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I'm watching baseball again. This time: Detroit Tigers vs Texas Rangers.
I want Detroit to win.
Why? Because the name "Texas Rangers" offends me, pretty much. Even though I have a friend in Texas (who was deeply offended last time I mentioned my dislike of the very concept of "Texas Rangers"), and I'm not sure offhand that I know anyone from Michigan at all. I studied some US history - the Texas Rangers perpetrated some of the worst atrocities I've ever even heard of. (And bear in mind that my fields of historical examination have included Nazi Germany and Stalinist Russia and medieval Europe. I know from atrocities.)
No, I won't go into details. If you don't know, you don't want to.
History is not a nice discipline. It's interesting, and sometimes heartwarming, but history features some of the most vicious, ugly, nasty events you can imagine. History is a field that gets you to a point where you see some of the things that, in fiction, are meant to be extreme - depictions of brutality, of small and large-scale atrocities, and so on - and you think: call that a war crime? That's weak!
The reason I don't like that kind of thing, in the fiction that I read, is that I've read the same and worse done to real people. Once, studying Soviet history, I was reading accounts of events that happened in 1931-32, and realised that I had to take a break - because if I didn't, I was going to throw up. (I was already crying.) I stopped, went to the campus science fiction club's room, where there were people, some of them my friends. When people asked what was wrong, I told them I was reading truly horrifying history, and I'd come to be distracted from that, carry on.
To my eternal gratitude, people resumed their conversations, while one friend gave me a hug, and eventually the nausea faded and the tears gave way to laughter.
The Texas Rangers did things worse than what caused that.
And so: hate. Go Detroit.
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These are things that are true, in my head, about Star Trek: TOS (not movieverse):
Uhura and Sulu made out at a party once. It only made their friendship closer - they laugh about it now but it will never happen again. They are friends for always.
Uhura and Yeoman Rand were on-again, off-again for years - sometimes many months would pass between times when they were anything but vaguely social, sometimes they would be in Uhura's bed (in the old Enterprise, Yeoman Rand had a roommate - I'm pretty sure that's canon, but it's definitely in my head) almost every night.
One time, not long after the aliens made them kiss, they were in the mess and Uhura sang a song about rejection and looked kind of tired and sad, and Kirk felt like ten kinds of asshole, and later he took her aside and told her that, just to be clear, he fought it so hard and hated it so much because it was forced, because it was ugly and tawdry to be kissing her for the entertainment of malicious telepaths. That he respected her, admired her, that she was a brilliant officer and a beautiful woman but it just wasn't right like that, and then Uhura laughed gently and told him yes, captain, she understood. And she kissed his cheek and smiled and left, and he felt kind of foolish and lucky as hell to have that woman on his bridge, knowing she was smarter than he'd ever be.
Sometimes, Scotty sleeps in Engineering, curled up in a corner where the engines can sing him to sleep. Everyone knows. Nobody says anything.
Once, when Kirk came back from a mission broken and bloody, and McCoy put him back together as best he could but they still all knew they might yet lose him, Spock and Bones kept vigil by his bedside all night. They played chess, and Bones lost every game until, cursing Spock and every Vulcan in his lineage, he made him switch to Go Fish. Christine Chapel brought coffee and fruit juice and food, an unobtrusive ghost when it got late enough that they gave in and talked. Bones said how worried he was and Spock told him that Kirk was strong and had recovered from worse and had an excellent physician by his side, and logically, therefore, he'd be fine. They played a few more rounds in silence, then tossed the cards aside and just watched the monitor bars above Jim's bed. Bones fell asleep, slumped in his chair. Chapel watched from a shadowed doorway as Spock got a pillow and gently adjusted his position so he wouldn't hurt his neck, and covered him with a blanket.
In the morning, when McCoy thanked her for her kindness, for the pillow and the blanket, she looked at Spock, at his carefully composed expression, and told the doctor he was welcome, she was always glad to help. When Spock gave her a grave nod of thanks, she knew she wasn't really lying - that, too, was helping.
There was this one time Chekov and Scotty had a drinking contest. Scotty was drinking vodka, and Chekov had whiskey. No-one knows who won, but Uhura confiscated all of the pictures anyone took of the two of them curled up next to each other in the mess hall, both fast asleep cuddling near-empty bottles with matching, drunken smiles. Rumour has it she didn't destroy the pictures - she just made sure only she had copies.
Uhura is the less-angry Ivanova of the Enterprise. If it happened, she knows about it. But she keeps her secrets, and everyone else's, too.
Everyone loves Uhura. At Comms she's the voice and ears of the Enterprise, off duty she sings in the mess hall and talks and listens makes everyone feel better because she's there. But nobody ever wants to piss her off. It's not a matter of what happens when you do - nobody even knows what that would be, because it hasn't happened. But everyone has the feeling they don't want to find out.
Christine Chapel knows people talk about her - they talk about how she's so obviously in love with Spock, and they sometimes laugh, and sometimes wonder why she doesn't just accept he'll never love her back. She never lets on how much those people disgust her, because she knows they're fools.
Christine knows that Spock will never return her love. Never could. That's not the point. He does love her, in his way, and he respects her, which is something else entirely. In her heart she knows that if he could change, if he could become a man who would love her the way she loves him, he would cease to be a man she could love. She loves him. He respects her. And that's okay.
Scotty likes his captain, respects his captain, would die for his captain... but sometimes he thinks Kirk's a little silly, because Kirk still seems to think the Enterprise is his ship, just because he's her captain. And Scotty knows the Enterprise will never love her captain as much as she loves him. It's okay, though - he's not the jealous type.
Hikaru Sulu has a rich fantasy life. Secretly, he writes novels of epic, swashbuckling adventure that no-one will ever see.
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People - always, so far, as part of a dismissal of all this discussion in really bigoted ways that also annoy me, but that's another diatribe - getting crankypants about the use of "fen" as a plural of "fan".
To which I want to say: shut the fuck up.
To which I'm attempting actually to say: Actually, that's an extremely well-established piece of fan argot. Communities that are subsets of a greater linguistic population, whether they be social, professional, or whatever, have a strong tendency to develop their own terms of common reference, slang, technical terms, etc. The sf/f community is no different. The terms are many and varied, and if you've been involved with fandom at all, you've used at least some of those words - for example, "fandom" is one of them.
"Fen" has been in use since before a lot of you were born. I can state categorically that it has been in use since the 60s; it may be older.
"Fen" has distinct meaning from "fans". It means not just people who enjoy and appreciate a given thing; it means people who are fans of sf/f and are active and involved in fandom. It means Our Kind Of People. People who understand.
You don't get to define the terms of an existing subculture to fit your pre-conceptions. In the same way that you can't decide that slash should now be called Angular Fucking, or whatever, you don't get to say that "fen" is unacceptable. Languages evolve by mass consensus, and are resistant to the efforts of individuals to control them. "Fen" entered the language before you entered fandom (if you've been active in fandom for the last forty years and still hate "fen" - wow, are you a slow learner, is all I can say) and protesting it makes you look like an idiot.
In summary: shut the fuck up.
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