#my heart wants to make them simultaneously as queer and as repressed as possible

[unrestedjade]

Baseless Ferengi headcanons no one asked for and that get increasingly queer-navel-gazing and self indulgent because the horrible space goblins have consumed my brain:

- Mobile ears, because if hearing is so well developed and important to them they should be able to aim those big stupid radar dishes. Also because then they can emote with them and that's cute. THE AESTHETIC IS PARAMOUNT.

- Since they canonically sharpen their teeth with chew sticks and sharpeners, their teeth must grow continuously. So I submit: subcultures that let certain teeth grow out as a fashion/political statement. Ferengi punks and anarchists with 5" tusks. Ferengi with all their teeth filed flat (mom and dad HATE it).

- Corollary to the above, most of their teeth are crooked. At the least, they don't share our fetish for straight teeth. What if their teeth are deciduous, and there's no point in trying to force them into perfect alignment, since they'll just fall out and get replaced? So like, sharks but their teeth can also grow longer with no limit. WHAT HAST EVOLUTION WROUGHT ON FERENGINAR :V

- Parents nagging their kids to sharpen their teeth "or they'll grow up into your brain and you'll die :)"

- Personal space? Don't know her.

Okay I need a cut because there's too many now. WHOLE SOCIETY OF GAY HOMOPHOBIC UNCLES AND AUNTS GO I HAVE A PROBLEM

- I can't remember who on here put forth the idea of them having retractable claws but Yes. :3

- Pushing back against the worst canon episode a bit but: relative ear size being the only obvious sexually dimorphic trait, and even that having enough of a gray area that the only way to be 100% sure you're talking to a male or female Ferengi is if you do a blood test. Unless they're intersex! *shrug emoji*

- This is why they're so fanatical about gender conformity and their Victorian "separate spheres" attitude to men and women's roles. Capitalist patriarchy is fragile! And as artificial to Ferengi as it ever was to Humans! (self-indulgenceeeee about gender shiiiiit)

- You know how with domesticated rabbits, the rabbit getting groomed and paid attention to is the boss? Yeah. Go ahead and paint your bestie's nails, just don't be surprised if she cops a little bit of an attitude with you from then on.

- Their fight/flight/freeze/fawn instincts skew heavily toward the last three, and what a lot of other species read as annoying sucking up is the Ferengi in question feeling anxious and unsafe. Especially if they don't feel integrated into the group. Even being at the bottom of the pecking order is better than not being in the flock at all.

- If they DO opt for fight, it's ugly and typically their last resort. Bites or scratches will get infected without intervention-- microbes that their immune system can handle could cause big trouble for aliens. You might wanna check for full or partial teeth that break off and get lodged in the wound, too.

- Too many of these are tooth related but I don't care. :B More teeth stuff: you know what else has teeth that grow constantly? Puffer fish. Likewise, Ferengi can chew up mollusk shells as easy as potato chips, and they need the minerals for their teeth. (Imagine grandpa Sisko offering Nog a crayfish for the first time and watching as he just...pops the whole damn thing in his mouth and crunches away...)

- Their staple foods seem to be grubs and other arthropods, high in protein and fat. I've unilaterally decided their cuisine also involves a lot of edible fungi, ferns, plant shoots and seeds. Gotta get those vitamins. Overall flavor profile leaning toward umami, vegetal, and fresh herbs, and pretty mild (or "delicate" if you wanna be snooty about it, which a Ferengi probably would let's be real).

- Not much sugary food. I'm basing this solely on Quark's aversion to root beer as "cloying". Which could definitely just be his personal preference, but most of the people I hear hating on root beer cite the actual sassafras/sarsaparilla flavor (saying it tastes like medicine) not the sweetness. Nog might be the weirdo outlier for being able to enjoy it.

- Their home planet isn't bright and sunny, so their eyes are better at discerning shades of gray in low light conditions, with relatively weak color vision. Which could explain why they dress Like That.

- Conversely, human music has a reputation for stinking on ice because a lot of it is juuuuust lightly dissonant or out of tune because we can't pick up flaws that small. Ferengi can, and it drives them up the *wall*.

- Music? So many different kinds. Traditionally, maybe lots of percussion and winds, and water as a common component of many instruments to alter pitch or tone. Polyphony out the ass. Some of the modern stuff is an impenetrable wall of sound if you're not a species with a lot of brain real estate devoted to processing sounds. Pick out one melody to follow at a time.

