In a Pig's Eye

Star Trek TOS Fanfiction
Title:	In a Pig's Eye
Author(s):	Beverly Volker
Date(s):	1975
Length:
Genre:	gen
Fandom:	Star Trek: The Original Series
External Links:	online here.
Click here for related articles on Fanlore.

In a Pig's Eye is a Star Trek: TOS short short by Beverly Volker .

It was published in the print zine Contact #1.

Reactions and Reviews

One piece which I do really like is "In A Pig's Eye." It's a (never sent) letter from McCoy to Spock, obviously drawing on that awesome moment at the end of Amok Time where McCoy pretends to accept Spock's "logical" excuse for being concerned about Kirk before going "lol @ u you dumbshit hobgoblin." It's wonderfully in-character, unadulterated McCoy-sarcasm all the way through and it is awesome -- if you keep in mind that it was written back when this point hadn't been made about 538745 times before. It's all about the Kirk & Spock relationship, but this time through McCoy's eyes -- McCoy's Eyes are the single most useful narrative tool that has ever existed or ever will exist in fanfiction. They are the precursors of every great fan-surrogate fic device ever invented, and still do it better than any subsequent fandom has ever done it. This aspect of the letter also reminds me vividly of that time last summer when I was re-reading the early slash fic "Poses" by Leslie Fish for the bajillionth time (I unironically love every line of that fic, goofy '70s psychobabble, anthurium penis, and all) and thinking it was strange that, while I really enjoyed the the Kirk/Spock scenes, my favorite scene by a wide margin was the one where McCoy verbally rips Spock a new one right before the climax over his gay Vulcan-panic induced attempt to abandon Kirk. And then I realized that all this time, my brain had parsed the whole fic as not a Kirk/Spock romance fic, but a Spock & McCoy friendship fic with a Kirk/Spock romantic subplot, and I had to put down the laptop for a bit to laugh at myself, because apparently that's how my brain works. In any case, that theme and McCoy's voice really works in "In A Pig's Eye", whether it's read from a slashy point of view or not.