saavikamhere

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whadever.....

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here’s a little saavik sketch i drew while rewatching the search for spock!!

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it's been over a year since i first draw them

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good night (VVuncolouredVV)

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Saavik and Shadow are filed in the exact same category of traumagirl to me

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Was sketching Kirk’s body type and one thing led to another…

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Happy Threshold Day, everyone!

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Happy Threshold Day to all who observe!

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The Freeman's aboard the Enterprise...

Here's the full illustration for the commission I had the honor of doing for @figachilles!

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Beyond everything else, you know what's baffling to me?

Section 31 as a concept is about Cold War-inflected espionage and the slow grind of moral compromise. If you were going to make a movie with them as the protagonists (which, to be clear, you fucking should not) you'd do that, right? You'd do some Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy shit, maybe some Deedra Meero in Andor shit.

Instead they made a mediocre streaming era action flick.

Seriously. Like... I wanted to fulminate about it but I almost can't because this is barely Star Trek, it looks and feels like something Netflix would have greenlit as an original sci-fi IP in the pre-COVID splurge era. I was expecting something with a really, really gross "hard men make hard choices, Colonel Jessup was right" post-9/11 mentality to it and instead it barely even registers. I can't even be offended about it like I was about the treatment of this sort of thing in the first two seasons of Discovery, it's so substance-free.

I genuinely think they were so worried about backlash to doing this (the interviews and press tour they've been doing for the past few months have featured the writers, directors, and execs in a defensive crouch, like they know they fucked up) that they filed off everything about it that could be viewed as condoning, you know... war crimes. Which is good, but once you do that you're left with nothing, so why on earth bother? This is a budget that could have gone to something meaningful.

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Section 31 is responsible for the near destruction of Earth in Picard S3E10.

I had an epiphany the other day while I was out walking: Section 31 fairly reliably has never demonstrably "saved" the Federation on screen that I can recall. On the other hand, literally no good ever seems to come from its obsession with its epistemology that only Section 31 can preserve the Federation's wholesomeness and decency through doing the unethical things your average Starfleet officer cannot and must not do.

In modern espionage, there is a much discussed concept called "blowback." Blowback is a euphemism for the unintended consequences of an action or policy that seemed like a good idea at the time, but has ripple effects that may or may not be foreseeable.

The Fourth (?) Borg attack on Earth and the almost certain many thousands of casualties is an example of blow back. Now in Section 31's defense, the chain of consequences meanders quite a bit and heated arguments over whether this constitutes a black swan or gray rhino are not entirely unjustified.

But the fact remains, that without the assistance of Vadek's rogue Changelings, the Borg Queen clearly did not have the assets to execute her plan to infiltrate Starfleet and set conditions for the assimilation via transporter of Starfleet's junior crew.

Vadek and her Changelings were motivated by vengeance. Vengeance for the torturous experiments they were subjected to by Section 31 and, although its not clearly spelled out, almost certainly the near extinction of the Changeling species by a Section 31 bioweapon. This Vadek would have known about when she rejoined the Great Link, if not before when she and her crew killed the researchers experimenting on them and may or may not have had access to other Section 31 files in the process.

Classic blowback.

I may have misjudged the streaming era of Trek and its handling of Section 31, because while it has normalized it in some ways, that so many problems are caused by Section 31 in this era of Trek does not seem to be an accident. I don't like the normalization as a worldbuilding aspect, but I do appreciate its function as the provocation for cautionary tales.

In universe, Section 31 really needs to be disbanded. As an organization, there is no evidence it has ever actually saved the Federation from any existential threats and it seems to be in the business of reliably creating existential threats. If I had a strip of gold pressed latinum for every time Section 31 was in the chain of causality for a computer virus hive mind taking control of Starfleet vessels and attempting to exterminate organic life, I'd have two strips of gold pressed latinum. Which isn't a lot, but its weird that it happened twice.

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HAPPY SECTION 31 DAY!

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Saavik edit by Neo or @/harrysullivankisser on TikTok <- link but i wanted to save it in case the app goes down

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A VERY sketchy Saavik and Kira :)

I’ve been very artblocked the last couple of months, so I haven’t drawn much at all (miss it a lot) but I have been working my way through the original Star Trek series, movies, and Deep Space Nine, which has been fun! Really hoping I can paint proper portraits of these two eventually

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More Mari'Lyn sketches because I can't control myself