#Star Trek (Canon & Concepts)

[tea-earl-grey]

We're all familiar with how most of the Star Trek shows have their dialogue in that somewhat formal stilted manner that plenty of people have poked fun at but also it kind of makes sense in an era of universal translators that people would make a habit of speaking clearly and avoiding slang/metaphors to ensure their points are well translated. I know that was never the intention (and a lot of newer trek shows go for more informal dialogue) but hm. Food for thought.

[marsixm]

im trying to wrap my head around why i dont get enthusiastic about reddit style fiction (not a dig but a descriptor) like scp and shit like that, bc its not that i can’t enjoy them but i think its like… when stuff is framed as if it were real, but its fiction, its like, well KNOWING its fiction eliminates a huge element of the intrigue, but also, crucially, i like character-driven stories, or at least stories WITH characters. but i also like it when things are interesting for said characters to experience, like, i want the ghosts and monsters and conspiracies but i want the characters to be character-ing, yknow? not that i dont enjoy slice of life and… what would u call the first thing, non-character specific horror? idk? but i prefer when its both. its like i love kirk and spock but also i do enjoy watching them Experience Situations when i watch star trek. i enjoy the idea of spooky national forest monsters that arent real but experiencing it alongside a character would be better, and i want more trans and gay characters whose lives are clearly trans and gay but i want a plotline to unfold too

[im-all-out-of-ideas]

fuck the fandom i loved every season of st: picard and i have thoroughly enjoyed the writing they gave the series. it's not my fault that this fandom has called literally every iteration of trek past tos inferior bc you can't get over yourselves about what trek should be. picard is a good if flawed legacy show that honors what it displays and i will love it out of spite.

[lenievi]

In a timeline where Christopher Pike did not accept his promotion to Fleet Captain, James T. Kirk receives command of the USS Farragut. As the Farragut starts her voyage, the tragedy that happened on board six years ago continues to haunt Jim’s mind.

Kirk-centric Kirk/McCoy pre-slash/friendship, 1775 words, T. 

Based on TOS episode Obsession and SNW episode A Quality of Mercy. Mainly Obsession.

---

“What’s the matter, Jim?”

The blue behind the large window moved fast, carrying them further and further away from Earth.

“I thought you’d be happy.”

His first starship command. A mission spanning five years. To patrol. To discover. To meet. To friend. Everything he’d always dreamt of. It was ironic it was on board the same vessel as his very first deep space assignment.

“Do you sometimes get the feeling that you’re living a life you’re not supposed to?” Jim fiddled with his empty cup.

McCoy’s forehead creased in confusion. “You've always wanted to be a starship captain.”

“That’s not what I meant. This ship…” The observation deck was modernized yet still looked the same as before. Captain Garrovick would often sit at the table in the corner. Sometimes alone. Sometimes with his senior officers. Always with a cup of black coffee. “It’s full of ghosts.”

[continue]

[mejomonster]

List of fanfiction prompts (please feel free to use these and tag me I'd love to see):

Tentacle shennanigans. Truly anything you can come up with from the truly bizarre to the "they fell into a monster trap" to "they adopted a cute little buddy." (Dmbj has tentacle monsters and zombie things in like every show and yet the ratio of weird creatures in fic? Could always be higher)

If the source material has aliens, monsters, creatures, powers, EXPLORE THAT! If the source material is mundane, try an AU where you explore What If they did have powers, were aliens, etc. I'm extra emphazising this though if the source material already has one of these elements, because it can be fun to expand the sandbox and explore how Far a premise can be stretched. There's so many source materials with monsters (supernatural), magic (merlin), powers (xmen, guardian, marvel), aliens (doctor who, torchwood, star trek) and it'd be cool having more fics exploring farther than the initial bounds of the source material, or even just a new angle it never happened to go in.

Ensemble group stories! What's a day in the life for the group? What's a bizarre day for the group? (If its star trek there could be cool aliens! Weird planets that make you question your own life! If its dmbj how weird would it be if they entered a tomb and just ran into a normal non criminal university achaeologist! If its Guardian did they meet a ghost? A mutant? Did they attempt to avoid weird shit entirely and it went fine until Chu Shuzhi pulled out his puppet and attacked someone being rude to the store customer service? Whats a class day of the kids on DS9 look like? What does Torchwood look like all on a covert mission to blend in at a resort getaway? How does a usual investigation go for Chloe and Lucifer?)

