To continue my periodic Tumblr TOS!K/S fandom pet peeves: I keep periodically running into comments on gifs or meta wrt Kirk and Spock's unhinged mutual jealousy of each other's love interests (or just. interests) that go something to the effect of: "well I like a Kirk and Spock who are a healthy, open-minded poly couple who don't get jealous at all." Every time, I can't help thinking, "Okay, so you don't actually like Kirk and Spock, then."

I mean, it's possible to like most of a character and headcanon away some specific detail that you think doesn't work or is OOC in the wider context of something that long and complicated (me with "Elaan of Troyius"; forcing Taming of the Shrew onto the TOS cast is a terrible and indeed OOC idea to begin with, but it simultaneously manages to be racist towards Elaan while shrugging off her drugging the previously repulsed Kirk into sex, and unsurprisingly shares a writer with the ragingly antisemitic "Patterns of Force"). But you have to ignore such a major component of their dynamic and characterizations to deny their jealousy wrt each other that this seems like ... not an offensive misreading, really, and there are others that bother me more on that level, but few strike me as so absolutely wrong. Every time I see it, I wonder if the person has even seen the show, at least at all recently, because it's just ... it's not even that it's baseless as an interpretation, it's actively contradicted so flagrantly, so often, that it seems completely disengaged from the show.

(Kirk's heartfelt, melancholy description of love is extremely and explicitly monogamous, well beyond the casual defaults of what you'd expect from the era, and he's ... I mean, Kirk spends almost the entire show fully aware that Spock is ashamed of his feelings for him, and after the first shock, is incredibly tolerant and unconcerned about Spock dealing with this angst via repression and blatant lies. But Kirk's easy, patient assurance around this dries up the instant he gets the slightest glimmer of a suspicion that someone or something else could conceivably dislodge his position at the center of Spock's world. He seethes with extremely visible jealousy and hostility whenever that happens and swings to the opposite extreme of getting unhappy and insecure. And Spock's jealousy is even more incredibly conspicuous and persistent throughout most of the series, especially in episodes like "The City on the Edge of Forever." By S3, Spock has hit such an intensity of envy that when Bones is like "you just couldn't understand love triangles, or love at all, all the desperate things it drives people to do, the ecstasies and agonies... anyway g'night" Spock immediately responds by mind-melding with the unconscious Kirk to remove his latest love interest from his memory after bleeding jealousy of her the whole episode. Kirk and Spock are many things, but healthily poly people free from jealousy and insecurity is certainly not among them!)