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Our Imposter Syndrome cancels out our Dunning-Kruger

Ship’s Log Supplemental

Ship’s Log, Supplemental: Sting Operation

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I’ve said before I’m no expert on comic books. I know I’ve spent basically the whole back half of this book talking almost exclusively about Star Trek comics, but Star Trek was an exception for me, like it was in a lot of other ways. My knowledge of the history of the medium and its important events and figures is functional at best, but, like a lot of people I should imagine, I did use to read them every now and again. Now I never read a ton of comics (at least, not US comics), but neither was Star Trek the only thing I followed in four colours at the time. I never read superhero comics (though I was aware of the characters from other media), but aside from Star Trek I did have a few books I kept an eye out for at the newsstand whenever I’d go shopping with my family. Probably unsurprisingly, they were all licensed titles: Archie Comics’ Scooby-Doo series, Gladstone Publishing’s reprints of Carl Barks’ Donald Duck and Uncle Scrooge stories, and a monthly book from DC Comics published under the Warner Brothers name based on Looney Tunes.

Being that I was first getting into Cartoon Network in the summer of 1995, I was spending a fair amount of time exploring the archives of the Golden Age of Animation, and from this period I have to say that it was the Warner Brothers stuff that most interested me. I was and still am a huge fan of Disney’s Renaissance Age output (…at least on TV), but I have to admit their “Classic” stuff always left me feeling more than a bit…bored and annoyed (with the notable exception of Alice in Wonderland, depending on where you peg the end of the Golden Age being, which is naturally the one Disney movie everyone but me hates, except, apparently Japan). Looney Tunes, on the other hand, was energetic, anarchic, creative and exciting. I had a couple of VHS tapes with some select shorts on them beforehand, mostly Bugs Bunny and mostly a mixed bag, to be honest. But Cartoon Network gave me access to a whole lot more content than I’d ever had anywhere else before, so I eagerly used the opportunity to catch up on my animation history by way of the 1990s version of archive binging.

One of the things Looney Tunes was of course known for was its frequent parodies of then-current pop culture. Bugs Bunny would frequently mingle with representatives of famous celebrities of the time for example, and just as frequently impersonate them. There was also a famous short entitled You Ought to Be in Pictures from the earlier days of Warner Brothers animation that posited Porky Pig and Daffy Duck were actual actors employed at the WB studios and was an early example of blending live action with animation (a tactic, ironically enough, Walt Disney had hoped to use in his various abortive attempts to make an Alice in Wonderland movie prior to 1951).…

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Ship’s Log, Supplemental: Star Trek: Deep Space Nine Magazine

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Here’s where I must make my “Fake Geek Girl” confession to all of you, dear readers. Though let’s be honest, it’s not like I ever pretended I was a real one.

All throughout, my coverage of Star Trek: Deep Space Nine has rested on the unspoken assumption that I was a fan of said TV series, or at least a casual viewer, at the time of its airing. I was not. I hint at it a couple of times during the preceding chapters, but the more accurate truth of the matter is that I was actually a fan of Star Trek: Deep Space Nine Magazine and the tie-in comic book series from Malibu. I did not watch the television show called Star Trek: Deep Space Nine during its original run (at least not regularly), although to be fair to me I *couldn’t*: Due to the way syndicated television worked in the late 80s and early 90s, local affiliates of large national networks could buy programming packages to show whenever they had empty space in their broadcast schedules when they weren’t airing network TV or local news. So this meant that a show made for syndication, like Star Trek: The Next Generation and Star Trek: Deep Space Nine, had no fixed airdate or station and could come on literally whenever and wherever. This was fine when there was only one show, but as soon as Star Trek: Deep Space Nine came along things got dicey, and in some regional areas (like, say mine), rival networks would actually air the two shows in competition with each other during the same time slot. No matter what the new Star Trek series looked like, it was always going to be a hard sell to ask me to give up my weekly time with a cast of characters who had become like another family to me.

