#cardassian stuff

[1960z]

the lack of a like… really focused on cardassian woman in star trek is disappointing to me.

cause you have the kinda trifecta of “main cardassian characters” in garak dukat and damar which are all men. there’s ziyal of course but her story was severely mismanaged. I was so excited for seska because the premise of her character was so interesting and there were so many fascinating things you could do with it but they ended up just giving her a very stereotypical femme fatal plot line then killed her off. and then all the other female cardassian characters from alpha canon I can think of are one offs.

which is really a shame bc the glimpses we’ve gotten into women’s roles in cardassian society are so interesting?? like the way sciences are considered to be more suited to women tell me more about that please why is that.

[1960z]

#LITERALLY #i miss the bajorans too. and the vorta and the jem'hadar #ds9 rlly had some of the most interesting species dynamics and stuff in all of star trek #(ik the cardassians and bajorans started as tng races but i feel that their potential was only fully realised in ds9) #the cardassians especially feel like. very resonant with modern western culture and society in many ways #but ALSO they're their own believable culture as well and aren't rlly a direct analogy for anything #the same goes for the bajorans #you can relate them to real life but also they feel so real as their own people #and i miss all of them a lot #ik lwd has had some bajoran stuff but it would be nice to see them featured in a more "serious" setting again (tags via @funnywormz)

I miss the Cardassians. They were so damn interesting, so complex, so cartoonishly villainous one moment and devastatingly sympathetic the next. I don't think any other Trek race has ever held up a mirror to reality in such a compelling way.

I'm not sure I totally trust any post-DS9 show to do something meaningful with them, but then maybe being forced to engage with complexity again could the franchise good.

[writergeekrhw]

Hi! Hope you are well! One of the only storylines in DS9 that has truly truly confused and bugged me comes from the episode “Cardassians” who’s decision was it to have Rugal return to cardassia with his “father” when he showed absolutely no desire to connect with him nor any desire to go back to cardassia. He had a family on bajor who loved him and raised him and who he loved. It seemed a bit cruel in the end for sisko to be the one to decide that he had to go live with this man who he clearly detested.

Did you guys ever consider not doing that and having him stay on bajor? It just seemed off. Like in suddenly human with jono they let him make the decision to go back and live with the talarians, so I was confused by the route they took with this episode in that regard because I expected it to end similarly.

I wasn't super involved in that one, but I think the logic was that Sisko would have to make the hard decision to send Rugal back to his "real" family, even though it feels terrible, because it's politically necessary and probably better for Rugal in the long run... ish? That's how it would work in the real world... which ended up being a little prophetic given how how the episode's resolution pre-figured the Elian Gonzalez incident 6 years later.

Also worth remembering that Rugal's fate was a manipulation by Gul Dukat against his political enemy, which Sisko undid by returning him to his biological father.

[vaguely-concerned]

I love gilora so much and it's a shame she's a one episode wonder in destiny. 'chief o'brien I would never neg you for being a human! goodness, can you imagine. I'm negging you for being a man in STEM'

she's such a funny window into a side of cardassian culture we haven't been allowed to peek into before this. 'I'm here to do science eat alien food and more importantly eat alien p -- ' *ulani hurriedly claps a hand over her mouth to avoid a diplomatic Incident*

[smolartdork]

Star Trek ocs! I finally made them proper ref sheets.

[charlesemersonwinchesteriii]

Medical log, stardate 18935.15. Once more have I seen the tailor go out in his lizard fashion—

[spocks-kaathyra]

Portrait of a Cardassian Family

their stories below the cut!

Kenan (keh-NAHN), the eldest, is about 20 years old here. He spent the first few years of his life raised by his mother, until his father retired from the military and they settled down on a farm in the countryside. He's everything a Cardassian man should be. He'll go on to marry a nice girl from a nearby town and start a family, who all die with him when the town is destroyed in the Dominion bombing.

Tirin (TEER-ihn) is 16 here. He's hardworking, caring---softer than his older brother. He spent a lot of time taking care of Marrok when he was small, so they're close. He'll inherit the farm when their father dies of illness, and continue the family line.

Marrok (MAHR-uhk) is 8 when baby Eyal is born, and it becomes his responsibility to take care of the little ones while his parents and older brothers work on the farm. He's a quiet child, with a flat affect and big staring eyes that unnerve everyone who meets him. He grows up jealous of his baby sister for reasons he can't quite place. At 23, when both his younger siblings are old enough that he's not worried about them anymore, Marrok will run off to the big city and change her name to Nal. She gets recruited by the Obsidian Order, and the rest is history.