An expansion of the last one: take a crack fanfic premise and write it seriously. Wu Xie is stuck with a normal oblivious archaeologist, they run into zombies, the archaeologist still has no idea, a monster possesses Wu Xie, what happens? Danny Phantom runs into Mulder and Scully, what happens? Zhao Yunlan wants to interrogate Fei Du on suspicion of murder and being a mutant (im writing this lol). Henry from RWRB wakes up in his fantasy story where he's incan old kingdom and Alex's lookalike is there, does he think its a coma he needs to escape, does he accept his new life? Barbie meets Wednesday Adams and they date (pretty sure this fanfic exists). Some fandoms are predisposed to treating crack seriously, such as dmbj or star trek you could write time travel slime monsters body doubles sex pollen invisible city floating on clouds talking flowers and all would basically be believable possibilities in canon. Those can be fun to explore the extent of bizarre and stretching you can do. (Kingdom Hearts is like... already that in some ways). But from the other direction, it can be fun to take something more realistic like RWRB or Bad Buddy and go "what if somebody was a mermaid, or they got stranded on an asteroid in the year 3000, or adopted a lil tribble, or were suddenly cloned."

Ridiculous Meet Cutes. This could be genre mashing so like: character A is a slasher on a killing spree and runs into character B who was plotting to kill a person dangerous to them and ends up thanking character A which was unintentional and intensely NOT intended, character A crashes a spaceship on character Bs job so yay they get to quit at least (in a fandom where there shouldnt be space ships canonically), character A summons a demon but B shows up instead, character A meets character B at the library as they share like interesting reading material both unaware theyre like Story Enemies (hero/villian or perpetrator/investigator etc). Character As house is haunted and they run out screaming and crash into B who is then also Haunted by extension and confronts A about it. Idk Im not great at meet cutes but I guarantee the wild stuff fanfiction comes up with can often times be a lot of fun and sometimes very interesting in a way canon might have not put as much thought into.

[normcore-tertiary-character]

Oh! I get it, tumblr wants the blorbo in the microwave because there's an element of additive interaction with the watching our blorbo rotate slowly. It's not enough to just have them on a spinning platform like a car show, you need to see what happens when you push them this way and that.

It's different from putting them under a microscope or up on a pedestal where we just learn every tiny detail that's already there in canon and try to understand it exactly how it exists

This also makes sense for differences in fandom preferences between the "I know every fact about every Star Trek race and planet and also I speak both Klingon and Vulcan" fans and the "Ok but I've read 300k words of fanfic on Spock's dick this week and look at this meta essay I wrote on the strengths and weaknesses of different hypothesis about Vulcan penises." Both might be obsessed with Star Trek but the former might prefer TNG for it's broad range of Things to Know while the latter might prefer Voyager for being a good idea with good characters and very little consistent canon to get in the way of a good time.

Also why people of color, women, and LGBT folks might tend to gravitate towards transformational fandom where we can make ourselves be represented where cis white men might gravitate towards a fandom experience where they catalogue the canon media as-is.

[televisionenjoyer]

Allow me to set the scene: it's 2026. Star Trek 4 (written by steve yockey) is finally out. There's a Shatner cameo as Kirk Prime. Against all odds, this is the movie where Spirk finally becomes canon. This is your dash on release week:

🤠destpirking follow

of course destiel is trending. steve yockey your impact.

🐶tonysopranosmallnaturals follow

ok let me see if i get this straight. In 1967 Theodore Sturgeon writes the Star Trek episode Amok Time, which introduces both the concept of Fuck or Die and of a humanoid species experiencing violent heat into the masses. Battle Angel Alita happens. Dark Angel happens. Jensen Ackles is in it. Supernatural happens. Some fan creates the omegaverse so that Jensen Ackles can experience misogyny. Supernatural keeps happening. Steve Yockey writes some notable Destiel episodes. Cas gay confesses to Dean and goes to superhell. Steve Yockey writes some other gay shit for dead boy detectives idk i havent watched that. Now in 2026 Steve Yockey has the honor to write the Star Trek that finally makes spirk canon and he somehow manages to invent a weird alien society in which there's misogyny for male vulcans also?? are we closing the portal?? is this what full circle looks like?? should we call kendall roy??

