pendragonsclotpole

[pendragonsclotpole]

Ygraine and the sword make beautiful babies i guess🤷🏽‍♀️

[pendragonsclotpole]

you have the best, most informative posts that explain weird things ive noticed. 🥹

Your daily reminder to use « Merlin/Arthur Pendragon » despite the fact that it seems to have less fic, it currently look like it has « 7049 », and not « Merlin/Arthur Pendragon (Merlin) » (33619) when searching for fic because Merlin/Arthur Pendragon include « Merlin/Arthur Pendragon (Merlin) » but « Merlin/Arthur Pendragon (Merlin) » exclude older fic that used « Merlin/Arthur Pendragon »

Example :

Here is the number of fic if you filter using Merlin/Arthur Pendragon (Merlin) aka 33,619 fic

And here is the number of fic you get if you filter by using Merlin/Arthur Pendragon aka 38,899 fic

It also happen for tag such as bottom arthur pendragon, you get more fic if you filter by using bottom arthur instead.

824 fic for bottom Arthur (with the Merlin fandom filter) vs 717 fic with the bottom Arthur Pendragon (Merlin)

Btw it isn’t the case for Merlin since bottom Merlin is a « Tags with the same meaning » of Bottom Merlin (Merlin)

Also I just noticed but this mean that there is actually MORE (tagged) bottom Arthur fic lmao

[pendragonsclotpole]

i would 100% do a reboot of the original series with the exact same amount of questionable moments as the original, but then reveal in the last episode that they were actually accidentally married on a planet during their second visit somewhere and they both knew but thought the other didn’t and then that they’re happy living like that as thyla so they don’t get married until they’re both old. then when they’re old, spock is an ambassador, and kirk is still exploring the galaxy with him but on their own private ship with their own money.

I actually do wish Spirk was canon, but I want it to be entirely off-screen and just mentioned by other characters as a matter of fact. Like 'hey, did you know Starfleet only ever made one exception to their fraternization policy, and that was to allow Spock to serve under Kirk when they got married?' Or maybe there's a planet that's populated by Vulcan-Terran hybrids and everyone knows that it was founded by those two because the conditions were good for both species. No, Kirk wasn't the youngest captain in Starfleet, the record was actually beaten by his daughter Saavik two decades later. People say she struggled to live up to her parents' fame, poor thing. A hundred years later Kirk and Spock's messages to each other are published in two tomes. The High Council deems them so inappropriate that they're banned on Vulcan, et cetera.

Any depiction of Spirk on screen would be inherently disappointing because it's straight up impossible to live up to sixty years of fan-made content. The only way to make it good is to incorporate it into the lore and arouse even MORE speculation and fan-made content.

Feel free to disagree, though...if you could make Spirk canon, how would you do it?

[pendragonsclotpole]

oooh op, thank you for adding this perspective!! i also posted something similar in regards to my annoyance that something like this had taken so long, especially when the canon has had so many revivals recently.

if i remember correctly, there was a proposed scene with a recording of old!kirk written by jj abrams for the aos movies that never actually happened (i read somewhere that this is because william shatner didn’t want to do a small cameo, not sure how true that is). and unification, while great, reminded me of the lack of a true onscreen reunion between kirk and spock while both actors were still living to reprise the role. i’m glad shatner, paramount, and leonard nimoy’s family okayed this, but it occurred decades after fans had already run with their interpretation of the canon material and seen it be rejected or at least overlooked by the canon itself.

it was also through posts on here that i learned there are supposedly shatner sanctioned novels that rewrote the canon of kirk’s death, and while that’s nice, the canon i lived with for years and that i presume is most well known by all is kirk’s entrapment in the nexus and his tragically ironic death years later with not one of his dearest friends around him. and spock having died in an alternate universe without anyone either.

because of this, i think it’s important to keep unification separate from those older works, and i hope people listen. validation from the canon source material is great, but it shouldnt be necessary to conflate it with fan created works that long predated it. if anything, unification should be tagged/commented with all the spirk works people created decades ago. it was because of them that unification resonates so loudly, and arguably why it finally happened.

Gonna be real honest and rude about it here, but if we're going to start tagging K/S fanworks that existed prior to November 18, 2024 with "Unification" then we're doing a great disservice to the very fans who created those works and we're bending what fandom means to align with offerings from a corporation.

The fans who still chose to draw or write about Kirk and Spock being together despite Generations and the TNG episode that separated them did so out of their own visions of K/S's future that rejected what was officially being offered to them. They took one look at the new canon and transformed it to something else, without waiting for Paramount or Roddenberry to offer that image of unification to them.

