Hello!

You can call me Fi. This is my Data/Troi blog. Feel free to comment on/like/reblog things, or send me messages.

I often find that I go through phases where I can write all dialogue, but no prose. And then other times where I can write lovely prose, but the dialogue is stilted and off. Anyone else find that?

And taking this further: would anyone mind if I just posted chunks of dialogue or prose? Out of context even?

I feel I should stick to what I have been saying for a while and just post things even if they are not done because they can spark ideas.

I haven’t been writing as much microfic the last few weeks, but I have had ideas regardless. Just wanted to let people know I’m not dead, lol

Just a heads up that I made a mistake in my previous post. Pien goes by they/them pronouns. If you reblogged the OG post from me it would be mighty kind of you to delete it and reblog the corrected version.

Thank you!

I commissioned the wonderful Pien who was very patient with me during the commission process. If you want to see more of their work just click on this link! I asked for an ‘almost kiss’ between Data and Troi, and I wasn’t disappointed in the least!

I saw a gif yesterday from a game I really enjoyed called Observation.

SPOILERS for the game, but at the end the computer and human characters become one being. And that made me think about how Data and Deanna experience the world in very different ways and what a similar experience with them would be like.

They run into strange technology all the time on unexplored planets, in ruins, from other cultures etc. And the idea of a device that would put Deanna and Data, maybe not physically together in the same body, but link their senses and thoughts together briefly as if they were, is some kind of thing I’m enjoying thinking about.

In the game Observation, SAM (the computer) and Emma are clearly cohabiting Emma’s body. Speaking and thinking as one, but still separate people.

If this were a Star Trek episode, I would love to see how overwhelming this experience would be for either Data or Deanna, and I would wonder if this device was even meant to link artificial sentient beings to organic beings in the first place.

Is this a device they can take with them, or is it a device very firmly built on a planet? Do they have to be in constant contact with the device, or does it link them until the link can be reversed?

What was the original intended use of this device? Was it to help people communicate? To help see from other people’s point of view in negotiations?

And how does this experience affect their relationship? Is it positive or negative?

An image that keeps popping into my head is Deanna and Data in her quarters, both of their hands touching a smooth, black object on her table.

Despite Data’s rather even keeled nature, I keep thinking he would be the one to struggle with this. Could he form an addiction of sorts to it? Of linking to her?

And there are erotic implications too. Deanna isn’t a stranger to being in someone's mind, but this is different. This is being that other person in a way that goes beyond telepathy and her own empathy. To be able to be the skin being touched and the hands that are touching? A sort of pleasure squared. Data may not experience pleasure in the same sense, but the mix of his own sensory input and hers is an experience profoundly different for both of them.

Anyway, I like this concept a lot and I have decided it may live rent free in my brain all it wants.

I’ve had a bit of a groggy day- I didn’t eat enough, I felt strange and lost and not together, so I offer you the only coherent thought I have managed thus far today:

That part in the episode The Next Phase where Data closes that door

I’m living for all the tags on my earlier post, but I wanted to respond to some specific ones.

starry-bite:

‘to belong to a place and know you cannot belong in a place’ perfectly sums up my feelings about Deanna’s experiences as a child on Betazed. Tam even says to her ‘it looks like you finally found a place to fit in’ in the episode Tin Man. I think Tam, more than anyone, understood how isolating and difficult it was to be different on their home planet.

I always imagine that Will was another spot of difference, another mark of something other to score against Deanna. Not that Betazoid’s are incredibly prejudiced, but I do think there is a cultural undercurrent of having opinions about non-telepathic species, and that this bias hasn’t been addressed by their wider society.

I also believe that Will knows Deanna has a speech impediment, but he is one of the only people she has ever told. I have imagined it as a secret she keeps, not because anyone would look down on her for it, but for the fear that she has that someone will. Deanna, understandably, does not like how people treat people they perceive as disabled as I am very certain she has often been on the receiving end of that attitude on her home planet more than once.

This otherness also fits into my own shippy ideas of Data and Deanna having more in common than what anyone might assume. They are both misfits who found their place on the Enterprise. Two people who have been dismissed by many. I like to believe she would someday be able to be vulnerable with him. I know he would understand.

I am glad to hear different perspectives on my headcanons because I never want to put something out there that hurts anyone. I want to know that where I am coming from is from a solid place and not based in my own ignorance. Having people who have a speech impediment, know about linguistics, or are simply enthusiastic in the topic sending positive feedback gives me some confidence.

Also, thank you for the follow!

USS-party-bus:

I hadn’t thought of it in terms like this, where it’s not so much an impediment as a lack of practice/learning language very deliberately.

It’s an interesting note about your co-worker. I hadn’t considered the idea despite the fact that I have recently had a coworker comment on my French in a similar way saying that everyone likes my accent because I speak Quebecois French very delicately. They like the sound, but it is markedly different than a native speaker.

More food for thought!

ripscratch:

YES YES YES. I really think there is a reason that Deanna became a counsellor and it wasn’t just because she’s empathic. Deanna had a difficult childhood- the early and sudden death of her father, the otherness of her life on Betazed, and an overbearing mother who seems to never really listen to anything she has to say.

Deanna understands the importance of talking, of being able to sit with someone and have them listen. And I think she knows that from the absence of it in her own life.

hemipta: This absolutely made me smile!

side note:

I don’t like to think of the Federation as being comprised of groups of people who claim to have reached utopia when they have not. I like to believe, much as the original series puts forward, that all of these things (ableism, misogyny, racism, poverty, disease, war etc) really have been solved- at least on Earth. Because I would like to believe that Star Trek, at it’s heart, is about how the human race made it. We went through all this blood and war and horribleness and we managed to get to the other side of it and do better. I really believe in that.

But, unlike Gene Roddenberry... I really like interpersonal conflict, especially when it is something that really resonates with people. I’m not into drama for the sake of drama, but meaningful stories about people coming together and finding their paths along side each other is really lovely.