🧔jensenanklesofficial follow

ok so i've been watching the shatner interviews he's been doing lately regarding this movie and honestly it's time we cut him some slack. he shows sincere remorse for his previous actions and has shown clear support for the spirk ending and honestly how hard can we blame him for what he said as a guy who was brought up culturally homophobic and hit the prime of his fame in the sixties?? its enough that he's changed his mind at his age. what i'm saying essentially is i think it's time we forgive william shatner.

🐍ouroborosgaysex follow

OK WAS ANYONE GOING TO TELL ME THAT THEY SENT SPOCK TO THE NEXUS ON THE CHINESE RELEASE BECAUSE OF THE CENSORSHIP??? OR WAS I SUPPOSED TO FIND OUT FROM REDDIT??

👀spockstiels follow

say what you want about the admittedly shitty and predictable klingon genocide plot but i think i speak for all of us when i say 'billy shatner cameos as kirk prime to set up spirk in an attempt to redeem himself to the lgbt community' was on NO ONE'S 2026 bingo card

👨🏼startrekgaysex

no it was literally on my bingo card for years. i've made several posts about it in fact.

🌌thenexus follow

i DID NOT just read a post saying we have to forgive william shatner???😭😭😭😭 god i hate tumblr

📼deancasgenesis follow

"this was my nov 5th" shut up NOTHING will ever be like november fifth. you don't understand the impact of destiel.

🌟bisexualjimmykirk follow

you're joking right.

🖖🏼supersimplefeeling follow

congratulations jim kirk on becoming star trek's last first gay character.

[joshuaalbert]

ok I am enjoying the la’an and una spock amok b-plot

[cuterefaction]

Trektober Day 13 - Baking. TBH I'd like to draw about two dozen different Star Trek characters baking, but since Odo is canonically bamboozled by the concept of stirring he had to take it :) (it's okay, Sisko will help him fix whatever happens)

[quasi-normalcy]

Actually, you know what? Ever since I learned that Ira Steven Behr signed that grossly unfair letter against Jonathan Glazer, I've been forced to kind of reevaluate some of my interpretations of things in Deep Space Nine.

Like Section 31. I was willing to suppose that it was always and only intended to be villainous. But knowing as I do now that the showrunner who included it is perfectly willing to turn a blind eye to genocide, I'm forced to wonder...was it critical? Was it?

Like, let's consider canon here. In "Statistical Probabilities", Bashir and the other augments calculate, in no uncertain terms, that the Federation can't win its war with the Dominion. Their model even accurately forecasts things that happen later in the series: the Romulans declaring war on the Dominion; a full-scale revolt on Cardassia Prime. The end of the episode kind of pooh-poohs their model, like, "Well you couldn't even forecast what Serena would do in this room" but like...(1) the premise is basically lifted from Asimov's psychohistory concept, which works on populations rather than individuals, and (2) there's even a line of dialogue in the episode saying that the models become *less* uncertain the further you go in time. And indeed, the Federation ultimately wins the war not because any of their assumptions were wrong, but because there was another factor that they weren't aware of: the Changeling plague. The plague that had, of course, been engineered by Section 31 to exterminate the Changelings.

So again you have to ask: *was* this critical? Or was the real message that a black ops division willing to commit genocide is necessary to preserve a "utopian" society, no matter how squeamish it makes a naïve idealist like Bashir? And yeah, the war is ultimately won by an act of compassion, but only *after* Bashir sinks to S31's level by kidnapping Sloane and invading his mind with illicit technology. So...is this really a win for idealism?

