#Klingon Politics

[sapphosewrites]

I have seen many a gif and video from the SNW musical episode, but no one informed me about the Klingons.

[fauvester]

postwar cardassia :: postwar germany, after a few years of abject disaster they hit an economic miracle based on tech innovation and end up with a striking half rubble/half high rise postapocalyptic thing. ally with romulas and the klingons. get a very mod fashion reboot. i want romulan bobs to be the newest thing on cardassia prime

[faggotfuckery]

just thought there was a nazi in the train with me because he had a sewn on patch that looked like right wind stuff

turns out it's the Klingon flag

[animentality]

the Star Trek fandom always acts like either Riker or Kirk is the god of rizz in the Star Trek universe, and it's bullshit, when Quark exists right there.

he was literally pulling klingon widowers, cardassian enemies of state, trans ferengi, vulcan terrorists, amorphous he/they shape shifters. he constantly had men chasing after him too.

Kirk's womanizing ways were vastly overstated by people whose memories are clouded by age, and Riker's repertoire was the most generic humanoid hotties out there, whose personalities were basically omg i'd love to have sex with you do you like my skimpy outfit.

Quark was pulling much harder just by virtue of the fact that all of his pulls were people who had a good reason to not get involved with him at all, but couldn't resist in the end.

seriously. cardassian political scientist that hates him, ferocious klingon warrior who just wants to use him for political reasons, a trans ferengi who doesn't want to be outed, a Vulcan terrorist who REALLY shouldn't be helping him but does, and a cop.

he has that much rizz, mk?

trust me. I'm a scientist.

I have the qualitative data to back this up.

[tea-earl-grey]

the thing is that when you look deep enough, Klingons and Klingon society is actually pretty well developed by Star Trek standards. we know the ideals of their society and the way their ideals are corrupted by classism and archaic tradition. we see how "warrior" and "honor" are complex terms that involve more than just warfare and fighting. but we also see Klingon scientists and lawyers who are proud of their work but are pushed aside for not living up to their society's standards. we see how their political relations change over time and how strategic alliances are formed and dissolved. we know their marriage customs and holidays and mythology and history. we see a variety of Klingon characters with varying degrees of attachment to their species and culture. we see how they're stereotyped and discriminated against in the Federation for being "too alien" when the Federation is supposed to be accepting of differences. we have an entire real, usable language for Kahless's sake.

the thing is also that 90% of Klingon stories choose to ignore all this complexity in favor of bioessentialism and racist takes on "warrior society".

[flotter4eva]

Me: So..

My mum: No politics at christmas.

Me: You don't even know what I was going to say.

My mum: No, but I know you.

Me: Anyway. Opinions on the Khitomer accords?

[rivercule]

Watching Star Trek (original series) again. The Klingon design. is so bad

[noctilusent]

What I love about being new to Trek is I react to TOS like a time traveller having a panic attack. The future past did WHAT now?

[doyouwanttoseeabug]

Star Trek crew but they're all different species hear me out:

Jim - Jim has to remain human. He's the humanist human around, and also there is infinite comedy in the idea of a bunch of other species making exhausted eye contact whenever he pulls his bullshit.

Spock remains Vulcan obviously.

I initially thought Tellarite Bones BUT I think Andorian Bones fits better. Adding an extra-spicy layer to his Thing with Spock if their grandparents were literally shooting at each other. Every time Jim is Extremely Jim, Bones pulls out the ushaan-tor with a Dammit Jim I'm a doctor not a duellist but DON'T TEMPT ME

Romulan Uhura. No listen, trust me on this. Escaping from the Romulan empire because her love of languages leads her to a love of other cultures and a fiercely anti-imperialist anti-hegemonic stance. Her poise and calm comes from a lifetime of lying to the Tal Shiar, who were aggressively trying to recruit her before she joined Starfleet. How did she become an expert in diplomacy? Well her favourite childhood hobby was not getting dissapeared by the state so the rest came naturally.

Klingon Rand was revealed to me in a dream.

SCOTTY is the Tellarite. Jim rings down to engineering all meek like "hello Scotty can you tell me why the "ship is about to explode" light is flashing" and Scotty's like your mother was a leper and your father was a clown. Yeah the engines are fucked.

Chekov is Orion for The Angst TM

I know I KNOW that the Federation hadn't made contact with the Cardassians in TOS but Cardassian Sulu. He's so nice and smiley and polite :) and he's just saying Captain that if you want anyone poisoned I might know a guy :) the guy is me, Captain :)

I really wanted a Ferengi on here but no one fits so. Ferengi Chapel I guess. She's actually incredibly nice and way more professional than Bones but occasionally there's a gleam in her eyes and you just know she's thinking Oh, if I wanted to, I could rip these suckers off.

