#mcspirk soldier poet king

[dustykneed]

judgement call (nice kitties jim!)

whoooops. ever get reflexively nerve pinch'd?

(context: soldier poet king)

[cowboymater]

controversial opinion maybe:

I KNOW. i know. hear me out

i saw a couple edits on tiktok of mcspirk to soldier poet king and like. i’m not putting anyone on blast but good lord some of those choices made my head hurt. it’s taken me a couple days to synthesize my reasoning for the superior choice (as pictured above), but here goes:

the problem with assigning characters to soldier poet king comes when you take it at face value, flattening the paradigm to angry-sad-tired or violent-artsy-authoritative. if we want to get down to the root of it, the song is based on the threefold office of christ as priest (soldier), prophet (poet), and king. like i’m not christian, but on a textual level it gives us context: the concept that as prophet jesus gave us counsel and words of wisdom, as priest he sacrificed himself to redeem us, and as king he provides for, defends, and forgives us

maybe the most famous priest/prophet/king (& thus soldier/poet/king) allegory in all of literature is frodo, gandalf, and aragorn. frodo bears the burden, though he wishes he did not need to; gandalf offers words of wisdom and mercy; aragorn is a born leader, on the front lines with sword in hand, ready to die with his men if he must

KING: capt. james t. kirk is the easiest one to place. it is a burden and a privilege, an honor and a horror to have the lives of so many depend upon you to make the right call under fire. he makes the call. he leads the landing parties, he puts himself at the head of the charge because by god he is not about to send his men into a battle he wouldn’t fight himself. he leads—with heart when he can, steel when he must—and people follow him. bones and spock are always right behind because they believe in what he believes in, and more than that they believe in him

POET: bones serves as kirk’s emotional sounding board, his moral peer review. he lends an ear, and the word of an old country doctor who’s seen much and understands more. man has ascended to the heavens, to hurtling through the void in a glorified tin can, and it would be no great hardship to forget that our place in the universe is not that of higher life—we are not as quasi-gods, moving pieces on the great three-dimensional chessboard, but flesh and blood, and we must attend to each other. bones tempers the pure logos and rationality offered by spock; he offers grounding in this age of technology that wrinkles the fabric of reality, offers the kind of emotional intellect that cannot be taught, and has always been sorely needed

SOLDIER: this is the one where you really get tripped up by surface-level analysis. yes, spock is reserved and collected. yes, vulcans are pacifists (as you may recall, so are hobbits, and yet frodo remains the soldier in allegory)

the thing about vulcans, though, is that despite the vegan pacifism, they are warriors. it’s tangled up in their history and their DNA. the koon-ut-kal-if-fee survived through centuries of analytical dogma for a reason; even now, they cannot wholly escape their inheritance of violence. their forefathers ran the sands of vulcan green with blood. they venerate logic and condemn emotionality so that they will not

your average high-achieving vulcan, probably on the path to kolinahr, commits their lifetime to the pursuit of knowledge at the vulcan science academy. it’s a measured, rational decision. a controlled environment, where there will never be any logical reason to resort to violence

spock joins starfleet

he joins starfleet, and pursues knowledge in the vast unknowable universe. there is reason for violence, frequently. and sure, the purpose of their mission is peaceful. it’s true that spock would rather resolution be reached without force. but a soldier needs not want to be a soldier. he only needs go to war

when it comes down to blows, he will match them. he makes the sacrifice play, jumps on the grenade, goes into the radiation-soaked engineering room alone. it’s only logical, after all

spock is there to pick apart the universe, unravel the threads of logic until it all makes sense. bones is there to stitch it up. kirk is the hand that holds it all steady, the gravitational field that binds the people of the enterprise to their purpose. soldier-poet-king, commander-doctor-captain. it’s a story old as dirt, and we’ll keep telling it, i think

edit: my bad vulcans have. green blood

[m0rbs]

and king wants to be poet; you know how it goes

[himboadvocate]

Soooo that soldier/poet/king trend huh?

[dustykneed]

i am attached to my daily posting streak to a worrying degree!! anyways the universe called and asked for stained glass mcspirk soldier poet king

i do have some character analysis for these actually but thatll be tomorrows post because im all tuckered out (also happy bday deforest kelley!!)

[dustykneed]

raise your hand if youve ever typecast yourself as your genre of comfort scrunkly by accident. Boy i sure am glad this has never happened to me !! (i am lying through my teeth) (my comically large clown shoes honk loudly as i walk away in shame)

if i had a nickel for every time this has happened i would have a bunch of nickels. nothing wrong with that but the fact that it keeps happening is mildly interesting.

anyways char analysis as promised ｡⁠.ﾟ⁠+⁠ ⁠⟵⁠(⁠｡⁠･⁠ω⁠･⁠) (stained glass mcspirk soldier poet king)

soldier (spock):

as a half-vulcan, spock's burden in life has, to a remarkable extent, been predetermined for him; society holds him to impossible standards and he will never be vulcan nor human enough to meet them. he fights not wars but for his place in the world. spock is a soldier because he has carried the weight of strife since the day he was born and he will carry it for the rest of his life-- one day, it will no longer be his burden but his anchor and his most treasured asset. he was fated to fight-- but it appears that he is perfectly capable of fighting fate itself, too.

