Only a Fool Breaks the Sneakers.

Kangaroos Originals in Ruby/Sand

meta rec: uhura's job description

telesilla: So you want to be a Starfleet Communications Officer, but...

all you need is an in-depth understanding of tactics, hardware, software, intelligence work, and xeno-linguistics. Oh and the ability to prioritize.

There's been some debate going on with people who feel there was misogyny relating to the way Uhura was written in the movie, some of whom have said that she doesn't get to be awesome enough. (I haven't been following all this carefully; this is just a general paraphrase I've gotten from things I read on both sides!) Other people are responding with, in essence, "Are you crazy? Uhura's job requires mad qualifications and she's really good at it. She has to be a genius AND she kicks ass."

I think two issues are at work here - what I'll call the meta level and the spackle level. The meta is what was going on behind the scenes, the Moral of the Story, screentime apportionment, and creator (and studio) intent. On the meta level, in TOS we rarely saw her do anything much¹ other than "answer the phone". Sigourney Weaver as Tawny made a scathing comment about this in Galaxy Quest, and her point is in no way detracted from by the fact that in order for the ship to actually function the character must have had a lot of knowledge and expertise that we DON'T see (spackle level): the fact remains that Nichelle Nichols didn't get to do a lot aside from answer the phone and be eye candy, and it's an amazing credit to her that she made Uhura likeable, kickass, witty, intelligent, and possessed of a very definite character. In the TOS movies this was already somewhat remedied: we see her hot-wiring communications somewhere (I don't remember where, exactly), culminating in her monumentally impressive ability to decode the whalesong transmissions in STIV using a burned-out stolen Klingon ship without an instruction manual.

The meta level is what the complaints are talking about: some people have a problem with her being made into a love interest (whether this is a valid complaint has been and will continue to be the subject of much debate), or her lack of participation in physical action scenes. Many people (I would hope everybody) have a problem with her uniform, which looks like the stripper version of the real Star Fleet uniform that we just have to assume, for the sake of our sanity, really exists somewhere.

telesilla's post addresses the spackle level. In order to spackle the universe - that is, create an internally coherent interpretation of it all that makes sense - it's necessary to assume that even in TOS where she mostly said "Captain! It's MCI! They say it's a limited time offer!"², she had all the expertise that telesilla lays out. The new movie takes Uhura's expertise and runs with it. We know she's absolutely the best of the best, and considering the pool Star Fleet draws on that's pretty damn impressive.



1. Uhura did also fix the wiring of her own console: no one else ever repairs it (although Spock is allowed to help at least once), which shows that she's the expert not just in linguistics, but in all the specialized computers used for her job. She's also shown to be handy with phaser, dagger, and hand-to-hand combat (eg Mirror, Mirror) and pretty fearless under pressure (eg The Naked Time, The Squire of Gothos).

2. Futurama

To Our Members, We're The Fourth Plebefic Header.

1. A/n: Sorry that this is so short, but there's only so much cliche-esque situations a chapter can take, and this one got a liberal injeciton, in MY opinion........



2. [link text] When in deep water, become a diver.



3. Summary:Rape Group AU. Does have descriptions of rape, so you have been warned. It's rather graphic descriptions...



4. Summary: This isn't the same sort of story you've read before. This isn't some story told around the campfire to frighten young children into behaving. This story is true. I was young then, or as young as I could possibly be, forever being eighteen. But there were worse things than just being eighteen forever.



5. Notes: For the purposes of this story, Patrick’s eyes are blue. So there.