@trillscienceofficer / trillscienceofficer.tumblr.com
ceci, she/her, 30s, white
@girlonthelasttrain's Trek sideblog. Mostly DS9 and Voyager. Fictional women with identity issues are all I care about.
The majority of posts run from a queue. Feel free to ask for specific tags.
If you're ever inspired by one of my posts to write or draw something, please message me first. An anon ask will suffice.
i really wanted to incorporate pink in some way lol
This event runs from the 3rd-9th of September 2023.
The rules for this event are as follows: 1. No explicit material featuring minors, beastiality, or rape/non-con. 2. Dub-con, major character death, and graphic depictions of violence are allowed so long as they are adequately warned for and tagged. 3. OT3s are allowed, as long as the relationship is F/F/F. 4. All works must feature an F/F pairing as the primary ship. 5. As this is an event for celebrating female characters and relationships, we request that you do not include genderbent canonically male characters in works for this event. 6. Written works can be of any length. Art may be of any medium, including graphics and photosets. 7. We will share 14 prompts for the week, including a Free Space. You do not have to participate in every day. 8. If you share your work on Tumblr, tag it #startrekfemslashweek2023 so we can find and share it!
Star Trek: Voyager 6x02 “Survival Instinct”
Well, isn't it at least possible that what you experienced was simply nostalgia?
#voy does a pretty good of job of presenting its cast#as being “how the future looks mostly’#sometimes you are reminded however that we achieved that by putting the most beautiful women anyone knew in costumes (via @vermiculated)
idk i just love these two in the holosuites (being in love)
The thing about the fandom’s interpretation of Data and Pulaski is that it makes both characters extremely flat and boring while also erasing their whole relationship. Data’s made into this flawless, naive baby that can’t defend himself (when he does - when Pulaski mispronounces his name, he tells her exactly why she should pronounce it correctly), while Pulaski is an ugly bitch-hag who is morally reprehensible. Most fanfics portray Data as being uncomfortable or scared of her, while Pulaski’s chomping at the bit to break him into parts. Their whole relationship in season two is based around the fact they both have flaws, and that Data is still learning about what exactly he is capable of as an android.
In “Elementary, My Dear Data”, the big question of the episode is if Data can solve a narrative mystery without it being based on his knowledge of the original stories. Geordi doesn’t know the answer. Pulaski doesn’t. Data doesn’t. From what they know of Data, Pulaski outright dismisses the possibility that Data can, which sparks the episode’s plot.
So when Geordi goes back later and prompts the computer to alter the program to be more challenging, both Data and Pulaski are excited! They want to see where this goes! They are openly having fun with this.
In her first episode, Pulaski dismissed Data when he tried to stay during Troi’s labour, and only relented when Troi said she wanted him there. But by “Penpals”, she assures Sarjenka that Data will be at her side the whole time. When Data expresses doubts, she assures him that this is what’s best for Sarjenka, but that his memories of her will still be important. This is also the same episode where Pulaski defends both her and Data’s personal involvement in the situation to Worf.
In “Measure of A Man”, the game opens with some of the crew playing a poker game. Data and Pulaski are obviously friendly and comfortable enough to socialize together outside of professional circumstances. And again, the scene shows Data calling the game simplistic and assuming he will win, but he turns out to be wrong.
Later in “Peak Performance”, Pulaski sets up Data to compete in Strategema, only for him to end up losing, to everyone’s surprise. The reason why Data’s confidence falls is because he had the exact same assumption about his computational abilities as Pulaski. They were both wrong! When she sees how much losing has affected him, she apologizes:
Data says that he must be malfunctioning. It’s not until Picard tells him that failure can happen even when you do everything right that Data accepts he can make mistakes - and that making mistakes is okay! By the end of the episode, they both know that Data is not infallible, and that he can be affected by failure as much as any human.