That’s not to say I wasn’t interested in Star Trek: Deep Space Nine, of course. I would have loved to watch it more often than I did, I just didn’t want to give up Star Trek: The Next Generation for it. So for the first season, I was limited to tantalizingly brief out-of-context snippets of random episodes, the odd trailer and assorted PR Stills in magazines. Even that was still enough to fire my imagination, however, and I pined for the day I’d finally get the chance to give the new show my undivided attention. By the second season, things had changed a bit: I still wasn’t able to watch the show regularly, but what I did have access to this season that I didn’t in the first was the Starlog-published Star Trek: Deep Space Nine Magazine. Granted it launched in 1993 alongside “Emissary”, but, as with most things like this, you have to remember I live in the back and beyond of everything: Pop culture stuff takes a while to trickle down to me. I only started reading with the second season issues and, even then, like all the things I was interested in, my corner market only got the magazine in sporadically at the very best.…

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Ship’s Log, Supplemental: Star Trek: Deep Space Nine – The Emissary (Music from the Original Television Soundtrack)

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Other composers may be more renowned in the fandom today, but when Paramount needs to launch a Star Trek show, they turn to Dennis McCarthy. He’s the working composer who holds the franchise together in song on a day to day basis. And his score for “Emissary” (mistakingly affixed with the definite article on the sleeve notes) may well be his magnum opus. It’s definitely a major turning point.

You can make much the same argument for Star Trek: Deep Space Nine itself, at least as it exists now in January 1993. It’s the culmination of everything Rick Berman, Michael Piller and the rest of the Star Trek creative team had learned over the past three years, and it’s the fullest realisation of everything they’d ever wanted to do with Star Trek. More importantly it’s a vision that finally and at long last embraces the franchise’s utopianism instead of bristling up against it, in spite of how many overtures to conflict for conflicts sake the team makes in interviews. In absolute defiance of the “three season rule”, in “Emissary” Star Trek: Deep Space Nine opens straight up with a defining statement that’s easily a contender for the title of Greatest Star Trek Story Ever Told, and it’s a testament to how good this season is that it ends with one too.

Dennis McCarthy’s soundtrack is reflective of every ounce of the team’s newfound confidence and inspiration. There’s even one obvious standout cut from this album that’s just as definitive as “Emissary” itself, and is in my mind the single greatest piece of music ever composed for Star Trek. We’ll talk about it in good time, of course, but as that’s obviously going to take up the bulk of this essay I’ll save it for the end. In the meantime, on the rest of the record McCarthy finds the perfect feel for what Star Trek in the twilight of the Long 1980s should sound like: There’s still a little of that golden age film score sound Ron Jones popularized, albeit quite a bit less bombastic than Jones’ work. And there are definitely slower parts where the music is intended to fade into the background a bit, and by that I mean there are parts of “Emissary” that absolutely sound like, well, a TV soundtrack. But McCarthy strikes just the right balance between that and a more eclectic edge that he’s quite frankly never been given the credit he deserves for.

(Although quite frankly, any argument that McCarthy just writes “sonic wallpaper” flies straight out the window for me whenever “New Personality” starts playing. It’s an instantly reconisable piece and it immediately transports me right back to one of my most formative and evocative television memories.)

Where Ron Jones was given instructions to be extremely classical and old-fashioned Hollywood (a tad dated and overblown to my ears, though I concede that’s my opinion) and Jay Chattaway does his best stuff with organic world sounds, particularly Celtic ones (c.f.…

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Ship’s Log, Supplemental: Gene Roddenberry

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On October 24, 1991 Gene Roddenberry passed away.

It may seem strange to grant him an entire chapter in this book. Roddenberry has, after all been an undeniable presence since the very beginning of Star Trek, and no small amount of digital ink has been spilled on my part, or on the part of others, trying to piece together precisely who he was and what his contributions to Star Trek really were. I’m not going to do this every time a major creative figure exits our story permanently, but given the stature Roddenberry had, and to some extent still has, and the synchronicity of his death happening almost exactly parallel with Star Trek’s 25th Anniversary, there’s no way this was going to be seen as anything other than a massive event even among a 24-month year marked by massive events. There’s only one other primary creative figure in all Star Trek who casts a remotely comparable shadow over the series’ heart and soul to the one Gene Roddenberry does: He’ll get his due when his own time comes (in fact he’s in many ways *more* deserving of tribute than Roddenberry, a true unsung hero), but right now this is something that needs to be properly addressed for good.

