#like i'm not calling star trek racist but like

[annikasevenshots]

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[communistkenobi]

Hi, genuine good faith question if you'd like! How is TOS racist? It was my understanding that the OG Series was like, huge for equality in media?

I’m speaking primarily about the content of TOS itself, not its historical impact - I understand it had various historic firsts in terms of having characters of colour in respectable roles, which I’m not dismissing. My experience with the discourse on here surrounding the show is that people front-load these character representations as emblematic of the show’s progressive politics. Which, if we want to go that route, TOS was contemporary to the US civil rights movement, which provides us with a handy measuring stick to see how TOS actually grapples with race, not just the presence of characters of colour themselves. I'm going to be kind of defensive in this explanation, not towards you specifically, but because I have had this conversation with people online many, many, many times, and so any defensiveness on my part is in anticipation of arguments I know will come up as a result of making the basic claim that a show made in America in the 1960s is racist. I'm also going to be copy + pasting from an older post I've made on the subject since it's been a while now since I've watched TOS so some of the details are fuzzy.

Like okay, the premise of TOS is that the Enterprise, as an ambassador of Starfleet/the Federation, is seeking out new alien life to study. The Prime Directive prohibits the Enterprise crew from interfering with the development of any alien culture or people while they do this, so the research they collect needs to be done in an unobtrusive way. I think this is the first point at which people balk at the argument that TOS is racist or has a colonial conception of the world - the Enterprise’s mission is premised on non-interference, and I think when people hear ‘colonial’ as a descriptor they (understandably, obviously) assume it is describing active conquest, genocide, and dispossession. Even setting aside all the times where Kirk does directly interfere with the “development” of a people or culture (usually because they’ve “stagnated” culturally, because a culture "without conflict" cannot evolve or “develop” beyond its current presumed capacity - he is pretty explicitly imposing his own values onto another culture in order to force them to change in a particular way), or the times when the Enterprise is actually looking to extract resources from a given planet or people, I’m not exactly making this claim, or rather, that’s not the only thing I’m describing when calling TOS racist/colonial.

The show's presentation of scientific discovery and inquiry is anthropological - the “object” of analysis is alien/foreign culture, meaning that when the Enterprise crew comes into contact with a new being or person, this person is always read first and foremost through the level of (the Enterprise’s understanding of) culture. Their behaviour, beliefs, dress, way of speaking, appearance, and so on are always reflective of their culture as a whole, and more importantly, that their racial or phenotypic characteristics define the boundaries of their culture. Put another way, culture is interpreted, navigated, and bound racially - the show presents aliens as a Species, but these species are racially homogeneous, flattening race to a natural, biological difference that is always physically apparent and presented through the lens of scientific objectivity, as "species" is a unit of biological taxonomy. Basically species is a shorthand for race. This is the standard of most sci-fi/fantasy genre work, so this is not a sin unique to Star Trek.

Because of this however, Kirk and Co are never really interacting with individuals, they are interacting with components of a (foreign, exotic, fundamentally different) culture, the same way we understand that a biologist can generalize about a species using the example of an individual 'specimen'. And when the Enterprise interacts with these cultures, they very frequently measure them using a universalized scale of development - they have a teleological (which is to say, evolutionary) view of culture, ie, that all cultures go from savage to rational, primitive to advanced, economically simple to economically complex (ie, to capitalist modes of production). And the metrics they are judging these cultures by are fundamentally Western ones, always emphasising to the audience that the final destination of all cultures (that are worthy of advancing beyond their current limited/“primitive” stages) is a culture identical to the Federation, a culture that can itself engage in this anthropological mission to catalogue all life as fitting within a universal set of practices and racial similarities they call “culture.”

This is a western, colonial understanding of culture - racially and spatially homogeneous people comprise the organs of a social totality, ie, a society, which can then be analysed as an “object,” as a “phenomenon,” by the scientists in order to extract information from them to produce and advance state (ie Federation) knowledge. The Enterprise crew are allowed to be individuals, are allowed to be subjects with a capacity for reason, contradiction, emotion, compassion, and even moments of savagery or violence, without those things being assigned to their “race” or “culture” as a whole, but the people they interact with are only components of a whole which are “discovered” by the Enterprise as opportunities to expand and refine the Federation’s body of knowledge.

Spock is actually a good example of what I'm talking about, because he is an exception to this rule - unlike the others in the crew, his behaviour is always read as a symptom of his innate Vulcan-ness, where his human and Vulcan halves war for dominance in his mind and character. Bones (the doctor, one of the main cast) constantly comments on Spock's inability to feel things, that he is callous and unsympathetic, ruled by Vulcan logic to such an extreme that his rationality is a form of irrationality, as his Vulcan blood prohibits him from tempering logic with human emotion and intuition. Now you can argue that Bones is a stand-in for the racists of the world, that Spock proves Bones wrong in that he is able to feel but merely keeps it under wraps, that Vulcans are not biologically incapable of emotion but merely live in a socially repressive culture, but this still engages in the racial logic of the show - Vulcans are a racially-bound species with a single monolithic culture, and Spock's ability to express and feel 'human emotions' is the metric by which he is granted human subjectivity and sympathy.

And on the flip side you have the Klingons - a “race” that is uniformly savage, backward, violent, and dangerous. In the episode Day of the Dove, where Klingons board the Enterprise along with an alien cloud that makes everyone suddenly aggressive and racist (this show is insane lol), the Enterprise crew begins acting violent and racist, but the Klingons don’t change. They aren’t more violent than before (because they already were fundamentally violent and racist), and they don’t become less violent when the cloud eventually leaves (because they are never able to emerge from their violence and savagery as a social condition or external imposition - they simply are that way). Klingons are racially, behaviourally, psychologically, and culturally homogeneous, universally violent and immune to reason, and their racial characteristics are both physical manifestations of this universal violence as well as the origin of it. The writers and creators of TOS are explicitly invoking the orientalist idea of the “Mongolian horde,” representing both the American fear of Soviet global takeover as well as blatantly racist fears about “Asiatics” (a word used in the show, particularly in The Omega Glory where a fear of racialised communist takeover is made explicit) dominating the world.

This is colonial thinking! Like, fundamentally, at its core, this is colonial white supremacist thinking. Now this is not because TOS invents these tropes or is the origin of them, it is not individually responsible for these racial and colonial logics - these conceptions are endemic to Western thought, and I am not expecting a television show to navigate its way outside of this current colonial paradigm of scientific knowledge. I’m also not expecting an average person watching this to pick out all the intricacies of this and link it to the colonial history of Europe or the colonial history of western philosophy/thought. But this base premise of Star Trek is why the show is fundamentally colonial - even if it was the case that the crew never intervened in any alien conflict, never extracted any material resources from other people, this would still be colonial logic and colonial thinking. The show has a fundamentally colonial imagination when it comes to exploration, discovery, and culture.

I think a good place to end is the opening sequence. The show's first line is always "Space! The final frontier." I do not think the word frontier is meant metaphorically or poetically - I think the show is being honest about its conception of space as an infinitely vast, infinitely exotic frontier from which a globally Western civilisation (which the Enterprise is an emblem of) can extract resources, be they material or epistemic

[neroushalvaus]

Tumblr in the 60s – deleted posts

Some people requested a sequel to this post so I thought I'd post these drafts that didn't make it to the original. Maybe doing more at some point if the inspiration hits me but I hope these bring you some joy.

🚀 starrfleet Follow

HEY GUYS!! We're buying The Beatles so John and Paul can finally get together!! Who's in

🎹 nixonsafascist Follow

Call that... Beatles for Sale

🚀 starrfleet Follow

Dude this is serious. We want to free them. Why is homophobia so very funny to you?

🎶 mclennstarrison Follow

Didn't The Beatles start managing themselves after Mr Epstein died? So you plan to buy them... From themselves?

🚀 starrfleet Follow

Oh so the george harrison vampire mpreg blog is going to preach to us now.

92 notes

📻 lesbianbobdylan Follow

"Let men have short hair!!" "It's okay to not agree with the civil rights folk" "Don't let tumblr tell you that serving your country is bad" You are all so chronically online and convinced your little hippie bubble represents the world that you have the worst takes. Conservatism is alive and well, us hippies are the fucking minority. The outside world is perfectly okay with all the anti-mlk short-haired men who are happily getting drafted. You are not counterculture.

15,5 t. notes

☁️ ankin-vaimo Follow

Tumblr is so US/UK centric. Scrolling through this site you'd think there were no other tv shows than star trek and no other bands than the monkees and that the stonewall riots were the only meaningful political activism that has ever happened. There's so much great culture elsewhere. I bet you have never even heard of Tapani Kansa.

🇻🇳 shirellesofficial

#shhh don't tell Tumblr that other countries exist #they couldn't even admit Please Mr. Postman was originated by black women (tags via @marvelettesofficial)

peer reviewed tags

#sorry for going through your tumblr marvelettesofficial #you're just so funny #hope i'm not annoying you

54 notes

🌼 andpeoplesaywebeatlearound Follow

People really like to pretend us Beatles girlies hate Y*ko for being asian and a woman like she didn't literally make John cheat on his wife and leave his young son

🪕 prostitutesandlesbians Follow

don't talk like us beatles girlies are all the same, i personally want to fuck her on a canvas while we're both covered in menstrual blood, creating modern art by making love

✝️ jesusrevolution Follow

Op is this you? ↓

🎶 mclennstarrison Follow

Also like, "made John cheat on his wife and leave his young son", did John himself have nothing to do with that decision or..?