Pulaski makes assumptions and mistakes, and so does Data. They learn and grow from them, and their relationship is overall a very positive one despite their very different personalities. It’s an interesting dynamic that gets rewritten by fans entirely, despite the fact that it’s weirdly one of the more developed dynamics in the show.
when I said that there is space to think of specific Spanish dialects when it comes to Chakotay and B'Elanna I was thinking about how Mexico is huge, and how many Indigenous languages there are, often not related to one another, and how Spanish spoken locally also borrows from those languages. The same language specificity also goes for Puerto Rico. I realize I worded that post very badly and again I apologize about that, I really really didn't mean to imply that ethnicities are interchangeable
its always the latinos that get the vaguest shit cuz nobody wants to think about us as actually diverse with many different dialects of spanish and just… can yall be a little more inclusive when it comes to talking about latino characters too?
the rep we have is very little and then yall just go assigning whatever hispanic ethnicity you want to latino characters while ignoring the ethnicity of the actor
to make it clear, imma list the characters and ethnicities of the actors for yall
b’elanna- puertorican
chakotay- mexican
hugh culber- afropuertorican
hugh borg - uruguayan
cristobal rios - chilean
i kept it to main characters only but please we are so much more than just hispanic/latino dont just leave our representation at the door. please just hold us as dear in your heart as you do others to bother and research about us too
so uh I don’t think I’ve seen anybody ever mention the ambiguously affiliated native american man smack dab in the middle of the rec room scene
& for all the people who didnt know, star trek already has a very rocky past with trying to portray native american characters
chakotay from voyager was an attempt to try and create an inspiring and ground breaking character for native american people the way uhura was for black people (like the way whoopi goldberg cites her existence on the show as a huge influence on her), but because of the situation it Really didnt work out
in their effort to write a good native character they got a native american on as a consultant which is a great idea! the only problem is the man (jack marks, his fake name he used being ‘jamake highwater’) they hired was later exposed for racefaking and building an entire career on his fake native identity and publishing books and documentaries and working on other things, like star trek.
marks became a massive name for native american stuff but at the same time there were many native americans who said they doubted his ancestry since his works were painfully stereotypical and insincere. he received well over $800k from federal grants put aside for native american people and took dominance in the media as a Native American Expert On Native American Identity, while pushing out work putting natives as weak caricatures and stereotypes.
marks was the consultant for making chakotay be a good native american representative, and so chakotays character ended up stereotyping native americans and being contradictory in itself. while i before would say “well, they tried and they just had bad luck that they chose someone who ended up being fake,” i just now in looking at it see that they hired marks well after his racefaking was exposed and marks himself admitted to it - the exposé was published in 1984, marks stopped claiming to be cherokee but continued to profit off of his established ‘indian presence’ and later said he pretended to be cherokee to get into the writing industry, and marks submitted his notes for chakotays character backstory in 1993… nearly a decade after being exposed.
where uhura inspired black women like whoopi goldberg to become actresses, chakotay is a confusing mess that reinforces age-old stereotypes about native americans and keeps native media rep locked into caricatures of ndn identity. while it is good there was a main cast native character and there were definitely good aspects to his character and writing, the ridiculousness of his native american identity has gained a lot of criticism from actual native americans. the poor writing and decisions dont even hurt too much, its that we (native americans) were robbed of the chance for a powerful, inspiring, and main cast member on an incredible scifi series by a fraudulent racefaker and a production crew that hired him on either without doing a background check or without caring that he was exposed for it.
so star trek has already failed harshly in their attempt to make a diverse starfleet, particularly in the case of native american characters, so im not surprised by this questionable production decision and i would invite the fans defending it or not seeing the issue with it to educate themselves. star trek has had amazing diversity and powerful messages, and thats honestly why chakotay and the decision of hiring jack marks as the consultant hurts so much.
star trek has done amazing things but there will still be mistakes and places where they fail to write as diverse as they aimed and its messages of understanding and progress are what should inspire us as the audience to see those mistakes, acknowledge them, and work for better writing and representation in the future and not allowing these mistakes to fall through the cracks or even be defended as “good diversity” when they are clearly not.
tl;dr chakotay was written badly and partly as a racist stereotype through what is at best ignorance and at worst purposeful apathy on the star trek production side when they hired an exposed racefaker who got native american federal grant money based on his fake identity. star trek doesnt have perfect diversity, especially wrt natives, and its important to be knowleadgable and critical of this when we discuss native american characters, themes, and identity in regard to the series.
if you would like to do research on this situation, feel free to google ‘jamake highwater’, read chakotays wikipedia page, and follow the citation links to more in depth content.
for those of yall that r new or dont know a lot about voyager heres why we dont fw chakotays writing
I can't stop thinking about people on Star Trek & languages. The UT breaks & it turns out that nobody speaks the language people expected them to, or not exactly the way they were expected to. Ben switches it up between Louisiana French & American English. Kira speaks a dialect from West Dahkur. Everybody expected Jadzia to speak a Trill language but she speaks Federation Standard (& everybody feels silly now for assuming). Julian speaks British English but sometimes slips in some Sudanese Arabic for himself. Miles speaks Munster Irish. Ezri speaks Standard Trill but integrated some Sapporan vocabulary into her speech as a teen on purpose (her mother hated it). Quark speaks the Capital City dialect of Ferengi. Jake & Nog turn out to be practicing each other's languages (Louisiana French/American English & Capital City Ferengi) all the time & this is why their UTs have been "acting strange" lately.