From the beginning of Vaka Rangi, I have been exceedingly and harshly critical of Gene Roddenberry. I did not, I want to make eminently clear, start this project with a chip on my shoulder and an ax to grind. This was supposed to be a voyage of peace and understanding. And I went out of my way to be as even-handed about him as I possibly could in my inaugural essay on “The Cage”: That episode is, without question, Star Trek as Gene Roddenberry saw it. It’s the purest, most distilled version of his original vision for what the series should be, and even though he had a ton of help cleaning it up and making it presentable from Bob Justman and Herb Solow, that remains plainly on display in the finished product. But the other thing about “The Cage” is that, unfortunately, it is fucking terrible. So that’s also where things start to go wrong for both Gene Roddenberry and Vaka Rangi.

The period of the original Star Trek Gene Roddenberry was the showrunner for, from “The Corbomite Maneuver” through “Dagger of the Mind”, does not inspire confidence (with the extremely notable exception of “Balance of Terror”). Nor does the fact Roddenberry thought, for whatever reason, that “Mudd’s Women” and “The Omega Glory” would have been suitable pilots for Star Trek. Once I started to actually dig into the behind-the-scenes history of Star Trek and actually cast a critical lens upon it, I discovered two things. One, I wish I had never thought to do that because the whole thing is way over my head and way too dangerous for me to me to even conceive of messing around with.…

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Ship’s Log, Supplemental Bonus: “Oh, don’t even go to the first season!”

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Was what LeVar Burton once said in an interview with the now-defunct Star Trek Magazine when the DVD box sets for Star Trek: The Next Generation started being released. Even cast members, when prompted in fan environments, will tow mainline fandom’s party line and cringe on cue at the prospect of the series’ supposedly irredeemable first season. And while I grant there are issues to be found in this year’s crop of episodes, there are issues to be found in *all* of Star Trek: The Next Generation‘s seven seasons and I’m still resolute in my belief the first year is unfairly singled out for blame. No, it’s not what we’ve come to expect from Star Trek: The Next Generation and yes, it’s a bit awkward in places, but Jonathan Frakes is correct to point out this was a year where the show took risks it wouldn’t take later on. And, love her or hate her, this is your only opportunity to see Tasha Yar as a crewmember.
So these are my picks for the absolute best of Star Trek: The Next Generation, Year One. Not every episode is a masterpiece, but each one is far better than its reputation would have you believe and well worth a look during any journey through the show’s mythos.
  1. “Encounter at Farpoint”
  2. “Haven”
  3. “Where No One Has Gone Before”
  4. “The Last Outpost”
  5. “Lonely Among Us”
  6. “The Battle”
  7. “Too Short a Season”
  8. “The Big Goodbye”
  9. “11001001”
  10. “Home Soil”
  11. “Coming of Age”
  12. “Heart of Glory”
  13. “The Arsenal of Freedom”
  14. “Symbiosis”
  15. “We’ll Always Have Paris”
  16. “Conspiracy”
  17. “The Neutral Zone”
 
Addendum: If this is your first visit to Star Trek: The Next Generation, I have to begrudgingly throw in “Datalore” as well. It’s not good, but the events it sets in motion come back to play an important part in later story arcs. But even without it, I look at this list and still see a pretty formidable success-failure ratio. I’m recommending roughly the same amount of episodes from Star Trek: The Next Generation Season 1 as I would from the entirety of the Dirty Pair TV series-While this season doesn’t have anywhere near the same number of unmitigated masterpieces as that one did, that’s pretty high praise coming from me.
Speaking of…
Since we’re compiling enumerated episode lists anyway and since I never officially did one for this show, here are my picks for the very best episodes from the Dirty Pair TV series, for the five DP fans who actually follow this site. While as of this writing I’m still going with Dirty Pair: Affair of Nolandia as my absolute favourite Dirty Pair story overall, the first two novels are a must-read if you can find them and Dirty Pair: The Motion Picture is probably worth a look at least once, they’re not included here (nor is any Classic DP material I’ve yet to cover) as I’m strictly focusing on the 1985 anime TV series today.
…

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Ship’s Log, Supplemental: Star Trek: The Next Generation: Encounter At Farpoint (Original TV Soundtrack)

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I didn’t own a lot of music when I was younger. CDs were expensive, vinyl records moreso, both were hard to find where I live at the time and we didn’t really have much to play them on anyway. Any music I did have was strictly on audio cassette, and one of the most life-changing moments for me came when my aunt bought me a Sony Walkman so I could actually listen to my own music wherever I wanted.

