#ds9 genetic enhancements

[walkingstackofbooks]

I just want someone to ask Julian if it hurt, when he was enhanced.

You know, just for one of his friends to have really think about what having such drastic bodily changes might include, and what having the procedure done in a place without Federation medical standards might mean...

(Perhaps Keiko or Miles have a moment when they've taken Molly to the infirmary and Julian is reassuring her that it will only hurt a little bit--

Or Odo had been wanting to discuss Dr Mora with someone who might understand a little of what he went through, and ends up noticing that Julian seems to be relating to his past far more than he expected--

Or Ezri overhears some remark Julian makes to Sarina about how he goes his infirmary feels far safer than the ones their parents had left them in--

Or Garak realises why he doesn't feel like deriding the book that Julian has chosen this week, despite the fact that the plot of Matilda is absurdly ridiculous--)

...And maybe Julian would reply that no, it didn't hurt. There's no canonical evidence, as far as I'm aware, and his parents did find a 'decent doctor', after all.

But I think he'd get a funny, unfocused look in his eyes for a few moments, before saying, "No-one's ever asked me that before."

"And? Did it?" they might ask softly, a little unsure if they actually want to hear the answer.

And Julian would frown: appearing puzzled, though, rather than troubled.

"Of course," he'd reply. "I'd thought that was obvious."

[incorrectgarashir]

Garak: Okay, but what if we went to lunch, but not as friends this time? Julian: AS ENEMIES?! Garak:

[cardasssians]

this was inspired by the fic hub server a night or two ago and I can't stop thinking about it

[youngpettyqueen]

GENETICALLY ENHANCED???? DNA RE-SEQUENCING?????

[deeplovelydark]

obv it's not the idea of incest that excited him (maybe a bit.) but his fixation on being special heroic outstanding etc and the other side of that coin is feeling like or being viewed as a freak and an aberration

sorry but bashir was really excited by the prospect of fucking his great-grandmother and becoming his own ancestor. he was all fired up defending his theory

[vasquez-rocks]

ds9 characters by how they would react to being deaged, as in the tng episode "rascals"

sisko: would be a little annoyed by it at first, but would kind of find it cute to get to have a more sibling-ish relationship with jake temporarily. family is the most important thing!

kira: like ensign ro, i think it would bring up memories of her awful childhood. unlike ensign ro, she was an actual terrorist as a child and her current effectiveness at her job depends on people knowing that she could just shoot them if they disappoint her, so i think she’d just keep pluggin’ away and then have one (1) devastating breakdown when she’s alone with odo about how her real childhood was stolen from her.

dax: would HATE IT SO MUCH. she likes her body! she likes being tall! all her favorite things (drinking, sex, gambling) are inaccessible to children! plus the worm wouldn’t shrink with her so it would probs be really uncomfy to have it in there! fix it! make it better!

odo: he would continue to look the same because his kind does not have childhoods. “are you all right, sir?” a security officer would say after he heard sobbing from inside the security office. “it is a… private matter,” odo would say.

bashir: depends if it reverts his genetic enhancements. if it does, he’ll have Feelings. if it doesn’t, he’ll probably just try and take advantage of his newfound flexibility to improve his tennis game.

o’brien: not thrilled, but this is just what happens to o’briens, isn’t it? keiko got turned into a child back on the enterprise, molly got turned into a feral adult by the time portal. it’s been years since he felt any regret about stealing that bread from the hag back in the old country. a bloodline curse is a bloodline curse. this will work itself out soon enough. at least it’s not another mind prison thingy

quark: nothing good

[gay-disabled-characters-showdown]

LGBTQ+ Disabled Characters Showdown Round 4, Wave 2, Poll 2

A character being totally canon LGBTQ+ and disabled was not required to be in this competition. Please check qualifications and propaganda before asking why a character is included.

Check out the other polls in this wave and round here.

