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anghraine · 1 month ago

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I was thinking again about the divide between the tactical seduction Kirk romances and the genuinely romantic unforced ones, and something that's been percolating through my head for awhile is the question of power.

So, the tactical Kirkmances are all responses, at some level, to power being taken from him or someone else or both, and are part of attempts to gather information, escape, and/or protect other people, whatever. But "no" is not realistically an option, whether because he's trapped or imprisoned or desperately needs some information or is under duress in some other form (sometimes the woman in question is also under duress, like Shahna or Drusilla, though most often not).

Because of that, and because of multiple cases where it's made explicit that he doesn't feel any interest in the woman in question and is willing to just lie/deceive to succeed and smooth things over afterwards, we often have no way to know what he really feels in these varyingly coercive circumstances. In most cases, whether he's actually into the woman or not is so irrelevant to him as far as his outwards behavior goes that we have a much clearer idea of the desperation of the situation, his primary agenda, and what other people would be most comfortable with him feeling than what he himself does.

So, for instance, Deela in "Wink of an Eye" enjoys seeing him struggle against her, whether it's through seduction, trickery, physically pushing her away etc, but also wants him to be actually attracted to her and ultimately willing to live out his entire life in the next few months as her, uh, sex toy/breeding stock before dying. Kirk's feelings about all this end up being messy and complicated in a believable way, but essentially culminate in "anyway fuck off forever and die."

There are multiple scenes in "The Conscience of the King" in which we see McCoy desperately wanting to believe that Kirk isn't just using Lenore Karidian, but actually likes her and has real romantic interest in her. McCoy prefers to filter his understanding of Kirk's behavior in the episode through that lens, rather than contending with the horror and injustice that drives Kirk's actions. Spock, whose judgment is continually validated throughout the episode, had already considered the idea of Lenore being a motive and found it unlikely in this case; he guesses that Kirk's real focus is on Anton Karidian and he's just using Lenore to get at him, an assumption that leads to Spock's discovery of the Tarsus IV genocide and murders of the eyewitnesses. In the final scene, McCoy returns to his insistence that Kirk must have had genuine feelings for Lenore; Kirk ignores him and McCoy takes this as proof that he's right, while Spock stands quietly by.

Even in much worse episodes, it's like ... Shahna in "The Gamesters of Triskelion" wants Kirk's sudden flirtation with her to be real, and is too sheltered and vacuous (/sigh) to connect it to his screaming panic over Uhura that immediately preceded it, or the fact that Shahna is his prison guard. Shahna is made so utterly clueless that she can't be held responsible, while Kirk transparently uses her for information to deal with the oppressive overlords of the episode that have placed Chekov, Uhura, and Kirk in thralldom. In the end, Shahna just blandly accepts his refusal to take her with him, and his hope that someday she'll understand why he had to do what he did.

But in these story lines, whether it seems like he's actually into the woman at some level, or very much not, or (as is overwhelmingly most common) it's ambiguous, Kirk takes the initiative to pursue or flirt with someone because of some loss of power. He's not exactly aggressive in the usual masculine sense (the narrative framing is more dramatically-lit morally-ambiguous noir lady), but he is highly proactive and assertive in these cases, and essentially sets out to initiate and control a romance for a distinctly unromantic agenda of his own.

There is a kind of stage management quality to it, and the cases where he seems most visibly troubled or angry about the whole thing tend to be the ones where he's least able to steer the "relationship" or where someone who puts him in some awful situation to begin with acts like they're the injured party (obvious examples: Deela, Helen Noel, Lenore, Sylvia). But he seems to have a definite preference in these "romances" for asserting some kind of power: being the flirty one, the one doing the pursuing, the one who understands what's happening more clearly, the one ultimately in control of how this is going to go, and the terms on which it will end.

But this is conspicuously different when it's an actual romance that isn't forced by the circumstances. Apart from his demeanor being radically different, something that's struck me about the genuine, unforced Kirk romances is how much this insistent assertion of power, authority, and/or control vanishes when there's no threat.

