easier if I shipped the most popular ship in the fandom.
Charles Xavier/Erik Lensherr: I got committed to the tragic friendship way too young to change my mind, but I have nothing against the ship.
Any configuration at all of Jim Kirk/Spock/Bones McCoy: I just…struggle? I concur that Spock/Kirk is pretty gay in TOS and I want to ship it, and honestly Kirk/Bones should be my exact shit, but I just–look, Kirk is too in love with the Enterprise for anyone else to have a claim.
Buffy Summers/Spike: nope, nope, nope, nope, can’t do it. Too rapey, too much sexual assault, even if I didn’t like Angel I wouldn’t be able to handle it.
Doc Holliday/Wynonna Earp: the show clearly really wants me to care about that pairing and like…I guess there’s nothing wrong with it, but I raise you Doc Holliday/Wyatt Earp and Wynonna/Dolls because Dolls is wonderful and Doc is so blindingly obviously in love with Wyatt and trying to work his issues out by fucking Wynonna, which, no judgement, because Wynonna is clearly trying to work out her own adequacy issues by fucking Doc.
Draco Malfoy/Harry Potter: I want to ship it just so I could stop feeling this level of seething wrath about it, I feel similarly about almost EVERY ship that the HP fandom likes, including literally anything that includes Severus Snape.
F: What’s the longest you’ve ever been in a fandom? What fandom was it?
I mean…I was a late-comer to the concept of internet fandom (the last…four or five years?) because of various reasons, but I’ve been a devoted consumer of any X-Men content I could afford to get my hands on since I was 7 and I’ve been collecting Animorphs books about as long, so there’s those.
Usually Bones is so casual when he’s off duty that people on board can forget that he knows all their personal information. Not that he’d ever misuse it. But one night everyone was very drunk, amd Jim was insisting that Bones couldn’t possibly remember who on board has an appendix. So everyone lined up and Bones walked down the aisle. Yes. Yes. No. No. Yes. Yes. No. Yes. No. No. No. You’re species doesn’t have one. Yes. Yes.
100% correct.
This might be my new favorite headcanon.
^^accepted lolol
“And you, your liver’s funny lookin’.”
“And you’re missing 3 cm’s of duodenum.”
“Two plates in the left femur.”
“Regenerated kidneys.”
“And if I ever have to see the inside of your peritoneum again, Riley, I’m gonna hand in my papers.”
I’m cackling so hard at the last one!
Everyone has something anatomically or medically weird with them, and some are more obvious than others.
I can see him making his way down the line:
“Horseshoe kidney.”
“Perforated left tympanum at the age of seven.”
“Missing the nail on your right hallux because it just would not stop ingrowing.”
Headcanon meme. Bones is my one true saltmate, okay, it’s
like a soulmate but with bitterness about the world. Also, this is a little bit gonna be the Jim
& Bones Friendship Hour.
A: what I think realistically
Bones actually has a very real phobia of
space. Like, he manages it. He does a good job managing it. But.
Listen.
In order to successfully graduate
Starfleet Academy, every student must take and pass a shuttle piloting class. In case of emergency. Pass proficiently,
not just scrape by on a wing and a prayer.
Bones fails twice and scrapes that pass the third time and honestly he’s
thinking about just giving up. He knows
all the settings and controls—Jim drilled him silly after that first fail—but getting
into the simulator and seeing all that black, and the pressure, he just. He locks
up. It’s all he can do to control his
breathing, never mind controlling the shuttle.
He can’t go back to Georgia and he can’t do this and where does that leave him?
Jim finds Bones in a tiny-ass little bar
the day before his fourth retest date and drags him protesting out the door,
about eight whiskeys down, and bundles him into bed and listens to him mumble
about how he’s never going to pass and he’s never going to graduate and
honestly fucking good because space
is the worst and Jim’s crazy for wanting to go there but also Jim’s going to go
into space without him and Bones
doesn’t have anywhere else to go and it’s all just really awful, you know what
I mean, Jimmy?