#re: your tags... I think what b'elanna speaks depends on interlocutor#to interface w the other starfleet officers she speaks federation standards#with chakotay specifically she speaks spanish but they have different accents#what seven speaks is uh. an interesting question.#it would... sort of make sense if the borg had chosen her as a drone liason because of#her ability to speak federation standard with sufficient vocabulary#(she was assimilated very young but she lived with scientist parents who talked about research all the time)#there's a book i think that hints that she spoke norwegian with one of her grandparents when she was little#but I can't see it being the language she usually speaks around people#not to mention I doubt borg machine language plays well with the UT#(does the voice doubling of the borg happen because the UT gets a little whacky trying to translate??) (tags via @trillscienceofficer)
I love the idea of B'Elanna & Chakotay speaking Spanish together (& with different accents! Yes!) & next time I watch a Voyager episode that features a longer, more private conversation between them I'm definitely keeping in mind that the conversation is happening in Spanish & that's gonna add an interesting layer to the scene.
As for Seven, you're right, it would make sense if she spoke fluent Standard. Norwegian would be sort of a language of the home to her - & I wonder if she might have tried to read/watch media in Norwegian at some point during her time on Voyager, & what that might have meant for her?
(And the voice doubling of the borg being a result of the UT struggling to translate is a fascinating idea & I think I'm adopting that one as canon tbh - it makes so much sense & would explain a lot! Machine translated through another, barely compatible machine - & I wonder what that means for the scenes where other members of the Voyager crew become temporarily part of the collective. IIRC they hear the voices doubled too - does that mean the UT is involved at there too, & maybe functions as a translator connected to the nanoprobes? My Voyager knowledge is not good enough to make any better guesses but could this be a thing?)
Very glad you liked these thoughts!! :D
The Borg multiple voices thing plagues me a bit because Voyager is so inconsistent with it... Seven's borg drone voice was multi-tracked for 7x09 “Shattered” even though it was not multi-tracked for her first appearance in 4x01 “Scorpion part 2”, nor for the flashbacks in 6x02 “Survival Instinct”. And I believe her voice was multi-tracked again on the first season of Star Trek: Picard, when she took control of a Borg cube. So it seems like something that either Seven can do at will (??? how though, does she have an audio processing unit in her vocal cords) or something that depends on the listener and the language spoken. I thought the UT going on the fritz when confronted with Borg language could help explain it, but you raise good points by noticing that the 'multiple voices' effect also happens to characters who are not strictly hearing the Collective but rather receiving communication directly into their brain through a neural transceiver (like Chakotay in “Unity”). It's definitely more of a 'mood' effect than anything that's easily understood diegetically, that's for sure.
As for B'Elanna and Chakotay speaking Spanish with their own accent, it's something I'm now really attached to as well! Since Voyager is so vague (or straight-up terrible) about both B'Elanna and Chakotay's backgrounds there's a lot of space for various headcanons about which specific accents they have, but I liked the idea of them having grown fond of each other's language habits. I like to think they started speaking Spanish with each other in the Maquis where equipment like the UT wasn't always available, and every common language between people was a very useful asset (and also comforting for them both, I'm sure! Honestly I think this commonality is one of the reasons Chakotay took her under his wings).
i do wanna chime in with b’elanna and chakotay bc they wouldnt JUST have different accents they would have different dialects. spanish is just like english in which there are different kinds and not just accents if yall r gonna get elaborate about it please actually do some research about us too
i like using the actors ethnicities for the spanishes they speak ie chakotay mexican and b’elanna puertorican but to divulge deeper into that as chakotay is indigenous i always found it silly that they made so much shit up about him when mexican indigenous people literally exist and have their own languages as well as indigenous puertoricans. we arent just an accent thankyou
also they would NOT would speak castellano as it is colonizer spanish
I'm sorry, you're right that I should've called them dialects, I apologize for the imprecision and the implications of that mistake. And yes you're totally right—it's really sad that what could've been an actual indigenous background got instead a terribly racist treatment.