The first person we know he fell in love with was his girlfriend as a teenager, Ruth. He hasn't seen her since he was 18, when he was a somber first-year cadet at the Academy. Even accounting for 60s casting, his memory of Ruth is pretty evidently that of someone who was older than him, more sophisticated and assured, and further along professionally, in no way under any authority from him. Even his interactions with a replica of her lack that stage management quality of the tactical Kirkmances, and his instinct on seeing her is to just go along with this bizarre situation.

The timeline isn't exactly clear, but some time later, he had a disastrous year-long relationship with Janice Lester. And it is clear that something fundamental to that relationship falling apart was the fact that he had avenues of authority open to him that Janice didn't. Kirk actually agrees with Janice that the glass ceiling is wrong and unfair, he just thinks that Janice taking her frustrations out on him as her partner, and tormenting him while indulging her internalized misogyny, was intolerable. One of Janice's many grievances is that they could have stayed together as his career progressed, and she could have gone to space with him, presumably as a member of his crew, while he was and remains very much "absolutely the fuck not" about that possibility. That decision is reinforced by his very consistent, non-negotiable red line around relationships with any crew members, but seems pretty clearly even more objectionable to him than usual in this case.

Even within "Turnabout Intruder," it seems that Kirk doesn't like having to bring power to bear on Janice, although she has thoroughly violated his agency at that point and it has become very necessary. She's the only ex he's known to have unilaterally broken up with, and he would have preferred to part ways cordially, but that was never going to happen; Janice is strongly implied to be an abuser-turned-stalker who resents him getting away, and filters every violation she commits against him through her sense of eternally persecuted (white) feminine fragility.

She insists a man like Kirk could never be physically assaulted and overpowered by a weak and feeble woman like herself, despite knowing perfectly well it's exactly what happened. She isolates him through medical abuse as well as lying about why he left her to his friends and co-workers. She relentlessly targets anyone who tries to help him—the one mainly punished for Kirk's escape attempt is Spock, after all, not Kirk himself ("Turnabout Intruder" is misogynistic in many ways, but a lot of the discussion of that seems to ignore that it's also pretty obviously dealing with an abuse/stalking situation that, apart from the sci-fi conceits, includes some extremely common traits of female domestic abusers IRL).

Janet Wallace, who parted ways with Kirk some six and a half years before S2, is a very successful scientist, and was already building a career in her field when they were together. Both of them are authority figures in their own careers, but their professional paths had so little to do with each other that it was essentially the reason they broke up. Their lives were too separate, despite what seems to have been a pretty mutually rewarding relationship when both were ambitious 20-somethings, and they mutually agreed to separate rather than one of them dictating terms to the other. Jan does seem to have some kind of kink for older male authorities, though; in "The Deadly Years," her sudden uptick of interest in 34-year-old Kirk as he starts prematurely aging is directly associated with her marriage to a very much older authority in her own field, and Kirk is viscerally uncomfortable with it.

His later girlfriend, Areel Shaw, is a healthier figure, though their relationship and break-up seem roughly similar. Both are highly successful career professionals, they're still very fond of each other and obviously still attracted to each other, and there's no indication of any attempts on either side to assert power or control over the relationship in the past or present. Areel makes a joke about him outranking her, but they're in completely different parts of Starfleet, and throughout the episode, he's obviously much more professionally vulnerable to her than the other way around. She's the one to suggest their goodbye kiss by the turbolift, and she takes the initiative to blow another kiss at him as she leaves, leaving him cheerfully poleaxed for a moment before he returns to his job.

The only other ex we know about it in TOS, as I recall, is the unnamed lab technician mentioned in the pilot, whom Kirk seems to have been oblivious to until Gary Mitchell helped her out. Kirk was an instructor at the Academy at the time (implicitly teaching philosophy to cadets for several years), likely in his mid-twenties from contextual information, and she was the one who pursued him. Kirk did have a serious relationship with her, but he didn't know about Mitchell helping her with the "campaign" to catch his attention in the first place, even though he and the lab technician nearly ended up getting married.

