Space; The Final Frontier

the absolute BEST rival dynamic is where one of them is like “you are my equal unlike any other, you respect me and my power even if you disagree with my methods, i will only die by your hand and you by mine, perhaps i want your attention perhaps i love you, together we challenge each other to unseen heights, we are each other’s destiny, we are intrinsically linked,” and the other person is genuinely like “please die”

Star trek ds9 as Reductress headlines 9, garashir edition

#the idea symbiotes join to trills to try and discover what childhood is or was anew with each host (via @spocks-evil-godmother)

Forgive me for bringing your words out of the tags but YES, I genuinely think this is the heart of what this 'symbiosis' is! I maintain that the joining is ultimately it's about the symbionts wanting to experience other forms of life as much as they could, and explore the world through other creature's senses, and in turn (bipedal) Trills get to experience the lives of others in the same all-consuming sharing of perspective. I think the symbionts are essentially curious about everything, but have evolved to have such radically different sensory and cognitive apparatuses compared to bipedal Trills that anything beyond very basic communication between the two species is impossible, so in order to 'see' the world outside the Mak'ala caves they started 'hacking' their way into other beings' nervous systems. It would be horrifying in any other context but here it isn't! The Trill seem to have figured out pretty early on that they could just choose whether or not taking in a symbiont, and I always got the feeling that the symbionts ultimately care a great deal about their hosts, because they can't not; the symbionts are the hosts, for as long as they are joined. The joining always goes two ways, and every host is a completely new and different (and exciting!) existence.

as much as we all love the ballad of ricky dornt the first host of a trill who only gets memories of a dark cave, i think the first trill host probably has a cool experience totally unlike the subsequent hosts. they’re the closest to the symbiont itself, because there are no other hosts whose memories overwhelm that connection. the first host gets such a fully alien experience of coexisting with another form of life!! it’s such a pure joining experience!! and the symbiont must be 😮 😮 😮 at every new humanoid sensation, and the humanoid trill would share in that. walking! talking! anyway i think the period of being joined with the first host is like peak wonder for both parties and i would sign up.

i also think a lot about the love-but-that’s-not-the-word between host and symbiont and how it can never be explained to unjoined beings, and how so much of the grace and self confidence of most hosts (except early ezri and adira who are still working through that) might come from that.

I don't want to be in Starfleet, running around, taking orders. I want to be Jake Sisko, bothering people at work, but I'm taking notes so they can't they can't do shit about it

[Image description Jake Sisko talking to Dr Bashir who is trying to do something at a ship's console]

The Irishman can never die.

…except for that time that he did, but that was PresentMiles; FutureMiles replaced him.

Don’t forget that time his clone died. A clone who believed he was the real Miles so much that his last words (to Miles) were to take care of Keiko.

That was pretty fucked up for Miles to watch.

Oh right!

Yeah, Miles had a FUCKED UP time on DS9. I think he inadvertantly ended up time travelling more than any other Star Fleet officer.

Plus that time he got shoved in an alien mind prison for an hour or two that felt to him like a life sentence…then was just expected to go back to his regular life.

The man’s PTSD had PTSD.

But he survived it all.

The Irishman can never die.

[image description: art of Miles O'Brien looking tired but holding two thumbs up. he wears a party hat and is surrounded by confetti and says “survived the horrors, again”. end description.]

the writers had a saying that “o'brien must suffer” in every season and by golly did he. there was also the time he lost his daughter for a while and had to deal with her as a feral young adult. and the time he was stuck dying on a desert planet with bashir before they were besties.

My one problem with Star Trek is that no one is ever consuming contemporary media. As in media that's contemporary for their time period. Everyone is always reading old novels and practicing classical music. They study Klingon Opera or read old Cardassian mysteries. No one is ever like really into obscure Klingon Nightcore. Nobody is reading shitty Ferengi pulp novels. There's no kids media of any kind. Where is space Sesame Street or junior novels about gaining superpowers from a warp core accident? What about comic books? Nobody is playing crappy indy holodeck games. It's always some recreation of a historical battle or just lounging in a mud pit at some alien spa. Someone give me angsty Bajoran protest music. I need some rebellious teens producing the worst most cacophonous death metal techno that they recorded in an empty cargo bay. I need contemporary pop culture in Star Trek.

