#Klingon Politics

[cogcltrcorn]

are we as a society gonna talk about how tos is a show made in the middle of cold war and has at its center a positive character from a communalist culture that appears withdrawn and cold to the human [american] pov characters, and is materialist in its core philosophy. what I am saying is: are we gonna talk about spock essentially fulfilling the role of the soviet communist in the narrative. are we gonna talk about vulcan as ersatz-ussr (again, communalist, philosophically materialist, but, because of rodenberry's utopic vision of the future, an ally)

[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

[gleaningsinbuddhafields]

Withdrawing

It was a cutthroat time in Chinese history, and Confucius wanted no part in it. #Confucianism #Analects #Politics #StarTrek #Klingon

Kang: “Only a fool fights in a burning house.” Star Trek, “Day of the Dove” (s3ep11), stardate unknown  Ever since … recent events, I’ve been thinking about this quote a lot. “Kang” the Klingon captain from Star Trek episode “Day of the Dove”. Played by the brilliant Michael Ansara. This also reminded of this passage from the Analects of Confucius: [8:13] The Master said: “Be of unwavering…

[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

[quasi-normalcy]

It does, however, sound like the kind of thing that could become an in-universe slander of the Jedis by practitioners of rival religions.

I think one of the big reasons “the Jedi are baby thieves” doesn’t hold water for me is because that attitude is just not present in the movies or TCW at all, there’s nothing to indicate that they’re greedy for more people to join their ranks, and, just as importantly, our earliest introduction to the Jedi Order as a community is them going, no, we don’t think we should take on this extremely powerful child. Our first introduction to them is them turning down a child being brought to them, like that’s not the way a group of people behaves if they’re a bunch of baby thieves! You don’t make a major point of characters saying no to being offered a kid as pretty much your only example of the Jedi adoption process that makes it into the movies, if they’re meant to be baby thieves!  That’s not how you introduce characters if they’re meant to be baby thieves! It’s the only time it comes up in the movies, it’s the only time we’re given an explicit scene about Jedi taking on kids, and it’s one where they say no.

[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.

[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.

[velvetvexations]

With Warless Weekend over, it's time I address Plaidos openly accusing me of secretly being a man! Oh, yeah, she's doing that now. I'm tagging this because I'm annoyed at Very Popular Tumblr Transfeminist misgendering a trans woman because her politics are too transmasc-friendly.

Isn't it great how she cuts this off, implying I think segregation by sex is not a big deal, rather than it being ridiculous she's made Michfest specifically her 9/11? I try so often to word everything I say in a way that can't be snipped like this but I clearly fucked up here.

Let's breakdown the reasoning given in her reply to a reblog concurring that I'm probably a sockpuppet:

Plaidos is assuming as TRFs always do that her clique is fully representative of transfems on Tumblr so if she never sees me positively interacting with them I must specifically be avoiding them. The reality is that I simply don't inspect the genitals of everyone I interact with.

Not only do I often argue with self-identified TMEs, probably even more than trans women, but Plaidos is literally responding to a self-identified TME who's talking about me having argued with them, so framing this as me going after trans women is ridiculous. I can literally pull up screenshots that I'm pretty sure predate me coming back to Tumblr where I talk about how it seems from what I observed on the outside was that the rabidly transandrophobic crowd was mostly non-trans women bloodletting for one or two idols, which is a notion I was unfortunately and despairingly disillusioned of upon getting into the trenches myself.

Also, "dishonorable"? Is she a fucking Klingon?

Annnnnd there's the implication I am in fact a trans man. She's certainly saying I'm not a trans woman and that's also misgendering because I've said repeatedly that my gender rests firmly on being Not A Cis Woman. But why simply "implicate" I'm a man?

Hilarious. Doubly so since I just recently found out that person runs my favorite Y2K blog, which I'm sure will get used as 'proof' at some point.

Do I seriously need to post fucking gock lol? Are we literally down to genital inspections at this point?