And then we have the Jem'Hadar. They're a race of slave soldiers, genetically engineered to require a compound that only the Changelings can give them. By any reasonable standard, they're victims. And yet, the series goes out of its way, especially in "The Abandoned", to establish that they're irredeemable. You can't save them. Victims of colonialism they may be, but your only choice is to kill them, or else they--preternaturally violent almost from the moment that they're born--*will* kill you. And of course, I've long assumed that this was just a really unfortunate attempt to subvert what had become the standard "I, Borg" style Star Trek trope where your enemies become less scary once you get to know them, but like. I would say that there's pretty close to a one-to-one correspondence between this premise and the ideology excusing the mass murder of children in Gaza.

Or the Maquis. There's this line at the start of "For the Uniform" where Sisko tells Eddington that he regards the refugees in the Demilitarized Zone as being "Victims of the Maquis", because they've kept alive the forlorn hope that they would ever be allowed to return to their homes and...Jesus, when I write it out like that, Hello, Palestinian Right of Return. [The episode of course ends with Sisko bombing a Maquis colony with chemical weapons, though it is somewhat less objectionable in practice than I'm making it sound here].

And you know what...I get that DS9 is a show that's intended to have moral complexity, and to be kind of ambiguous in a lot places, and not to give you simple answers and so on. And I'm *not* trying to do the standard JK Rowling/ Joss Whedon/ Justin Roiland thing where a creator falls from grace for whatever reason and people comb through their oeuvre to show that they were always wicked and fans were stupid for not seeing it earlier or whatever. But I will say that these things hit different when you know that the series was show-run for five seasons, comprising every episode that I've just named, by a man who would go on to sign his name to a letter maliciously quoting Jonathan Glazer out of context to drag him for condemning an active genocide. And given that I've been a fan of DS9 for basically my entire life, this is deeply unsettling to me.

[brawltogethernow]

I dreamt the other night that there was an extremely mid live action Murderbot TV show adaptation. That's not my retroactive assessment in the daytime. In the dream I was like, "This has multiple very avoidable or outright comedic flaws. I am going to binge all of it." (I'm aware that this is very meta.)

It had a "life on a starship" structure in the style of Star Trek, though it may have technically been set on one of the satellites orbiting Preservation.

The core relationship was SecUnit and Mensah, which was executed with absolute sincerity that couldn't not be charming, and was also where a lot of the more narmish moments were centered.

SecUnit would hack devices by focusing on them, cuing the camera to zoom in on the relevant machine—then the zoom in would continue with a transition to aggressively average CGI of the inside of the machine, which would animate it...being hacked or whatever. I got the impression that happened at a pivotal moment at least once an episode.

Some of the canon characters were present and were well-cast and characterized. However, the "crew" had also been padded out with a handful of original side characters. There was a gruff ship's doctor type (more Kelso than Bones though), a cook SecUnit had an arbitrary rivalry with, and for some reason two teenage boys who were BFFs. The cook existed to facilitate interpersonal comedy, the teens to have sci-fi concepts explained to them, and the doctor to solve like a third of the one-off plotlines at the end of the episode once whatever emotional arc they'd been facilitating was concluded. The new characters were almost all played by white guys like after they cast the canon characters thoughtfully and considerately they ran out of energy/wanted to work in people who were already on the lot.

I dream-watched three random episodes, but unfortunately the only one I remember specifically is the last one, where the plot was Murderbot getting amnesia (because of sci-fi reasons) to back when the company owned it before it hacked itself. The emotional climax was it deciding to help Mensah even though it didn't remember their friendship, by disabling a machine that was harming her—which it did by triggering the hacking animation by slamming its hands against it several times. Like you do when you hack stuff. The amnesia was fixed after this by the medical doctor administering a liquid for it to drink that reportedly had nanomachines in it. I'm pretty sure the prop was one of those plastic cups dentists give you stuff to swish around your mouth in with water in it.

Murderbot was played by a tall and gloriously buff...enby woman...? I don't exactly recall. —Who in behind the scenes content had a startlingly sweet demeanor and higher vocal register than the character.

10/10 dream I am laughing my socks off. I miss the fake show.

[quantum27]

To whom it may concern - the mutuals, the fandom-in-laws and the average movie goer. I would like to explain the plight of the Tron fandom.

