Fic: All day, every day.

I took inspiration for Padmé's robes from the final act of Phantom Menace - a combination of her and Sabé's battle getups.

“You mean you locked up a pack of curious, highly competitive persistence predators with NO enrichment in the enclosure? You FOOLS! If you had bothered to throw a basketball or half a box of Legos in there, KE-X9 would still be alive!

Like they’re totally unable to figure out what’s happening because the cameras keep going out, but every night things get moved, or stolen, exhibits are disappearing, WHAT IS GOING ON, they’ve moved facilities twice and it’s still happening, are they haunted, are the ancestors angry, WHAT IS HAPPENING!?

And then a weary humanologist is all ‘… your humans are getting out’. 

“That is impossible.” 

“They’re getting out.” 

“That enclosure is COMPLETELY SECURE.” 

“And yet somehow they’re getting out.” 

“THE HUMANS ARE NOT GETTING OUT.” 

“Oh yeah? I bet you twenty glarks they’re getting out. Stay after closing time with me and I’ll show you.” 

*next day*

“… the humans were getting out.” 

“… why did they keep going back in, then?!”

1 - at our own zoos the MOST notorious jail breakers are the orangutans, who exploit all manner of methods, including literal lock picking. One orangutan, Ken Allen escaped several times WHILE THE ZOO WAS OPEN TO THE PUBLIC without getting caught by watching Zoo employees, even when they tried to disguise themselves as tourists to catch him at it. While he was being “secretly” surveilled, he managed to escape AND show the other orangutans how to escape. They finally found out he was doing some thought-to-be-impossible rock climbing to escape. To fix it, they brought in a team of human rock-climbers to locate all possible methods of climbing out. So. Humans would absolutely be the worst to try to keep contained. Like, “escape rooms” are currently seen as a fun date idea. I’m sayin.

2 - animals that escape most often return to their own enclosure (after all that’s where their beds and dinners are, and if the zoo is any good it is the place best suited to their species-specific needs for miles and miles) after they have had sufficient excitement. Ken Allen the orangutan would escape and wander around the zoo looking at the animals like he’d bought a ticket. So if the keepers were nice, and formed a bond, and the set up was comfy, once the human knew they could get out if they really wanted, they’d probably go back, depending on how uncomfortable/dangerous the alien environment was.

another responsibility for the stressed person

requires time and money they probably don't have

takes a lot of luck and hard work and time to be effective

$5000

I don't mean co-writing either. I mean having a friend or two who you talk through plot ideas with, who you bounce ideas off of, who you trust to tell you if something doesn't work.

The problem is - if you do weight it more towards the “straight-up racial slurs” end of the spectrum rather than the “banter between friends who consensually use the V-word and the H-word to affectionately rib each other”, then I don’t know how you find your way to a true Kirk/Spock friendship in that situation. Because that is a profoundly toxic work environment that Kirk every day of that five-year mission has the power to put an end to and doesn’t. (What’s the point of white-knighting by shutting down random bigoted Navigators-of-the-Week if you’re going to smile fondly and not say a word when your CMO regularly says even worse for the whole bridge crew to hear?)

I agree that the racism is there and visible (not to mention sexism, given that Spock took on certain traits of the lost female Number One).

Kirk was asleep during the particularly unprompted, unjust screed against Spock in “Requiem for Methuselah.” He wasn’t there when Bailey tried his hand at microaggressions in “The Corbomite Maneuver” or when even Uhura attacked Spock in “The Man Trap.” He’s not there in the giffed scene above in “All Our Yesterdays.” He doesn’t seem to know about Bones’s absurd recurrent theory that Spock is a power hungry schemer plotting against Kirk to seize authority; it never gets mentioned around him. The usual insistence that all three are pretty much always together and, deep down, on the same page impoverishes a lot of the show’s themes IMO.

Bones and the others don’t have to be scheming villains in this; possibly they don’t even think about why their restraint so quickly erodes and their usual plausible deniability escalates so much when the boss isn’t around. I think the rest of the crew responds to Stiles ranting right there on the bridge the way they do not because they necessarily think he’s a monster in some way that’s totally distinct from the similar treatment of Spock on the regular, but because of the time and place. They think he’s an asshole, yes, but even more that he’s an idiot.

I think the idea in all this is intended less as a referendum on specific individuals tbh (for better and worse), and more to make a point about how workplace racism works. Spock isn’t someone who is going to see logic in telling Kirk about this, and doesn’t. A single good boss doesn’t fix widespread bigotry (though they’ll act when they do see it). Bones is not unusually bigoted; his bigotry is entirely ordinary in Spock’s life, even from those with real affection for him (like his parents and multiple friends, of course including Bones himself).

Spock is visibly shocked that Kirk, already well established as a close friend, would stick up for him in that way and swing his authority behind doing so, pretty obviously because no one has ever done so before. It seems the first time a Stiles situation has involved both Spock and Kirk specifically - Spock is genuinely stunned by both Stiles and Kirk in BoT, but the other crew clearly understand that Stiles is digging his own grave by doing this in front of Kirk. And the two times Kirk obliviously uses (however blatantly insincere) racism as an SOS signal because he’s so sure Spock rightly believes Jim Would Never, it specifically bothers Spock to hear that from him; Kirk occupies a unique position in Spock’s life as someone he can see as safe, not just generally but specifically in the context of Spock’s experiences as a biracial person, not because he’s a flawless ally but because he’s a course-correcting one.

Because on a surface level, it does seem thematically interesting. You could talk about vampires forever looking the age that they died, aging, and the natural fetishization of aging an immortal being might have and how that might present, especially in a character like Armand etc etc etc. But also, there are people who want to fuck Daniel Molloy right now.

Like actual normal aged mortal humans. Most of them are significantly younger than 72 year old actor Eric Bogosian. Like ok you can't really argue that Armand wanting to fuck that old man is weird when a large chunk of people came out of IWTV thinking "I want to fuck that old man"