Naturally, an album of music from Star Trek: The Next Generation got one of my scarce tape deck slots. There were a lot of soundtracks released for the series, but the one I had was the very first-Dennis McCarthy’s score for “Encounter at Farpoint”. Trekkers may disagree, but McCarthy is for me the iconic and quintessential Star Trek composer, with what’s probably my absolute favourite piece of music and score in the entire franchise to his name. We’re not talking about either right now, but we are looking at his first Star Trek work and one that holds a great deal of meaning for me personally.

I’m not ashamed to admit one of my favourite genres of music is film, television and video game soundtracks, especially theme songs. I admire how musicians can create songs that are designed to be equal parts short, catchy, memorable and deeply evocative. I can put on a good soundtrack and be instantly reminded of what I love about the actual work so much without being burdened with the infelicities that sometimes accompany the works themselves: It’s like a version of the work with the contrast dial turned up, and I’ll frequently put a soundtrack on in the background if I’m trying to cultivate a specific mood surrounding its parent work, like if I’m trying to write about it or something.

Dennis McCarthy’s score to “Encounter at Farpoint” is very solid: It is, I have said, not my favourite of his scores, though there are one or two pieces that stand out for me, but it is quite good. Indeed, it’s probably the best kind of soundtrack for the background music style of listening. It should probably say something that this has never been an album I listen to in its entirety very frequently-Not that it’s bad, but rather, that “Encounter at Farpoint” itself is so good I typically prefer to just go watch that. Although that said, I do have memories of putting this on during a road trip to Boston once and it making the other passengers quite happy. The real draw of this album for me has always been two things: Firstly, the sleeve art, which is one of the most evocative and meaningful images ever associated with Star Trek for me. The shot of the Enterprise in particular is my absolute favourite. Second, the theme song, which is, ironically enough, the one part of the soundtrack McCarthy *didn’t* do.

When I was younger I adored this song; it was probably one of my favourite pieces of music ever for a very long time and seemed to embody everything I saw in and loved about Star Trek: The Next Generation.…

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Ship’s Log, Supplemental: Star Trek: The Next Generation Series Bible

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The beloved crew of the USS Enterprise NCC-1701-D were not always the people we know and love and have become so intimately familiar with over the years.

Though Star Trek: The Next Generation did not undergo as radical a transformation as some shows do between preproduction and filming, there are still a handful of drastic differences between the show as conceived and the show as aired, in particular in terms of the characters. There are a number of surprises in store for the Next Generation fan who decides to look back into the show’s early brainstorming sessions and first-draft series bibles, and before we boldly go off into the show that was, I think it’s important for us to take a moment and reflect upon the show that almost was. A show that is many respects the same as the one we all know, but in many others significantly different, and, perhaps in some respects, more intriguing.

This essay then is not a straightforward transcription of the original Star Trek: The Next Generation Writer’s Guide by Gene Roddenberry, but is rather an amalgamation and distillation of a number of early drafts and ideas that Roddenberry and the team were working on before the cameras finally started rolling. I make no pretenses that I’m organising all this according to any particular structure or logic apart from the one that emphasizes the things I think are most important to focus on and keep in mind about this period of the show’s history. Honestly, I’m not even sure the actual preproduction of the show was as ruthlessly concise and methodical as I’m making it out to seem, but I maintain my goal here was to create a sort of unofficial, pseudo-bible for a version of Star Trek: The Next Generation that had a very respectable chance of actually happening. With that in mind, let’s have a look at

The New Crew

Captain Jean-Luc Picard, played by Sir Patrick Stewart, takes his name from Swiss inventor and explorer Auguste Piccard. Auguste is famous, along with his brother Jean-Felix, for their scientific expeditions in hot-air balloons to record data on the upper atmosphere, their studies of cosmic microwave background radiation and their invention of the bathyscaphe Trieste, which his son Jacques piloted to Challenger Deep in the Marianas Trench, the deepest point in Earth’s oceans.