🪕 prostitutesandlesbians Follow

do you guys think she and john do mommy play

🎶 mclennstarrison Follow

I appreciate the input @prostitutesandlesbians but we're trying to call the op out for being a racist misogynist

🪕 prostitutesandlesbians Follow

sorry

346 notes

�� thekinkykinks Follow

Why is there even discourse about this... Yeah, the folks at Stonewall could have been more respectful towards the police officers who were just doing their jobs, but why are we acting like throwing some pennies at the police officers and calling them "Lily Law" is the worst type of oppression

🥿 trustnobutch Follow

You know what? No. Fuck you. I'm tired of you all talking about these people like they were your poor little meow meows. Have you read about this at all? The raid did not happen because the police "hates gay people wah wah". Stonewall Inn was run by the mob. The. Fucking. Mob. Would you rather have the police not protecting us from criminals, huh??? And the rioters were nothing but a bunch of attention seekers. I heard that a guy from the fucking Mattachine Society phoned newspapers and took pictures of the riot. I'm so disappointed, that was the only gay group that seemed to care about looking respectable in the eyes of the heterosexuals. People who were there made us all look bad and set our movement back like 50 years. Fuck you for supporting them.

🍊 kissmemissoklaholma Follow

Yeah. I heard someone threw a brick.

✌ draftdodgerdyke

??? Nobody threw bricks, where the fuck do you get your information ??

#they should have tho #chilling at the stockholm airport finding the weirdest takes

998 notes

🧸 teddyboyfemme Follow

i'm sharing a joint with this cute ass butch with the cutest curliest hair ever guyyyyssss I think i'm falling in love

🧸 teddyboyfemme Follow

she plays the harmonica for me i want to fuck her to the mattress

🧸 teddyboyfemme Follow

i don't have any idea what she's singing about but i think she likes the rolling stones too, we have so much in commonnnn

🧸 teddyboyfemme Follow

So it turns out that was Bob Dylan.

70,9 t. notes

[demilypyro]

Okay since this doesn't seem to want to go away here's me addressing every single "allegation" that I've heard about. I hope to have at least given a good explanation where the horrible things being said about me came from, and why I consider them either just totally not true or badly misconstrued. Some of my friends have recommended I don't say anything at all, but I've always preferred openness and honesty, so I hope that's appreciated.

I understand that some people will still dislike me even though the things being said about me are not true. That's fine. I don't need everyone to like me, but it's when I'm being consistently harassed and lied about that it interferes with my mental health and ability to work. So I'm gonna try and end things with this.

"She's racist"

From what I can tell this is about one time when I said I keep my interest in anime to myself around new people. I do this because showing you're a Huge Fucking Nerd right off the bat can make a bad impression. I could have said the same thing about Star Trek or comic books, I just happened to be talking about anime in that moment. Someone seems to have misconstrued this as me finding Japanese culture something shameful and lesser than other cultures?... Which I would call a total willful misinterpretation. The rest of this seems to stem just from being Dutch, because the Netherlands is a country that has a problem with xenophobia. This is true, but uhhh I'm mixed myself so I'm pretty well aware of that, and I obviously don't support our infamous "blackface holiday." Just because I live here doesn't mean I agree with everything this country does, be that historically or in the modern day.

"She's friends with racists/misogynists/transphobes"

The only thing I can guess this is about is when I was mutuals with a user called porko-rosso at least 5 years ago and didn't really believe it when people told me they were a bigot. I haven't interacted with this user in over 4 years but people still claim we're like best friends, which was never true in the first place, we just knew a lot of the same people. Most of the resentment from the people who repeatedly spread these rumours about me seems to have started here. So for the record: no, I am not friends with any racists, misogynists or transphobes.

"She thinks she's better than other trans women because she passes better"

This is just not true. This idea seems to pop up just whenever I post about enjoying the benefits of HRT or surgery, but most recently this was misconstrued from a post where I said being trans is about being yourself as much as possible. Since this was in response to someone saying that me trying to pass is "erasing my identity", people thought I meant trying to pass is the same as being good at being trans, which was not what I meant, but some people didn't seem to want to believe me when I clarified. My apologies for the misunderstanding I guess, but that's all it was. So no, I do not hate people who don't pass as well as I do, nor do I think all trans people should be transitioning medically, and I resent the implication.

"She has a secret discord server where she makes fun of pictures of other trans women and calls them slurs"

I had absolutely no clue what this was about when I first heard it. I was sent screenshots that supposedly prove this but all they show is me being rude about someone's appearance one time in january of 2022. I actually thought these were faked because I don't remember this happening and the things said confused me, but one of my friends says she found it was in her server, where she had showed a picture of someone and asked everyone present (mostly other trans women) if they were hot. Apparently I did not think they were hot. So yes, I did insult someone's appearance back in january 2022, but it was an isolated incident. Frankly even I find my remarks in these screenshots distasteful, I don't know what I was on when I wrote that stuff. I'm sorry to that person specifically. What I said has weighed heavily on me and I apologize for it. It's not something I approve of, and don't intend to repeat that mistake. Still, to say it means I hate trans women and I love to make fun of them in my secret discord server and call them slurs is just... a super-villain level of exaggeration. I didn't even know about the word that was named as an example. It's not true.

"She's often rude"

I can't deny this one. Autism gonna autism. I've seen many therapists, doctors, experts, what have you, to try and help me with this, but it seems my particular brand of autistic in combination with the cultural differences between mine and other countries just really often ends with my foot in my mouth when I speak English. I apologize! I have never meant to personally offend anyone. It just keeps happening and I can't stop it from happening.

If after reading all this, you still consider me bad enough to hate my guts, I can't stop you, but I wanted to have at least had my say. I swear that everything in this post is the honest truth as I understand it, and that I've never acted with purposeful malicious intent.

[worflesbian]

Klingons & Racialisation - the Long Post

This post is an overview of the racial coding of the Klingons from their first appearance to the present day, illustrated by quotes from Trek writers, actors and crew members taken from the Memory Alpha article Depicting Klingons, with my own interjected summaries and explanations. It is by no means comprehensive (I likely missed some stuff), and does not offer critical analysis of the quotes provided, but nonetheless is intended to demonstrate irreproachably the open fact that Klingons have always been intentionally written and designed as non-white -- something that fandom consistently fails to take into account when perpetuating racist stereotypes and reiterating racist canon content. I recommend reading the whole article for a more in-depth understanding of the subject, as well as seeking out the existing writing of fans of colour. This post is primarily for reference purposes so I've tried to limit my own analysis and opinions, but I do post those in my Klingon tag as well as more general headcanons and worldbuilding and I'm happy to answer any (good faith) questions this post may raise.

As always, if I have overstepped in any way as a white fan in making this post, I am grateful to be informed and will make any required changes.

Content warning for outdated and offensive language under the cut.

The Original Series

"There is some suggestion that the Klingons represent a Cold Warrior's view of China in the 1960s – swarthy, brutally repressive." (Star Trek Magazine issue 153, p. 66) "And I think he was basing a lot of it on the kind of attitude of the Japanese in World War II...." ("Errand of Mercy" Starfleet Access, TOS Season 1 Blu-ray) The script of "Errand of Mercy" introduces the Klingon look by saying, "We see the Klingons are Orientals," "Spray my hair black, give me a kind of swamp creature green olivey mud reptilian make-up, and we'll borrow some stuff from Fu Manchu, and put a long moustache and eyebrows on me." ("The Sword of Colicos", Star Trek: Deep Space Nine - The Official Poster Magazine, No. 8) "I think the makeup was called 'Mexican #1 or #2.' That was the name of the original makeup foundation – they actually had kind of racist names at the time, like 'Negro #1' and 'Mexican #2' – which was the basis for the original Star Trek makeups." (Star Trek Magazine issue 172, p. 59) "In the original series, all they wore was a dark face and their black hair," Michael Westmore observed. ("Michael Westmore's Aliens: Season Two", DS9 Season 2 DVD special features) The Klingons' appearance changed within the original Star Trek series; although dark makeup and heavy eyebrows were the norm, the Klingons of "The Trouble with Tribbles" were much lighter-skinned and more Human-like in appearance.... He noticed that they are not only less like Mongol warriors by having less of a swarthy appearance but also by being slightly not as fierce... ("The Trouble with Tribbles" Starfleet Access, TOS Season 2 Blu-ray) "...they were meant to represent the Communist foes of the United States specifically during the Vietnam War, which was being controversially fought at that time. (Star Trek: The Original Series 365, p. 222) "...let us never set up a situation whereby those adversaries of ours [Klingons] give any indication of ever being anything but highly aggressive and self-seeking opponents." (These Are the Voyages: TOS Season Three)

Here it is explicitly stated that the Klingons were based on various Asian cultures, with the USSR also being mentioned heavily in the article. This influence and the use of "yellowface" is covered more comprehensively in this youtube video Klingons & The History Of Racial Coding. However, the video has some notable gaps which I hope to cover in this post.

