Conceal the unhappy truth as long as it is possible - I know it cannot be long.
What unhappy truth, you ask? Well, I was working on a scene in my Spock/Uhura fan fiction piece the other day when a weird feeling of deja vu came over me. My (borrowed) protagonist, a man of dignity and reserve who works hard to keep his emotions contained in channels that will be acceptable to the community in which he grew up, was going to have to confess a major failure in that department, to the very person who had provoked the feelings in question. This represented a pretty significant crisis in his life: he was completely unused to self-exposure and the confessional mode, and the feelings he was going to have to admit to should have been beneath him to begin with. It was going to be fairly excruciating for him, but, if done right, quite enjoyable for the reader.
This all seemed so... familiar, somehow. I had seen this movie before, but where? When I figured it out, I groaned and smacked my forehead. Was the Spock/Uhura romance, which I had read somewhere was the thing many female moviegoers were citing as their reason for repeat viewings of Star Trek, really just Lizzie & Darcy redux? Oh, Lord. I envisioned this analogy spreading like wildfire across the Internet and the old school media, becoming conventional wisdom within the week. I saw stupid headlines being written for stupid think pieces in the New York Times style section, Slate, the arts section of the Wall Street Journal: "Pride and Prejudice in Outer Space." "Is the Bridge of the Enterprise to be Thus Polluted?" "A Truth Universally Acknowledged: Ladies Love Emotionally Unavailable Men," etc., etc. In short, I saw the Bridget Jones-style condescension beginning. Because after all, we straight chicks with our banal romantic fantasy lives are such predictable one-trick ponies, aren't we? Give us an emotionally distant or conflicted Dude Who Cannot Love - preferably one who has aristocratic posture and rarely uses contractions in everyday speech - and hint that for that one special woman, he'll make an exception, and we'll be all, "SWOON! Sign me up, Scotty!," amirite?
Well, I have signed up for more of this, as this blog makes clear. And I am a fan of Jane Austen, though not particularly of Bridget Jones, since I prefer to take my romance with a pretty heaping dose of intellectual rigor. But having never been exactly a normal representation of heterosexual womanhood (assuming such a thing even exists), I maybe shouldn't speak for why women like the Spock/Uhura pairing, because I'd probably come up with some bullshit answer centered around identifying more with Spock than with Uhura, even though I really like Saldana/Ortzman's interpretation of Uhura 2.0 so far and don't at all grok the charge from a few old-schoolers that she's nothing but a sex object (wha??). Given that it's women's job to be the designated expressers of emotion on behalf of all humanity and everything, I wouldn't want to shock anyone by suggesting that we ladiez are at all familiar with the phenomenon of chronically suppressing emotion in order to perform our various duties and get through our various days.
Anyway, maybe I've been worrying in vain, because the P&P meme seems so far to be mostly confined to fandom. There's a piece by DawnCandace called "Pride and Logic" up at fanfiction.net which begins "It is a truth universally acknowledged that a Vulcan in the grip of pon farr must be in want of a mate" and is actually pretty funny, and the other day I ran across a journal - on this very site, I think - that superimposed the words "If I loved you less, I might be able to talk about it more" over an image of the Spock/Uhura reassignment scene (which I'll credit to its author, if I can find it again). Extra bonus points to this latter person, too, for cribbing from Emma rather than P&P - not only is the former less of a cliche, it also happens to be one of the sexiest pieces of writing ever committed to paper. There is a bit of the Mr. Knightley/Emma mentor-mentee dynamic in the Spock/Uhura relationship, too, but I wouldn't be surprised if the Emma Woodhouse in this scenario turns out to be Spock - the smartass who's not quite as smart as he thinks he is - rather than Uhura.
*It may be sacrilege to say this, but the cover version wins. The extra angst makes it soar.
This all seemed so... familiar, somehow. I had seen this movie before, but where? When I figured it out, I groaned and smacked my forehead. Was the Spock/Uhura romance, which I had read somewhere was the thing many female moviegoers were citing as their reason for repeat viewings of Star Trek, really just Lizzie & Darcy redux? Oh, Lord. I envisioned this analogy spreading like wildfire across the Internet and the old school media, becoming conventional wisdom within the week. I saw stupid headlines being written for stupid think pieces in the New York Times style section, Slate, the arts section of the Wall Street Journal: "Pride and Prejudice in Outer Space." "Is the Bridge of the Enterprise to be Thus Polluted?" "A Truth Universally Acknowledged: Ladies Love Emotionally Unavailable Men," etc., etc. In short, I saw the Bridget Jones-style condescension beginning. Because after all, we straight chicks with our banal romantic fantasy lives are such predictable one-trick ponies, aren't we? Give us an emotionally distant or conflicted Dude Who Cannot Love - preferably one who has aristocratic posture and rarely uses contractions in everyday speech - and hint that for that one special woman, he'll make an exception, and we'll be all, "SWOON! Sign me up, Scotty!," amirite?
Well, I have signed up for more of this, as this blog makes clear. And I am a fan of Jane Austen, though not particularly of Bridget Jones, since I prefer to take my romance with a pretty heaping dose of intellectual rigor. But having never been exactly a normal representation of heterosexual womanhood (assuming such a thing even exists), I maybe shouldn't speak for why women like the Spock/Uhura pairing, because I'd probably come up with some bullshit answer centered around identifying more with Spock than with Uhura, even though I really like Saldana/Ortzman's interpretation of Uhura 2.0 so far and don't at all grok the charge from a few old-schoolers that she's nothing but a sex object (wha??). Given that it's women's job to be the designated expressers of emotion on behalf of all humanity and everything, I wouldn't want to shock anyone by suggesting that we ladiez are at all familiar with the phenomenon of chronically suppressing emotion in order to perform our various duties and get through our various days.
Anyway, maybe I've been worrying in vain, because the P&P meme seems so far to be mostly confined to fandom. There's a piece by DawnCandace called "Pride and Logic" up at fanfiction.net which begins "It is a truth universally acknowledged that a Vulcan in the grip of pon farr must be in want of a mate" and is actually pretty funny, and the other day I ran across a journal - on this very site, I think - that superimposed the words "If I loved you less, I might be able to talk about it more" over an image of the Spock/Uhura reassignment scene (which I'll credit to its author, if I can find it again). Extra bonus points to this latter person, too, for cribbing from Emma rather than P&P - not only is the former less of a cliche, it also happens to be one of the sexiest pieces of writing ever committed to paper. There is a bit of the Mr. Knightley/Emma mentor-mentee dynamic in the Spock/Uhura relationship, too, but I wouldn't be surprised if the Emma Woodhouse in this scenario turns out to be Spock - the smartass who's not quite as smart as he thinks he is - rather than Uhura.
*It may be sacrilege to say this, but the cover version wins. The extra angst makes it soar.