I understand the desire to draw connections, track parallels and repetitions, and use later story-lines to re-contextualize what came before (I do it a lot in my trekposting! I'm a big fan of doing those things!). But to do this to fanworks crosses a line and it is so disheartening to see. This entire fandom came about because fans of the show saw Kirk and Spock as having a relationship that went beyond their official roles on the ship and their duty to Starfleet, that went beyond just friendship, and they dared to name it love and depict it in any way they pleased, regardless of what the general public thought, regardless of public pressure and removal at cons, regardless of anti-obscenity laws (which would impact fanworks depending on the state or country and the local enforcement of those laws), regardless of fanclub leader campaigns to blacklist slash fanzine editors and their supporters.

To take their work and reconnect it to something they had already dared to envision long before it was offered through the official canon is to ignore what fandom is.

Links and quotes for further reading under the cut.

Kathy Resch on publishing T'hy'la:

Two local Trek fen were publishing a zine called The Other Side of Paradise, and one of their issues was X-rated (het). I asked their advice, called their printer for a quote, and then took the finished zine in to be printed. The print shop was a wonderfully funky little hole-in-the-wall place in Oakland. They had a “mascot” named Phred, a brindle-colored Great Dane who had the run of the place. Their primary business was to publish limited run books and study materials for the University of California at Berkeley. They were set up strictly for book publication—no business cards or wedding invitations. They had the specialized machinery necessary to do that sort of work. It was, I admit, a bit difficult to go in there for the first time. I was a bit…embarrassed. But the people who owned the print shop were as cool as they could be…. Back then, it took about two weeks for a printer to print a zine. An odd thing happened during the two weeks T’hy’la 1 was being printed. I got several phone calls and letters from people asking me if I knew what was being said about that Horrible Nasty Zine that was being published. (People think the internet is fast, but the telephoning abilities of fans in early fandom cannot be underestimated.) Person A, a Big Name Fan who ran a fan club for Unnamed Trek Actor, was pitching a fit about this Horrible Nasty Zine and was asking fan club members to basically swear a “loyalty oath” that under no circumstances would they ever have anything to do with said Horrible Nasty Zine or K/S at all. (Almost all my tribbers were members of said fan club.) I finally filled in the details of this mystery when I went to pick up the finished copies of T’hy’la 1. Person A was doing a club zine, and had gone to various Bay Area printers for quotes. When she got to my printer, he told her — with a great amount of glee — “We’re doing one of those right now!” He brought out the back cover for her perusal. Not the front cover, with its nice tame drawing of K&S side by side. No, the back cover, with K&S in a liplock. Person A nearly had an attack, and then began spluttering all sorts of threats and imprecations. I take it the end of Western civilization was involved. My printer, being the ex-flower-child and complete iconoclast that he was, got a huge amount of entertainment out of this. (He didn’t get her business. But he got all of mine in the future.) Person A was determined to root out this evil. All that happened was that my tribbers who were members of her club went ahead and swore her loyalty oath, then made sure I was using their correct pseudonyms. I never heard directly from her, and since I wasn’t a member of the fan club in question, she couldn’t expel me. My printer really enjoyed printing my zines. By the time I’d done my 3rd or 4th issue, he told me the women in the bindery always looked forward to my zines. They’d post prints of the artwork on the bindery walls to keep them entertained while they worked.

[pendragonsclotpole]

in another life, i would have really liked just doing laundry and taxes with you

[pendragonsclotpole]

the campyness of hannibal in the face of the show’s themes or murder and cannibalism should be studied because they pulled it off so well.

yes, your honor, we did just witness a disembowelment, but DID YOU SEE THE WAY HANNIBAL LAID OUT THE CORPSE FOR WILL????

I adore, adore, adore that Hannibal's a shitty patient. He goes to Bedelia and acts like a little brat. Keeps stepping on their boundaries and smiles to himself when she maintains authority in response. He behaves the same way in daily life, behind people's backs--manipulating them, murdering and feeding people his victims, making puns and smiling to himself when they can't catch it. I think, because therapy is a space for dissecting and discussion of oneself, Hannibal lays a bit more on the plate than he usually would, and is more openly mischievous. When he's shed his skin in season 3, he's more obviously playful and flirty. And after he's captured, he's just savage in his humor (re: telling Chilton he made him eat dessert with blood, eating Chilton's lip, "Tell him I hope he isn't very ugly"--now that I think about it, he's just bullying Chilton), and flirts with Will like he's a romcom protag and not a convict who just barely missed the death sentence.

[pendragonsclotpole]

it’s the hannibal memes. they keep us together. also hannibal the show and hannigram the pairing are already pretty toxic on their own. i feel like that’s enough for us, ya know?