Post-TOS (movies)

The Star Trek III portrayal of Klingons took inspiration from Japanese history. "Harve [Bennett] had the notion that the Klingons were like Samurai warriors," explained linguist Marc Okrand. (Star Trek: Communicator issue 114, p. 27) Robert Fletcher agreed with Bennett, later saying of the Klingons, "I always liked to think of them as authoritarian, almost feudal, like Japan had been." (The Making of the Trek Films, UK 3rd ed., p. 52) Regarding the make-up, Michael Westmore observed, "Until now, Klingons were brown. Some had a bony ridge running down the middle of their foreheads, long black wigs and facial hair." (Star Trek: The Next Generation Makeup FX Journal, p. 28) "I thought it was an ideal way for us to have our closure too, because the Klingons for us have always been the Communist Block, the Evil Empire. It just made sense to do that story." (The Making of the Trek Films, UK 3rd ed., p. 100) "Gene was really bothered by the Klingons in VI [....] [They] were, in his words, 'too civilized, too decent, too much of the good guys in the story.' [....] [The Klingon detente] was not the way Gene would have handled it. He would have reversed it, he would have had the Klingons being the ones who couldn't handle the peace, with the Federation saying, 'Come on, let's try and work this out.'" (Star Trek Movie Memories, hardback ed., p. 289) "The story never explored the Klingon culture the way I'd hoped it would [....] I was hoping for greater insight into the Klingons." (I Am Spock) Nimoy hoped, in specific, that the movie would provide some important insight into why the Klingons had "always been so angry, such nasty, vicious murderers." Nimoy wanted the insightful knowledge to be an intellectually transformational force, changing the thinking of Kirk and the audience. (Star Trek Movie Memories, hardback ed., pp. 287-288) In an interview in the DS9 Season 7 DVD, Robert O'Reilly observed that a long-running joke among actors who have played Klingons is that they do not want to appear in the Star Trek films as, he believes, the only purpose of a Klingon in one of the films was to be killed off.

Although these last three quotes may not seem relevant, I believe they highlight an important facet of the racialisation of the Klingons. It reads as though Gene Roddenberry was against depicting the Klingons in a more sympathetic light than the Federation, and considering that the Klingons are intended to be non-white, refusing to give depth or motive to their anger in favour of keeping them "nasty, vicious murderers" comes across as fairly racist, especially when these kind of reductive and harmful stereotypes could've been challenged as Nimoy suggests. The treatment of Klingons as disposable villains is also concerning in this context.

The Next Generation

African-American actors were often cast as Klingons in TNG and subsequent Star Trek productions. This practice wasn't racially motivated but was instead carried out because it lessened makeup time, as the performers already had a brown complexion without having to have their skin painted that color. (Stardate Revisited: The Origin of Star Trek: TNG, Part 2: Launch, TNG Season 1 Blu-ray) Tony Todd, who portrayed the recurring Klingon character Kurn, stated, "I don't look at the Klingons necessarily as African-Americans, but it's about tapping into something–they're certainly an alienated people, so maybe that's why African-American actors can identify with those characters. But that doesn't mean it's exclusive to them." (Star Trek: Communicator issue 116, p. 54) Michael Westmore actually changed the Klingon facial design in numerous ways, though. He stated, "I added a Shakespearean style of facial hair and a forehead bone structure based on dinosaur vertebrae and I was able to modify motion picture Klingons for television." (Star Trek: Aliens & Artifacts, p. 59) In "A Matter Of Honor", the Klingons were intended to be used to shed some light on a common social problem prevalent at the time of the episode's making. This was, namely, what it was like to be the only person of either white or black skin coloration while surrounded by people of the other color. The Klingons were selected to illustrate this theme as a spin on the usual arrangement of a predominantly Human crew serving aboard the Enterprise-D alongside Worf. (Captains' Logs: The Unauthorized Complete Trek Voyages, p. 176) Two historical societies, the Samurai and Vikings, served as other inspirations, Moore perceiving about Klingon culture, "There was the calm, elegant reserve associated with the Samurai but there was the 'party-down' like the Vikings." (Star Trek: Communicator issue 114, p. 58) "I stopped thinking of the Klingons as the Cold War adversary," he explained. "I didn't think it fit [....] The place where the Russians were when I was doing the Klingon shows just wasn't as relevant any more." (Star Trek: The Magazine Volume 1, Issue 19, pp. 64-65) "The Klingons are not evil, tyrannical pirates bent only on pillage and plunder. They have a strict, almost unyielding code of ethics and honor and take their responsibilities as rulers seriously." Following a description of the Klingon homeworld, the memo continued by saying, "Klingon society could most closely be compared to that of Sparta or feudal Japan." ("Sins of the Father" audio commentary, TNG Season 3 Blu-ray) Having recently seen the film Malcolm X, he imagined the Klingons in the "Birthright" duology as metaphors for black people. (Captains' Logs: The Unauthorized Complete Trek Voyages, p. 274; Star Trek: Communicator issue 105, p. 16) "There's a certain way you have to carry yourself. You have to really be able to project the violence and the anger [....] All you have to do is think of the Spartans. They say, 'They'd rather have you come home dead on your shield than come home a coward.' [18]

This is where I feel the video essay previously mentioned falls short -- in the next gen era, Klingons are now explicitly black-coded. While some Asian cultural influences are still cited, they learn more towards the historical and are intermixed with other historical European influences (Spartans, Vikings, Shakespeare) rather than being fueled by contemporary prejudices towards the political enemies of the US as they were in the TOS era.

Deep Space Nine

Fields also generally based the Klingon group on American Western prototypes from the film The Magnificent Seven or, to a lesser extent, Japanese prototypes from The Magnificent Seven's movie source material, Seven Samurai. (Star Trek: Deep Space Nine Companion (pp. 131-132)) "So, the hair [...] was permed. So, it had more of a curl instead of the straight type look, and by perming it, they were able to kind of give them larger, bigger hair, so it was more like a mane." ("Michael Westmore's Aliens: Season Two", DS9 Season 2 DVD special features) "I don't know how you could equate Klingons with what's going on in the world today," he admitted. "I think the intention was to make them like samurai. That hairdo they gave them is very much a samurai hairdo. A lot of the fight sequences, the moves with the bat'telh, are very much taken out of the Asian martial arts [....] It's very romantic you know, these three old guys, the Klingon over-the-hill gang." (The Official Star Trek: Deep Space Nine Magazine issue 15, pp. 17-18) "It was different for them to get into this makeup, because [...] [the makeup was more elaborate and] the beards were bigger, and they were greyer, and they had curls to them, and the moustaches, they had the Fu Manchu look to them. So, they weren't used to sitting that long to be a Klingon." ("Michael Westmore's Aliens: Season Two", DS9 Season 2 DVD special features) For recreating some old-style Klingons in "Trials and Tribble-ations", the Klingon-playing actors had to be made up with the same swarthy, shiny brown makeup as used in the original series. (The Magic of Tribbles: The Making of Trials and Tribble-ations) ...he had them unite in song, thinking this was "just the kind of thing that Klingons do" because they are, in his opinion, similar to Vikings. (Star Trek: Deep Space Nine Companion (p. 449)) "I always saw the Klingons as a combination of Japanese Samurai who haven't had their morning coffee (or tea!) and African Zulu warriors." [25]

In DS9 the only inspirations cited seem to be historical, once again leaning towards feudal Japan and the Vikings. Interestingly although the Klingons here are predominantly dark-skinned, I don't think that J.G. Hertzler, who is white, had his skin significantly darkened to play Martok (at least, not compared to the obvious brown makeup worn by other white actors playing Klingons). Having a white actor play a Klingon without dark makeup could've set a precedent decreasing the use of such practices later on, but no one seems to have picked up on it.

Enterprise

The Klingons of ENT: "Sleeping Dogs" were based on the crew of the Russian submarine Kursk. "For me," said Dekker, "the point was to acknowledge the Klingons as 'people' – to find them in a clear position of distress [....] The idea to 'humanize' their plight was mine, and it wasn't anything I thought about as far as canon. It just seemed right." (Star Trek: The Official Starships Collection, issue 41, pp. 10-12) In the final draft script of "Affliction", the altered Klingons were initially referred to as "fierce-looking aliens" and were further described thus; "The aliens have a swarthy complexion, and dark facial hair... they could easily be mistaken for Humans. We'll eventually learn these are Klinqons... but their cranial ridges have disappeared."

At this point in time it seems the Klingons had essentially done a 180 from one-dimensional villains to sympathetic fan favourites, while still retaining the skin-darkening aspect of their makeup and "barbaric" characterisation. Although this is not mentioned in the article's section on the Abrams films, the images provided do demonstrate a level of skin darkening for the Klingons' brief appearance in Into Darkness.

The final section of the article is incomplete, meaning I don't have a lot of information for Discovery's redesign of the Klingons. The sources I can find cite ancient civilisations such as the Byzantines as well as Islamic architecture as inspiration for the set design, with a baroque influence on the costumes. I have heard rumours that the crew of Discovery have cited North African cultures as their inspiration for the Klingons but I can't currently find a source for this. Despite the lack of direct quotes, it's visibly clear that the Klingon makeup is still darkening the skin of white actors, although this time also to non-human blue and purple colours, as well as altering certain features in a racialised way. To elaborate: Mary Chieffo, who plays L'Rell on Discovery, is white and has a very thin nose and small lips, but in costume these are broadened in a way that seems imitative of African ethnic features.

