bumblingbabooshka

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looking at Sherlock Holmes adaptations and for reason when they cast a non-white person as one of the dynamic duo it's always Watson. does that have an implication? that has an implication.

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tbh, sometimes the “platonic explanation for this” is the more interesting one

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Taking place over the course of sixty-six pages, three portraits, four accounts of their meeting, one sex scene, and several decades, "Three Portraits" details the slow burn, star-crossed love affair between a Vulcan man named Strelkulkaulk and the Trill symbiote Grous' many hosts. Currently only available to 5$ Patrons!

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*holds your hand* OUR doomed narrative now

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train september 2024

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I really appreciate your reviews of the snw episodes, you're so articulate about why these new episodes are terrible (gives me a fuller understanding on why I don't like this season) the general tag doesn't have many people acknowledging what this new season is doing

Sorry if any of this sounds weird I just woke up.

HAHA thank youuu no it doesn't sound weird at all! I'm happy you find my points articulate - I always worry I'm rambling or not making my points clear. I don't just wanna say "I don't like this" I want to communicate WHY.

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pt 3/3

I understand the message they’re going for by making their enemies Human. I get that they’re trying to communicate “Your enemy is more like you than you think” but by making them LITERALLY Humans it completely blunts and even changes the message in a way I find telling, especially with the way the tone of the episode changes once their enemy is revealed as Human. We learn nothing else about them but it’s enough to make them sympathetic.

It feels as if Humans and Humanity are the unquestioned Good Guys of the universe. These are Good Guys, corrupted. How scary that even the shining stars of goodness could be so twisted…

Things in line with Humanity are good and outside of Humanity are strange or evil. This is reinforced by making it literally true so I don’t consider the fact that it’s literally true an excuse - this is a tv show being written. This perception is not challenged by making the deaths of The Other fine unless they’re Human. 

As an example…imagine there’s a show about a war. The sides are Japanese and American and we’re following the Americans. Every Japanese person we’ve seen has been portrayed as evil. We see an American soldier kill a bunch of Japanese soldiers that were about to kill every member of a town and we celebrate their deaths only to find out they were Japanese-American. That’s what this episode feels like. Confused and not making the point it thinks it is?

Even the conversation between Kirk and Pike feels confused.

Kirk says “Why does it feel worse to kill a Human Being than an Alien?” Pike responds “Having empathy for your enemy is part of the job.” Notably not answering that question. 

Kirk then says he didn’t think of them as people until it was ‘too late’ - to save them I assume? Which is kind of strange wording and seems to ignore what they were doing. It almost paints them as innocents? Kirk was also the only one who tried to rescue them, but before that point they were ready to kill everyone in their path so what did he wish he’d done differently? What would having empathy for them have changed? What other course of action could he have taken?

Pike responds “Maybe that’s the lesson, empathy isn’t conditional” and DOES point out what they were doing - trying to kill everyone in their path which again to me illustrates the problem of inserting this moral here though I do find myself…idk. Saying empathy isn’t conditional, talking about it like it’s an all or nothing thing seems odd and extreme to me in a way I can’t quite articulate. I think maybe it feels connected to the “You’re either a Good Guy or a Bad Guy” mentality I see a lot in SNW.

In short, this episode is trying (at the last possible moment) to make the point that empathy should be extended even to our enemies but 

1] The show doesn’t give us any reason in episode besides the fact that they’re Human to extend empathy towards these people - positioning their Humanity as their redeeming factor and as SUCH a redeeming factor that their deaths, once a thing to be celebrated or not considered or at all, are reframed as a tragedy that weighs on everyone’s hearts.

Even that one scavenger choosing not to kill Pike (presumably because he saw they’re both Human) adds to this. If Pike were an alien, he’d have been killed. He is spared because he’s a member of the same species.

2] The show has never really communicated this moral about empathy for the enemy before and in fact has communicated the opposite several times and positioned it as correct - the enemy are monsters and should be killed is something that SNW has said is concretely true. 

3] Our enemy in episode is not “other” so there’s nothing that says “otherness” is something we should have empathy for or try to understand. This moral of tolerance and empathy doesn’t feel as if it extends to aliens. Because of the first point, their Humanity being the ONLY thing making their deaths tragic, there’s no reason given to feel sad about an actual alien’s death. Kirk the character might internalize that as he questions why them being Humans makes him so much sadder but Pike notably doesn’t answer that and the messaging around the moment doesn’t feel like it wants that answered in a way where we’d have to examine how SNW treats Aliens v Humans.

I’m not saying that’s the only lens to view this episode through or that this is what the writers intended. I’ve seen people talking about this episode through a critique of capitalism lens, this machine that kills planets piloted by American Humans. But I’m focusing on how this episode tries to handle Alien V Human life and how it fumbles this both in-episode and throughout the show. 

At the end of the day, this episode only reinforces the fact that in SNW there are Humans and Monsters. Saying that Humans can also be monsters doesn’t challenge that as radically as it could, especially with the added context of the magnitude of evil these people were ready to commit. 

The way SNW thinks of Human Life vs Alien Life is concerning to me. Under the cut is a major spoiler for "The Sehlat Who Ate Its Tail." These are all my thoughts immediately after watching, so do with that what you will.