“Sure, buddy,” Jim says, propping Bones
up and pushing a glass of water into his hands.
“Drink something, okay?”
The next day, at 1500 hours, Bones
stumbles into the simulator room with—well, not the worst hangover of his life, but probably top ten. And lo and fucking behold, instead of the usual gaggle of students looking to (re)test,
there’s James Goddamn Kirk, hands stuffed in his pockets and a sunny-ass smile
on his smart-ass face. James Goddamn
Kirk, who passed his pilot’s test with glowing
scores on the first try.
James Goddamn Kirk, who somehow lied and
cheated his way in here so that he could sit in the simulator while Bones
sweats his way through a passing grade.
It doesn’t cure his phobia, obviously,
but the first time Bones does
actually have to pilot a shuttle, it’s James Goddamn Kirk bleeding out in the copilot’s
seat and Bones barely even notices his heart race.
B: what I think is fucking hilarious
Leonard McCoy, day one of his term at
the Academy as he stumbles, shaking and panting, off the shuttle, swears to himself
that he’s going to pry this blue-eyed limpet off him on the spot and also
sedate anyone who addresses him as Bones.
Day one of his second year at the
Academy, Bones McCoy gets half-tackled by Jim, who’s already talking about this badass new Tactics class they’re
offering, I’m gonna take it and I’m gonna destroy everyone, it’s gonna be
awesome and he has no idea how this happened.
What would have been day one of his
fourth year, Bones is fuck knows how
far into the black of space, listening to his crew tattle on Jim’s delinquent
ass.
“Doc, I don’t think he’s taken an off
shift in, like, a couple days maybe,” Sulu says as he passes through for an
antihistamine.
“I’ll work on it,” Bones says, and jabs
Sulu with a hypo. “Stop poking plants
you don’t recognize.”
“Doctor McCoy, Alpha shift told me to
tell you that the captain forgot to eat today,” Chekov reports, sticking his
head inside. “Can I get another screen?”
“I’ll deal with that,” Bones says, and
waves the kid in. “Stop sleeping with
people you don’t know.”
“Doctor, I would appreciate it if you
intervened in the Captain’s opinion that holodeck safety protocols are
optional,” Spock says evenly as Chapel checks him for broken ribs.
“I’ll do my best,” Bones says, and gives
Spock a bitter wave with the medical tricorder.
“Stop getting in fistfights,
you have a damn phaser.”
“Doctor,” Uhura starts as Bones sprints
past her. “I think the Captain might be
allergic–”
“I’m on my way!” he yells back over his
shoulder. “Stop Spock from causing a
diplomatic incident!”
“Doc,” Scotty starts, leaning into the
medbay and squinting painfully.
“I don’t want to hear it,” Bones snarls,
and gives Scotty a vengeful jab with a hangover hypo (actually a calibrated mix
of thiamine, folic acid, and magnesium sulfate, but listen, it’s a hangover
hypo) as he marches past toward the bridge.
Bones has Regrets.
C: what is heart-crushing and awful but fun to inflict on friends
Bones keeps expecting to get to a point
where he’s…like…past being horrified and shocked when one of the crew rolls in,
near death or already dead.
It wears on his soul like acid, every
time. He decides very early that he’s
going to leave Starfleet when Jim dies. The
longer he spends on the Enterprise, the more names he adds to that list (when
Spock dies, when Uhura dies, when Chekov-Sulu-Scotty dies).
Bones is a doctor, not an
adventurer. He’s not built to outlive
these people. When they are gone, he will never leave orbit again.