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i really like the idea of miral moving back to qo'nos with b'elanna so that they can get some distance from humanity after john, expecting b'elanna to have a bit of a rough time and finding that being with humans changed miral too
I can't stop thinking about people on Star Trek & languages. The UT breaks & it turns out that nobody speaks the language people expected them to, or not exactly the way they were expected to. Ben switches it up between Louisiana French & American English. Kira speaks a dialect from West Dahkur. Everybody expected Jadzia to speak a Trill language but she speaks Federation Standard (& everybody feels silly now for assuming). Julian speaks British English but sometimes slips in some Sudanese Arabic for himself. Miles speaks Munster Irish. Ezri speaks Standard Trill but integrated some Sapporan vocabulary into her speech as a teen on purpose (her mother hated it). Quark speaks the Capital City dialect of Ferengi. Jake & Nog turn out to be practicing each other's languages (Louisiana French/American English & Capital City Ferengi) all the time & this is why their UTs have been "acting strange" lately.
#re: your tags... I think what b'elanna speaks depends on interlocutor#to interface w the other starfleet officers she speaks federation standards#with chakotay specifically she speaks spanish but they have different accents#what seven speaks is uh. an interesting question.#it would... sort of make sense if the borg had chosen her as a drone liason because of#her ability to speak federation standard with sufficient vocabulary#(she was assimilated very young but she lived with scientist parents who talked about research all the time)#there's a book i think that hints that she spoke norwegian with one of her grandparents when she was little#but I can't see it being the language she usually speaks around people#not to mention I doubt borg machine language plays well with the UT#(does the voice doubling of the borg happen because the UT gets a little whacky trying to translate??) (tags via @trillscienceofficer)
I love the idea of B'Elanna & Chakotay speaking Spanish together (& with different accents! Yes!) & next time I watch a Voyager episode that features a longer, more private conversation between them I'm definitely keeping in mind that the conversation is happening in Spanish & that's gonna add an interesting layer to the scene.
As for Seven, you're right, it would make sense if she spoke fluent Standard. Norwegian would be sort of a language of the home to her - & I wonder if she might have tried to read/watch media in Norwegian at some point during her time on Voyager, & what that might have meant for her?
(And the voice doubling of the borg being a result of the UT struggling to translate is a fascinating idea & I think I'm adopting that one as canon tbh - it makes so much sense & would explain a lot! Machine translated through another, barely compatible machine - & I wonder what that means for the scenes where other members of the Voyager crew become temporarily part of the collective. IIRC they hear the voices doubled too - does that mean the UT is involved at there too, & maybe functions as a translator connected to the nanoprobes? My Voyager knowledge is not good enough to make any better guesses but could this be a thing?)
Very glad you liked these thoughts!! :D
The Borg multiple voices thing plagues me a bit because Voyager is so inconsistent with it... Seven's borg drone voice was multi-tracked for 7x09 “Shattered” even though it was not multi-tracked for her first appearance in 4x01 “Scorpion part 2”, nor for the flashbacks in 6x02 “Survival Instinct”. And I believe her voice was multi-tracked again on the first season of Star Trek: Picard, when she took control of a Borg cube. So it seems like something that either Seven can do at will (??? how though, does she have an audio processing unit in her vocal cords) or something that depends on the listener and the language spoken. I thought the UT going on the fritz when confronted with Borg language could help explain it, but you raise good points by noticing that the 'multiple voices' effect also happens to characters who are not strictly hearing the Collective but rather receiving communication directly into their brain through a neural transceiver (like Chakotay in “Unity”). It's definitely more of a 'mood' effect than anything that's easily understood diegetically, that's for sure.
As for B'Elanna and Chakotay speaking Spanish with their own accent, it's something I'm now really attached to as well! Since Voyager is so vague (or straight-up terrible) about both B'Elanna and Chakotay's backgrounds there's a lot of space for various headcanons about which specific accents they have, but I liked the idea of them having grown fond of each other's language habits. I like to think they started speaking Spanish with each other in the Maquis where equipment like the UT wasn't always available, and every common language between people was a very useful asset (and also comforting for them both, I'm sure! Honestly I think this commonality is one of the reasons Chakotay took her under his wings).
I always forget that after "Facets" Jadzia remembers what it is like to be a shapeshifter. I'm sure Ezri has thought 'damn I wish I could turn into a liquid right now' many many times
