• Welcome! The TrekBBS is the number one place to chat about Star Trek with like-minded fans.
    If you are not already a member then please register an account and join in the discussion!

Quirks and Challenges for characters

How about someone whose last name is Kirk but has absolutely no connection biologically or otherwise to James Kirk (aside from the Adam and Eve connection, that is). But the problem is, everybody always thinks they are related.

So here's this person who is living in the shadow of someone who has nothing to do with them whatsoever - everybody expects them to embody his good or bad qualities, depending on who you ask. Too much pressure.
*hack*cough*cough*
 
LOL. It might get tiring after a while to see Emily Kirk/Fred Kirk (or whatever first name they get) constantly explaining this, but occasionally it'd be good for a complication.
 
Imagine someone who lives on a relay station/outpost (like Kelvin timeline's Delta Vega) but has a small holodeck inside where they pretend to be a member of a ship's crew and go on adventures? (a much less boring assignment than what they are stuck doing). Maybe they even use the content of official briefings to supplement their storylines, as if they had been there. Then they encounter the real ship and its real crew. Uh-oh...shades of Geordi and Leah Brahms, not to mention the fact that they may not be able to distinguish reality from fantasy...
 
Kirk, Picard, and Sisko all suffered from some severe traumatic situations prior to being given command (the dikironium cloud creature, the Battle of Maxia, and Wolf 359). They could've easily lapsed into PTSD type situations in their respective series (Kirk, for example, grew "obsessed" with taking down the cloud creature). I guess Federation psychology has cured that particular malady.
 
Imagine someone who lives on a relay station/outpost (like Kelvin timeline's Delta Vega) but has a small holodeck inside where they pretend to be a member of a ship's crew and go on adventures? (a much less boring assignment than what they are stuck doing). Maybe they even use the content of official briefings to supplement their storylines, as if they had been there. Then they encounter the real ship and its real crew. Uh-oh...shades of Geordi and Leah Brahms, not to mention the fact that they may not be able to distinguish reality from fantasy...

The series would be about the ship in question, and the episode would be about how they come across this lonely outpost with its single occupant, and when they find him, he's in mid-storyline about something they did a couple of years ago. The complication is that something happens, and they need the lonely guy's input to solve the problem.
 
Yeah, that makes sense. Living vicariously through Starfleet briefings and they actually get the chance to put all that "practice" to good use.

The wrinkle is that "official" documents aren't always accurate about things like personality/what actually happened versus the sanitized "for publication" version. So their memories of what "happened" may be totally different, or possibly include missions that never happened.

Further, there's the crew this person supposedly "knows". So the guy this character doesn't like may actually be a decent fellow, the one they're best friends-ish with doesn't get along with them, and the person they like is in a relationship already/isn't interested in them.

Talk about emotional whiplash. It's also kind of a metaphor for fans who'd like to be in on the action themselves. Could you actually handle it? I know that sounds like a Mary Sue-ish fanfic, but if written right...

The other idea I thought of was this person who flunked Starfleet Academy, but his parents shut him in a holodeck and convinced him he was still in it and had gone on to be posted on a ship. Then that same ship visits; the parents try to keep it a secret from the ship, but the crew finds out and so does their kid. Shattered and angry, they lose it or at least are very hurt by the truth.
 
If you are not already a member then please register an account and join in the discussion!

Sign up / Register


Back
Top