Damin (DAH-mihn) is 2 here. He's an ambitious, willful little boy, desperate for the attention and praise his parents never give him. He wants to be just like his father someday, clings to every word of the stories his father tells about his glory days in the military. He joins up as soon as he's old enough, and is dead and buried before he turns 30.

Eyal (ay-AHL) is only a few months old. The baby of the family, and the only daughter (that they're aware of), she's absolutely doted on by her mother, who's been hoping for a girl since Tirin was conceived. While her siblings envy the attention she gets, she feels suffocated by it, can't stand the pressure to be her mother's perfect little girl. A few years after Nal leaves, Eyal does too. She becomes a cool butch and settles down with her cool butch Romulan wife on a planet on the edge of Cardassian space.

PLEASE ask me about them they r everything to me. Nal especially but I love her siblings too I think abt them sooooo much. Here's a picture of the drawing without the text and background btw

[exasperatedoctopus]

Is there a man more maligned in all of Star Trek canon than Miles O’Brien? I think not. His Intergalactic Injustice And Suffering Punch Card has more holes in it than your average fishing net

[catboyelimgarak]

There was ALOT in the Cardassian RPG Sourcebook I was not on board with — I’ve found more recent fanworks and ideas a lot better in this day and age. But one of the few things I really enjoyed was Vesala, which can simply translate to One’s Connections. Like the connections Humans make on Earth, knowing the right people in your Network can get you want you want and or need. The sourcebook states that these contacts can be used as a “Currency” that can be used for favors between Cardassians in their society. The book says as well it’s a “Stock Exchange” (you want to know this, so you ask one of the members of your Vesala, and if they want they can ask for an Exchange of secrets or favors in return, and I’m taking it as: if you decline thus not able to get the information, your other connections, or even own information you know of the person, can be used to coerce the person to tell you what you want. Like this you win either way with your large Vesala. It gives you, as the book says, Power Over Others). With a strong and big enough Vesala, you can purchase/get anything, because everything has a price. Except Social Standing, like how people view you.

Which means it also can be weakened and shrunk if you ask for too many favors, especially at once, because like currency, you can go broke and leave your wallet/Vesala empty once you’ve used them all. In the same way that Humans will talk shit and criticize others who don’t give back (you ‘helped’/lended someone money and was never paid back for it, even told that the person wouldn’t help you when you ask for it despite you having helped them) so will Cardassians when they’re connection doesn’t pay back when called upon —a person will have their name sullied and gossiped/push down the Grapevine to be known as untrustworthy and unreliable, which is important in society. Thus your account is empty or even overcharged by others who use this weakness to get you to do as they want because you have nothing to defend yourself with.

One part of this really got me excited, in that someone can just ACCUMULATE a large Vesala and have so many people to ask favors from because this person has never called on them for favors before! And the sourcebooks saying it can ALL be used in “One Fell Swoop”, is just so much fun! A single person who is smart enough and strategic can possibly take down not just one person (send them to bankruptcy in the currency-sense) but A WHOLE GROUP PERHAPS, is such a power move!

It’s very Victorian if I’m not mistaken. I very much believe this is how Tain stayed so strong and def before he became the head of The Obsidian Order. And we see many times that Garak STILL has his Vesala, calling on them to get information and sneaking around, despite being in exile. That Garak is so skilled and reliable and strategic, even when he is exiled does his connections come through (even if some die jn the end lmao).

[mercury-prince]

Now, what I want to see from star trek is how aliens represent other aliens in art. Imagine if that ancient Bajoran guy who space-sailed to cardassia came back and told ppl how cardassians look, spawning hundreds of kinda shitty drawings in bestiaries after a long game of telephone where they barely look recognisable (like these: first is a scorpion, second is a panther)

[Image ID: a square medieval illustration of a creature with a human-ish face, a fish-like body, and four limbs sticking out akimbo. it has a sharp tail that is piercing someone's hand. /.End ID]

[Image ID: a deer-shaped creature with a red belly, face, and legs, a blue back, green butt, and beige neck. it has white streaks coming out of its mouth, as if it's exhaling or spitting. a group of rams, sheep and deer look at it, with very confused expressions. /. End ID]

All the pre-warp species that the federation had broken the prime directive with must have some sick paintings of vaguely humanoid creatures standing around in matching outfits.

