Comment on Breathless

  1. SLWalker Wed 13 Dec 2023 11:12PM UTC

    Oh gosh, okay, so I have spent a probably worrisome amount of hours talking with any poor sucker who gives me their ear -- mostly my wife, sainted woman -- about how Scotty processes fear or why. Because sometimes, the man's recklessly fearless. He crawls into an access crawlway rigged to jettison him into space and kill him dead and doesn't hesitate for a second. Flying pancakes that took Spock down? Not an ounce of fear on Scotty's face, he just phasers them. Threatening to blow up the Enterprise to end the Kelvans? Or, for that matter, several others? Actually doing so once? Icewater in his veins.

    But he also gets tweaked after Ambassador Fox leaves the bridge. (He's not afraid of prison, but probably is not a little bit about his people on the surface.) He was absolutely afraid when he and Gillian were staring down a drowning, though I think that the primary reason was her and the whales and himself last. In my stuff, there are times he's afraid -- about to leap during the storm to save the Lady Grey -- and times he's not. Like dying under a bulkhead. Not until you've got some poor medic trying to help him, anyway.

    What I mean is. I love that he's that damn complicated. What he fears. Or what he doesn't. What's actual fear, what's anxiety, what's trauma response. Or, for that matter-- what's courage, what's self-destructiveness, and how do you even detangle those?

    But you also keep far away from the fanon that she has his whole heart. She absolutely doesn’t. Yes. I got-- idk. Tired of fanon going that route? He was a year older than I am now when TOS started, in-universe timeline wise. And I have lived a whole lot of life in the past forty-three years. Why wouldn't he have lived a hell of a lot in forty-four? Of course he had other loves and family and triumph and tragedy and all the things all living people do.

    (What makes him healthier than Jim Kirk is that he maintains them; Chief is only part of his definition. Captain is almost all of Jim's. Like-- canonically, too.)

    Thank you so much!

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