D: what would never work with canon but the canon is
shit so I believe it anyway
Read an AU once where Bones was a
humanitarian aid volunteer at like 21/22 who went to Tarsus IV and met furious,
half-starved, 13-year-old, fresh-off-a-genocide JT Kirk and it was my favorite
thing. It was also abandoned after like
two chapters. But like. Any intersection of my infinite feelings
about Tarsus IV and my infinite feelings about Bones & Jim (& Spock)
friendship is My Favorite Thing and I believe in my heart that this is true. Bones didn’t recognize him at the time and it
takes him years to connect the emaciated murderous kid with the electric blue
eyes to his buoyantly brilliant best friend, but he does, eventually. He asks Jim straight up, very late one night,
and they have one single conversation about it before they vow to never discuss
it again.
Anonymous asked: You did Nyota for the headcanon ask meme, can you do Bones?
Headcanon meme. Bones is my one true saltmate, okay, it’s
like a soulmate but with bitterness about the world. Also, this is a little bit gonna be the Jim
& Bones Friendship Hour.
A: what I think realistically
Bones actually has a very real phobia of
space. Like, he manages it. He does a good job managing it. But.
Listen.
In order to successfully graduate
Starfleet Academy, every student must take and pass a shuttle piloting class. In case of emergency. Pass proficiently,
not just scrape by on a wing and a prayer.
Bones fails twice and scrapes that pass the third time and honestly he’s
thinking about just giving up. He knows
all the settings and controls—Jim drilled him silly after that first fail—but getting
into the simulator and seeing all that black, and the pressure, he just. He locks
up. It’s all he can do to control his
breathing, never mind controlling the shuttle.
He can’t go back to Georgia and he can’t do this and where does that leave him?
Jim finds Bones in a tiny-ass little bar
the day before his fourth retest date and drags him protesting out the door,
about eight whiskeys down, and bundles him into bed and listens to him mumble
about how he’s never going to pass and he’s never going to graduate and
honestly fucking good because space
is the worst and Jim’s crazy for wanting to go there but also Jim’s going to go
into space without him and Bones
doesn’t have anywhere else to go and it’s all just really awful, you know what
I mean, Jimmy?
“Sure, buddy,” Jim says, propping Bones
up and pushing a glass of water into his hands.
“Drink something, okay?”
The next day, at 1500 hours, Bones
stumbles into the simulator room with—well, not the worst hangover of his life, but probably top ten. And lo and fucking behold, instead of the usual gaggle of students looking to (re)test,
there’s James Goddamn Kirk, hands stuffed in his pockets and a sunny-ass smile
on his smart-ass face. James Goddamn
Kirk, who passed his pilot’s test with glowing
scores on the first try.
James Goddamn Kirk, who somehow lied and
cheated his way in here so that he could sit in the simulator while Bones
sweats his way through a passing grade.
It doesn’t cure his phobia, obviously,
but the first time Bones does
actually have to pilot a shuttle, it’s James Goddamn Kirk bleeding out in the copilot’s
seat and Bones barely even notices his heart race.
B: what I think is fucking hilarious
Leonard McCoy, day one of his term at
the Academy as he stumbles, shaking and panting, off the shuttle, swears to himself
that he’s going to pry this blue-eyed limpet off him on the spot and also
sedate anyone who addresses him as Bones.
Day one of his second year at the
Academy, Bones McCoy gets half-tackled by Jim, who’s already talking about this badass new Tactics class they’re
offering, I’m gonna take it and I’m gonna destroy everyone, it’s gonna be
awesome and he has no idea how this happened.
What would have been day one of his
fourth year, Bones is fuck knows how
far into the black of space, listening to his crew tattle on Jim’s delinquent
ass.
“Doc, I don’t think he’s taken an off
shift in, like, a couple days maybe,” Sulu says as he passes through for an
antihistamine.
“I’ll work on it,” Bones says, and jabs
Sulu with a hypo. “Stop poking plants
you don’t recognize.”
“Doctor McCoy, Alpha shift told me to
tell you that the captain forgot to eat today,” Chekov reports, sticking his
head inside. “Can I get another screen?”
“I’ll deal with that,” Bones says, and
waves the kid in. “Stop sleeping with
people you don’t know.”