Julian Bashir-Star Trek: Deep Space Nine

Qualifications:

Disability: Along with being generally awkward with conversation and not knowing how to talk to people, a part of his backstory is that he was “underperforming” in school so his parents got him illegally genetically enhanced to ��fix” him (in the show this is treated as a horrible fucked-up thing that they did LGBTQ+: He has a relationship with another male character on the show that everybody behind-the-scenes (except the homophobic producer) treated as canonically romantic. The homophobic producer had to tell the writers to stop putting Bashir and Garak in scenes together because they got along too well and he didn’t want the audience to think they were a couple. The non-homophobic producer said in a documentary looking back on DS9 that one of his biggest regrets about the show is not making the relationship actually canon.

He was canonically intellectually disabled as a child, which his parents attempted to "correct" with illegal gene editing. This eliminated his intellectual disability, but he displays many many autistic traits still (socially awkward, infodumps, hyperempathetic, echolalia, blunt). This lends itself to the popular interpretation that the gene editing couldn't "correct" his autism, but it did change exactly which autistic traits he had. One of his closest onscreen relationships is with Elim Garak, a relationship that both actors have since said is romantic in nature, and Andy Robinson (Garak's actor) has explicitly said he played Garak as being attracted to Bashir. There is also some possible evidence of Julian being trans; in one episode, he says this of a situation in which he had to transfer a fetus from one of his friends into another due to an emergency (paraphrased): "The fetus was in distress, and the only available candidates were Major Kira... and me." This line potentially implies he is capable of carrying a fetus. Furthermore, he canonically has a name that his parents used to call him that he refuses to answer to now (Jules). In-universe, this is due to him finding out about his genetic engineering, but it is very transgender of him.

Propaganda:

- He uses all of his free time to role play historical events with his best friend - He intentionally got one question wrong on his finals so that he wouldn’t be valedictorian - On like 5 separate occasions he gets invited to medical conferences then kidnapped on the way - Season 2 episode 22 “The Wire”

He is so awesome. Very autistic, very interesting character. He's an extremely caring doctor, to the point he once stayed on a plague-ridden planet with no futuristic tech, mixing medicine by hand for weeks in an attempt to cure the populace. Which he succeeds at, by the way!! He also, after finding a rogue group of former enemy soldiers who have managed to kick their dependence on the drug used by the enemy government to control them, Julian agrees to try to formulate a way for all of the soldiers to be free of their dependence. He only fails due to interference. Also, when Garak is suffering withdrawal from a brain implant, he stays by his bedside for days on end, caring for him, and even going to the heart of hostile territory to ask the head of the Space KGB how he can cure him. And that's not all! In addition to being a very dedicated (if often unethical) doctor, he is also a space tennis player! He has a tendency to put his foot in his mouth immediately upon meeting anyone new, and not just because of his canonical foot fetish! I'm not joking about that. It is canon.

The qualifications and propaganda paragraphs correspond, @convenient-plot-device is the second submitter.

Harrowhark Nonagesimus-The Locked Tomb

Qualifications:

She's a lesbian and the author Tamsyn Muir has confirmed she's written as schizophrenic, based on her own experience.

Okay SO Harrow is a necromancer nun who is also a huge lesbian. She spends the books of TLT series being super gay and repressed about her emotions for 1. Butch lesbian Jesus and 2. Human Barbie the death of God. She narrates the second book (Harrow the Ninth) and is author-confirmed schizophrenic. She experiences hallucinations thru the whole book and has since childhood. She’s also WIDELY headcannoned as autistic by the fandom (me too) because. Because she IS SO FUCKING AUTISTIC (source: I am autistic too)

Schizophrenic lesbian with a traumatic brain injury

Schizophrenic and sapphic

canonically a schizophrenic lesbian. neither word is used in series, she isn't in a position to get a diagnosis and queer identities are so normalised in the universe that labels just don't get mentioned, but she is written as both by an author who is also both.

