#deep blogging

1— Yes, TOS Kirk is better than Spock at chess, not because he's just a chaos agent or lucky or Spock is distracted and letting him win or any of the other ways of minimizing TOS's extreme clarity on this point. Kirk keeps winning, as Spock himself gradually comes to accept, because Kirk is better at chess.

Behind their mannerisms, Kirk is the cooler-headed and more relentlessly calculating of the two, and fuses not only exhaustive background information but very quick, versatile adaptation and application of information + tactics to changing circumstances, even when the change is highly unexpected. Spock doesn't adapt to breaks in routine or expectation as quickly or as smoothly, and ... lbr, he pretends he's not more of a hothead than Jim Kirk in his totality will ever be, but it's a dirty lie.

2— Speaking of which, once Spock learns poker? He's way better at it than James "any time weird powers strip away my iron grip on my weaknesses I get consumed in analysis paralysis" Kirk. Spock loses now and then through a) monumental bad luck that speaks poetically to him or b) brazen pretense so other crew members will keep the eternal Enterprise poker championship going, rather than getting so disheartened they give up altogether.

(Yes: Highlander is a fellow March baby for me and the disproportionate number of my friends also born in March!)

In all seriousness (well, some seriousness), Highlander is a genuinely compelling film visually despite the basic silliness and some truly wtf decisions, Sean Connery vs Clancy Brown, etc with some truly great cinematic craft going on between the... rest, all enormously aided by a fantastic soundtrack care of Queen.

One of my favorite Queen songs of all time is actually from Highlander: Brian May's "Who Wants to Live Forever?" Apparently, May was just so emotionally touched by the cut of Heather's death he'd been shown that he felt moved to write a whole power ballad about it. It's just very beautiful and soaring but intense, I adore it. It's also the basis for the most recurrent motif in one of my favorite (and I think most extra) orchestral covers ever, Tolga Kashif's six-part The Queen Symphony with the Royal Philharmonic Orchestra.

However, my other favorite is just a fantastic good time: Freddie Mercury's "Princes of the Universe," with the bonus of a magnificently unhinged music video in which, among many other things, Christopher Lambert shows up in costume as Connor MacLeod from the film and has a duel with Freddie. The song was released March 12, 1986, so we're closing in on its birthday in particular. Behold its glory:

There's Trelane kinda believing Kirk's pretended possessiveness of Teresa Ross but when he really wants to get Kirk to do something, he points his gun at Spock instead. There's the very pointed blond-on-blond violence of Leila Kalomi's interactions with Kirk. There's Kor using Kirk and Spock's relationship. There's Edith Keeler iconically managing to be like "oh, so you two are queer queer" while simultaneously hitting on Kirk in a very adorable way.

There's T'Pring's multi-layered schemes involving her absolute conviction that Kirk will have no sexual interest in her whatsoever if the "Kirk wins, Spock dies" scenario occurs. Spock's mother spends a few minutes with Kirk and is like "wow. and such a nice respectful young man who sees through Vulcan nonsense, too ;)" within about forty seconds. The quasi(?)-Precursor Sargon figures out a way to save Spock when Kirk has to order his death and essentially explains himself as "son, I couldn't let you do that to yourself."

There's Miranda Jones very understandably responding to Kirk's vicious unhinged screed about Spock's only maybe-preventable death with "you're insane." There's a whole lot of this in "Plato's Stepchildren." Deela, the most chilling of the women of the week interested in Kirk, comments on Kirk's "great affection" for Spock as he desperately tries to contact him with "I wonder if they will demonstrate it to us" with a little giggle. There's Gem the empath heading over to see McCoy and getting suddenly distracted and turning to see Spock tenderly watch the injured Kirk sleep and being utterly charmed while soft sweet music plays in the background. There's "Lord" Garth offering sexy Orion girl Marta to a deeply unenthusiastic Kirk who looks at Spock like he's trying to beam SOS at him with his mind and Garth gesturing between Spock and Kirk with a level of delight I can't begin to describe.

