Eruditorum Press

Less the heroes of our stories than the villains of some other bastard’s

Anniversaries

Vaka Rangi: Three Year Anniversary

, 4

So I’m not going to put too fine a point on it, but this past year has not been an amazing one for me either. But I’m also not going to make a big deal about it-We all have our own suite of hardships to deal with in our lives, and all we can do is continue to carry on to the best of our abilities.
To the future then. Obviously, the post on “All Good Things…” (and some other stuff) goes out Monday, thus officially taking the blog out of Star Trek: The Next Generation as well as the joint coverage of it and Star Trek: Deep Space Nine. This is, to put it mildly, a major turning point. Apart from closing off a sustained block of writing for this project that dates back to 2014, this is also the place where I exit Star Trek permanently. Though my affection for the series never goes away and no matter how much my thinking and identity will remain bound up in it, from here on out Star Trek remains firmly and irretrievably a part of my past. There will be a rather lengthy epilogue of sorts once we hit TNN again in 2000, and then Enterprise the following year, both of which bring Star Trek back into my immediate life temporarily. And I suppose I’ll have to say something about Star Trek (2009) and its subsequent film series as people have been clamouring to hear my take on it since 2009. But even so, Star Trek is never and will never be again what it was for me when Star Trek: The Next Generation was on the air. This is the point in which I follow Kei and Yuri’s lead from last March and exit the narrative for good. My personal story is effectively over.
I’ve talked about this a few other places, but I thought I’d lay out the biographical reasons for this in one concise essay somewhere. After all, not all of you could be or should be expected to follow me through my scattered podcast appearances and my even more sporadic social media presences. Basically, the two reasons I fell out of Star Trek in 1994-5 can be attributed to two things: Satellite TV and Star Trek Voyager. Star Trek: The Next Generation and Star Trek: Deep Space Nine had been syndicated: For readers outside the United States, in this country we have a handful of national networks (ABC, NBC, CBS and FOX), and each of those networks has their own set of exclusive programming. But, because the United States is so large, we also have regional affiliate stations-Local TV channels that are associated with the national networks, but have news programming targeted to regional communities. Whenever these affiliates are not airing the news or national programming, they have free blocks of airtime they can fill with “syndicated” programming: Shows that aren’t tied to a network and can be bought straight from a studio distributor and aired whenever the local affiliates have time to fill (these usually tend to be reruns of ancient, creaking sitcoms from the 1960s).
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Vaka Rangi: Two Year Anniversary

, 3

The Dirty Pair, by Alan Gutierrez

My entire past year can be summarised in just one phrase.
Dirty Pair.
It was almost exactly a year ago today that I began my week-long miniseries on the history of professional wrestling to lead into my essay on The Great Adventure of the Dirty Pair that would introduce Kei and Yuri and change the shape of this project forever. It was an intentionally cheeky move, I admit, and I took great pleasure in watching you all try and guess where on Earth I was going with that tangent. I enjoy making unpredictable moves like that and keeping my audience on their toes: Not only is it fun for me, but it keeps the project fresh and is a way of offering a subtle reminder that Vaka Rangi is meant to be far from another standard-issue history of Star Trek narrative.
But of course Dirty Pair was never an out-of-the blue, 90-degree turn for this project. Even though I’ve only been a fan of the series myself for the past three years or so, I’ve known about its existence, and its shared history with Star Trek, for decades. I’ve been dying to look at Dirty Pair from a Star Trek perspective, and vice verce, ever since I learned what huge geeky fans of the show Rick Sternbach and Mike Okuda were. The Long 1980s are an age where truths are conveyed through aesthetics, images and emotions, science fiction is a genre primarily about ideas and possibilities, anime is a medium particularly well suited to broadening the imagination through cinematography, and the fact that it was the two design illustrators who were the most profoundly affected brings it all back full circle.
The fact Dirty Pair turned out to be one of the single greatest and most personally meaningful bits of narrative fiction I’ve ever experienced in my life is really just icing on the cake.
Even though Dirty Pair was always going to be a part of Vaka Rangi in some form or another, I didn’t originally mean for it become so pronounced that it would end up standing on equal footing with Star Trek: The Next Generation. When I first started, I figured I’d give Kei and Yuri a Sensor Scan post, maybe a few-One for each broad category of the Classic Series. Then when I started to actually watch it for research, I immediately realised the series was way, way too good to be relegated to the between-season errata: This was actually leagues better than the stuff I was actually treating as my case study. At that point I knew it would have to be one of the major pillars of Vaka Rangi Volume 3-The book I spent almost the entirety of this past year writing. Even then though I wasn’t planning to serialize it on the blog: The decision to cover Dirty Pair episode by episode and bit by bit was made at literally the last possible moment when the traffic hits were coming in on the Great Adventure of the Dirty Pair essay and after I discovered the whole series was on YouTube and Hulu freely and legally thanks to Manga Entertainment.
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Vaka Rangi: One Year Anniversary

, 14

Like any good student of synchromysticism, I’m well aware of the importance of dates, in particular anniversaries. Especially when they’re mine.

It was, in a sense, inevitable that I would one day have to do a lengthy project about Star Trek. No large-scale media franchise, or indeed possibly no work of fiction, has consistently meant as much to me or been as much of a source of inspiration (and frustration) over the course of my life as Star Trek. I would have had to address my personal history and issues with Star Trek in some fashion at some point, and that was before my Internet writer colleagues pushed me to work them out through a large-scale serialized blog project.

So, first and foremost, Vaka Rangi has always been more about me than it has been about Star Trek. You may have noticed. Sorry about that. But, as someone trained to notice, analyse and compare positionalities, and also simply knowing it would be pointless to do *yet another* “Let’s watch every episode of Star Trek in order and write about it” thing, I also figured my perspective might allow me to say some things that might not get said in mainline cult sci-fi discourse. But this also means this is a particularly personal project for me, as it’s my reaction to Star Trek that informs not just the kind of critical perspective I offer, but that kind of person I am. I never wanted this to be a straightforward critical history, even a subversive one, and the project was never going to let me make it into one.

Growing up cut off from the kind of pop culture discourse that seems to have morphed into Nerd Culture, I guess I assumed the things I saw in Star Trek were what everyone liked about Star Trek, but it very quickly became evident that I was wrong, and any evidence I found to the contrary seems to have been deliberate misrepresentations in marketing buzzspeak. As a result, I spent a lot of time thinking about how I was going to structure this project to get this across, and I eventually settled on the idea of comparing Star Trek’s idealism (at least the way I saw it) to the philosophy of the ancient Polynesian navigators for various reasons. Obviously, as a cultural anthropologist I’ve read about and studied them a lot, as Polynesia is one of anthropology’s favourite classic case studies and Hawai’i in particular has a very deep and spiritual connection to the night sky. But it’s also a region I feel connected to myself in a very deep and personal way I can’t exactly articulate (there are a few places around the world that are like this for me, but Polynesia was the first one I consciously noticed my connection to). More specifically, I genuinely do see and try to find a kinship in the way the navigators conceived of growing, learning, travelling and the concept of a global community and what I think Star Trek really ought to stand for.…

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