Canon schizophrenia

Canon lesbian with canon schizophrenia

She's a schizophrenic lesbian with a traumatic brain injury

Propaganda:

The Locked Tomb is pretty popular on tumblr but I might as well submit her anyway

She’s a lesbian necromancer nun. She’s a saint and also woke up the death of God, who is a human Barbie, who she is in love with, tho she’s also kind of married to lesbian Jesus. She’s schizophrenic. She’s scrungly. She puts bread in a drawer. She’s even autistic

Harrow first started hallucinating (visual and auditory) when she was ten years old! The traumatic brain injury and seizures are much more recent. Unironically gotta love a pov protagonist who makes you struggle along with her in sorting out hallucination and false memory to figure out what's going on. Also while Harrow's disability shapes the narrative, the book isn't at all about her being disabled. It's a fantasy/scifi gothic horror novel about being trapped at a work retreat with God.

so many women want her but she’s determined to be in love with the soul of the dead earth trapped in a 10ft barbie doll instead. she’s a lesbian disaster and is trying to deal with both schizophrenia and over 200 actual ghosts haunting her.

a schizophrenic lesbian, written by a schizophrenic lesbian! she's in love with multiple dead women, but she's also a necromancer so that's not as big of an obstacle as it sounds. weird little bone-obsessed necromancer lesbian. I care about her deeply

Author Tamsyn Muir has discussed how Harrow's schizophrenia is modeled after her own experiences. It matters a lot in her eponymous novel, where her inability to trust what she sees and hears is compounded by her self-inflicted lobotomy to save her girlfriend's soul from getting absorbed into her own.

Harrow is one of the protagonists of her series & both her lesbianism & her schizophrenia play major parts in the story. The author has spoken about how she wrote Harrow based on her own experiences, and the authenticity comes through strongly. Beyond that, she's a teenage gothic nun in love with a holy corpse & she's the greatest bone magician ever born. What more needs be said.

She's a lesbian, she's psychotic, she has seizures, she faints regularly and can't rely on her own memory worth shit. And the only reason she's not going to kill god is so she and her girl can escape the cycle of violence. Basically, Harrowhark Nonagesimus is the entire package.

Anything Else?:

Listen. Listen. I’m not doing Harrow justice here. I LOVE her (Submitter 2)

The author is also schizophrenic! Which is pretty cool. (Submitter 3)

The author of the series is openly schizophrenic, and has mentioned in interviews that she's drawing on that experience when writing Harrow :) (Submitter 8)

[beauxjangles]

i just love the fact that when julian's genetic enhancements finally came to light, the ds9 crew didn't even stop for a second to question whether or not he should be there. they know that his place is on the station with them and his enhancements don't change a single thing about how they view him

[drmajalis]

No one:

Absolutely no one:

Me: Dr. Julian Bashir on star trek ds9 still has his childhood teddy bear, Kukalaka. He was his "first patient" after his leg was accidentally torn off. His mother wanted to throw him out, but Julian restuffed and stitched the bear back together, and would continue to do so for his entire life.

Julian is also genetically enhanced individual, an "augment" with genetically enhanced strength, intelligence, precision, everything. By his own admission he was developmentally disabled, and his parents gave him the illegal gene therapy begets they wanted what was best for him, but in Julian's mind, they "replaced" their defective son with a more perfect one, saying "Jules" the nickname they gave him, died on the operating table.

Maybe the reason Julian was so fixated on keeping Kukalaka is because he didn't want anyone to think they were replacable because of a defect or injury, that he saw a little of himself in this stuffed toy and thought "I won't give up on you," just like how he wouldn't give up on treating The Quickening, or the Jem'Hadar's addiction.

[tuttle-did-it]

*Sorry Nicole de Boer, nothing personal, but it’s true

[walkingstackofbooks]

Just realised how relieved Julian must have been that Lwxana got distracted by Odo in The Forsaken.