Captain Picard is described as an aesthete; someone who enjoys the “privileges” and “eccentricities” his rank affords him. A veteran officer, Picard got command of the Enterprise due to already being a “24th century Stafleet legend”. I seem to recall someone commenting once in a Star Trek magazine that Roddenberry had described his conception of Captain Picard as a dashing, suave and debonair “hairy Frenchman” who enjoyed things like fine wine. Apparently, women in Star Trek: The Next Generation‘s universe consider men like Picard (who is described as being in his fifties) to have “just entered [their] best years”.…

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Ship’s Log, Supplemental: Star Trekkin’

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We’re jumping ahead a few months by looking at The Firm’s chart-topping tongue-in-cheek send-up “Star Trekkin’”, which was released in June of 1987. But we’ve already played with temporal mechanics recently in regards to With Love from the Lovely Angels, and anyway, I can’t honestly comprehend looking at this song anywhere else but here: That it went out into a world where Star Trek: The Next Generation exists is frankly inconceivable to me, but I suppose it’s yet another example of how intractable and immovable the Original Series is in pop culture.

I don’t really need to analyse this song too much as “Star Trekkin’” is pretty self-explanatory. It’s a cumulative song that runs through caricatures of the Original Series cast who rattle off parodic and increasingly scrambled variations of their iconic catchphrases. And there are some real doozys-My favourites are Uhura’s acknowledgment of the sheer inherent ridiculousness of the Klingons (“There’s Klingons on the starboard bow/Scrape them off, Jim!”) Kirk’s wallop of “We come in peace! Shoot to kill!”, Scotty’s “Ye cannae change the script, Jim, och, see ye Jimmy!” and of course the chipmunk’d chorus of “Star Trekkin’ across the universe/On the starship Enterprise under Captain Kirk/Star Trekkin’ across the universe/Boldly going forward, ’cause we can’t find reverse”. It’s pretty straightforwardly, and amazingly, an itemized list of everything that was ever cliche about the original Star Trek.

One thing that’s neat about “Star Trekkin’”, aside from the obvious, is how it plays with its structure as a cumulative song. The way the crew keeps repeating their lines, both in their actual verses and when those verses are recreated in the next verse, it sounds like a VHS or cassette tape somebody keeps rewinding and playing over and over again. And, as the verses get stranger and more distorted as the song goes on, building to its epic chipmunk finale, it sounds like that same tape is getting, well, warped. And, when this is all paired up with the wonderfully bonkers music video featuring sock puppets, pizza starships and singing potatoes, “Star Trekkin’” becomes just about the perfect translation of Star Trek to the Long 1980s: At once playing off of the venerable twenty year nostalgia cycle (Star Trek, as an extent filmed media phenomenon, turned 20 in 1986) and into the post-MTV understanding of the power of symbolic imagery, “Star Trekkin’” distills its source material down to its most memorable setpieces and parrots them as a commentary on the ouroboros-like mentality that accompanies being a Star Trek fan.

But this is worth parsing out. You’ll notice that, over twenty years on from “Star Trekkin’” itself (pushing thirty at the time of this writing), there’s been nothing similar done for any of the subsequent incarnations of Star Trek that came in its wake. There are a number of factors perhaps involved in this outside of Star Trek itself: For one, so-called “old media” like pop music (or at least the pop climate that would allow something like “Star Trekkin’” to reach number 1 on the pop charts) swiftly died a quick and painless death in the 1990s, a decade that also saw (at least the West) slip into an embrace of complacency and apathy that, at least as far as I’m concerned we haven’t come out of yet (if indeed it’s even possible for us to anymore).…

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Ship’s Log, Supplemental: A Fragment Out of Time

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Slash fiction is a thread that’s been with us for quite some time already, and it’s been with Star Trek arguably since as early as “Where No Man Has Gone Before”. Although certain hardcore fans might not like to admit it, it is unquestionably one of the franchise’s most defining and signature motifs: Although slash has existed for pretty much as long as people have been telling stories, the current manifestation of it, the interaction it has with late-20th and early-21st century fan culture, and thus the way it is commonly conceptualized today, can be directly traced back to Star Trek.

There are any number of possible opportunities to discuss slash over the course of the franchise’s history, but the one that seems to most appropriate is here, with the first documented piece of Star Trek-inspired slash fiction, Diane Marchant’s “A Fragment Out of Time” (Page 1, Page 2), dating to 1974. Marchant submitted it to one of the first (and at the time only) Star Trek zines targeted expressly towards adults, a publication somewhat wonderfully titled Grup. Given the zine’s comparatively small audience and interviews she’s given after the fact, Marchant never expected it to be the bombshell it ended up becoming.

