Weekend wittering

[kathleen_dailey]

Yesterday the female Wheel-Trans driver (a rarity--we don't often see women driving the WT buses on our routes) wished me a happy International Women's Day during a trip to Sunnybrook Hospital with the spouse. We had a lovely conversation all the way up Mount Pleasant Road about the occasion, its history, its significance, and the big march this weekend, which I believe is underway as we speak. The driver was a bit worried, not surprisingly, about how the traffic diversions might hinder her pickups of people, but she was very enthusiastic about the event.

* * *

I recently ran across a 2025 variation on the fandom flounce. An author announced that they had deleted a series of stories from AO3 because readers were leaving only kudos--not comments--on multi-chapter stories. The author informed their readers that comments were expected as payment for the stories, and that while kudos were "fine," "reading for free"--that is, reading without commenting--wasn't acceptable. Therefore, consequences ensued: the stories were deleted from the archive and moved back to the author's personal website. (The author didn't provide a link to the site.) So now AO3 users looking for stories in that particular fandom and featuring that particular pairing may never find the author's works, thus guaranteeing that no more comments (or even kudos) will be forthcoming. (For the record, I remember seeing the author's deleted stories, though they weren't in my principal fandom, and I know that they received many highly complimentary comments. Just not enough, I guess.)

* * *

I was reading a thread on trekbbs.com about novelizations of Star Trek movies. A commenter mentioned that Vonda McIntyre's novelization of TWOK had contained the line about Saavik's heritage being half-Vulcan and half-Romulan, while the film itself had omitted it. It's probably true that edited-for-television versions and latter-day DVD versions of the film did indeed omit the line, because I never heard it spoken in either of those two formats.

BUT! I saw the film in its original theatrical release, and I have a pretty vivid memory of a two-shot of Spock and Kirk discussing Saavik's performance on the Kobayashi Maru test. Spock says (in response to a comment from Kirk) that she is half-Vulcan and half-Romulan--"a volatile combination."

Now, I might be willing to believe that I conflated the text in the novelization and the sequence in the film, and that my aging brain is misremembering onscreen dialogue that I heard more than 40 years ago. Except that I attended that screening with a filmmaker--who also happened to be a passionate Trek fan--and I know I didn't imagine our post-screening discussion about Saavik's backstory, and about how Kirstie Alley's casting and Nicholas Meyer's directing made it easy to believe that the character was half-Romulan, and about a possible connection to "The Enterprise Incident" ((quickly dismissed after we saw TSFS, naturally).

If both the filmmaker and I hallucinated that "volatile combination" dialogue in the first theatrical release of TWOK, maybe I also hallucinated the scene in the original airing of a TOS episode--never, to my knowledge, heard again in any of the syndicated episodes--where Spock says, "My people do not kiss." If so, once again I wasn't alone; at least one zine author from the 1970s incorporated the line as a character point in a fic (M.L. (Steve) Barnes, "Almost a Legend," collected in A Handful of Snowflakes and Other Trek Tales).

Maybe I should just attribute my mixed-up memory to our recent planetwide slippage into The Bad Timeline and leave it at that.

Comments

[jenab]

That was quite the flounce, especially since the author guaranteed not getting any feedback anymore.

[kathleen_dailey]

I'm always surprised by authors' varying expectations. I would have thought that posting stories to a non-profit archive would give an author the assurance that their stories would be found and read by interested fans for years or decades to come, regardless of comments or lack of comments, and that it would be "payment" enough to know that the work would always be there for those who want to read it.

The author in question also writes professionally, so maybe they are firmly in the mindset of "I must be compensated for my work, one way or another."

[kitarella_imagines]

Interesting about the flouncing. I see there is an author, I won't mention the name or site, who writes 'kudos and comments are great for me. Or leave nothing if you hated it.' That sounds like emotional blackmail to me...