- Yes, back to teeth again I'm sorry. It's a sickness. At some point in their history, pre-chewing food was just something you did for your baby or great grandma as a matter of necessity. Possibly your baby gets an important boost to their immune system and gut biome from your spit. At some point takes on a more formal intimacy aspect and gradually drifted from something all adults and older kids do to something only women do. Your husband and older kids have perfectly functional teeth, but you love them, right? =_= (Think old memes about husbands being useless in the kitchen if little wifey isn't there to cook, but even more ridiculous. Ishka was right about everything but especially this. Thank you for making your family chew their own food, Ishka. Not all heroes wear capes. Or anything!)

- How did they get started on the whole men: clothed vs women: unclothed nonsense? My equally stupid idea: men just get cold easier. Those huge ears dissipate a ton of body heat. Cue Ferengi cliches like "jeez, we could be standing on the surface of the sun and my husband would put on another layer." At some point, again, this got codified and pushed to ridiculous extremes in the name of controlling women and keeping everyone in their assigned box, to the point that women just have to shiver if they really are too cold and men have to pass out from heat stroke if the alternative is going shirtless, because That Would Be Inappropriate.

- Marriages default to five years, but they're also the only avenue for women to have their own household or any stability. Plus their religion places no emphasis on purity save for pure adherence to the free market and the RoA. So, curveball to the rest of their patriarchal bullshit: female virginity isn't a concern in the least. Bring it up and they'll rightly side-eye you.

- Family law is absolutely bonkers and lawyers that specialize in it make BANK. I feel like custody would default to the father usually but oh wait, the maternal grandfather has a legal stake in this, too, and your next father-in-law is asking HOW many kids are you dragging into my daughter's house, etc etc. Growing up with a full sibling is way rarer than growing up with half or stepsiblings, since it usually takes both men and women two or three tries to find someone they vibe with. (Not love, unless you're super cringe.)

- A misogynistic society is a homophobic society. Imo those flavors of shittiness just come in pairs. Homosexual behaviors are fine within certain parameters (aka "always have sex with the boss") but not on your own terms. To add spice, bisexuality is their most common mode (because I'm bi and these are my hcs for my fics I'm not writing, so there), but capitalism demands fresh grist for the mill so you better get het-married and pop out some kids you lowly peons. You have a choice so make the proper one. :)

- Corollary to the above, that doesn't keep all kinds of illicit "we're just friends with quid-pro-quo benefits for realsies" affairs of every stripe and every gender from going on everywhere. Many Ferengi have a lightbulb moment somewhere in early adulthood when they figure out their dad's business partner or the "auntie" who visited their mom every month had a little more going on.

- Plus there's way more gender non-conformity and varying degrees of trans-ing than the powers that be have a handle on. Pel isn't unique, even if most would have to somehow make it out into space to be able to thrive.

Damn a lot of these are just my personal bugbears plus THE GILDED AGE BUT WITH HAIRLESS SPACE RODENTS ain't they

- Women can't earn profit, okay. But lending or "lending" things to each other isn't commerce, riiiiiiight? To be assigned female is to master navigating a vast, dizzying barter/gift economy. Smart boys and men leverage this, too, and there are splinter sects that view this as the purest expression of the Great Material Continuum.

- Of course plenty of women make profit anyway, and just do their bast to dodge the FCA. The tough thing about insisting on using latinum as currency is that cash can be so hard to track, you know?

- Because of the RoA, guys are discouraged from doing favors or giving gifts without setting clear expectation of getting some return on investment. This can twist into an expression of friendship (and of course women do it too), and the ledger will keep cycling between debit and credit among friends for decades. A common mistake aliens make is to tell them recompense isn't needed without explaining why, or return their favor or present with something that zeroes out the debt. The Ferengi will assume you want to break off the friendship. (I cribbed this from dim memories of an African studies course I took in 2007 and whose textbook I know I still have but I can't frigging find it...)

- Flirting, they do a lot of it for a lot of reasons. Roddenberry made it clear that they're just straight up pretty horny, but there's no reason it can't pull double duty for building alliances with other people, smoothing over feuds or disagreements, or cementing friendships. Ferengi who are ace and/or sex-repulsed are possibly viewed similar to the way we'd view someone who's "not a hugger/not big on touching" and if they flirt just don't get offended if it doesn't go any further; aro Ferengi don't garner much comment aside from an occasional "wow how badass, never falling in love with anyone."

- where to even start on making sense of the Blessed Exchequer??? Like seriously, what is this literal prosperity gospel insanity, I need to force myself to re-read Rand and like, some Milton Friedman for this shit. Help.

- fuck I'm probably going to actually do that, RIP me...