[ireallyamabear]

The choice to put Una Chin-Reily on a Starfleet recruitment poster in the late 2370s seems a nod to the extraordinary person she is and her exemplary service, but Boimler’s enthusiasm for her as a personal hero cannot mask the fact of what Starfleet execs are really doing here: while it is Starfleet tradition to honour esteemed personnel from its centuries of history, we have to look at the poster as a product of its time: it seems clear that, shortly after the devastating death toll and the rapid militarisation of the Dominion War, putting a prominent figure of the Great Exploration Age - and notedly someone who had not served in the Klingon War - as the poster person for Starfleet is an indictment that contemporary young people of the Federation are not drawn to the service as it is in their time anymore.

Critically, Starfleet has to use somebody from a 120 years ago, a timeframe that would lap generations of even especially long lived member species like Vulcans or Denobulans, to attract new recruits. Boimler says himself that seeing Una as a representative and her motto - “Ad astra per aspera” was: “Uh, it was a really big reason why I joined.” Clearly there is a wealth of recognisable Starfleet officers from 2370 and onwards, but their entanglement in the Dominion War, or at least in the Borg threat makes them unsuitable as role models for people like Boimler who cannot help but associate these contemporaries with the horrors of war and intergalactic conflict. Thus, the retreat to a “safe” historical narrative, with Starfleet still being about peaceful exploration reflects the growing divide between the realities of a colonised galaxy, the ongoing need of new bodies to fill the posts on all those ships and space stations and the aspirations and values of young people today. In this essay I will question whether Starfleet can keep its promise of scientific integrity in the face of growing political unrest in the UFP and ask what “Number One” herself would have thought about-

[clementine-kesh]

this isn’t anything new or revolutionary to say but i hate how star trek portrays alien cultures as a monolith, maybe with two or three different subgroups at most. first of all it contributes to a lot of the weird bioessentialism written into the show second of all that’s just not how culture works. look at all those posts going around here joking about how what’s considered rude in one culture is polite in another, and that’s just in humans! “all klingons inherently have the Warrior’s Spirit” can you imagine if we said that about humans. sorry guys my ancestral scottish highlander genes are calling me to go beat the shit out of some englishmen i’ll brb

[worflesbian]

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

[quasi-normalcy]

I know that we, as a culture, have outgrown the use of pop culture metaphors for understanding politics, but bear with me:

The Left sees itself as the Federation - Peaceful, egalitarian, and committed to science and human flourishing above all.

The Right sees the Left as the Borg - An aggressively hegemonizing swarm that brooks no dissent, cares nothing for established values, and wants to take away what you are in a very fundamental way.

The Right sees itself as the Klingons - Brave warriors committed to honour, duty, strength, and tradition above all.

The Left sees the Right as the Pakleds - A bunch of dumb, violent assholes who only care about power for its own sake and who delight in hurting people because it makes them feel strong.

Source: Reading YouTube comments under Star Trek videos.

[idonotbitemythumbatyou]

By the will of the prophets, by the end of the series Sisko (and thus Bajor) has formed strong personal bonds of friendship with figures of political influence in nearly every major power that could be a threat to Bajor, or could simply be a help to Bajor’s growth.

The Federation: it would have been enough for him just to be there, but Sisko’s war hero status makes their investment in Bajor more personal.

The Klingon Empire: Worf - (as outlined in this post) is almost comedically well connected, and practically handpicked the Chancellor himself.

The Founders, (and thus the Dominion) : Odo is sent back to temper his people with a love for a Bajoran woman that will live with him the great link forever.

Ferenginar - Sisko performed the Grand Nagus’ wedding ceremony (to a Bajoran, no less. Leeta is part of this too), and personally mentored his son.

Cardassia - Garak will likely have some influence in the new government given his skills and role in the war. Of course, no matter how much he owes Sisko, he’s too capricious on his own to be trusted with Bajor’s safety, so they granted him the tempering influence of a profound relationship with a federation doctor. Whether you think they get married post canon or not (they do), wild horses couldn’t keep Julian frontier-medicine Bashir from going to help rebuild Cardassia.

I 100% think this was all planned by the prophets. It had to be that exact moment with those exact people. (We’re just missing the Romulans, really. Bit of an oversight.)

And then they left Kira there to oversee it all, and maintain those relationships, Kassidy to build his temple according to his specifications, and Jake to tell the story.

[isagrimorie]

People give Janeway guff about not giving Kazon replicators and transporters. Still, it's proven repeatedly that giving one Kazon faction an advantage over the other would be mixing it up in an internal war that would LITERALLY shift the balance of power.

Klingons at least know the technology they have engineers, even as it's becoming a dying breed over Warriors.

TLDR in Alliance Chakotay and Tuvok convinces Janeway that making an alliance with a Kazon faction is the way to go.

And so she does finally concede on this little experiment but with a lot of reservations going in: That once they leave the infighting will go on, and might actually have been worse.

Tuvok naively thinks it might help and bring about a Federation.

B'Elanna then pushes forward Harry's sarcastic comment about forming an alliance with Seska and then at the first sign of this, Chakotay balks.