As of the making of this post (early August 2023) I haven't seen any of Strange New Worlds, but from some cursory research its latest episode (Subspace Rhapsody) seems to have put a white actor (Bruce Horak) in brown makeup to play a Klingon. I am deeply disappointed that on a television set in 2023 people can still be darkening an actors skin like this without questioning the racial implications of what they're doing.

Thank you for reading to the end of this post. Please feel free to link to it if you found it useful enough to cite in another context. I would like to reiterate that I am white and while this is an issue I care deeply about it is not one I have an emic understanding of, and if anything I've said here is inappropriate I would be very grateful to be made aware.

[captainhattersvoyagerstuff]

Why I Still Love J/C

Okay, I just really have to get this off my chest. There are people who don't like Chakotay, or won't ship him with Janeway because of the actor or the bad way Native American representation is shown. Now if you just plain don't want to mess with the character, don't like him, whatever, fine. But please don't let something an actor said or did keep you from loving a character or a work he was in. And don't ignore bad representation - try to improve on it.

I love J/C because I look at what is on screen. Their chemistry and caring relationship is incredible and inspiring to me. Everyone is welcome to their own ships, but that's the only one I have because it just seems so obvious to me. But I keep hearing people gripe about Beltran, or the representation. You can fix that, or read work that is fixed. It's called fanfic. If you're into the fandom at all you can see that fanfic Chakotay is not just like Chakotay on screen and definitely nothing like the actor.

The actor who played Icheb did some very bad stuff, but I hardly hear anyone say they won't use Icheb in a story because of this. So why Beltran? Why can't we just ignore these people instead of calling attention to them over and over? I'm not saying justify what they did, but remember they are real people with their own faults. They played a role, and even the most enthusiastic Star Trek actors are not as in love with the show as its fans are. It's hard to understand it, but it's true. I've watched podcasts with Tom and Harry's actors. They had forgotten many episodes, and didn't even know people didn't like Threshold. Why? Because this was a job for them. Maybe they enjoyed it, but it was still a job.

As far as representation goes, yeah they did an unbelievably horrible job, it's there from the beginning when Paris says racist stuff about "Indians". So I try to research, find stuff that is more accurate hopefully, or at least more respectful. It's a challenge, but worth it because there isn't enough good literature about Native Americans. And as far as Chakotay's character goes, there was, like so much of Voyager, wasted potential. So I try to add in that potential. Many fanfic writers do this wonderfully. I can recommend so many. His background in the Maquis, his faith, etc. We have that power.

TL;DR: If there is a ship you love, or a character, I really hope you don't let actors or bad writing turn you away.

[princesscolumbia]

Ranma 1/2 Thoughts, Meta Edition

I have consumed...a lot of Ranma 1/2 content.

I mean, this is kinda what happens when you're a repressed transgirl who discovers the manga a year into a marriage that you got into to "fix" being trans and be "a real boy" in a desperate bid to fill the hole that you wouldn't learn for two decades could only be filled by living as your true self.

I've encountered precisely four (4) types of Ranma 1/2 fans in that time:

Transwomen who see Ranma as their idealized expression of the gender experience ("I'm not like this because I want to be, it's a curse. A curse that gives me a smokin' hot body and HUGE tits! But it's tooootally a curse, for realsies! I'll find a cure any day now, see how hard I'm looking? I'm trying sooooo hard to find a cure...")

Transmen who see Ranma as their perfect representation of their gender experience ("I'm a guy, damnit! This body...it's a curse! I hate it and I want nothing better than to be cured, but all sorts of Life Bullshit keeps getting in the way!")

Lesbians who kin either Ranma (butch NB lesbian) or one of their love interests (Akane - comphet closetted butch lesbian, Shampoo - Strong, smokin' hot bad bitch who goes after what she wants, Ukyo - transmasc coded genderfluid NB)

Completely clueless nimrods who miss the FUCKING POINT and are only into the show for the martial arts and think it would be better if Ranma got cured and they stopped having funny stuff happen.

(In case it's not obvious, IMHO the last group are the worst parts of the fandom and need to Go Away. Most of the toxic stuff that exists in R.5 fanspaces is because of this group of assholes which includes the incels that think everything would be better if Ranma just did stuff that's questionable from an ethics and morality perspective and chased after Shampoo because she's the closest thing to a Barbie-doll these closet fascists can allow themselves to fantasize about playing with, completely ignoring that she's a complex character that's a subversive pastiche to the Japanese racist stereotypes of the 1980s.)

I'm not kidding when I say that in the early days of the public Internet (before Facebook and Twitter ruined it for everyone), Ranma 1/2 was the SINGLE largest fandom by a MASSIVE stretch. I once checked my math on this by going to Fanfiction.net (before the massive purges) and brought up the Big List of All Fandoms and right there at the top with a MASSIVE number of fics was Ranma 1/2 by a HUGE margin. It took three fandoms (Star Trek, Doctor Who, and I believe Naruto if I'm recalling correctly) to have their combined total number of fics exceed the number of R.5 fics on FF.net...and that was JUST FF.net. There was an entire separate index (The Penultimate Ranma 1/2 Fanfic Index) that had the single task of listing, not even curating or reading or reviewing, ONLY Ranma 1/2 fanfics. Not fanart, not commentary, no RP blogs or chat transcripts or whatever, JUST fanfics. And only about half of those linked to FF.net, meaning that if you dig up the archives you'll find at least 60% of all fanfics that people had managed to index in the Ranma 1/2 fandom are missing because they were never properly archived and just...faded from the Internet as the public servers and places like Geocities started disappearing. You can find teasing, tantalizing hints of larger works that all we have left, like scraps of ancient papyri revealing a quote from a missing book of the Bible, are single chapters backed up on niche sites that managed to get spider-crawled by Archive.org, but many great works are just...lost. (There's an ero fic called "Playing with Water" that was SUPER hot and featured elements that we have tags for on porn sites but didn't really have proper words for back in the day...but even back when it was first being written finding the thing was hard...and today? Nearly impossible.)

(If you wonder why I'm such an absolute RABID advocate of AO3, this is why)

For me, Ranma will always be the transfemme coded genderfluid hero that we needed in the late 80s and early 90s. We were on the tail end of the AIDS pandemic, and just like COVID-19 there were a bunch of assholes who used it to ride to power and marginalize queer folk. It was easier to do with AIDS, of course, given the absolutely massive numbers of queer cis men and transwomen who contracted it and died. (Sidebar: the reason "L" comes first in "LGBTQIA+" is because it was the Lesbian nurses who were the caretakers of the Gay men who were dying in numbers large enough to be counted as a tragic statistic instead of a mere tragedy) and while the world was starting to acknowledge (again) that gay men was a thing that existed and they weren't actually trying to corrupt the youth, what we now call "transgender" was still listed in the DSM as a mental disorder that required treatment to "cure." According to the cultural majority in damn near every field you can imagine, the Gender Binary was the only way to exist and if you didn't fit neatly into one or the other then you were Damaged™ and had to be Fixed™ for The Good of All People™ (but specifically so cis-het-white folks, usually men, could feel comfy and not be confronted by things that made them feel icky and might have cooties). It's a truism that's treated as a joke that transwomen get into coding and wind up doing IT work in such massive numbers that between us and the furries we ARE the foundation of the modern Internet. And into the fanspaces packed to the brim with closetted AMAB transwomen who hadn't yet had their egg cracked came this plucky martial artist that gets to swap their gender with a splash of water but somehow still winds up the best of the best, the finest martial artist of their generation. (Goku can suck it, Ranma would turn the Kamea-meha right back on the over-muscled, braindead loser with a food fetish and still make it home in time for Kasumi's dinner)

I'm no sociologist, anthropologist, behaviorist, whatever, but I suspect that the reason Ranma Saotome spawned such a large fanbase so early in the modern Internet's history was specifically because the series created a safe space where people could talk about gender issues with a degree of separation that helped strip away the stigma surrounding feeling like you were in the wrong body.

I get why people like the martial arts aspect. I mean, Ranma kills a demigod. This is NOT something to sneeze at. I also understand the transmen who latch onto Ranma as a kin because I get the feeling like you have no control over what your body's doing and you're going through your days in existential dread of what might be dragging you further and further away from what you always knew was right and correct about yourself. It's a terrifying thing and here's someone who (esp. the anime version) IS a guy trapped in a girl's body.

For me, though, and for a LOT of transwomen out there, Ranma is transfemme. And, yes, canonically Ranma states right near the end of the manga that they're both and they kinda forgot about the 'cure' when they had to pick between that and the really important stuff and that they're okay with being fluid ('cause water, gettit?!) about their gender and it's a damn shame this was the 80s 'cause a continuation might wind up showing Ranma embracing being both...

BUT, and this is a transfemme thing, I know, if you continue the parabolic arc of Ranma's character development, the logical conclusion (for us) is that she eventually decides that she's a woman and just lives in her "cursed" form the majority (or all) of the time.

And yes, this is because that's the transfemme story arc. In the manga in some distant part of the multiverse that peers into our universe and for some reason decides to make me the MC (god, that must be a FUCKING BORING manga by our standards, I weep for those fans), my story arc is the gradual progression of uncracked, closetted transgirl to transitioned out and proud transbien mom. At one point I swapped back and forth between gender presentations because it was safer for me to appear in some spaces as the male that they thought I was. Now I would prefer to die before being forced to go back to pretending to be a man again.