[timemachineyeah]

This is how it sneaks up on you. I’m looking for a new phone case.

I keep finding myself holding my phone in ways that make my fingers hurt, so I looked into getting a strap or something for my phone. But the problem is whenever I pictured them on my phone it made me sad because it felt kind of ugly with my case.

And I realized if I’m going to keep not buying a strap because of aesthetics with the current case that it might be better to just get a new case with some kind of strap or finger support already there, so I can address the aesthetic and finger support simultaneously.

And since the whole reason I didn’t just get a loop or something is because it wouldn’t be cute, I might as well get something really cute.

I don’t usually care so much, but when it’s something you look at and interact with every day, you want it to make you smile, or at least not be disappointing.

So I’m shopping around for phone cases. My current case is classy because when I got it I had a weird bug in my ass about looking adult for once. But now I know better and I want something nerdy. Most of what I can find on Etsy that fits my criteria are bootlegs, which I don’t rule out, but I’d rather give my money to more legit independent fan operations. Especially without the presumed art theft.

So I find myself typing in terms. Sailor Moon phone case. Mermaid phone case. Steven Universe phone case. UFO phone case. Beauty and the Beast phone case. Fraggle Rock phone case. Octopus phone case.

What else? What else makes me happy? What do I like that I assume enough other people like that it’s reasonable to hope some genuine indie maker has hand-made something cute for it?

Harry Potter

The answer is there but it’s not true any more. But it’s still there. Like a habitual prayer. Recited so often your brain does it without you, a song stuck in your head. It used to be my favorite song. For a while.

And it’s not like the other things that stopped being fun. Sure, some seasons of Doctor Who disappointed, but I can go back to the ones I like. And that was the show itself that let me down. Sure, people were behind it, but it was the story that wasn’t fun anymore.

Harry Potter finished its story and it was fun from the first book to the last. Sure JKR could retcon and expand and sequel to her hearts content but that didn’t touch the story that had been told, the books that had been published. It was done. She couldn’t take it away.

But she could. And she did. In the worst way possible.

Can you have a parasocial relationship with a franchise?

They are far from perfect books. Even before the controversies spread, the varnish had started to wear off. What am I supposed to do? Tell eleven year old me (hiding in a closet to avoid chores and read the day after Christmas) that she has bad taste? Tell closeted repressed teen queer me who spent hours theorizing with her outcasted queer friends that they couldn’t do that any more? What’s done is done. If Harry Potter had never existed, maybe I would have hauled myself out of Tartarus by other means. Maybe it wasn’t the book, but me. Or maybe in another universe I am far worse off. It doesn’t matter. I’ll never know. While I cannot know what would happen in another timeline, I cannot deny in this one that the formative impact of Harry Potter was an unquestionable good for my life. It was a source of comfort, courage, and community that I had no replacement for.

And I hate that. Because she fed off of it. She took that joy and that enthusiasm and that earnest love and she turned it into power and influence and once she’d stolen all that power and influence she turned it around and abused my people, the community that made me whole. She exploited the excitement and wonder of children to amass power to hate and oppress those same children as they grew up and more children besides.

I think about them. If I’m buying from a maker and not her, then she doesn’t get my money. Does that really hurt?

The question is moot. Putting aside how others might feel in the presence of such an artifact, I would not feel joy. I could get a hand made trans positive Harry Potter case, but whenever I saw it I’d just be thinking about all this again. It’d make me sad. And that is the point, isn’t it? To get a phone case that makes me happy, makes me smile. So it can’t be Harry Potter anyway. Not for me.

I am not wanting for small joys. If it is for want of a themed phone case or fantasy novel, the hole left by her betrayal of the trans community is easily filled. There are, indeed, other books.

But when I think of other lost passions, they do not sting the same way. With them, we grew apart. That happens. Sometimes you grow and your old shoes don’t fit any more. Sometimes they change the recipe of your favorite snack. That’s not a betrayal in the same way.

If tomorrow the creators of any other thing I ever stopped loving came out and said, “Wow, I did a bad job, and I am aware of that, and I’m sorry” it wouldn’t fix the source material. That’s what hurts. They are flawed books, but if tomorrow she sent out a press release going “Wow, I got radicalized like an asshole I’m sorry. That was incredibly transphobic. And I have also been tone deaf to downright colonialist on these many other issues. Here’s major donations to all these relevant nonprofits and an action plan to start repairing the damage” I don’t know if I would forgive her? But I know I would want to. And in either case I know I would finally feel like I might be able to enjoy a reread of the books that meant so much to me.