However I think she really needn’t be ashamed, because the piece itself is, perhaps contrary to what one might expect, really quite tame and laudably well-written, describing a night of passionate lovemaking between two parties of whom great care is taken to speak in vagaries (though an accompanying illustration, not to mention the fact it was published in a Star Trek zine, sort of makes it obvious who the two paramours are supposed to be). And “lovemaking” really is the proper term: Marchant is very clearly interested in the intimacy and tenderness shared by her protagonists, and the gentle, poetic tone that permeates the entire piece reflects this. Honestly, as far as slash fiction goes, or really erotica in general, you could do considerably worse for yourself than this.

Like so much fanfiction of its era, Marchant wrote “A Fragment Our of Time” largely as an experiment. However, she also always maintained that she didn’t come up with the idea of shipping Kirk and Spock herself, she was merely responding to what she felt was blatant subtext in the original Star Trek and that everyone who watched the show recognised and acknowledged to one degree or another, regardless of whether or not they actually admitted it. Marchant was adamant that the only thing she contributed to the history of Star Trek and the broader fan culture was the first work that was bold enough to put it into words, and I’m more than reasonably convinced she was right.

There was, of course, (and still is, to some extent) some manner of controversy over this opinion. The popular consensus for what happened next (I mean as much as there can be consensus about something as understudied and undervalued as fanfiction) is that “A Fragment Out of Time” caused a great schism amongst Star Trek fans and a firestorm of a debate about how proper the fic itself was and whether Marchant’s argument was convincing or not.…

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Ship’s Log, Supplemental: A Trekkie’s Tale

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Gee, golly, gosh, gloriosky! It’s Lieutenant Mary Sue!

Oh boy, here we go. Yes, my friends, the time has finally come.

“A Trekkie’s Tale” needs no introduction. A notoriously vicious bit of satire attacking a particular trend within Star Trek fanfiction, the story is infamous for introducing the world to the hated Mary Sue. It took no more than five brief paragraphs to completely tear Star Trek fandom asunder and, as a result, “A Trekkie’s Tale” has transcended fan circles to become ubiquitous in the larger pop consciousness such that it’s had a truly transformative, profound, and arguably profoundly negative, effect on the way we look at genre fiction even to this day. A case could be (and has been) made that the introduction of the Mary Sue archetype is one of the largest and most sweeping acts of reactionary silencing tactics in the history of genre fandom.

And yet “A Trekkie’s Tale” itself is misread and misunderstood by pretty much everyone.

First, some background for those perhaps less familiar with what this is than others. “A Trekkie’s Tale” is a piece of satirical fanfiction published in 1973 and featuring a character named Lieutenant Mary Sue who is the youngest, most beautiful and most talented officer in the entirety of Starfleet. On her first day on the Enterprise, Lieutenant Mary Sue outperforms everyone else on the ship, causes Kirk to instantly fall in love with her at first sight, outwits Spock with logic (that is never fully explained) and singlehandedly saves the ship, the crew and the Federation at least twice before tragically dying randomly at the end of the story to be mourned by everyone and essentially turned into a modern-day saint. Lieutenant Mary Sue, and “A Trekkie’s Tale” more generally, is fairly transparently an attack on a certain kind of Star Trek fanfiction, and is most often read as a parody of (usually female) writers who create author avatar characters as wish fulfillment, thus sidelining the original cast and narrative in the process. In the years since the initial publication of “A Trekkie’s Tale”, the term “Mary Sue” has become a stock character archetype and nowadays gets tossed around rather carelessly, most typically as a knee-jerk reaction from insecure male fans to the concept of “strong female character I don’t like and who makes me uncomfortable with my masculinity.”

What’s the most interesting thing about the Mary Sue archetype to me, however, is how uniquely Star Trek a concept it really is. Star Trek fandom has, in my opinion, a very peculiar fascination with an *extremely* specific sort of fantasy: It’s an almost omnipresent dream amongst Star Trek fans of all ages, generations and genders to be captain of their own starship, command their own crew and, essentially, to be the star of their own Star Trek spinoff. This goes totally contrary to the stereotypical conception of the obsessive fan, which would be someone fantasizing about the characters or the actors, either in a romantic or sexual way or just a desire to meet them in person.…

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