My blog has a pre-discourse history where I mostly reblogged images and argued about a Dungeons & Dragons show!* I'm literally a published author! What about all the very specific kinks? Being a scholar of Imperial Japan? The very specific opinions I have on very specific media? My specific fandoms?

What an elaborate character I've constructed to come up with a multiple system where the system members even have surnames and are the distinct sources of specific parts of my personality and interests, including one who's Christian and one who's attempting to learn Hinduism but has only ever briefly mentioned it about twice.

I think TRFs have never moved past the point in development where people don't exist when you stop looking at them.

*much of which was about how much I hated the transmasc player's cis lesbian PC; make of that what you will

I don't block people very often, but I do in fact do that! Thicced-Witch has openly talked about me repeatedly having her blocked and unblocking her when it did no good. I also have prettykittenpaw and fite-club blocked because they got into the annoying habit of coming on to every one of my posts, and my tolerance for prettyeelwithagun ran out when she stuck by Thicced-Witch's misgendering of people for the purposes of "satire."

God, this is all so, so stupid. Transfeminism, everyone.

[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-

[writergeekrhw]

Did you ever think much about how the human characters having strong attachments to their national identity (like Sisko and obrien) works in the globalized, or even galaxized, world of the federation?

I always thought it was interesting that people seem to yearn for the past in that sense, perhaps the fact that nations are no longer real things makes them feel "safer" than other identities (like human centrism of planets identities) that might be actually politically divisive? Or a reaction to the sense that the federation homogenizes people (in the "we come in peace" "root beer" way).

I feel like the Federation actually appreciates and even encourages its citizens to express their cultures of origin, if they want to. Since the Federation has evolved beyond national rivalries, they've likely eliminated toxic nationalism. Witness how Bashir willing plays Battle of Clontarf with O'Brien while O'Brien plays Battle of Britian and sings "Jerusalem." So instead of being a source of conflict, in the Federation, cultural identity is just another wonderful diversity that adds to the tapestry of their society. IDIC and all that.

My only regret is that we really only see this from humans and we never created "nationalities" for Bajorans, Klingons, etc. But in truth, that would have been a lot harder than filling out the aliens' cultures and might have confused the viewers.

[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

[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

[keo6323]

come to ds9 we have all you need

- scifi

- crime solving

- PTSD handling of an entire planet

- the best klingon restaurant in the entire universe

- toxic yaoi

- the barkeep™

- cute families

- economics, politics, morale and sentimentality

- bisexual whore

- weird sidequests

- the horrors

- war

- lesbians

[literaryvein-reblogs]

hiii, i am writing my first book/novel. its highlighting d***th, romance, mystery, politics, pretty questionable characters w revenge, thriller and lots of women n power play. its my first book and im not that educated about such themes. but this rough plot i have in my mind is so beautiful that underperforming this excellent trope would be a shame....ive never written before so could you please what to do to actually write this kinda theme to my heart's satisfaction. I've never written a freaking chap before and now im really lost

Writing Ideas: Revenge Tropes

some tropes related to revenge, thriller, women, and power play

Afterlife Avenger: This trope involves the circumstance where a character explicitly still chooses to pursue conflicts against whatever's left of their hated target long after they've passed.

Best Served Cold: Named for the French (or Sicilian, or Klingon, or drow, depending on who you ask) proverb, "Revenge is a dish best served cold." At least in the case of drow, it also means one can have well-planned revenge and drive them mad with fear as a bonus.

Crusading Widow: The death or murder of their significant other motivates the character to seek revenge.

Defeat as Backstory: A protagonist (or some other character's backstory) in a story begins by having been defeated either before the story began, or early on in the story (often in a prologue).

Dying Curse: With his dying breath, a character wishes ill fortune upon his killers, or some other personal enemy.

Pay Evil unto Evil: In real life, the sort of thinking behind this trope is called "retributive justice".

Revenge Through Corruption: Instead of inflicting physical harm, the villain attacks the mind and soul.

