cimorene

Last night by the time I finished uploading my remix to cimorene.net and posting it, I was kind of too tired and distracted by the badfic I was reading to write up a post about the remix process.

I kind of wish that this had been the common practice the first time I participated in Remix Redux, too, because I feel like the process was a lot more interesting that time (when I remixed Daegaer's Good Omens AU, "Ordinary People" - in which Crowley and Aziraphale are humans - by keeping the entire plot but converting them back into themselves). But there's always a process when you're trying to engage with one story and make a new one, so here's what I have to say about remixing

medie's Still Waters.

My remixee has a large ouvre, but I knew right away I was going to be restricting myself to Star Trek, because her other fandoms - while containing several awesome stories - were all ones whose canon I'm not familiar with. In fact, I was hoping when I signed up for the exchange in the first place that I'd end up with TOS, my One True Fandom.

In fact, I was immediately enamored of Medie's recent femficathon story, Double Blind, which was actually TOS, in which Uhura and Chapel take charge of the Enterprise while an engineered virus attacks all the possessors of the Y chromosome on board. Besides being possibly the ideal story tailor made to what I want to read in Star Trek nowadays, this one was full of wonderful dialogue and attention to detail, including a stunningly large cast of secondary female characters all pulled from canon episodes. (I can't recommend this story highly enough - see my rec in

awesomeuhura here.) On the one hand, this story was incredibly awesome. But on the other, I didn't feel there were many chinks in it: it was told from Chapel's point of view, but as I turned it over in my mind, I didn't feel that recasting it from Uhura's would produce any important changes, even though it would contain lots of fun information. I would have loved to play in Medie's universe, but it wouldn't have provided the conversation with the original that I really wanted with a Remix. And of course there was a kind of feeling that there was no way I could even approach the original in awesomeness, which was another deterrent.

When I looked at her other Star Trek stories, I was see-sawing back and forth between some Pike/Number One pieces and "Still Waters", a Star Trek XI story, which I eventually chose. On first glance, Still Waters didn't seem like a great candidate. Medie has made genderfuck a specialty, as I quickly noticed going through her past stories, and so much of the ethos of her genderfuck stories is contained in the premise itself. To put it another way, the immediate answers that spring to mind from "What if Spock were always a woman?" are a big part of the story, and playing on the power of the question itself made up most of the rest, to my mind. Her story didn't change the plot of Star Trek XI at all: it was a simple coda from female Spock's point of view, in which a quiet moment contemplating the ocean is interrupted by Kirk, come to gently prod, question, and ultimately have sex with her. Evidently Spock's being a woman has had the effect of removing the canon Spock/Uhura, without affecting the antagonism and chemistry with Kirk. The vivid characterization of Kirk's trademark style of eliciting information from Spock was noteworthy - it unified a definite Reboot-Kirk flavor in the dialog with a characterization founded in the extra information we have in TOS canon.

But when I sat back to ponder my choice of story for a few days, I found myself lighting on the bit of dialogue in "Still Waters" where Kirk says that Spock has pulled every string at her disposal and that she's "some kind of royalty". Medie explains that this is how Kirk gained command of the Enterprise, by Spock's hidden political influence. Kirk has chosen to confront her on the beach, it emerges, basically to find out why she did it, and not just to make sexual advances. Spock denies that she did it because she's attracted to him (which struck me as very important to Spock's characterization, because he would never indulge in such favoritism at the expense of logic).

zvi had made a post about Star Trek XI pointing out Kirk suddenly gaining command as a plothole. Kirk is obviously pretty awesome, but even in TOS canon he worked his way up through the ranks by serving on several ships and being promoted through the intermediate steps, not suddenly elevated to captain of the *brand-new flagship* after one successful engagement. I have to agree with Zvi, there. It's not impossible to spackle, but it is highly improbable. Even assuming that he was decorated copiously with medals of honor and promoted at once to command, why the flagship? Surely they would promote their next most awesome captain after Pike, who would be someone competent and highly experienced, to that post, and give Kirk a smaller ship.

I found Medie's solution from "Still Waters" extremely appealing and also provocative. It's a popular piece of TOS old-school fanon that Spock is, as she put it, "some kind of royalty". T'Pau is sometimes said to be Sarek's father, other times an elder relation. She's often given a very personal relationship with Spock. "Still Waters" seemed to contain a nod to this fanon which is usually just a bit of dazzling background for Spock, turning it on its head to make it central to the plot. Once I realized I'd like to explore that more, I still wasn't certain how to handle it. I felt that simply going into the point of view of a female Spock as she pulled her strings would be more like a prequel than a remix and would leave the story too one-sided, with too little Kirk, but that adopting Kirk's point of view and focusing on how he got the ship that way would make Spock's genderswap superfluous to the plot if the gender question weren't made the thematic lynchpin of the story.

Eventually it was going back to look at my remix of "Ordinary People" that made up my mind to take the plot of "Still Waters" out of the AU and put it back in canon. I do think it's important to keep a remix in conversation with the original, and in my first draft, I struggled quite a bit to strengthen a gender-relations B-plot.

On the gender relations theme: This is why I chose to frame the story with Winona Kirk, because I felt that the relationship of a boy with his single mother is highly thematically relevant to the way he relates to women as an adult. You can see remnants of my original intent to make this a much bigger theme throughout the story with lines like "His strategy with women was flattery-heavy, and he'd practiced (most of) it on her first" and "Fortunate, really, that she was a woman. Jim's methods were rarely so effective at winning information from men". That was also why I added Vega Blue. In TOS canon, Kirk uses his sexuality to get what he wants out of incidental female characters all the time, which provided the inspiration for this scene, but the motivation was to show another aspect of his relations with women, and how his charming a mark differed from charming his mother, with an intervening episode of charming Bones, his closest male friend (my intent, and my belief, is that Reboot!Kirk's relationship with Bones involves more charming, or one might say cajoling, than TOS!Kirk's. You are of course free to disagree). Although my Kirk doesn't acknowledge it, there's not a great deal of gender division in how he manipulates people: his approach to Bones isn't all that different from his overall approach to women, just markedly low on smarm (consider Reboot!Kirk's come-on to Uhura versus TOS!Kirk's).

In the first draft, the final scene was really more like the penultimate scene, and there was a far-too-talky bit of Kirk-Spock dialogue exploring how Kirk relates to Spock and how their situation would differ if Spock were female. This scene was disastrously unsuccessful because that theme was touched on more subtly through the rest of the story, making the conversational resolution seem to come out of nowhere and tip the entire thematic balance of the story the wrong direction. It seemed to create a double ending - one to the political manipulations/"Some kind of Vulcan royalty" plot and one to the exploration of Kirk's Women Issues. As the insightful

effex remarked in her beta email,

"The gender meta is... strange. An interesting strange, but I think it needs a story of its own - this one is really more of a [waves hand about] rest, an explanation, and a look at where Kirk and Spock are going, as a team."

And she was exactly right. She gave the OK to my proposed solution of cutting out the excess scene and smoothing the edges over and pushing the Women Issues theme a little more into the background, and I think it worked pretty well, although I'd be fascinated (seriously) to hear if (and why) anyone disagrees. I do feel a bit mournful that I didn't get a chance to explore the Women Issues, though, because I was getting really fascinated (and a bit too side-tracked) by them. I think that those types of questions are implicitly fundamental to any genderfuck story, and a remix of one would have been a good opportunity to explore them - but in retrospect, that would probably be a completely separate remix.