The sequel announcements Disney pulled this year (2024) are insults to anyone who enjoys movies. There's nothing wrong with sequels, don't get me wrong, but to have a catalogue that has only 1 original movie announced is truly saddening, especially to those who love animation.

Then there's also the fans of Tron.

Tron (1982) was the first major motion picture to use CGI extensively for it's settings, vehicles, and many more things. Many of it's animators would go on to work at Pixar and pioneer CGI there. It was so early that it was rejected at the Oscars for special effects because it was considered "cheating" essentially. This isn't a post about the history though I recommend learning about it if you're interested in the medium of animation.

Tron was an average boxoffice movie. It made back it's money and that was it. However it became a cult classic. It's a strange movie- a bit hard to get into- I only fully understood the plot the second watch, even though it's not that complex.

It would spawn a video game sequel, Tron 2.0 (2003). Years later, in 2010, another sequel would come out, setting the current canon timeline (think of a Star Wars legacy canon and disney canon or Star Trek alpha or beta timelines- that's how the fans treat it) Tron: Legacy.

There were also other supplements, the ever mourned, cancelled after one season cartoon midquel Tron: Uprising- tie in video games and comics and a complete ARG before the release of Legacy. Then there was the planned third movie. It languished in development hell, canceled and uncanceled. (There's more complexity there, involving even, Tommorowland (2015) and of course money.)

Now what we're getting is Tron: Ares. A movie that doesn't even feature the actor for the character Tron, Bruce Boxleitner. There's also the fact that Cindy Morgan who starred in the original movie and original video game sequel was always ready to come back has now passed away. Jeff Bridges is set to return in some capacity, the most well recognized actor from the franchise to the point people assume he is the actor who portrayed Tron.

The first short trailer shown for Tron: Ares shows fundamental flaws in misunderstanding the concepts in the prior works, watering it down to an aesthetic. Most fans I've spoken with have little hope for a good movie at this time. It even stars the controversial actor Jared L*to as it's main character! All of these are red flags.

So, to those who read, please know, after waiting for a decade, Disney has decided to shill out a product with less love than any prior element in the franchise. And I mean even less love than the tie-in movie games for Legacy, of which are of varying quality. This is likely due to the opening of the US version of the Tron rollercoaster. The rollercoaster has more love and attention in it than the trailer shown. And with complete love to it and what I've seen of it- the movie should be a higher quality than a rollercoaster in terms of story and lore.

Our only current hope is for more visual novels after Tron: Identity was released in 2023. And I suppose the NIN fans will get a soundtrack.

Disney does not care about it's audiences. But it especially does not care about Tron fans.

[1960z]

being both a star trek fan and an ace attorney fan is funny cause the star trek fandom has this concept called kirk drift right which is basically used to describe the cultural misremembering of jim kirk as this kind of chauvinistic play boy asshole whereas his actual portrayal in tos is someone who’s very much kind, gentle and sociable.

and then when I look at the ace attorney fandom, jim’s canon portrayal feels very similar to how certain parts of fanon portray phoenix. but canonically phoenix is like. a bitch.

[elexuscal]

i think it's interesting which tropes and concepts catch on more in different fandoms.

like a big deciding factor is just the genre of the original story. a piece of historical fiction gets a bunch of fanfics based on historical fiction tropes. a superhero movie series gets a bunch of buck-wild superhero tropes.

as a clear example of this trend, the Murderbot Diaries is a pastiche, deconstruction, and reconstruction of a lot of science fiction across a lot of genres, but it's specifically a love letter to adventure-of-the-week style serials like Star Trek and Star Gate. so while there are plenty of more low key fanfics with POV swaps, missing scenes, realistic explorations of post-canon, etc, there's also a LOT of playing around with things like "body swaps", "mind control virus", "time travel", "mirror universes", etc. They're normal, they're mundane.

Meanwhile I bring a selection of those tropes to the Temeraire series, which aside from placing some dragons in the Napoleonic wars, is relatively grounded historical fiction, and they stick out like a sore thumb.

But okay. That's straightforward. Popular fanfic tropes mirror the genre of the original work.