Ranma has the choice, and good for them. Until the Kaisufuu is permanently destroyed, even if the "curse" is locked, they have the option of going one way or the other based solely on their own, personal desire. I can't say I'd be comfortable with that option being available. In that theoretical manga where there's a reboot that gives me a condition like Ranma's, I'd probably wind up destroying the equivalent to the Kaisufuu just because of the threat to my mental wellbeing it presents.

So it's not a stretch to imagine Ranma making the same choice. She's a woman now, she has the life she never realized she wanted because she never had the choice so didn't know she was allowed to imagine it, but now she's happier than ever and why would she ever go back to that struggle of being a guy that only ever brought her pain and challenges and heartache?

[chiisana-sukima]

follow up to the question you just answered (tho I'm a different anon), when did you first get into fandom? what was it like back in the day?

I read what I would now consider my first fic when I was thirteen. It was split into two traditionally published Star Trek novels, but they were whumptastic, barely sanitized Spirk (no sex, but omg the "Ill die for you, give up everything for you, endure horrible torture, etc" vibes were off the charts). And while I can't say they awakened something in me per se--because I had already read a bunch of other raunchy queer scifi by other authors--they were certainly my first taste of transformative works, and I've been in fandom on and off since I became old enough to drive to cons a few years later.

Why is that romulan chick there when this is sanitized gay porn? No idea, its been years since I read these.

I went to Star Trek cons when I was in my twenties and still know some of the con runners from that time. There were, to put it bluntly, a lot of raves and a lot of sex lol. It was a more open time period in some ways, or at least it was open enough my whole friend group basically all banged.

Otoh though, there wasn't nearly as much language to think and talk about identity. I think The Youth TM have really stepped up around issues of gender and sexuality in ways that are net huge positives, including for older queers who can now identify ourselves in ways that may always have been central to us, but which we didnt have language to express (I still call myself bi and queer but can now also say I'm nonbinary/genderqueer and aro--both of which I have been for as long as I can remember but only have words to discuss now). We banged a lot back then (which was great! no regrets!) but didn't know ourselves very well.

I didn't become what I'd call active in fandom on a regular basis though until the 1990s. I was a manga translator in the late nineties/early 2000s and ran a small scanlation team. There wasn't as much Discourse about what kinds of content are acceptable then as there is now, but Discourse springs eternal, so there were a bunch of other kinds of wank instead. My team was international, and we ended up splitting over a weird mix of factors that included one of the members being incredibly racist due to childhood trauma during the Yugoslav wars, my own anxiety over customs opening all my packages from Japan, and an attempt by a traditional publishing company to co-opt all the scanlators as contractors for shit wages and no benefits.

I took a long break and then came back into fandom on the fic reading/writing side in 2015, and I love it here a lot. AO3 is the best thing since sliced bread. Even though I worry about purity wank and the panopticon and how that's all affecting people growing up now, I think overall fandom is a better place for the togetherness that the internet has bred. It's much more accessible now compared to when I was young, and it's easier to find your own little tribe of weirdos who match your freak pretty exactly.

[coffeefrenchandhistory]

About Me

I figured I should do this. No idea why. Anyway, it'll get updated... whenever I feel like it should get updated.

Tumblr bio (because it's somehow getting cut off and I don't like that): I'm Josh. 32. Unapologetically Jewish & Zionist. History geek, nerd, and Francophone. I write fanfics on AO3. Slytherin ambition with Gryffindor nerve. Blank/empty/anti-Zionist and antisemitic blogs will be blocked

What's your name?

Sir Lancelot of Camelot (and my quest is to seek the Holy Grail) It's Josh [surname redacted]. Pronouns are he/him.

You're on AO3?

I am! I'm currently writing a Wrong-Boy-Who-Lived fanfic (yes, yes, I know, WBWL stories have a... reputation...).

What fandoms do/will you write?

Predominantly Harry Potter if only because that series was my first love and still has a place in my heart. I'm also planning a few fanfics in the Mass Effect, DC, Star Trek, Game of Thrones, original fiction, and Fallout fandoms.

Why?

Well it all started when I was born...

Who are your fanfic idols/inspirations?

@artemisia-black, hands down. She is one of the finest writers I've ever seen, ever had the privilege of interacting with, and I genuinely adore her as a person.

But I'm also a big fan of Frickles, TheSinister_Man, Dorothea Greengrass, and TheEndless7.

What kind of fanfics do you write?

If it's Harry Potter, it's either a Wrong Boy-Who-Lived (WBWL) fic — either with Harry's brother as the believed to be Boy-Who-Lived or Neville as the believed to be Boy-Who-Lived. Or it'll be "action-adventure" where canon diverts this way instead of that way.

Ships?

I mean the USS Massachusetts is pretty neat, but that's also because I was able to visit it when I was a kid.

No, I mean, who do you ship?

Ohhhh!

I'm not a fan of Harry/Ginny, nor Ron/Hermione. Actually, the only canon pairings I like are James/Lily and Ted/Andromeda... that's pretty much it.

For Harry: Lavender (she'd be great for him ngl), Hermione (eh, sometimes), Pansy (enemies to lovers is top tier), Daphne (Haphne is a top tier ship and everyone should know it), Susan, Fleur (I just think she's neat), Tonks (post-war), Andromeda (post-war), Parvati, Padma, and Bellatrix (when it involves time travel).

Most out-there ship you've got?

Ron/Pansy, Hermione/Cormac or Anthony Goldstein/Hermione, Draco/Ginny. Also Kingsley/Bellatrix, Sirius/Aurora Sinistra, and Snape/getting his ass handed to him.

Most cursed ship you've seen?

[trauma intensifies] We don't go there. But I've seen some shit.

What character(s) do you hate the most?

Snape. I despise Severus Snape with every fiber of my being. The fact that Harry names his son after that child-abusing terror supporting racist wank-stain who simped hard for his mother after calling her a bigoted slur is a stain (and wanted her as a prize after he sold Lily, James, and baby Harry out to Voldemort) is the reason I throw the epilogue into the trash where it belongs.

Also Dumbledore, while I do think he's (for the most part) well-meaning, is very much the chess master who got far too up his own ass with how important he is. Also he facilitated child abuse, so I don't like him.

And Molly Weasley, who is an overbearing harpy of a mother who gleefully and maliciously went out of her way to bully a 15 year old girl because she read some bullshit in the Daily Prophet — when a few chapters before she had dismissed the author (Rita Skeeter) as a hack.

What do you do?

I work for a medical provider's office. Specifically, an ophthalmologist's office. Oh, go get your eyes checked!

Do you like it?

So then what do you want to do?

I'm actually getting myself out there to be an actor! And a writer of works that aren't fanfics.

Are you Zionist?

Yes.

What does that — ?

It means I believe Jews have the right to national self-determination in our ancestral homeland.

But what about — ?

That's literally the definition of Zionism. And yes, I do believe that anti-Zionism is antisemitism.

What if I'm an anti-Zionist?

Get off my blog then. I don’t want you here.

[gloomth-and-wanderings]

Ahoy there!

welcome to my blog! (tags/more info under the cut)

open for trick-or-treating!! 🎃🎃🎃

Free Palestine 🇵🇸 Avaunt ye racists, transphobes, homophobes, and aphobes

gender is weird but she/her works for now for convenience; call me Frankie. (if you're on les mis letters or whale weekly discord you might also know me as Walpole!)

my other haunts: @bean_valbean on ao3, @holodecks-and-hennins is my star trek fashion sideblog, @555-number is my x files fashion sideblog, @lmchaptertitlebracket is exactly what it says on the tin, and I'm PlaidFrankie on letterboxd :3

profile picture is Joseph Cotten in Journey Into Fear with the hair of Enjolras from Les Miserables Shoujo Cosette edited on; header picture is Jonathan Richman from Live on Toppop 1978; blog title is a quote from hit film She (1935)

Some tags:

#my art is my art, #frankie's creations is other stuff I've made (like edits), #frankie.txt is me yammering on. For a window into my brain check #so me and #i think about this all the time

Interests most prevalent here:

history/material culture (I tag by decade and year when I can)

Les Miserables

Star Trek

the X Files

the sea and the sky

old hollywood-era movies and old time radio, especially stuff with Orson Welles, Joseph Cotten, and Harold Lloyd

music, especially Talking Heads and Jonathan Richman

I speak English, but I am also learning Mandarin and would love to practice! 我的母语是英文，但是我也在学中文，所以我很想练习！

Feel free to send me asks!

I try to add alt text to my posts but if I forget make sure to let me know.