In terms of the unforced romances we actually see in the timeline of the show, there are only a few. The earliest is the sort of mutual courtly pining between him and Janice Rand. In "The Naked Time," Kirk's fantasy of a romance with (the superior) Janice is a fantasy scenario where they're on a beach away from any kind of professional context, and specifically, where he has no captain's insignia. We find out in "Miri" (though it was already obvious) that Janice fully reciprocates his interest and wanted to attract him, though she's very professional and competent in general. It's very obviously doomed as a romance. They might hang on to each other in a crisis, but will never do more or cross that line, though it's allowed by regulation—it's doomed wholly because Kirk's position as captain gets in the way for Kirk. Kirk even vents to Bones about being frustrated at Janice's assignment to him as his personal yeoman because he specifically doesn't want pretty women filling that kind of role around him.

It obviously bothers him especially when the yeoman is Janice because he's infatuated with her, but we also see that discomfort in the notorious backrub scene, when Janice's equally photogenic successor as yeoman dutifully starts trying to help with the strain in his back. Kirk thinks it's Spock massaging his back and that's fine (more than fine lmao), but when Spock makes a point of stepping forwards and Kirk realizes the person touching him must be his pretty yeoman, he's intensely uncomfortable and immediately orders her to stop as he gives Spock a long-suffering look.

In Kirk's grand m/f romance, the one with Edith Keeler, she's very much a socially established figure with a secure, stable position, the one who provides Kirk with a job and a roof over his and Spock's heads. She evidently thinks they're eccentric homeless guys when she finds them and takes them under her wing, and later suspects they're WWI vets, but it is very clear that the security of their situation remains entirely dependent on Edith's good will towards Kirk.

Of course, there are ways in which he knows more than Edith and has an advantage in that respect, but Edith is absolutely calling the shots in general. This is the context in which their romantic walks and hand-holding and dates and stolen kisses in the stairwell etc are happening. One of their big romantic scenes occurs because she finds out about Spock stealing materials and Kirk has to sweet-talk her, and she's like ... well, I guess I could overlook it... if you took me on a date. ;) And he's delighted to be pursued by his landlady that way, let's be real.

Edith running the show at least as much as Kirk is, I think, forms part of the idyllic quality of this romance for him. He's not there when Edith casually refers to him as "my young man," but I suspect he would very much like it, yet he's extremely unlikely to think of her as his girl/young lady/whatever. But overall, it just seems very, very clear that this whole dynamic is vastly more to his tastes than one where he's primarily in control and managing things and making all the major decisions.

That's reinforced over a season later, when we find the increasingly strained, tired Kirk of S3 wistfully longing for some arena of his life in which he's not making all the decisions all the goddamn time. Then he gets amnesia, remembering almost nothing about his previous life except that he had never felt happy or at peace, and he's pretty much informed that he's going to marry a hot priestess. Without the baggage of his actual life/memories/responsibilities, he is entirely content to go along with this and seems happy with her.

I mean, "The Paradise Syndrome" is a bad episode, especially the A-plot, but that aspect of it absolutely does track with the rest of what we see of him.

In the superior S3 episode "The Mark of Gideon," the more ephemeral romance with Odona occurs in a context where he thinks they are completely isolated from all other people and institutions, and neither of them has any particular power over the other. In reality, Odona knows a lot more than he does about what's going on, including that they aren't remotely alone. She's there to steal a blood sample from him and, ideally, to make the idea of remaining on Gideon as a disease blood bag more appealing.

After Kirk and Odona are back on the real Enterprise and she's saved, and both are able to exert the autonomy to decide their futures (Odona set on returning to Gideon, which Kirk doesn't want her to do, and Kirk on returning to commanding the Enterprise and its mission, which Odona doesn't want him to do), he has no particular power over Odona specifically but is very much back in authority. They're still flirty, but it's clearly dialed down to a more courtly, going-nowhere level:

ODONA: How can you bear to look at me after the way I deceived you? KIRK: At least, you owe me the privilege of letting me look at you. ODONA: You are a gentleman, Captain Kirk. KIRK, visibly pleased: Thank you, ma'am.

His last romantic plot is with Rayna in "Requiem for Methuselah," a decidedly mid episode until the absolutely buckwild final scene. It's also probably the weirdest of the romances that aren't obviously tactical. Kirk does meet her in his professional capacity, but it's actually the crew of the Enterprise who need help from Flint, Rayna's guardian (Flint has the resources to cure a terrible disease). Kirk et al. essentially bully Flint into helping them, but Rayna isn't present at that point, and Flint evidently has his own secrets and motives. It's only later that they're allowed to meet Rayna, Flint's highly educated and intelligent, but extremely sheltered, ward. She has never met a man other than Flint before (and for the audience, Flint is very obviously grooming Rayna to be his wife).

