Sometimes I think about how the Tarsus IV hellscape is, chronologically, where TOS Kirk's history begins.
Virtually every popular idea about who he was before that, or what the details of his life and history were prior to Tarsus IV, come from outside the show—either decades-later retcons nowhere suggested in TOS, or just pure fanon. In the show, it's a long time before we even hear that he was born on Earth. He volunteers less information about his family and pre-Starfleet life than Spock.
Pretty much the only thing we're told about his life experiences that could possibly indicate something about him between his birth and the famine on Tarsus IV comes from "The Paradise Syndrome," in which as a stranded amnesiac, he has a strong but uncertain impression that he'd never felt happiness or peace in his life before. That is it. So the whole idyllic rural Midwestern childhood with wonderful supportive parents deal is something entirely external to the show (and, tbh, I think very much part of a later push towards making Star Trek in concept and Kirk in particular more "comfy" and accessibly heroic for blockbuster purposes).
But Kirk's earliest appearance in the internal timeline of TOS is as the thirteen-year-old survivor and eyewitness to Kodos's crimes, one among nine boys and men to survive, and in no way distinguished from the other eight at the time. There's basically nothing to him before that collective experience; the coup/famine/genocide there are the first of the many atrocities and horrors that define so much about his life, but they're also the first anything about his life.
In a way, it tracks that "The Conscience of the King" contains the storyline that, had the writer been allowed, would have mentioned a parent of Kirk's (his father would have been a scientist murdered by Kodos, and Tom Leighton the RA to Dr. Kirk who was scarred in that event, hence Leighton's highly personal appeal about "the bloody thing he did" to Kirk as the episode opens). As far as TOS is concerned, Jim Kirk's life as a character begins with Tarsus IV.
#aos: the aspirational influence of the all important father as role model is what forges a boy to a shiny hero. twok taught us this#tos: if u think about it the horrors were kirk's real father all along :)#also...tos providing zero backstory between tarsus iv survivor jim kirk 20 years before s1 and the casual lore drop about#not just serious but 'absolutely grim' bullied cadet jim kirk 15 years before s1? then moving 'shore leave' up#to follow directly from cotk & balance of terror??? the network fucked up a lot but the vision was cotk->bot->sl and afdjkadjkd#cool cool cool. choices sure were made.#ngl kirk letting spock's ludicrous secretiveness pass with barely a comment isn't just him being an enabler or gracious or whatnot#it's not like he's volunteered information about his own family ever! even at deneva he was rather notably unhelpful w/ info at first#/bones/ was the one who was like 'oh hey doesn't your brother live here' until aurelan picked up#spock has to use his pro starfleet account search engine to find out extremely relevant facts about kirk's history multiple times!#if kirk raised a stink about the sarek and amanda awkward moment spock would just give him the bitchiest bitch face in vulcan history#and he would deserve it! but really every time i see something like#'we need to come up with an explanation for why kirk doesn't explicitly mention tarsus iv more' i'm like. but do we#bc if you ask me that would be more of a break w/ the continuity of his character than him not mentioning it but going 1000-yard stare#or near feral with rage in situations involving connected issues like food/hunger/starvation or tyranny/mass murder/ecofascism#for an alleged ~greater good—and in a way that no other character does even when others share his general indignation. aka what happens (X @anghraine)