Villain-by-Proxy Fallacy: When someone goes after not only a crime's perpetrator, but those who supplied the perpetrator or were otherwise marginally connected to it, whether or not the people involved had anything to do with the actual crime.

Woman Scorned: A woman who's been dumped, cheated on, or otherwise done wrong by her significant other (or, in some cases, merely thinks she's been).

Examples

Alexandre Dumas's The Count of Monte Cristo, probably the greatest revenge story of all time.

In the original version of Beauty and the Beast, the Prince's widowed mother goes off to fight a war and leaves a wicked fairy to help him rule. When the Prince comes of age, she tries to seduce him and turns him into a Beast when he refuses her advances.

In Moby-Dick, Captain Ahab makes it clear throughout the book that he'll pursue Moby Dick to, into, through, and out of Hell, and even then he still won't be satisfied until the whale suffers forever for its slight against him.

Crime and Punishment: One of the antagonists of the novel, Porfiry, works as a police officer and interrogator, which usually would qualify as a good-aligned job. As you further witness this officer's tactics in catching criminals, you see him commit to bribery, thievery, death-threats, and psychological torture to force an admission. Furthermore, he seems to actually enjoy it, toying with amateur criminals like a cat torturing a wounded mouse. The justification, of course, being that the victim of this was a murderer, and therefore deserves it.

George R. R. Martin's Fire & Blood: After the war, Lady Joanna Lannister has a beef to pick with the Greyjoys, who've taken up raiding the coast, including killing a few Lannisters. She decides the best course of action is go to the Iron Islands and kill every man, woman and child she can find. She just settles for burning a lot of things and abducting one Greyjoy, gelding him and turning him into her fool.

Feyd Rautha Harkonnen receives a Dying Curse in Dune. After killing a combat slave in the arena, his opponent's final words are "One day one of us will get you." Given that this fighter is not just a slave, but one of the soldiers from the army of the Harkonnen's blood enemies, the Atreides, this may be prophetic.

In A Song of Ice and Fire, Arya Stark's conflation of justice and personal vengeance leads her to Villain-by-Proxy Fallacy. While many of people on her death list certainly deserve to be brought to justice, such as the Tickler for torture and Weese for abuse, others were merely acting on orders, such as the Hound, doing their jobs or are just guilty by association. Cersei Lannister is on her death list for being involved in the execution of Ned Stark, but Cersei wasn't complicit in that activity, and even spoke out against it. Same with Ilyn Payne, who was just doing his job as the royal executioner. The real mastermind of Ned's death, Littlefinger, is not on the list. Meryn Trant is on the list for killing Syrio Forel, but there isn't any evidence to confirm the crime. Polliver and Dunsen are on the list for flimsy reasons, like stealing. She has Chiswyck murdered for the crime of not being as funny as he thinks he is (granted, Chiswyck was joking about a gang rape, but that isn't the reason Arya cites as his crime). The conflation of justice and vengeance, and how that conflation leads to this trope, is one of the key themes of the entire story.

Queen Dido in The Aeneid, who prophesies that her and Aeneas's people will meet again in war (the Punic Wars — her future, Virgil's past). Particularly tragic in that it's made fairly obvious that he'd have stayed with her if he'd had the choice.

Sidney Sheldon's The Best Laid Plans: Leslie Stewart plots to ruin the career of Oliver Russell when he leaves her at the altar to marry a woman whose father promises to further his political career.

The Hunger Games: The Pay Evil Unto Evil trope is discussed all the way through Mockingjay, and reaches its culmination when President Coin suggests either executing all Capitol citizens or forcing their children into the Games.

Source ⚜ More: References ⚜ Writing Resources PDFs

Hi, here are some tropes I found related to the themes you described. You can find more in the source linked above. Study how it is portrayed in different types of media, and in your favourite films/books, to gain inspiration for your own story. You can take the rough idea/plot you already have, and try to incorporate techniques and tropes used by other authors, but then deviate from borrowing those ideas when your story starts to flow naturally. All the best with your writing!

[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.