So Rayna is not in any way subject to Kirk's authority, although it's the reason he's there, but she's so sheltered that there are definitely ways in which he seems the more proactive of the two of them in this particular romance. But she's also intelligent and curious and actively into him. At first, Flint doesn't want her around them at all, and it's Rayna who insists; Rayna is a bit overwhelmed, but interested in exploring the potential of her romance with Kirk; she starts pushing back against Flint's restrictions, and falls for Kirk in a way she never could with Flint.

Flint basically comes up with delaying tactics that involve throwing Rayna and Kirk together, allowing for the more sentimental, "high romance" type of courtship that Kirk goes for (waltzing, kissing etc). But it turns out that Rayna is a very sophisticated android and oblivious to this fact herself (this Rayna is the latest in a long series of attempts), and Flint finds her interest in Kirk promising as far as Flint's ultimate goal of making her his own immortal wife is concerned. He's essentially keeping Kirk around to encourage Rayna's capability to feel romantic love and sexual attraction in general, like a sort of ... sexy lure??? in hopes that she'll turn those feelings to Flint in time.

The problem is that this is, obviously, super fucked-up towards both Kirk and Rayna (Flint refers to Rayna as his property). Kirk's usual hatred of AI does not extend to an AI who is genuinely a full sentient person, though he has to grapple with the concept for a moment, and this revelation doesn't actually destroy his feelings for her. He insists that a) Rayna is in love with him and he with her, and b) Rayna is clearly a full person, and thus no one's property, and has the right to choose what she wants. In the final scene, the question of power is specifically raised:

FLINT: No man beats me. KIRK: I don't want to beat you. This is no test of power. Rayna belongs to herself and she claims the human right of choice to be as she wills, to do as she wills, to think as she wills.

Rayna's very newly-developed capacity for feeling is torn between her love for Flint as a mentor and father-figure, and her confusing and overwhelming feelings for Kirk, and her desire to avoid hurting either of them. The strain of all these contradictory human feelings and impulses (/sigh) fries her circuits and she self-destructs.

(Spock, who spends most of the episode visibly consumed with jealousy of Rayna, is also sympathetic to her, but his priorities are what they are. McCoy accuses him of being incapable of understanding the love triangle that created this situation, as well as of feeling romantic love in general, in all its agonies and ecstasies, after the exhausted Kirk falls unconscious upon returning to the Enterprise. Spock simply tells McCoy goodnight and once he's gone, mind-melds with Kirk and wipes his rival from Kirk's memory because, uh *looks at hand* he and Kirk are totally normal healthy platonic bros and Spock doesn't experience love.)

But I do think the chasm between the actual Kirk romances and the tactical ones is also very much felt in how Kirk navigates power/control/authority. In seduction, he hangs tightly on to some sense of power and autonomy through his ability to control himself and the situation. In romance, though, it seems like he strongly prefers dynamics where he can (or must) step down from his usual authority and the weight of decisions and responsibility is distributed away from him.

#every time i read a fic where it's taken as given that he would want to be in control and making the decisions in a romantic context #just as on the enterprise #i'm like... hmm. strong disagree!#i /can/ see him taking that kind of role in a relationship out of habit or to accommodate a partner or some other reason #but as his own actual real deepest inclination? nahhh. in fact i'm not sure there's /any/ major character in tos who i believe it less of #anghraine babbles #long post #star peace #st fanwank #c: who do i have to be #cw dubcon #otp: closer than anyone in the universe #cw abuse #tos: s1 #tos: s2 #tos: s3 #anghraine's meta #edith keeler #james t kirk #janice rand #tos: the conscience of the king #tos: wink of an eye #tos: the city on the edge of forever #tos: turnabout intruder #tos: the mark of gideon #tos: requiem for methuselah #cw coercion #c: i object to intellect without discipline #c: i'm beginning to think i could cure a rainy day #janice lester

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