“Doctor, I would appreciate it if you
intervened in the Captain’s opinion that holodeck safety protocols are
optional,” Spock says evenly as Chapel checks him for broken ribs.
“I’ll do my best,” Bones says, and gives
Spock a bitter wave with the medical tricorder.
“Stop getting in fistfights,
you have a damn phaser.”
“Doctor,” Uhura starts as Bones sprints
past her. “I think the Captain might be
allergic–”
“I’m on my way!” he yells back over his
shoulder. “Stop Spock from causing a
diplomatic incident!”
“Doc,” Scotty starts, leaning into the
medbay and squinting painfully.
“I don’t want to hear it,” Bones snarls,
and gives Scotty a vengeful jab with a hangover hypo (actually a calibrated mix
of thiamine, folic acid, and magnesium sulfate, but listen, it’s a hangover
hypo) as he marches past toward the bridge.
Bones has Regrets.
C: what is heart-crushing and awful but fun to inflict on friends
Bones keeps expecting to get to a point
where he’s…like…past being horrified and shocked when one of the crew rolls in,
near death or already dead.
It wears on his soul like acid, every
time. He decides very early that he’s
going to leave Starfleet when Jim dies. The
longer he spends on the Enterprise, the more names he adds to that list (when
Spock dies, when Uhura dies, when Chekov-Sulu-Scotty dies).
Bones is a doctor, not an
adventurer. He’s not built to outlive
these people. When they are gone, he will never leave orbit again.
D: what would never work with canon but the canon is
shit so I believe it anyway
Read an AU once where Bones was a
humanitarian aid volunteer at like 21/22 who went to Tarsus IV and met furious,
half-starved, 13-year-old, fresh-off-a-genocide JT Kirk and it was my favorite
thing. It was also abandoned after like
two chapters. But like. Any intersection of my infinite feelings
about Tarsus IV and my infinite feelings about Bones & Jim (& Spock)
friendship is My Favorite Thing and I believe in my heart that this is true. Bones didn’t recognize him at the time and it
takes him years to connect the emaciated murderous kid with the electric blue
eyes to his buoyantly brilliant best friend, but he does, eventually. He asks Jim straight up, very late one night,
and they have one single conversation about it before they vow to never discuss
it again.
For THIS headcanon meme! (You thought you were free. You were wrong.) I’m kind of picturing AOS because that’s what I watched most recently with Uhura.
A: what I think realistically
Nyota Uhura grows up speaking three
languages fluently—English and Swahili, because her family speaks both, and a
German dialect, because her cousin’s husband speaks Swahili like a
three-year-old and doesn’t seem to be getting better at it. He dotes on Nyota, calls her little star and swings her up onto his
shoulders to ‘scare’ his wife and Nyota’s mothers as a monster with two heads,
and he thinks it’s the greatest thing in history when she starts translating
for him. She’s six years old when she
goes to a museum and meets the curator, who is a Vulcan woman of superlative
brilliance. The woman greets her family
with a formal Vulcan phrase and is visibly taken aback—something of an
accomplishment—when Nyota carefully, cautiously sounds out in imitation, tonk’peh, dif-tor heh smusma.
“Very good,” the Vulcan woman says in
English, arching an eyebrow. “But the
correct response is sochya eh dif.” Nyota parrots it back, and the Vulcan woman
offers her a salute. Nyota comes back
the very next day and plunks herself expectantly in front of the woman’s door,
and more or less bothers the woman into agreeing to teach her the language.
Nyota, talking to her teacher, learns
about Star Fleet, where she can learn
every language in the galaxy (“that is quite impossible–” “EVERY language in the galaxy,” Nyota
insists) and spend her entire life speaking them as a job. She never looks away
from the stars again, and she remains in touch with her teacher, until finally
it’s Nyota who offers the lessons, in the grammar of Russian and the guttural tones
of Klingon.
Nyota’s teacher, very formal at all
times, is the one who begins calling her ‘Uhura.’ Nyota knows that her name means star, but to her, Uhura means linguist and
she holds it tight with both hands.