Tyranny

AI, for related reasons

Men who refuse to be goddamn grown-ups and use birth control

Gut emotionality that isn't disciplined by reflection and rationality

Racism

Shore leave in particular, and relaxing in general

Julius Caesar

Going to cafes full of gorgeous hedonistic women by himself

Losing the Enterprise

Men being entitled douchebags about women, particularly in a kind of sexual vending machine situation

Revealing vulnerabilities (especially in his face and voice) rather than impenetrable charisma or exaggerated theatricality, especially if it means telling people basically anything about the various horrors of the past

most 60s US soldiers

Interruptions to his meals or the prospect of anyone going hungry or starving

Any expectation of being some kind of masculine role model and paternal authority (maternal is fine)

The expectation of being some kind of alpha male sexy Lothario (sexy femme fatale is fine)

Young boys, whether little kids or teenagers (girls are fine)

Most high-ranking older men (powerful older women are fine)

Insecure masculinity games

Mass murder, especially as a means of control or "for the greater good"

An impromptu back massage coming from his pretty yeoman instead of Spock

Any kind of paradise fantasy or lotus-eater situation that removes the need for critical judgment and reflection and ethical responsibility

Ecofascism

Threats to his crew and other captains who don't do right by theirs

Spock even jokingly suggesting he (Spock) doesn't respect his (Kirk's) intelligence

Chaos/disruption in general, at least if he didn't cause it

Being alone

The many colossal assholes who don't take no for an answer (whether from him or others), or situations where refusal isn't a real option

Needless death

When for some dubious reason there are sexy women but no sexy men :(

Inadequate information, especially with no ability to use delaying tactics and trickery to get enough information to make a properly informed decision

Information and evidence getting disregarded without a compelling reason

Always having to make the decisions and be in control of everythinggggg, even in what little personal life he has

Dehumanization

Sex pollen/pheromones

Anyone with pretenses to divinity

trying to force conversation into the threaded comments rather than reblogs for whatever reason (I guess post + conversation in comments is more TikTok-like?)

trying to ape Twitter/Bluesky type structure even though Twitter is hardly in its heyday either

actual requests for a feature that essentially "gives credit" to the author of a reblog that is actually what the overarching conversation is about, rather than making it the OP's problem while concealing it from the author (I've definitely both been the OP of a post where all the notes I was getting weren't really about anything I'd said or spun off from an incredibly irritating reblog I didn't want to engage with, and the author of a reblog that I didn't know was spreading so far because the notifications were going to the OP and then I ended up feeling guilty etc etc, so it's not beyond the realm of possibility)

actively trying to punch themselves in the face repeatedly

There are so many scenes in which everyone else is baffled or missing something important that Spock or Kirk see in the other's behavior. Probably the peak moment for this is Spock, and Spock alone, realizing in "Arena" that Kirk has the raw materials to make gunpowder just as Kirk himself realizes it. So you get Spock murmuring "good, good...yes...yes..." right there on the bridge as his beloved starts reinventing the bazooka (pretty sure this counts as sex for him), but McCoy and the bridge crew are completely confused about what they're seeing. And there are plenty of moments of this kind of half-unspoken mutual brilliance while their co-workers wish they'd just use their words.

However. The important counterpoint to this is that Kirk and Spock each possess the special ability to instantly incinerate entire neuron paths in each other's brains and become 10x stupider around each other, also. Spock barges into Kirk's quarters in "The Enemy Within" without explanation, sees his naked chest, and his higher functions crumble into ash on the spot; when he regains the power of speech, he asks the baffled Kirk what he can do for him as if this somehow explains what he's doing there, and Kirk is just confused but pleased, and smiles enough that Spock's gay awakening visibly burns through even more neural circuits until he runs away.

And Kirk himself doesn't need to see skin to completely lose track of what he was even talking about because Spock did a thing. For instance, the scene when Kirk looks at Spock with flirty adoration at the end of "A Taste of Armageddon" and bats his eyelashes and says, "Why, Mr. Spock, you almost make me believe in miracles"—yes, it's extremely gay, but I feel it's important to understand the immediate context is a general conversation on the bridge about the horrors of war. But then Spock raised his brows and ambiguously complimented him, so Kirk's entire cognitive process melted into Spock Spock Spock Spock. In S3, Spock sits down beside Kirk to tenderly watch him sleep, without appearing to consider that anyone (like say the empath standing right by them) would notice, and then poorly fakes looking at tricorder readings when said empath picks on his emotions. Surely that will fool her psychic powers! (It doesn't.) Kirk, often a master of performance and theatricality, has to be physically held back from trying to singlehandedly maul a Klingon while in disguise and surrounded by an occupying Klingon force because one guy slightly shoved Spock.

And honestly, it feels extremely spot-on. The detail from "Court Martial" that, apart from Finney, only Spock and Kirk have the computer skills to subtly alter the programming of the Enterprise's computers the way they've seen is genuinely hilarious to me bc I am fully convinced Spock would get into programming for emo-nerd motives and Kirk for prep-nerd motives.

Spock mastering programming: the height of the Vulcan equivalent of his Evanescence phase, builds a website specifically to host photographs of taboo abstract emotional art pieces from the pre-Surak era with a detailed and consistent approach to the metadata