my magpie collection

Like! Kirk cares deeply, for sure, and is generally emotionally intelligent and expressive (doesn't always feel what he expresses, but still, emotive). He has a powerful sense of principle and compassion about the fundamental personhood of others, and what people need and deserve. He can be sweet and charmed and is quick to smile or laugh, yes. But he's also quick to calibrate his performance of himself to whatever he thinks is useful for [Situation] unless he's too annoyed to bother. He can be charming, friendly, aggressive, righteous, seductive, whatever, and he's very capable of emanating cold menace with little warning if he doesn't bother tamping it down (the other side of the correct femme fatale comparison!). The Lieutenant Kirk terrorizing Philosophy 101 cadets who didn't feel like critical thinking is still alive and well in him, he just has a lot more control over how he comes across to others these days. And a starship.

And he can be icily cutting with his own friends when he doesn't have the patience for certain kinds of emotional nonsense, as much as he can be intuitive and sweet ("How your lost love affects your vision, doctor, doesn't interest me. I've lost a man. I want to know what killed him"). His preferred method of processing the horrors in his own life is That's a Problem For Future Jim and moving on without dealing with it, often isolating himself and defensively lashing out when some particular horror comes back home to roost. We more often see Spock hovering in concern while Kirk has a moment's lapse of staring blankly into the void before pulling himself together than the other way around.

Kirk is bad with children and he hates AI and he torched his best friend's career by refusing to cover for his mistakes. He gets regular tension headaches and has a tendency to anxiously fiddle with his hands while controlling his voice and often his facial expression. He'll flirt/seduce for the mission and enjoys serious sweeping romance, but is absolutely opposed to fraternizing with anyone on his crew (though it's allowed) and doesn't have unforced casual flings. He seethes with jealousy when Spock seems like he might admire someone/thing more than him and has strong feelings about Why Misogyny Is Stupid and Wrong and sometimes is tempted to just murder. He has survived or been directly impacted by massacres including being targeted in a genocide, he survived starvation and is repeatedly preoccupied with hunger/food, he's experienced sexual coercion/assault and less well-defined but obviously inappropriate sexual/romantic/abusive behavior and mind rape and so on. He can be a petty trolling bitch because he's having a mildly annoying day or, alternatively, a very fun one. He loves flowers, and his friends and crew, and peeking up through his (long, visibly mascara'd) eyelashes, and holding hands and waltzing. He likes watching Spock do anything adorable (like existing) with hearts in his eyes and winning at chess and helping overthrow oppressors and knowing regulations better than the regulators and sometimes fucking with gender norms and sometimes using chemistry for Explosions. It's just... there's a lot more going on than contrasting with Spock!