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Something I love about DS9’s framing of Jake Sisko is how he’s consistently positioned as someone worthy of protection, whose survival and flourishing and emotional well-being are of tantamount importance, and whose innocence and vulnerability are precious.

It’s present from all directions in The Visitor. Everybody protectively closes ranks around Jake upon Ben’s disappearance, with those little moments of Dax and Kira and Bashir giving him physical affection and reassurance and Quark going out of his way to be nice to him. Jake’s older self’s protective impulses towards his younger self, as well as his desire to save his father, are the basis for the timeline reset. And then after the spacetime continuum gets wrenched back in line purely to save Jake from the emotional trauma of losing his father, the episode ends with Ben, who’s borne witness to everything and is the only one who remembers it all, continuing that work of shielding Jake from that knowledge.

And then Nor the Battle to the Strong carries on the thread of protectiveness towards Jake, in that case as part of the episode’s deconstruction of military heroism. As he’s marinating in shame over bailing on the mission to retrieve the generator, Bashir apologizes to him and says he was wrong to put Jake in harm’s way in the first place. And then at the end, he wakes up after sealing the cave entranceway and both Bashir and his father are tenderly looking after him, with similar imagery to The Visitor in terms of him being symbolically cradled by the other cast members’ concern for him. He never needs to toughen up or grow out of that need to be rescued - in fact, his fear and panic and feelings of being out of his depth prove to be immensely valuable, as his last conversation with his father emphasizes, because he’s able to bear witness to the experience of the soldiers through his writing.

That comes through in a really interesting way in Valiant as well, with Jake’s emphatic concern for his own survival in the midst of all the culty militaristic weirdness of the Valiant crew:

Nog: You don’t understand, because you’ve never put on one of these uniforms. You don’t know anything about sacrifice, or honor, or duty, or any other things that make up a soldier’s life. I’m part of something larger than myself. All you care about is you.

Jake: That’s right. All I care about is Jake Sisko and whether or not he’s going to be killed by a bunch of delusional fanatics looking for martyrdom.

And I love that exchange not only because it’s a rare articulation of how I would actually feel in a situation like that in a franchise full of characters who are all prepared to sacrifice themselves in the line of duty, but also because in the context of the episode, Jake’s position is actually the heroic one! It’s his sense of self-preservation, and the fact that he hasn’t romanticized the notion of heroic sacrifice, that enables him to see through the dogmatic ideology of the Valiant cadets and recognize how dangerously out of their depth they are. And it’s just a nice articulation of his own worth.

(And of course the Defiant rescues them at the end, because Jake’s grown up now, but he hasn’t outgrown needing his father to save him. And that’s never a shameful thing, but a really beautiful thing, and necessary to the fabric of the show.)

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Madonna and Salamander Child

HAPPY THRESHOLD DAY!!! And happy lunar new year I guess.

I was going to post Frank today but I forgot what day it was (!!!) and had to bang this out real quick. I feel the need to apologize to Janeway because my first ever drawing of her is THIS. This is also the first time I'm making Threshold Day art :]

(Full disclosure: I traced the Voyager because I had to finish quickly.)

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ONE MORE (KINDA SPOILER-Y I GUESS?)

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this is what happens after canon, right?

pfp size under the cut, lizard designs from this post

it's their birfday... they're having a pizza party to celebrate...

btw. this was supposed to be no background and black and white. woops

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People joke about DS9 A and B plots but this cut was bonkers

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Elim Garak worst noise compilation

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this polycule is in fucking shambles (part 1)

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empok nor is so wild from nog's perspective specifically. your middle school teacher's husband and your hometown's tailor who you've known since you were tiny(er) are arguing about how many of the tailor's people your middle school teacher's husband killed in some war that happened probably before you were born. the tailor is calling himself slurs and heckling him to admit that he liked killing. now your coworkers who were also there with you are all dead and the tailor and your middle school teacher's husband are hunting each other for sport. and you're only 3 apples tall. what a day.

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A barrier

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Ensign Paris

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I was asked to draw Garak and I drew the most silly studpi spy lizard I could

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mr Spock, analyses We have an itsy bitsy individual on our hands

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I am a simple man I want a shmall fluff fic where Odo rests In Kira's pocket after mission gone wrong

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star trek commission!

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Approach with caution

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