B: what I think is fucking hilarious
Uhura and Jim are actually great friends
by the end of the Enterprise’s first
year, once he feels less like he has to prove himself at all times and once she
gets past some of her ingrained horror about his casual disregard for the rules
when he thinks it’s necessary. (The
first time Uhura sees herself observe a rule and then toss it aside because,
well, this is more important, she has this moment of total exasperation because He Has Infected Her.) Jim speaks not a few languages himself, and
more to the point he’s actually not the trash can she assumed him to be. He doesn’t harass his subordinates, he would
clearly die for any of them, and even though at first she’s convinced he’s
going to drink on the job and sleep with everyone on the ship, there’s no sign
of it. He drinks sometimes with the rest
of the alpha shift command crew, but never to excess, and she’s pretty sure Jim
would rather take a phaser shot to the chest than risk his crew by sleeping
around—it’s like command has turned him into a real person rather than the caricature
he worked so hard to project and goddamnit she likes that person. No one is
more shocked and aggrieved than Uhura herself.
Uhura is also rational enough to date a
Vulcan, so after two months she huffs out a breath and plops her tray down at
his table during breakfast (Jim eats in the mess hall with the crew, rather
than a private mess, because he likes to know
his people, damn him). She has the same
stubborn look in her eye that once strongarmed a Vulcan into agreeing to teach
her language to a small human child.
“Um,” Jim says, wary, “hey, Uhura.”
“You’re going to stop hitting on me,”
she tells him, pointing at him sternly with her fork, “and I’m going to stop
treating you like an asshole, and then we’re going to be friends.”
Jim stares at her. “Okay?”
“So,” she says, lowering her fork to
gesture at his PADD, “what are you reading?”
He tells her, seemingly too bemused to do anything else, and she
scoffs. “Please. If you want the really weird Vulcan
literature, I can hook you up. You
haven’t lived until you’ve read some of the Pre-Reform homoerotic star-crossed
lovers nonsense I read during my tutorial on the Pre-Reform dialect.”
Jim laughs until he’s wheezing and
flushed, clutching the edge of the table as the mess hall looks at him in mild
alarm and Uhura smirks in satisfaction.
C: what is heart-crushing and awful but fun to inflict on friends
Uhura never becomes a captain, although
innumerable promotions are offered to her.
She loves her languages too much.
She believes, after seeing Kirk and Sulu and even sweet Chekov taken by
their ships and never return, that this is the reason she and Spock end up as
the last living members of that first bridge crew.
She kind of wishes, sitting at the
monument to James Tiberius Kirk and thinking about how he would have hated
having his middle name on the thing, that she had taken the captaincy.
D: what would never work with canon but the canon is
shit so I believe it anyway
LET! NYOTA!
UHURA! HAVE! A!
BIG! FAMILY!
Listen I
literally could not care less about what canon says, Nyota has like three
siblings and a bunch of cousins and her grandmother and her two moms and her
aunts and uncles and they all adore each other to little bits and pieces.
Nyota’s sister is dying to know about Spock from the first moment she hears about
him, and the poor guy is totally overwhelmed the first time Nyota brings him
home to celebrate [insert slightly ridiculous reason that the family came up
with on the spot because Nyota was on Earth and they were excited]. They immediately adopt Spock, he’s really
kind of alarmed about it.
Nyota brings
Jim to meet her family one time too (and McCoy because his wife has his kid
currently) when it’s his birthday and he just desperately does not want to deal with Star Fleet and the Kelvin
and the whole hero thing, and they all love him too.
Basically give me Nyota Uhura who travels the
stars because she loves them too much to stay on the ground, but who has very real ties to Earth because those are her people. She’s met by
the quintessential embarrassing family whenever they make earthfall. Her cousin (the one who still sucks at Swahili) has a sign.
Her sister and her twin brothers have a banner. She’s going to
murder them all but also she can’t stop grinning.