Currently reading: Correspondence of Horace Walpole, The Making of the English Working Class, The Other Side of the Sky, The Cheese and the Worms, The Flying Classroom, Maurice again

Currently watching: The X-Files (s5), Star Trek: Voyager (s6), Doctor Who (first doctor, s2), a lot of movies (on a Harold Lloyd glasses character binge at the moment)

[thegeminisage]

it IS. star trek update time. i am so behind because my fucking schedule got fucked. wednesday we watched "meridian" and "defiant," thursday we watched "fascination" and "past tense" part i (i know), and last night we caught "past tense" part ii and "life support" even though we were gonna do them in release order and start voyager first.

rip. we couldn't start voyager with like 30 minutes left. it hasn't been the first time we've had to go slightly out of order and it probably won't be the last. anyway, we've officially made it to 1995! 1994 ended with a string of surprisingly mid ds9 episodes, some i might even go so far as to call duds...

meridian:

had the summary of this one ahead of time ("quark attempts to use kira in the holosuite") and was braced for the worst. i was braced for deanna-barclay's-sex toy 2.0. at one point i was like "if they do it in this episode it's worse because they KNOW it's wrong. in tng they acted like they didn't know better."

thankfully they did not do it. the one thing i can say here is that they did not do this to my girl kira. and, you know, she had odo's support! it's always nice to see them together.

actually, the first scene of this episode sent me to fucking mars. first, kira asking odo about food. i've been wondering about this too so i'm glad she did. SECONDLYYY, kira pretending she and odo were lovers and then her calling him sweetheart again even though they were alone. odo looked like he was going to think about that every day for the rest of his life. i gotta say he does "gruff pining man who refuses to admit his feelings" very very well. could ANYONE really deserve kira? no, except someone who looks at her like she's hung the moon every time he think she's not looking back. bareil who. get out of here.

i just can't believe she touched his hand. maybe odo DOESN'T make hands to touch people with maybe he makes hands specifically so major kira can touch them. AAAAAAAGHGHGH

i absolutely HATED quark in this episode. i am trying so so hard to like him and prior to this i'd gotten up to a "slightly more positive than neutral" but we set back a lot of hard work here. maybe i'm the one racist against ferengis, not sisko, but it sure would help me be less racist if quark wasn't trying to put major kira in a holosuite. it was particularly cruel i think to tell her she'd won some kind of prize when "i've never won anything before."

it is kind of fun to watch odo do his kira thing and his quark thing at the same time, like him or not i respect that quark is one of odo's love interests. in one scene he got to be protective of kira WHILE bullying quark so that must have been a good day for him. i wish it had been a good day for me also

i had seen gifs of quark in the nightgown and when i googled "quark in a dress" i got entirely different sets of pics so it was fun to see where this finally came from! it was decent revenge, also, but i feel like quark never suffers any consequences when he actually does cross a line (vs just doing petty crime). like when he was dating that maquis vulcan or whatever it was. it makes it SO hard to like him and i am TRYING SO HARD. i like ds9 so much. i want to like the entire cast.

anyway, the actual plot. jadzia dax...........i am also trying so hard with her but GIRL you are gonna run off with some guy you met two days ago?? he is gonna leave his whole planet and age 60 years without them for a girl he met two days ago?? can y'all calm down???

it's even more damning because it's jadzia especially; she's very young, and if you ignore what i know about season 6 spoilers she would likely still be very much alive AS JADZIA when the planet comes back, but if not she'd still be alive in a new host. if friendships can run multiple lifetimes, why not romances? she could literally wait for him. instead she is gonna throw her whole life away

that said, the two of them WERE incredibly charming. they had great chemistry and jadzia being nervous in the tree because of curzon's tree trauma was extremely cute. i thought julian was a good sport about it too, considering - i was so worried he'd be a freak.

but my FAVORITE part of this episode was dax and sisko saying their goodbyes. they're both really good actors, especially the guy playing sisko, that i welled up even though i knew jadzia wasn't going anywhere and wouldn't have been THAT upset if she was. i love when sisko calls her old man and I LOVE when he loves people. it was such a sweet scene.

also, sisko with the kids was so cute. he's got the dad energy 24/7 and he's such an easygoing guy. i could watch him do anything. play with kids. mess around with his little baseball. yell at admirals. brush his teeth. literally anything. he's so fucking talented he could pull everything off.

ultimately, with a horrible b-plot and an only barely passable a-plot, this ep was a dud, but even ds9's duds are better than tng's mids

defiant:

SPEAKING OF TNG.............

okay wait first i have to comment on kira's little burnout scene. i can't believe she fucking yelled at julian and instead of getting mad he was like ah okay i see you're overworked i'm ordering you to have a day off. HE'S SUCH A GOOD PERSONNNN he makes me crazy i love him so much

i DO think it was a little mean to have quark be kira's babysitter and offer kira a holo program considering. you know. but i assume the episodes were written in isolation of one another

anyway, RIKER?? i always kind of wished riker and deanna could come to ds9 with worf because they were WASTED on tng, but NOT LIKE THIS!!!

he totally tricked me. i didn't pick up that he was shady until kira was showing him around the defiant and even then i thought maybe there was a hostage situation or some alien was controlling him......NO! it was the RANDOM ASS CLONE from a random ass tng episode!!! girl, WHAT??

him peeling off the sideburns was so funny. like, this riker doesn't have those. and at first i was like the difference is so minimal NOBODY would notice but then i couldn't stop looking at his beld little cheeks. horrible.

i love when dax and kira almost had girl talk about fucking riker but then she didn't even fuck him. sad. i mean it would have been under false pretenses which is kinda sketchy (which is probably why they made time to point out they DIDN'T fuck actually, good job ds9 staff), but still. it could have been fun.

i never did figure out why evil riker (sorry for calling him evil but he kidnapped kira my best friend) had beef with o'brien...was he just trying to get him to leave? does he hate everyone who ever worked on a transporter? i forgot the details of that other ep, and i remain mystified.

i love whatever sisko and dukat have going on. they hate each other but they love to flirt with each other. sisko should be allowed to flirt more often ESPECIALLY with men.

kira did a great job sabotaging that fucking ship after only being on board for .5 seconds. you can take the girl out of the warzone but you will never take the warzone out of the girl. they're lucky she didn't have their fucking heads i love her SO MUCH

i was sad about evil riker having to go to a cardassian labor camp...nobody deserves that. maybe vedek winn deserves--no, nobody deserves that. i like that kira promised to get him out, but i checked for spoilers and apparently we don't hear anything else about him until lower decks. which, good for them for providing closure, but i'm still not looking forward to that show.

also like HE WAS RIGHT. this is the second time someone from starfleet has been like "those cardassians are up to some shady shit" and everybody called them crazy BUT THEY WERE RIGHT. the cardassians are always up to something shady!!!

fascination:

i am sighing so deeply.

okay, right off the bat, i was at LEAST relieved jake finally got dumped by his FULLY GROWN ADULT GF. that was maybe the high point of this episode??

lwaxana troi is back. this is the first time we've seen her since i decided no one is allowed to be mean to her anymore. i do maybe perhaps wish she had touched odo a LITTLE less.

very sad when iodo thought he and kira were going on a little holiday date and she was like yeah remember my boyfriend? get out of here!

the bit with julian and obrien talking about how much racquetball they played was pretty good actually. like it was a good set-up to the thing later where julian was like oh buddy i know i said i was getting sick of racquetball before but i am actually down for HOWEVER many games it takes. he's such a good person. kill meee

jake falling for kira first was HORRIBLE. i was starting to wonder if he had an older woman complex. it was starting to get upsetting!!! someone put a stop to this!!!

"the office has changed winn" i don't think it has i think she's still an evil bitter old bitch. actually i got proved right later in fascination. so.

okay, actually, it was a little funny when dax fell for sisko and then he started nervous laughing about it thinking she was joking because this is NOT like fucking twins together and then she was no im dead serious lets fuck and he got out of there like the road runner so he could take her to sickbay. he's a good person too

also when kira and bashir started going at it, mostly because both of them were equally embarrassed/horrified/begging someone to get them apart with a cold water hose. i bet they were like let us NEVER speak of this again

however most of this episode was VERY uncomfortable and unfunny.........like, quark going after KEIKO? gross. i hate him. and, love and light, of COURSE it was lwaxana's fault...she was so toned down in this ep i almost forgot she was there

final note, it was absolutely miserable watching obrien and keiko fight...i want them to be happy! i can't believe they almost got divorced and there wasn't even a spell or anything happening. obrien was NOT at his best here and he's lucky he's good at apologies. in his defense on one point she DID ask him to decide what to do and got mad about his decision...but like, was he wrong? the red dress DOES look fantastic.

past tense parts i & ii:

I WAITED SO LONG FOR THIS............

ok some bg explanation required. ever since seeing this art and this art i became a little obsessed with an aos version of city on the edge of forever where they visit the 90s. the 90s would have about the same level of nostalgia to a modern audience as the 30s did to tos's original audience, right? it's one of those things i always thought about writing but will probably never seriously get around to. but in my mind palace, the aos version would HAVE to be in san fran - the geographical opposite of new york, and also the climate opposite (socal in summer vs nyc in winter). like i have half a plot sketched out in my head, this is a thing i have given SERIOUS thought to - i just don't know much about this era in trek's history

SO WHEN I REALIZED. THEY HAD TIME TRAVELED. which i did as soon as i saw the guns. i was BESIDE MYSELF with joy

and how absolutely fitting that it's 2024 in that show and in real life! i want to rewatch these episodes on august 30th.

also, sorry, if it's august in san fran why are they so cold...we looked up temps and the LOWEST low is 55, which IS chilly, but they were acting like they were freezing to death lol

this episode is ABSOLUTELY the spiritual sequel to city on the edge of forever. back to a dark period in earth history, stranded there, a good person has to die to uphold history, etc etc. it was SO GOOD.

