I Don't Know. This Is Far Too Reductive, Of Course, But I Kind Of Think That There Is A Very Real And

I don't know. This is far too reductive, of course, but I kind of think that there is a very real and notable difference between the way that violence was treated in the 1960s Star Trek, which was written in the shadow of nuclear armageddon twenty years after the bloodiest war in human history (and largely by people who had fought in that war), and in the newer series, where the writers' experience of violence comes primarily from action movies and video games.

Like, I think that there's a tendency of people in the present to imagine that people in the past were naive and...I really don't think that history bears this out. I don't think that subversion is always clever just because a trope can be subverted. I think that imagining that your enemy might be an actual moral actor with whom it's possible to reason is actually a great deal more mature than imagining your enemy as a bloodthirsty monster who will kill by nature.

We owe Una McCormack for her published beta-cannon (alpha-cannon to me) pining, angst, and fluff for Garashir in Enigma Tales

I've seen several cases where people are like "what happens if we meet aliens, and then they see Independence Day or War of the Worlds?"

But nobody seems to think about what happens when the aliens see Star Trek.

The aliens are gonna see these shows made by a bunch of humans but they put putty on some of the humans to make them look like what we think aliens might look like, and we told stories about how those aliens would be our friends and we'd explore the universe with them and find more aliens and try to be friends with them too!

Yeah sometimes they'd be mean and we'd fight but we'd always try to avoid it and even if we fought we'd try to be friends later.

We basically created 900 episodes of a child's drawing of a stick figure of a human and a stick figure of a grey alien holding hands and "best friends" written in crayon.

spock’s room decor is actually fucking bonkers. The weapons??? the big red velvet curtain??? like ok phantom of the opera go crazy.

for reference jim’s room has some photos and a plant so we can surmise this is uniquely a spock being a dramatic weirdo thing

I was thinking about how if Julian picks up skills and information he must have made an intentional effort to avoid learning as little history as possible to have such a blind spot for it in canon

And then I thought about how impossible it would be to have proper analysis of something like Shakespeare without historical context

And then I thought that logically Julian must not have been terribly into classical literature as a result, and he must've only started reading it so he could take part in the culture exchange with Garak

And then I thought of the headcanon that Garak actually has trash taste in literature and is pretending these cardassians novels are Great Works of Art

So these two idiots are sitting there every week just having The Worst takes on everything because Julian is bullshitting his way through a justification of the text with only half an idea of what is actually going on in it himself, and the only reason he's torturing himself with this stuff instead of talking about the 24th century's Jack Reacher is because he wants to look cool and sophisticated to Garak, who really has the literary taste of the average Mills and Boon reader

oh, to be loved very much and very dearly, even on awful days