And then Janeway says something that I feel is her guiding principle in dealing with hard decisions:

Janeway: "You can't have it both ways Commander. If you want to get in the mud with the Kazon you can't start complaining that you might get dirty."

Again, this is what I love about Janeway -- she gets flack for it but when Janeway makes a decision no one else wants to make it.

As I've mentioned in another post in tags: #right or wrong#i admire how janeway is always the one#who goes#the buck stops with me#she makes the hard choices on voyager#especially during debates#when the staff just goes around and around in circles#like in memorial where she starts just in the background#listening to the senior staff debate#from how janeway started in episode 2 of season 1#where she's presented with the horrific#sophie's choice of neelix dying because he has no lungs#and then subjecting another person to the same fate#to the (now boring debate about tuvix)#to this moment#to the moment on the memorial episode#she will take on that burden#and she will always stare at the hardest choice unflinchingly#because someone has to#as the 12th doctor once said#sometimes all your choices are bad ones#but you still have to choose#

In this episode, she allowed herself to be persuaded but she's not sold on it. But she's letting her crew run with it -- okay so we do this, but if we do this, we commit to it. And yet, at the first uncomfortable decisions... there's already balking. This was Janeway testing the waters if any other person on her senior staff could carry water about making the hard choices.

So far the ones who have stepped up were B'Elanna, Tom, and Neelix.

Anyway, I wish there was more fallout on the whole Kazon vs Trabe conflict because that was actually interesting.

But also Voyager had a Doctor Who problem -- if they meddle in the affairs of a spatial politik, they don't know the repercussions of their actions and just look at Living Witness and the reputation Voyager gained simply by doing a bit of a trade deal.

Voyager can help when they can, see: helping Brenari refugees escape the Devore. (Counterpoint).

But they can't and shouldn't really interfere with internal politics. They're not like DS9 where they can stay in one place and fix things permanently. They're just passing through.

This is also why I think she wasn't really considering Tuvok and Chakotay's thing during the Void episode where they raid another ship's resources. (Also, because after Ransom and Equinox, she knows what faltering in the Federation principles can do).

Crucially, she's also known both Chakotay and Tuvok enough that while she loves them -- Janeway knows neither men have the stomach for their proposals.

The Alliance episode was one example of that already.

Janeway, though, if she is pushed to make that commitment and there was absolutely NO way they can prevent raiding others-- Janeway would have committed to that action 110%. This is why I feel Janeway would actually come to a similar conclusion as Sisko in In the Pale Moonlight.

Especially, if she gets daily reports of Starfleet casualties. I have a feeling, there would be less kicking and screaming when Garak finally does his reveal.

Janeway has rules for a reason. She is fastidious about it. For a reason. Because once she commits to an action, it will take both hell and high water to take her off that course.

/edited

[headphones-lifeform]

Tumblr in the Star Trek universe part 3

[Parts 1 and 2]

[Now featuring OC cameo.]

🐾beanboi459 Follow

somene brought their pet(?) on board the starship i'm on and. thats the yippee creature. legit just the yippee creature.

🐾beanboi459

turns out it's actually called a moopsy or smth? still the yippee creature in my heart :') yall would love it

🐾beanboi459

hopital

1043 notes

🏴‍☠️crimedirective Follow

so. um. remember that starfleet-captain-confessions post from last week with the betazoid anon who got migrains because of the romantic tension between two of the senior officers?

turns out that was my captain. theyre a tumblrina.

brb gonna purge this account real quick

#at least im not one of the senior officers involved? #somehow i dont think my commanding officer is gonna approve of my username #cd shut up

56 notes

💖klingon-affirmations Follow

there is more than one way to be Klingon! not everyone is a warrior, and that's okay!

⚔️lesbian-kahless Follow

as a Klingon librarian I needed to hear this today <3 Qapla'!

#kahless reblogs

174 notes

💟hugsfromstarbase12 Follow

would you still love me if I was a tribble?

🍓strawberry-sehlat Follow

is this anything?

#this is a reference to a 20th century human song #probably a bit too niche #tribbles #tribble tw #total eclipse of the heart #bonnie tyler #human music #human culture #strawberry-sehlat silly post

248 notes

🦆duckwithatypewriter Follow

my Data Soong x Reader fic is now available as a holodeck program! You can find the code on my blog <3

#thanks programmer friends #cringe culture is dead #data soong #data soong rpf #reader insert #holodeck program

32 notes

🦎cardassian-in-ur-closet Follow

I know that one tumblr user rambling can't fix anything and that this is not nearly enough compensation, but I need to apologise to any Bajorans who see this on behalf of the cardassian empire (we are the worst)

💙andor-endorphins Follow

So I checked OP's bio and they are a teenager.

OP, you were clearly not involved in the occupation of Bajor. You shouldn't feel like you have to take the blame for it.

It'll be very hard to find a power that doesn't have a history of atrocities. I mean, look at Earth.

#my bajoran friend helped me phrase this #everybody say thank you to them #politics

3 notes