it aged both poorly and fantastically. every time they were like well the deaths of these innocent people made the world pull their shit together...uh, no, we passed that opportunity several school shootings and one pandemic ago. on the other hand, every time they basically turned to the camera and shamed us for letting it get this bad...what was that line, "causing people to suffer because you hate them is really terrible, but causing people to suffer because you don't care is worse." so true the news has numbed us into total apathy at even the most horrific of injustices "they'll remember how to care, in this century" WILL WE?? absolutely spooky and uncanny

references to the internet were really good. we gotta log on to the net. it won't let me in without my ID. ok are you in a republican state??

julian fighting his own internal nature every time he had an opportunity to save someone and couldn't. i was getting nervous even when he gave that woman a chocolate bar to treat her blood sugar. HE'S SUCH A GOOD PERSONNN

wah. sisko bring julian breakfast

i KNEW that guy who jumped in the fight was bell the second he did it. i knew he was gonna die and sisko was gonna have to replace him. absolutely over the moon about it. sorry to bell of course but we don't get nearly enough sisko content. the other characters in these episodes almost felt like afterthoughts, except for dax and julian a little bit.

even dax just spent the whole episode seducing and then radicalizing a capitalist though. which, good for her, but her scenes were SO BORING compared to everything my best friend sisko was doing

i did have a good laugh and kira and obrien landing in various wrong eras though. "i broke my nose" ma'am your hand in marriage

fun surprise of this episode was the really, really annoying mouthy guard also getting radicalized. i didn't see it coming, because he seemed really determined to get himself killed (to the point of sisko having to manhandle him to get him to shut up even a little lol) and i thought he was just there to make sisko's job harder. but then you hit the end and he has this come to jesus moment in real time before your eyes...i don't believe we'll remember how to care on a global level in this century, but THAT i did believe. it was SUCH a fun nice surprise, i really enjoyed that

my only complaint is that i wish they had played up the danger to sisko more - like we all know he can't die, but i wish the characters had worried about it more. i think the implication was that webb didn't have to die here, but someone did, and since it wasn't sisko, it was him? mush as i love kira and o'briens gag, i feel like we could have spent more time on the fact that sisko was willing to die - and leave his own son behind - if it preserved the timeline, and there was a very real danger of that happening. i really like julian staying behind when he didn't have to, and i felt like it was BECAUSE of this specific reason - he was desperate to prevent sisko's death. which he sort of did indirectly do, but i feel like that danger hanging over everyone would have for a more satisfying conclusion

oh wait final note. the fact that sisko read up on the fucking rules of acquisition because quark accused him of being racist a few episodes ago. KING behavior. i absolutely love that

life support:

...because it turns out he WAS racist against ferengi! i had nearly forgotten but jake reminded us that sisko once said ferengi and humans were too different to be friends. damn. tng is always forgetting its own episodes but ds9 remembers stuff that even i forgot

anyway. was this one EVER rough.

first of all, the b-plot of "nog doesn't know how to act around women" does not go well with the a-plot of "kira loses her lover one inch at a time while modern medicine turns him into a zombie in the name of politics"

i think the b-plot was bad because nog and jake's issue isn't "we had a moment of culture clash" it was "nog is treating women like property when they don't want to be treated that way." like, it doesn't matter if that's what ferengi do, he's NOT DATING FERENGI so he can't expect them to ACT like ferengi women. this was not about the ethics of "can we really protest sexism if it's a cultural thing" it was about nog failing to read a social cue. jake wasn't the only angry one, the girls weren't about it either

that said, this would never have happened if jake hadn't tried to ditch his friend for a girl. at least the girl was finally his own age i guess

i do like that he asked odo to fix it though. he was like odo i need you to be SUCH a huge bitch to nog and me for a little while and odo was like say no more sir

a-plot of this episode was somehow even worse. firstly, the OFFICE did NOT change winn. she is still a power-grubbing heartless old bitch, as evidenced by her outright refusing to lie to bareil for his own health when all she did in season 1 and 2 were lie to get her own way. she CHEATED to get this job and now she doesn't wanna fucking do it, she wants to use a dying (zombified) man as her scapegoat and tool. i can't wait until this bitch dies

and look. i never liked bareil. that first sex vision he and kira had in the orb really put me off. it seemed to make her deeply uncomfortable more than flustered-embarrassed the way you'd get if you'd seen your crush naked in the orb, you know? like i thought they were setting him up to be a bad guy. by the time i realized that wasn't the case it was too late. he always just kinda rubbed me the wrong way

but not even bareil deserves this!! me at the beginning of the episode yeah he's going to hell for touching kira in her orb vision me by the end can we please let him die already PLEEEASE please please

julian in this episode was so sad...he wanted to help, and instead he was being forced by literally everyone to use his doctor powers for evil. i think he was relieved near the end when he (and his patient) finally got to be finished with the torture.

kira's scene at the end was amazing, of course. she's already gone through so much and this is just one more shitty thing!!! she's so strong and i wish she didn't have to be. PLEASE treat her really niceys.

i can't say i'm sorry to get done with bareil's scenes, though, since i never liked him much. but i MUCH would have rather winn died instead.

whew!! that was a long one. NEXT TIME.....................we begin voyager. please please please please be good

[seriouslycromulent]

Ok. So I know I'm late to the conversation, but let's just say that I'm disappointed, although not surprised to read casually racist comments on YouTube posts about Billy Spencer and the revelation that Eliot Spencer's dad is black.

I say not surprised because I wasn't born yesterday, and I've learned from years of being a Star Trek fan that even if a show centers around uniting across cultures, features a multicultural cast, and spreads a message of fighting bad guys in every form, bigots will still gravitate toward that fandom and lose their shit if a person of color is centered in a space that the bigot assumes a white person "should have" been centered.

Why?

Because the fandom world is just a microcosm of all the bitchassness that exists in the world overall. The global society we live in is brimming with racism, homophobia, xenophobia, misogyny and a myriad of other forms of bigotry. And that reality will always be reflected in fandom because bigots are often oblivious and carry their prejudice with them wherever they go ... including into the fandom world.

Now I don't know the age of the person who claimed that hiring Keith David to play Eliot's dad was a sign of "everything having to be politically correct these days," but if I didn't know any better, I would've thought I had been transported back to the 1990s and was engaging with Al Bundy on Married with Children.

Seriously? People are still using the phrase "politically correct" without a hint of irony? I thought bigots had moved on to calling everything that doesn't center straight, white, cis, able-bodied people as "woke." I guess this person just likes the classics.

Nevermind that we rarely, if ever, see transracial adoption depicted on American television when the child is white. Nevermind that the series has always had a theme around found family from different backgrounds working together to bring a little more justice into an unjust and unfair world. Nevermind that we waited 6.5 seasons to learn more about Eliot's background, and all we learned was that he was adopted, his parents are black, and why he and his dad fell out and hadn't spoken in over 2 decades.

No. Bigots are mad because a white person has black parents on a fictional series because it didn't fit their preferred narrative.

Leverage is not a show without flaws, but it has always been a show that challenged the status quo, behind the scenes and in the stories they tell. Your discomfort after learning that Eliot was raised by black parents is a reflection of your bias and skanky race issues regarding BIPOC folks, and you should examine that further. Not search for facile excuses to hide your bigotry behind other "reasons" to dislike the episode. You're fooling no one.

And the adoption story of Eliot Spencer was not "forced." It was simply not telegraphed with clues at every opportunity because Eliot plays everything close to the vest, especially his past. It's completely on brand for him, and if you cared about this character, you wouldn't have a problem with it and would acknowledge the consistency of him never referencing it.

As for the people who think that the writers just dumped his entire backstory on us in one episode, what show are you watching? There's plenty more to Eliot's background than who his dad is and why they fell out. And I bet if his dad was white, these so-called fans would've raced to their keyboards to write countless fanfic backstories to Eliot's life growing up in a small town, how he navigated high school especially with being adopted, and his life, in general, prior to joining the military. All the while taking the information from the episode to craft a layered history of his life.

There's a ton of stories out there to tell about Eliot Spencer, but a lot of the bigots fans are now deflated because that means they have to write a story with black parents and they don't want to do that. But I bet every single one of them will swear they're not racist or bigots or anti-black in any way.

Racism in fandom is not new, but I honestly expected more from the Leverage fandom. Granted, I know it's not everyone in the fandom. And you can argue it's not even the majority, but I've seen very little pushback from the fans who don't have a problem with Billy Spencer being black against the fans who do have a problem with Billy Spencer being black. And that too is very telling.