Like, having to spend a significant amount of time in the company of a very powerful Betazoid must have been a nightmare for him, in terms of having to keep absolute control over his thoughts so his secret didn't get out, right?

What's the likelihood that if Lwxana had got trapped with the rest of them, and he was having to weigh up all the options of how to get them safe (and if he can risk using his enhancements to do so..), that control would have lapsed and she'd have realised what he was.

Julian's very subdued at the end of the episode, amidst all their praise of him - is he aware of just how close he might have come to losing it all?

[timaeuslover001]

what DS9 should ave done with "Section 31"

Have them be a splinter cell organization coming OUT of the Federationn/Satrfleet like (like in Kids Next Door lol ) completely unbeknownst to most of the duration and starlet.

They able to round up other augmented beings and even made some of their own.

Federation catches wind of it.

Federation lets a few admirals and Captain know about it and Sisko was able to capture eon and he died before any further investigation but exposing one made them aware about Bashir genetic enhancements. (which he doesn't care about in my AU, but his parents do get banned from federation space because of it because its a serious crime to the Federation )

Federation then plans to use Bashir to infiltrate sector 31.

THAT is what they SHOULD have done!

This is born from my other AU about Starfleet that I WISH was canon, was that about stand the fact their supposed to be a BETTER version of the military (I know their not a military , but Gene based them off his experience in the military so yea with it ) in the future where they don't have these secret operations or secret missions or sectors and al info is open access to all Starfleet organizations as well as Federation leadership. (like the CIA or whatever equivalent )

[azazelsazaleas]

I finished watching through DS9 a few weeks ago and I’ve been meaning to do a rundown of my thoughts on it. Here goes:

- Oh my god that was fantastic. I really wish it’s given it a fair shake back when it was on the air; I was a dumb teenager who resented it for not being TNG and was going through a weird self-loathing phase where I didn’t want to admit to myself that I was the massive nerd that I am. This seriously lived up to the hype. I may have to do a TNG rewatch because this might just have upstaged it as my favorite 90s Trek.

- Andrew Robinson should’ve been made a full cast member. Ditto Max Grodenchik and Aaron Eisenberg.

- Damar’s transmission at the end of The Changing Face of Evil lives rent-free in my head. I cheered out loud at that.

- One thing the show did fantastically that a lot of other SF/fantasy properties don’t quite get right is that it lands a pitch-perfect balance of “these characters are major, important figures in the larger multinational conflict” and “this conflict is absolutely massive and not everything revolves around the same small group of people.” The fact that Sisko, Worf, Kira, Odo, et al are so important is entirely plausible and it never feels like the writers are trying to gratuitously bring everything back to them.

- That said, I kind of love that Admiral Ross’s leadership approach during the Dominion War eventually consists of doing whatever the hell Sisko tells him to do.

- God, the acting was incredible. Andrew Robinson, Armin Shimerman, Nana Visitor, Marc Alaimo, and Louise Fletcher were real standouts, but everyone was just so damned good.

- Actually, I really need to give special mention to Shimerman. The man went above and beyond to make Quark be something more than a joke character, despite how obvious it was that basically the entire production team wanted him to just be cartoonish comic relief. He worked harder to flesh out his character and show his race as a race of *people* (not just caricatures) than just about any actor playing an alien on Star Trek before him except for maybe Nimoy. Give the man a goddamn Emmy. Don’t believe me? Go rewatch the iconic root beer scene from The Way of the Warrior.

That said: I do have a few criticisms:

- Pretty much all of the (canon) romantic subplots were just…yikes. The only major exception I can think of Sisko/Yates, where they actually seemed to have a healthy dynamic, fall legitimately in love with each other, and generally treat each other like adults in a serious relationship, not bickering teenagers.

- Seriously, Worf/Jadzia got so hard to watch and then the fallout with Ezri was just ugggghhhhhhhhh stop please for the love of god

- Why did the writers need to try to romantically pair off all the female characters? Just, why?