It’s crazy that the Hannibal fandom, a show about cannibals, is the least toxic fandom

[pendragonsclotpole]

i’m dyingggg because as a star trek and merlin fan myself, i can say that you described this so well and used the perfect comparisons. saavik as freya kills me. also the escalation from a handshake to a french kiss is gold. like i somehow forgot that vulcan’s being touch telepaths means that handholding IS a kiss. like thank you for that reminder OP. brb i’m gonna go scream into the night

To explain in Merthur term what is currently happening in the spirk fandom : it’s a if 40 years form now Arthur’s actor paid for a 8 minute film where he come back from the dead (have a unspoken conversation with Freya where she basically tells him to hurry and go), as Arthur walks there is Merlin’s voice in the background saying « I’m happy to be your servant till the day I die » , Arthur find Merlin in an old armchair, French kiss him then they look together at the sunset.

[pendragonsclotpole]

why are all the big “insert name slash ship is canon” events always four years apart in november? like it’s only happened twice so far but twice is more than i expected

what’s on the slate for the end of the month in four years, a ten episode merlin series reboot with a merthur confirmation and reunification in the modern day??????

fuck, imagine if it’s hannibal season four. double fuck, what does that mean for the election??

[pendragonsclotpole]

“There are always possibilities, Spock said. And if Genesis is indeed life from death, I must return to this place again.” Unification // Afterword by Spock of Vulcan, The Autobiography of James T Kirk

[pendragonsclotpole]

“There are always possibilities, Spock said. And if Genesis is indeed life from death, I must return to this place again.”

Yes, there's certainly some of that, certainly with love overtones. Deep love. The only difference being, the Greek ideal... we never suggested in the series... physical love between the two. But it's the... we certainly had the feeling that the affection was sufficient for that, if that were the particular style of the 23rd century. That's very interesting. I never thought of that before.

— Gene Roddenberry

[pendragonsclotpole]

literally, when my friend sent it to me i was like, hmm okay and is there any reference to anything like *checks notes* THE quote from the city on the edge of forever

I know I'm being a bit of a hater here, but I'm seeing folks going "OMG, Spirk is canon!" over 765874 - Unification, and then I watch it myself and I'm like... that's it? Yeah, it's a well-produced bit of fluff from a technical standpoint, but there were gayer moments in the Original Series, and if your intention is to celebrate a ship, "somewhat less gay than a TV show from 1966" is not an ambitious target!

[pendragonsclotpole]

AHHH SCREAMING AT THIS REFERENCE

this... simple feeling.

[pendragonsclotpole]

i wanna be perfectly clear that i felt nothing for the stark trek unification video besides contempt for the CGI and the potato quality of it on my phone, until i realized that lump on the bed was spock.

y’all idk what i was expecting when my friend sent me the link describing it as “destiel confirmed but for spirk” but i was not expecting the sweet bliss of two men irrevocably bound by destiny staring off into the sunset as they go towards death together

that’s when they got me, because spock fucking deserves nice things and to not die alone in a universe far from his own.

not to mention kirk’s own death in canon. i am officially headcannoning that kirk appeared to spock in his final moments via some weird magic with the nexus and then they went together peacefully.

also the fact that this was titled “unification” and not “reunification,” that’s very sweet, very mindful, very demure as they tear out my heart and remind me of the promise of spirk to see each other again across space and time.

but also, not to be ungrateful to the very clear amount of money by the cgi thrown at this. WHY DID IT TAKE SO LONG TO GET THIS. and the fact that we’re all going so feral over two men holding hands staring off into the sunset without them ever saying an entire word. this was not in my 2024 bingo card

[pendragonsclotpole]

watching john oliver rn and i’m seeing all the states that trump won but voted for abortion protections through propositions on their ballots.

the fact that “states’ rights” might be one of the only things that saves us from the general fuck ups of the federal government under trump is some kind of weird irony. but also, general reminder that all elections, state and local and federal matter!!

[pendragonsclotpole]

I know it’s for plot sake and also very unrealistic how Arthur doesn’t realise Merlin has magic, many times, even if it’s right in front of him, and even if some of Merlin’s excuses are just so stupid and unbelievable that you should actually be a dollophead to not see it, but then you think about how much trust Arthur has in Merlin, how much he put him on a pedestal, how much reverence he has for him, that he believes him, even if Merlin says, “Look, there’s a flying donkey behind you.” (Arthur would turn around, no doubt there).

And then it just becomes cute: Arthur is adorable and besotted with his manservant. That’s it. That’s the reason behind his obliviousness.

[pendragonsclotpole]

I would pay SO much money to see someone edit a Merlin episode but from Arthur's perspective. Like we only see whatever it is Arthur sees cause I don't think this fandom understands how absolutely batshit insane Merlin was/is ad just how much he actually got away with Arthur was hella tolerant. (It's also funny just imagining it)