[carbonbasedmatter]

ig i've had tumblr long enough so here's my intro yay

★ABOUT ME: you can call me trey, tris or something related to my url :) he/they, istp, minor, audhd, south asian, trans guy, demiromantic(?) bisexual

★BYF: this should go without saying but dni if you're racist, homophobic, transphobic, ableist, xenophobic, exclusionist or just discriminatory in general

I made this blog so I could have somewhere to be myself I mainly post about fandom stuff, fictional characters, music, my art, rants and random personal stuff (I also vent here sometimes if you're uncomfortable with that please block the tag)

i'm a multishipper I guess...I don't know I just like analyzing different dynamics between characters and seriously cannot tell the difference between romantic and platonic stuff sometimes

english isn't my native language so sorry if I make mistakes/don't make sense sometimes

other than that im just a teenager so also naturally a bit cringe and annoying (that's what I tell myself anyway😞)

send me asks about me or my interests pls pls pls (school has been kicking my ass lately so it may take me a few days to respond I swear I do like getting them though)

I love talking to people and making friends idc if we have like one thing in common feel free to message me

★LIKES/INTERESTS

reading, art, sleeping, music, alt subcultures, chess, plants, fall, queer history, global history, the middle ages, chemistry(love hate relationship with the subject) crocheting, mbti, skating, philosophy ( esp existentialism), ranting, crystals, sea animals, bats<3

★FANDOMS(idk if i'll post abt all of these lol):

heartbreak high

ghibli movies

osemanverse(mainly solitaire)

mphfpc

bojack horesman

the magnus archives

total drama island

south park

derry girls

the good place

community

parks and recreation

nathan for you

brooklyn nine nine

young sheldon(NOT tbbt)

breaking bad

heathers

mlp

tmnt

star trek

death note

blue period

the promised neverland

the disastrous life of saiki k

gilmore girls

carmen sandiego 2019

the owl house

adventure time

alexa and katie

the worst witch

just add magic

gortimer gibbon’s life on normal street

the perks of being a wallflower

stand by me

a series of unfortunate events

fear street

dead poets society

the outsiders

★MUSIC:

pixies, mcr, mitski, radiohead, mbv, car seat headrest, the front bottoms, system of a down, dazey and the scouts, florence and the machine, asleep at last, teen suicide, queen, neutral milk hotel, nirvana, the cure, the brobecks, paramore, ajj, brockhampton, tyler the creator, childish gambino

(music is my special interest so there's a lot more hehe but I kinda tried to include a few from each genre)

★SOCIALS:

mutuals/followers can ask for them cus im terrified of someone I know irl finding this account lmao

i've gotten really comfortable with tumblr though so this is basically my main form of social media right now

[damnfandomproblems]

Rounding up a few asks regarding Fandom Problem #5724 and ensuing replies.

Anon: (replying to this ask)

you are engaging with the fiction in a purely diegetic sense without thinking about how it interacts with reality. yes, vulcans are not autistic. but Spock was written by human writers, based on their experiences in exclusively human culture. Spock is not autistic in the canon of star trek, but it is absurd to claim that he was not inspired by, nor is metaphorical for, autistic experiences. also, what does Dan Olson's character have to do with the validity of that hypothesis?

------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Anon:

Response to the headcanons asks. The issue I personally have is when people claim their "character X is autistic" headcanon is canon. There's this TV show where one character is thought to be autistic by a lot of people in the fandom. He is not autistic in canon. People just think he is due to certain traits of his. Which would be fine, except if anyone ever says they find the character annoying, or they dislike some of these traits of this character, these fans jump up and call you ableist. By all means, have your headcanons, but you don't get to make accusations against people just because they dislike things about a character that you identify with.

------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Anon:

Hi, the "Spock is Human and Vulcan" anon that I think I started the whole ableism argument thing here. I realized I didn't explain that last part very well and want to clear it up. The ask was a rant about how the submitter omitted facts about Spock's heritage in order to justify why he can't be autistic, which to me came off as both racist and ableist (because intersectionality! You can be multiple things lmao). Disagreeing over headcanons is valid, but when you use racist and ableist arguments to do so, then it starts to be a problem. And I question why some people get so upset about neurodivergent fans seeing themselves within a character. Also, perhaps we should bring back the term "allegory". I'm not actually an expert on autism so I'm not going to diagnose Spock or make headcanons, but, I can acknowledge that he can be an allegory for autism because of the traits he exhibits, his behaviors, and challenges he faces, which people, and especially autistic people, can relate to. It's like how Jadzia is a transgender allegory because of the way in which her species and culture works, even if she herself isn't transgender. Once again, it shouldn't be used against fans who do headcanon a certain way, but idk maybe it can clear up confusion?

------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Anon: (replying to this ask)

Autism can be a huge part of peoples' identity, but that OOP person said "leave labels out of it" because that's literally what people are doing with characters: labeling them as this or that. Categorizing them. As autistic, or as anything. Surely that's obvious? "Label" isn't being used as a dirty or reductive word here. I'm bi and the word "bi" is still a label. It's a way to quickly explain what I am without having to wax poetic. Stop reading in bad faith. From your responses to these asks, it's happening a lot.

------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Anon: (replying to this ask)

I don't wanna make it seem like I'm taking an harmless joke post super seriously and I'm not really saying this AT that anon, but it just reminds me of a thing that's been bugging me, the fandom trend of going "what if actually the minority group were the MAJORITY group! ^^" (i.e. "everyone is neurodivergent" "everyone is queer" etc) Just 'cause it's kind of like. Missing the point? "A (relatively) small group of people struggle / are discriminated against because they're not understood or society was built without taking their needs into account, who largely confide in each other because they're able to find common understanding, which they often can't find elsewhere." If things were "reversed" the same issues would still exist, it doesn't actually fix or improve anything. Speaking as someone who IS queer and neurodivergent.

[hyperizzation]

realized i forgot to post a who am i thing so. here.

hello. my name is hyperizzation, yes thats a stupid name, yes i made it at 3 am, yes i KNOW

you can call me hyperizzation, rizzy, obama, any ungodly "rizz" pun idgaf

pronouns (if you must) are she/he, im 18, minors close to my age are alright and i'm sfw, but if you're a lot younger maybe stay away from me idk im not ur mom

send me asks about whatever or even art requests cause im bored.

DNI terfs, homophobes, sexists, racists, etc. etc. leave me the fuck alone!!! :)

heres my ao3. go crazy folks

fandom list:

Hamilton

Star Trek

Marvel

Hannibal

Sherlock

Merlin

Prodigal Son

Supernatural

Hazbin Hotel

Helluva Boss

Good Omens

Saiki-K

Madoka Magika

Lucifer

BBC Ghosts

Heartstopper

Heathers

SIX

Marble Hornets

Harry Potter

Metal Family

Grease

The Outsiders

Les Miserablés

Sanders Sides

Undertale

Doctor Who

Avatar The Last Airbender

FNAF

FAITH: The Unholy Trinity

Camp Here and There

The Magnus Archives

Midnight Mass

Welcome to Nightvale

The Office

Brooklyn 99

Tower 4

I Have No Mouth and I Must Scream

Moral Orel

Bojock Horseman

Dayshift at Freddy's

Detriot: Become Human

Heathers

Purpleverse

RRR

Omori

House MD

The Untamed/MDZS Adapations

Mr. Birchum

Legend of Korra

Kineto Pet

Heaven's Official Blessing/TGAF

sorry ik thats like way too many

[abuddyforeveryseason]

Today's April 27th, and this is the Buddy for the Day.

The Jetpack+Flying Saucer combo is a bit of an homage to Frank R. Paul, a beloved artist from the Golden Age of Science Fiction, whose art includes the first depiction of a flying saucer.

Truly, the world's most beloved Austrian artist. Not to be confused with the world's least beloved Austrian artist. You know the one.

There's a book by Norman Spinrad called The Iron Dream, which posits that if Hitler, instead of becoming an intelligence agent for the German army, had moved to America to pursue an art career, he'd end up with a career similar to Paul's. I don't know if that was Spinrad's intention or just a coincidence.

But the story goes on that Hitler would move from illustrating science fiction stories to writing his own, and that all his racism and general insanity would leak into the stories. What Spinrad meant by that was heroic fantasy and sci fi stories like The Lord of the Rings and Dune are also pretty racist - which is why so many neonazis and generally racist people are drawn to it.

Ironically, nazis themselves enjoyed Spinrad's book for showing the Hitler-like protagonist as a hero, missing the satire behind it. So I'm not sure if Spinrad should be taken seriously there.

Still, it's something that a lot of people discuss nowadays - is fantasy and sci fi racist? Or rather, are some tropes employed racist? On one hand, there probably are some writers who do hold racist views, either secretly, openly, or subconsciously. But there's also a lot of misaimed criticism that aims at popular entertainment because it's an easy target (and one that's enjoyed by lower class people).

Star Trek is a big example. There are different alien races there that are sometimes called examples of modern-day racism with a sci fi veneer. The Klingons, being rude, strong and with a love for violence, have the same stereotypes applied to black people. The Ferengi, greedy, sneaky and ugly, represent jews. And the Borg, emotionless and robotic, are the technology-obsessed east asians.

But that comparison is unfair. Because on one hand, greed, violence and lack of emotion are classical villain traits, and the reason minorities were accused of having these flaws was exactly to vilify them.

One episode of Key & Peele had a dialog about white guys approaching them and talking about ho King Kong was a racist movie. It is, to a certain point (the natives of skull island are portrayed like savages), but then the guy goes on to say it's racist because it's about a powerful monkey being chained and taken to America. And Peele said "that's not the movie being racist, that's on you".

It does kind of annoy me when people say pop entertainment is racist in general, because a lot of it is stuff I enjoy, and it seems like punching down at an easy target. On the other hand, nothing is stopping a racist guy from writing his own sci fi stories and just pretend it's just regular tropes about aliens. And if actually racist people are enjoying it, maybe writers should consider that before creating a random "evil race".

The rule of thumb I use is, if it's a book I like, then it's just coincidence, different values or exaggeration from the critics. If it's a book I don't like, then the author's secretly racist.