In the episode we get talk of how these aliens are monstrous, which is a concerning trend in how SNW thinks of aliens. La'An says that "Even the Gorn consider [these aliens] monsters" and we KNOW that means they're bad because the Gorn are themselves monsters to SNW. Then we blow up the alien ship, which is fine, it was heading to a planet in order to literally destroy it, so everyone cheers. Then Kirk asks if there are any life signs and if they can beam any survivors on board. Here, Scotty seems annoyed and reluctantly checks. He says that even if they DID want to beam them aboard, they couldn't. This moment is important because it's juxtaposed by how everyone, the episode itself not just the characters, reacts when it's revealed that the "aliens" were actually Human. CRUCIALLY (to me) not JUST Human. American. They SAY they gathered Human Beings from all over the world in the in memorium slideshow Uhura presents but they specifically show an American flag to the audience to show that these people are HUMAN and the SECOND we know that the episode treats their deaths as a tragedy. There's sad music playing. Uhura's practically crying, Pelia gets choked up talking about how much these people meant to Humanity. "They were the best of us..." and M'Benga says there were "7,000 souls" lost. Kirk, in conversation with Pike, ruefully notes that the lives of the crew he saved pale in comparison to the 7,000 killed. BEFORE learning they were Human beings, who cares? They're monsters. They're aliens. Their deaths are nothing. AFTER learning they were Humans, it's a tragedy. The episode addresses this. I'd like to analyze. "They were Human Beings. Why does that make it feel so much worse?" "All I can say is, having empathy for your adversary is part of the job." "But I didn't. I didn't think of them as people at all, until it was too late." "Maybe that's the lesson. Empathy isn't conditional, it's either given or it isn't." Pike then points out that these people didn't extend empathy towards THEM and it was a life-or-death situation. Which to me is the problem with inserting this moral into THIS episode. The first thing blunting this message is that Kirk literally didn't have another choice. These people were piloting a death machine toward a planet with the goal of killing literally every person on that planet. What amount of in-the-moment empathy are we expected to have for the people committing that act? In the episode it's not like there are peaceful courses of action that Kirk ignored because of his prejudice and it's not like they jumped to conclusions because of any false assumptions. These guys WERE gonna kill both crews and an entire planet. 7,000 people died...who were gonna murder millions upon millions remorselessly, as they clearly have before. Putting the "We should have empathy for our enemies" message in THIS episode doesn't work at all for me once you consider the actions of the enemy. It's a good message in a vacuum but nothing in the episode supports it. "When they left Earth...they weren't monsters." SNW again defaults to talking about people as monsters to distance them from interiority or empathy. Aliens are monsters and if you're not careful you too can become a monster. It less asks us to have empathy for the other and more cautions us against becoming the other - because then you'll have to be killed. How many empathetic aliens have we seen in SNW? Pike's words about having empathy for others rings so hollow and out of nowhere. Nothing about SNW has indicated it believes in that. Aliens are monsters and treated as such. They're evil, things to laugh at, or non-entities. I don't think we've seen a sympathetic alien race since season 1?

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Uh Oh. I've got a bad feeling about this one, gang.

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out of all the star trek chief engineers i think miles o’brien is the least likely to be a machinefucker. i think he loves his job but does not eroticize it. trip tucker is in the middle he would fuck a machine as long as it had tits and a sexy voice. b’elanna and geordi would go a step farther they would fuck a machine as long as it had a vaguely humanoid form but are happy to get pretty abstract with it. scotty would fuck the enterprise as is

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making a new post cause its kind of off topic but i really do find the commitment to writing klingons Like That baffling in the context of trek villains overall. like this isn't to say that these species are never written in a racist/bioessentialist way (far from it), but the romulans and cardassians are given complex political situations with many citizens disagreeing with the violence of their governments, the vorta and the jem'hadar are both shown to be victims of the founders' brainwashing (who were in turn victims of violent persecution), the borg are literally all individually victims of assimilation. and yet the klingons are just like that bc that's how they are. multiple attempts have been made over the decades to explain why the klingons have such a violent culture but none of them have made it to screen, instead trek has just doubled down on the idea that this entire race is just "naturally angry". and it's not like we've had plenty of sympathetic klingon characters! i'd say there's been more than any of the other species mentioned. but even when we're supposed to like a klingon character, the writing still insists on reminding us of their Inherent Violent Nature every so often in case we forgot. it's such bad writing and yet it remains an unquestioned part of trek canon. definitely has nothing to do with the klingons being the most consistently racialised of the long running villains of trek

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Holy houses, haunted houses

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various useful nba quote graphic memes some more real than others. some more nba than others

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on the topic of tom paris and his fraught relationship with masculinity there’s something really interesting with how that informs his relationship with b’elanna and the specific ways he conceptualizes her and her heritage pretty much exclusively through the lens of “big tough warriors”. not only is the warrior aspect the only part of b’elanna’s heritage he ever shows real interest in but he also consistently projects that image onto her even after she outright tells him that’s not who she is. and yeah we know tom can be immature and self-centered so of course that’s a factor in all of this but it also makes so much sense for a guy who is insecure in his manliness to seek out a partner who validates his masculinity in what is fundamentally a very fetishy, she’s a prize to be won and he cares more about the optics of having an epic warrior klingon wife than her actual interiority type of way

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Vulcan teen on Vulcan [tiktok] saying "I have just lost track of my father in the grocery store." The camera turns to show the viewers the grocery store in which almost every single older middle-aged man has a bowlcut and long robes. Camera turns back to show the teen's face which is expressionless and yet communicates all it needs to.

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just because a character is a good parent/spouse doesn’t mean they don’t deserve a fuckass situationship. they can be a good parent/spouse and still have a weird gay thing or three on the side

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This literally blew my mind so now you all have to know about it

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Trans Janeway. There's a girl with her arms wrapped around your shoulders, humming as she's carried along. You're the only thing she can touch. [Patreon | Commissions]