poet (mccoy):

at the core of his being, mccoy is a bleeding heart and a stubborn humanist and an unrepentant, defiant idealist. he could never bring himself not to care-- he is a sensualist because life is the most beautiful thing he could ever imagine, and life manifests in the darkest of places, in the smallest of ways, and all of them are beautiful to him-- and that is the fundament of a poet. he is a poet as much as he is a doctor, and his ode to life is scrawled across the continued existence of every person he has ever healed. he is a poet, and life is his art.

king (jim):

as a captain, jim is moral, and empathetic, and so genuinely noble in the highest sense of the word that it radiates from him like an aura of purification, drawing the worthy to him like a beacon, and this makes him a good king, certainly, but what truly serves him the makings of kinghood is his keen sense of strategy. he is a strategist by nature-- in the midst of a sea of dust and debris, he is capable of a preternatural clarity of judgement, and his instinct is uncanny. tactics to him are second nature. jim is so formidable because his judgement is very rarely clouded. if he aims, he misses only by choice-- and it is fortunate indeed that he has chosen to be so kind.

[domesticitydearest]

I love this so much, especially the characterization of Bones, he doesn't get enough credit around here sometimes.

I think there's something to be said as well though about how a soldier works at the behest of the king: as the acting right hand, just as he is the first officer to Kirk, there is an implicit trust between both to keep the other safe as they do what they must, and Bones acts as a counterbalance to keep them grounded to the rest of the world and not just each other.

Altogether there's a lovely interplay between each pair and how the third tempers the other two, I could go all day

controversial opinion maybe:

I KNOW. i know. hear me out

i saw a couple edits on tiktok of mcspirk to soldier poet king and like. i’m not putting anyone on blast but good lord some of those choices made my head hurt. it’s taken me a couple days to synthesize my reasoning for the superior choice (as pictured above), but here goes:

the problem with assigning characters to soldier poet king comes when you take it at face value, flattening the paradigm to angry-sad-tired or violent-artsy-authoritative. if we want to get down to the root of it, the song is based on the threefold office of christ as priest (soldier), prophet (poet), and king. like i’m not christian, but on a textual level it gives us context: the concept that as prophet jesus gave us counsel and words of wisdom, as priest he sacrificed himself to redeem us, and as king he provides for, defends, and forgives us

maybe the most famous priest/prophet/king (& thus soldier/poet/king) allegory in all of literature is frodo, gandalf, and aragorn. frodo bears the burden, though he wishes he did not need to; gandalf offers words of wisdom and mercy; aragorn is a born leader, on the front lines with sword in hand, ready to die with his men if he must

KING: capt. james t. kirk is the easiest one to place. it is a burden and a privilege, an honor and a horror to have the lives of so many depend upon you to make the right call under fire. he makes the call. he leads the landing parties, he puts himself at the head of the charge because by god he is not about to send his men into a battle he wouldn’t fight himself. he leads—with heart when he can, steel when he must—and people follow him. bones and spock are always right behind because they believe in what he believes in, and more than that they believe in him

POET: bones serves as kirk’s emotional sounding board, his moral peer review. he lends an ear, and the word of an old country doctor who’s seen much and understands more. man has ascended to the heavens, to hurtling through the void in a glorified tin can, and it would be no great hardship to forget that our place in the universe is not that of higher life—we are not as quasi-gods, moving pieces on the great three-dimensional chessboard, but flesh and blood, and we must attend to each other. bones tempers the pure logos and rationality offered by spock; he offers grounding in this age of technology that wrinkles the fabric of reality, offers the kind of emotional intellect that cannot be taught, and has always been sorely needed

SOLDIER: this is the one where you really get tripped up by surface-level analysis. yes, spock is reserved and collected. yes, vulcans are pacifists (as you may recall, so are hobbits, and yet frodo remains the soldier in allegory)

the thing about vulcans, though, is that despite the vegan pacifism, they are warriors. it’s tangled up in their history and their DNA. the koon-ut-kal-if-fee survived through centuries of analytical dogma for a reason; even now, they cannot wholly escape their inheritance of violence. their forefathers ran the sands of vulcan red with blood. they venerate logic and condemn emotionality so that they will not

your average high-achieving vulcan, probably on the path to kolinahr, commits their lifetime to the pursuit of knowledge at the vulcan science academy. it’s a measured, rational decision. a controlled environment, where there will never be any logical reason to resort to violence

spock joins starfleet

he joins starfleet, and pursues knowledge in the vast unknowable universe. there is reason for violence, frequently. and sure, the purpose of their mission is peaceful. it’s true that spock would rather resolution be reached without force. but a soldier needs not want to be a soldier. he only needs go to war

when it comes down to blows, he will match them. he makes the sacrifice play, jumps on the grenade, goes into the radiation-soaked engineering room alone. it’s only logical, after all

spock is there to pick apart the universe, unravel the threads of logic until it all makes sense. bones is there to stitch it up. kirk is the hand that holds it all steady, the gravitational field that binds the people of the enterprise to their purpose. soldier-poet-king, commander-doctor-captain. it’s a story old as dirt, and we’ll keep telling it, i think