I can only think of three examples of contemporary media; the Vulcan love slave holo series that quark is always peddling, the children's program naomi wilder played, and when the doctor makes his little holo family and his son starts hanging out with klingons and listening to Klingon thrash metal.

And all of them (well. Maybe not Vulcan love slave 🤢) just made me want more pop culture. Why is eove so obsessed with earth's 20th century??? It makes no damn sense

god i love this moment. i love sisko. he so clearly is thinking “one girl’s life IS worth more than eight life times of knowledge and experience.” like this guy could not have said a worse thing to sisko in order to plead his case. not only does it expose exactly how he wants a joining for all the wrong reasons, assuming it’s about power and being someone “better” rather than simply “different.”

sisko has already had this great moment of defending not just jadzia dax but jadzia alone, and his goodness in being able to see both their singular values, his ease in respecting both creatures in all the ways jadzia dax and jadzia are the same and not, and how frickin noble he is!! i just!!

i also think this is what jadzia dax and sisko have most in common. this sort of honor-ability. sisko grows to respect jadzia specifically when she protect’s curzon’s previous lover. and then sisko protects jadzia in a way that implies he think more of her than simply the worm once joined to his dear friend. i love them.

be sisko. wake up. cook a delicious breakfast for your family and pack lunch for your partner. get caught up on unanswered communications on your PADD. have a morally questionable figure become psychosexually obsessed with you, chasing the thrill of corrupting you while also desperately craving to earn the benediction of your approval as a Good Man. add them to the spreadsheet. look into starting a community baseball club. call your dad. schedule senior staff meeting to address the issue of the local bartender being split into good and evil halves due to touching an ancient relic he was trying to sell on space ebay. break up argument between two ambassadors from warring factions on the precipice of nuclear war. give them both a jumja stick. blackmail the evil half of the bartender into letting them have it on the house. add beets to your grocery list. write letter of recommendation for junior staff member. message your favorite worm to get the station gossip while you cook family dinner. go to bed. try your best to interpret prophetic dreams from sacred aliens beyond your understanding. wake up.

here comes the most specialest son in the whole world everyone clap for him or i’ll blow this whole bar up

sometimes i will simply fondly think about andy and sid reading queer + neurodivergent script fanfiction over lockdown written by and including brilliant and lovely people from star trek fandom 

@secretlyatimelady hell yeah you can watch them right here! little achievements, starring alexander siddig, andy robinson, @captain-athos and @syaunei, written by @almaasi script supervision by @little-arcadia)

and here! curse from the prophets, written by @thebluemeany and starring alexander siddig and django el siddig (his son)

there was also a series called “alone together” which brought back quite a few faces: cirroc lofton, armin shimerman, and nana visitor (alongside siddig and andy) – also the computer voice was siddig’s wife, shana. that one was done in the social club, but not involving the tumblr fandom + wasn’t quite so queer and nd

met gala theme: pon farr night at the vulcan nightclub

the real reason why eddington and dukat and everyone else who wants to be homoerotic nemeses with sisko fail is because sisko already has one

I love star trek being like 'this is how these aliens flirt / kiss' then have that alien doing it with someone of the same gender and they're like 'ignore that'

Speaking of which I'm personally of the opinion that by giving Lal free range over her gender & she just chose to be a girl because she likes it but is presumably entirely unaware of Gender Roles in the traditional sense & just picking and choosing what looks fun to her, Data unintentionally invented a femme lesbian

[ID: a reply from @m4lfine that reads "who says it was unintentional" /end ID]

Well it wouldn't be strictly on purpose either, as he really just told her "you can do whatever you want forever" and she picked her favorite gender herself