But there are exceptions. it's the exceptions that fascinate me.

there's that corollary of 'fandom adds anything missing from the original work'. that's why you'll end up with deep explorations of incredibly shallow characters; of very sexually explicit works for PG cartoons; dark fic like Fallout: Equestria in MLP:Friendship is Magic.

you've also got the stock AUs. you know, the ones that show up in pretty much any fandom, regardless of the original genre. Coffeshop AU. Daemon AU. Magical School/Hogwarts AU. Vampire AU. Librarian AU. the fun of these is specifically that they are different from the text, so that makes sense.

but funnier than either of those, i think, is:

'One writer or group of writer friends wrote a particularly buck wild premise but they did it REALLY well and other people started doing their own takes on it so now this fandom inexplicably has an outsized number of fics with this incredibly specific premise'.

[writergeekrhw]

hi! i was just wondering if you know if the concepts for cardassia and cardassian culture were at all inspired by the dune books? cardassia is a harsh, resource-poor desert planet, similar to how arrakis in dune has almost no water as a metaphor for scarcity, and they're both directly contrasted with peaceful and plentiful planets. because of this situation, both the fremen and cardassians have rigid social structures emphasizing the collective over the individual. also, the star trek canon about cardassia and dune both have a lot of covert political machinations with emphasis on the family as a political unit. and also the bene gesserit mental training and female superiority seems pretty similar to how on cardassia the children go through training to build up mental abilities like eidetic memory, and women are considered to be more rational and suited to scientific fields. sorry for the long question but there just seem to be so many similarities and i would love to know if that's intentional! thank you!

I can see how you think this, but no... If any novels inspired Cardassia, they were Kafka's The Trial, Orwell's 1984, and Conrad's The Heart of Darkness. But the biggest inspirations were historical. Nazi Germany, the DDR, Apartheid era South Africa, the British in Ireland, the Belgian Congo, and America in Vietnam (since I based a lot of what I wrote for Garak on my dad).

[bulbabutt]

not to still be all up in arms about the transformers religion but holy fuck, robots having religion is nothing new, they can have theology! that makes sense! robots who are fully sentient seeking out a reason for their souls is totally fine! im not saying the transformers shouldnt believe in primus or the all spark or believe in the 13 primes that whole thing works, it just bothers me that the canon of their religion is canon to the story. why is their planet LITERALLY their god. why is their religion based in literal history. i shouldnt even call it their religion, its just their canonical history. thats the problem! it comes from the perspective of writers who see religious doctrine as real history!

it also sucks for the nature of the robot as a concept! instead of being machines so advanced they are sentient, they are now fully formed beings granted souls by their god. thats no longer synthetic life conceptually, is it? that is a higher being creating life out of nothing. the concept of robots comes from slave labour, machines created by man to further their own advancements. machines created by organic life, not machines granted life by an ethereal being. they were created as commentary on capitalism. it asks the question "if this life is created synthetically, but it forms sentient thought, it is alive?". most other stories containing robots do this. think about overwatch's omnics, mass effects geth, star trek characters like data and the doctor, we the audience see them as alive but people in their worlds have to debate about it. that is the point of science fiction, to have theological discussions about robots.

what disappoints me about transformers isnt the changing of the lore, but the fact they couldnt conceive of anything more interesting to say about robots. i was watching g1 thinking "i cant wait to see future adaptations take this concept and flesh it out", and watching these adaptations strip the nature of the robot entirely from the lore in place of some all powerful god really sucks! imagine if their theology was the same, but their history was not. imagine robots who believe their planet is their god in spite of not actually knowing that to be true. wouldnt that be conceptually more interesting? wouldnt that say something?

instead of a unicron who is just a cosmic horror, a rogue planet who hungers for other worlds to sustain itself, unicron now represents all evil in the universe. hes a being of pure evil, existing as the equal and opposite to the canonically good god primus, the planet of cybertron. that ruins the concept to me. theyre taking the fun of science fiction out of it, turning it into basic "all good in the universe comes from god". it takes the choice of being good or evil out of it. giving them literal souls takes them choosing to say they have souls out of it. it takes the choice of valuing biological life away from the robots themselves to say that it is simply evil to not.

maybe some adaptation i havent gotten to yet will say something else, but as it stands right now im just so disappointed that this is the route it took.