Another excellent video that should be watched by all people who consider themselves Trek fans (whether you care for the franchise as a whole or are one of those people who hate any new Trek.)
This is fucking OUTSTANDING!
abandonment issues
feelings of emotional hunger, unworthiness, insecurity and shame triggered by childhood trauma such as neglect, starvation, abuse or the loss of a parent.#i’d give up the remnants of my soul to see jim’s face when he realized that bones wasn’t going to leave him (tags via captainsulus)
Reblogging for the comment above
treksmix
replied to your post “idk why im coming to ur askbox but i have to let this out: i have…”I think that a fair portion of it can be attributed to how unsatifying the movies are for Jim’s character, too. Like Spock’s issues get fleshed out and talked about and addressed, while Jim’s never really do. So fic kind of fills that in a bit.
yo this is a very good point as well. as fans, we are also confronted with a rather negative portrayal of Jim Kirk as a brash womanizer and in order to bring that 2 dimensional characterization to terms with the Jim Kirk we know and love (Tos Kirk), we have to give him angst, a backstory that explain such behavior. not to mention the fact that AOS Kirk’s characterization is often reduced to a punchline surprisingly often for a main character (see: risking his life during a joy ride: “My name’s James Tiberius Kirk.”)
so we use fanfiction for its best purpose. to fill in the blanks.
Like, think about the first time we see Jim in AOS. He’s being born, it’s very sad, his mom is crying, but she’s cooing at him and obviously loves him, so okay. But the next time we see him, he’s driving a car off a cliff. How did we get from Point A to Point B? What happened to this kid to make him do this, to make him be like this? Who cares. Who fucking cares. Whatever.
So the next time we see him, he’s in a bar, he’s chasing sex and getting into barfights, and we learn from his next exchange that he’s a “genius-level repeat offender.” This is the baby from the first scene with the tearjerker-scene about his parents and his dad’s last words being that he loves them. What happened to this kid?
Again, who knows. It’s never explained or touched on.
Both movies do this. The first movie explains Spock’s arc pretty concisely, half-human alien ostracized by his people and at home nowhere, attempting to reconcile his emotional side with the part of him that believes that he shouldn’t have emotions. Not only is it explained, but it’s resolved: by the end of the movie, Spock has heard his father admit he loved his mother, thereby confirming that his father has accepted his emotional side, and believes Spock should too. Spock then, at the end, chooses the Enterprise over returning to Vulcan, thereby choosing to honor his human half rather than force himself to pretend to be all-Vulcan. In the second movie, it’s kind of the same: Spock denies his emotional half, the part of him that feels friendship
(or hella gayness), but accepts it by the end of the film.Jim’s arcs never see that kind of resolution.
In the first movie, we see a wise-cracking “genius repeat offender” who gets into barfights and cheats on tests, but we’re never explained why he does the things he does. What’s Jim’s arc? He becomes Captain at the end, cool. But his actions are never explained. He’s never explained. What did he prove to himself by the end of the first film? And the second movie is even worse (and also pisses me off).The second movie shows us a side of Jim that falters, it shows that his confidence and cockiness are really tenuous and often disguise his insecurities.
This is exemplified by his line to Spock where he says (basically), “I’m not a good Captain, Spock, you are.” And then he dies and comes back and??? Okay??? But there was never any resolution to what he said. Is Jim a good Captain? Nobody ever argued with him when he said he wasn’t. Spock and Bones and Uhura saved him, but they would’ve saved anybody if they could’ve. There was literally never any fucking resolution to that line or that arc. He said that and quit being captain and essentially committed suicide and then bam, he’s captain again and we just never talk about it. Jim had no arc, there was no “this is how he started, and this is how he ended, and this is how he’s grown as a person.” Spock kind of had that in both movies. Jim didn’t.
So that leaves the fandom with half of a really interesting character and a bunch of blanks to fill in, and child abuse coupled with Tarsus IV fill in those blanks pretty nicely. They explain why that baby from the first scene became an angry, bloody-knuckled repeat offender picking up girls in backwoods dive bars in the Midwest. It explains why he’s cheating at tests and disrespecting authority figures and driving cars off cliffs, and why he’s so insecure and self-deprecating at times. It explains what the movies never bothered to about their own fucking main character.
Just my 2 cents, but I’m still angry that they left out the scene between Sam and Jim in the first movies because gosh, that scene will make sense why Jim is the way he is.
Vulcans cannot lie.
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