Lal being a girl on purpose is so trans femme like when you think about it. Good for her

ok sorry for longposting but i dont have any drugs so this is how im entertaining myself now. For me, sisko being the pragmatic™ captain comes through less in episodes for the uniform/in the pale moonlight/etc than it does in the way he’s able to manage everyone around him on an episode to episode basis by matching their energy and style of communication to be efficient as well as nice 

kira initially treats him as a threat to her goals and assumes he doesn’t care what they are so he only pushes back on her as much as she challenges him, but compromises and even defers to her judgement when she’s honest about why she wants what she wants (also i’ve been rewatching s1 and in ‘progress’ there’s this great moment when he’s trying to order her back to the station as gently as possible and kneels down next to her instead of looming or demanding that she stand at attention, it’s a very sweet little detail). bashir is ignorant out of inexperience and acts before he’s done thinking, so sisko clearly tells him how, not just when he’s out of line, walks him through his more impulsive decisions step by step, entertains questions that aren’t immediate challenges and even offers anecdotes about his own life to convince him to do things he doesn’t want to. jadzia is younger and newer to the chain of command as curzon, and likely leans on ben’s input far more frequently than she would if she were still his superior, so ben reflects what he learned from curzon back to her honestly, without any illusions about how she’s kind of a better person, and comes to her for advice in turn to confirm that it’s her perspective he values. when he has to intervene in odo’s investigations or pair him off with another officer, he stays clear and firm about why that’s necessary and what the new chain of command is because he knows odo flounders without certainty. he can quote the rules of acquisition to quark at the drop of a hat and has no problem openly telling garak he’s blackmailing him. i joke about him being completely impervious to dukat/weyoun/eddington/etc’s mind games but it’s not like the antagonists in the series don’t give him a lot of moral grief, it’s that he refuses to engage with them while they’re actively trying to undermine his goals   

the reason his Moral Ambiguity Moments work so well is because his deep, willing understanding of other people always informs his actions, so when he has to outplay someone to protect the lives of his compatriots, or even uphold necessary morale – or when, like in in the pale moonlight, he grievously misjudges someone’s character – it’s a much more tragic twist on the same qualities that make him a compassionate leader, an effective diplomat, a trustworthy protector, a tender & nurturing father 

yes!!! this ties into one of my fav things about sisko, I don’t have many detailed examples cause it’s been a few years since my last actual rewatch but I love how when negotiating with external groups n influences (whether it’s the brass, aliens from the other side of the wormhole, or aliens from the alpha quadrant) he always like, figures out their moral code and negotiation style, WORKS within it, and almost always fucking FLOURISHES (which is a chunk of why it’s so delightful to see him deal with quark, he’s down to be so much more of a bastard in a like, fun and familiar context where it’s the moral norm). I ready enjoy seeing him chameleon his way from negotiation style to negotiation style he’s so talented and sexy especially when he’s beating ppl at their own game (which is almost ALWAYS)

Friends, strangers, I want to share with you something I long thought I’d hallucinated, but which today I have discovered was absolutely real.

In the 90s my mum went to a number of Star Trek conventions and would often come home with a fan made tshirt. I need you to understand that my mother, barely 5’ tall, a catholic who to this day goes to church every Sunday, who was never heard to utter a swear word until I was in my twenties, who taught Grade One for decades at the local primary school. This woman, pure and innocent, went to a Star Trek convention and not only saw this tshirt but PURCHASED IT and now it’s been rediscovered in the garage and I’ve never been happier in my life.

I asked her what she was thinking and she said that she thought it was funny but when she brought it home my dad was (aside from side splittingly amused) absolutely adamant that she couldn’t wear it out in public because SHE WANTED TO DO THAT!! Grade One teacher, church on Sunday mum wanted to wear this around town! Who IS this woman I thought I knew??

Anyway now I have this awesome tshirt and I sort of want to frame it.

nana visitor on auditioning for kira nerys (the alpha quadrant, 2018)