- Kira had more sexual tension with that Romulan lady in half an episode than she did with any of her bucket-of-paint boyfriends over the course of seven years.

- I totally get the behind-the-seasons reasons why things panned out the way they did, but (hot take) I think Dax’s whole arc would’ve worked better if they had killed Jadzia off after the first season or two and brought in Ezri earlier. Jadzia was fun, but she was just too perfect to get many interesting stories and her relationship with Worf felt too much like manufactured drama. Having a trill who didn’t want to be joined, agreed to in a life or death emergency situation, and now has to reckon not only with taking on this symbiotic relationship with no preparation whatsoever but also succeeding this beloved person in the eyes of her loved ones is such a better setup for a character and it’s a pity we didn’t get to see that play out properly.

- Sisko deserved a better conclusion to his story. Give the man his damned house on Bajor and let him raise his kid with Kasidy. He’s more than earned it.

- Next time I rewatch the series, I’m skipping the mirror universe episodes and the ones with the genetically enhanced walking-90s-neurodivergent-stereotypes.

Other random thoughts:

- Dukat’s storyline should’ve ended with him getting killed at the end of Waltz. Either by Sisko, or by deluding himself so thoroughly that he does something suicidal. The pah-wraiths subplot felt like a lazy afterthought (except for the episode where he pretends to be Bajoran and starts fucking Kai Winn) and as much as I liked watching Marc Alaimo act, his story arc was basically over at the end of Sacrifice of Angels….which, incidentally is when Damar actually starts to get interesting.

- I loved the O’Brien must suffer episodes but I thought Hard Time was kind of overrated. Mostly for the plot line with the cellmate; I think I’m a little burned out on seeing stories that have a moral of “deep inside us is a line between humanity and savagery and when pushed to the limit, even the best of us would turn to murder.” It’s been done to death, and it’s really not truthful, at least for many people.

- I think I may have a little bit of a crush on Major Kira. It would never work out if I met someone like that in real life, though. I’m a laid-back, atheist, creative type; she’s a deeply devout former insurgent. Given certain real-life crushes I’ve had recently; maybe I’m just into strong women with big, expressive eyes who wear their hearts on their sleeve and have a spine made of fuckin’ steel. I have no idea what this says about me.

- MORN

- Favorite Episodes: In the Pale Moonlight, The Visitor, Improbable Cause/The Die is Cast, In Purgatory’s Shadow/By Inferno’s Light, In the Cards, Duet, The Wire, Civil Defense, The Magnificent Ferengi, basically the entire Dominion War arc.

[funnywormz]

i refuse to accept the idea that julian is Perfect At Everything and doesn't have any physical flaws the way ds9 sometimes portrays him. like 1) just from a biological pov, genetics isn't everything and environment, epigenetics etc play a big role as well + "perfection" is a subjective concept and depends entirely on environmental conditions, essentially making it completely unattainable and 2) it's kinda boring.

idc how genetically engineered he is i do NOT see all of his girlfail moments as him "trying to fit in" i think at least some of them were genuine. i think that things slip past him sometimes and he can be pretty oblivious, no matter how intelligent he is. i also think that despite his enhanced coordination, he's still not particularly physically strong........ like agile and fast yes but strong??? no. not that twink. genetic engineering can't just magically give you muscles

also i rlly want to believe that he ends up needing glasses when he gets older (like sid does irl). let's just say that whoever engineered his genes missed that one ok.............

[asidewalksymphony]

I finally watched s06e09 of DS9, "Statistical Probabilities".

And Jesus fucking Christ it was completely "Fully masked ND person interacts with non-masking/unable to mask ND ppl". Bashir fully reads as a person who masks 24/7 but has his ND traits accidentally slip through from time to time. I dunno if they MEANT for the genetically enhanced ppl to read as ND, but good god they do.

[allthoseotherworlds]

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