BUT MORE IMPORTANTLY: do other species have something like the zodiac? Or drawings of the star systems around their planet, using familiar figures to link different stars together? What did they call the foreign planets, before they learned they were called Vulcan or Romulus or Ferenginar? Imagine all the pre-warp star maps in different alien languages and art styles. the ones we have irl say so much about the cultures they were made in.

first pic [Image ID: a photograph of the nebra sky disk, from 1800-1600 BC. It is a turquoise coloured metal disk with a gold circle representing the sun, a crescent moon, and small circles depicting the Pleiadies star cluster. /. End ID]

second pic [Image ID: an annotated diagram of the Mayan Wakah-Chan Tree, a design found on the burial lid of Lord Pacal, from circa 680 AD. It is an illustrated diagram depicting the sun, moon and planets with intricately patterned symbols. /. End ID]

third pic [Image ID: an illustration from The Book of Fixed Stars by Abd al-Rahman al-Sufi, circa 964 ad. it depicts the constellation of Orion, using a black ink drawing of a kneeling figure with the stars drawn as red circles on different parts of the body. Each of the stars are labelled in Arabic. /. End ID]

I could go on forever about how we love to look into the vast unknown to find reflections of ourselves, and how i think star trek is an extension of that urge we've clearly been having since the dawn of time. Its not just the need to study things that will help with our everyday lives (like looking at the harvest moon), its the way we often take a celestial body and make it the symbol of a human characteristic, like how klingons represent honour and vulcans represent logic. what we think about space and what we do to fill in the gaps of the unknown say a lot about how we think in general. and according to trek we think a lot about weird little blokes in weird little outfits so. yh fair enough

i think this is my most research heavy shitpost ever lmao. but please add ur thoughts or take these ideas however u like

[meya-lily]

I kinda want to write Garak x reader content but I have no clue what I'm doing.

[raisinchallah]

u kno kinda funny to me how many people are so obsessed with star trek ship design when tbh all of them like across the board kinda suck and are boring star trek ship design peaked at the klingon battle cruiser in the motion picture its been downhill since then deep space nine which is clearly not a ship and is a space station being beautiful and sexy is an exception and not counted

[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).

[fauvester]

happy Lim!

bajor sends some relief packages to cardassia prime after the fire. Lim is introduced to some bajoran spices and sauces and is a big fan.

[bumblingbabooshka]

Tired of seeing “Neelix is racist” takes - if we can forgive Mccoy’s “Green blooded freak” ass then we can grant Neelix amnesty

[charlesemersonwinchesteriii]

Things that I know about A Stitch In Time prior to listening to it:

Garak goes to spy school, which is for spies (for some reason the idea of this is amusing to me. like I get it duh of course the Order must have some sort of training system but also. fanfic ass trope. Spy School! For Spies! it's even a boarding school and everything. DARKEST ACADEMIA)

Garak performs a classic bisexual rite of passage by falling in love with both members of an older(?) married couple (or well textually probably only the wife. I feel like I'd have heard about it if he were Betacanonically Queer (TM) in this book. but here's hoping I'll be astonished while listening!)

I can't remember if I read anything specific about it or not but just based on vibes alone I do not have high hopes for this couple's like. life expectancy.

Based on vibes alone I do not have high hopes for ANY character's life expectancy in this book tbh. If it involves Cardassians in general and Garak in specific I usually just assume everyone involved is doomed. This is going to be a FUN 12 hours and 28 minutes!

There was a post somewhere that mentioned that some supernatural magical stuff happens in this book and I'm SO FUCKING STOKED. HERE'S HOW GARAK ORB EXPERIENCE CAN STILL WIN!!!!

The entire concept of this book is so funny to me. Garak goes 7 years being ohhh so mysterious to Julian about himself or his past and then just spills his whole life story to him in a letter as soon as they're separated. Babygirl is going through Bashir Withdrawal Syndrome.

Most importantly KELAS MY BEST FRIEND KELAS FROM ONE (1) LINE OF CANON!!!!! I have no actual evidence that he ever shows up in this book but like he has to right. right. he's absolutely everywhere on ao3 y'all had to have gotten him from somewhere. I assume.