No Notes - Blog Posts
who and how will they remember you?
d20exchange pinch hit for @apple-scrumper
recent yeen stuff, there was a particular vibe at the time
THIS!!! THIS IS WHAT I CAME FOR!!!!
A fair argument, a good supporting evidence, and a perspective I had not thought of prior!
And also sorry I can't spell!!!! Like at all!! Sorry
This is to go with my other post where I gave my shpeal on why Morty works so much better as a woman.
I didn't wanna add this to it/reblog it with this because that post was too long already, and the other post was more about how there should be more primarch moms.(adopted mothers of the scattered primarchs)
And this one is:
Which Primarchs work better as women/femme:
Putrabo
Konrad Curze
Mortarion
Jagathai Khan
Magnus
Leman Russ
Okay, now explanations (warning this is gonna be looonggg)
Also, this is just my opinion. Please feel free to change and argue why!!! I love in-depth literary analysis and debate!
So, fist off after that, yes, I feel a majority of the traitors would make more sense as women, specifically their storylines, seem to work well with women leads. And would offer a more nuanced reading. (Also, this would totally piss off those fucking anti-woke chuds)
- Perturabo(Petra)- I could have also made dorn fem but I like the extra dichotomy their relationship is given as a brother sister dynamic. Both are different sides of the same coin. Even more so.
She would also be underestimated and compared to her shining golden brother. Her hate is that of women just as qualified for a job getting skipped over for an equally qualified man. (Yes, I know Putrabo's made to know how to tear things down where Dorn is made to fortify. But again, it's allegorical, that extra layer)
-Konrad (Kassandra)- she'd be such a Bipolar queen. Okay, done... nah, I got a little more.
So I feel not much is different until u reach that adult phase, more so than the others. Her madness and lunacy are painted much worse, but she's still on business. She despises her father(Emps) but does as she says. She's the freaky screwed up daughter (very Jinx-like) where Sanguinia is the perfect daddy's girl, and it makes Kass sick.
Mortarion(Morticia)- please see previous post
Jagathai Kahn(Khutulun) - okay, little out of left field, and truthfully, I don't know enough about the cannon warhawk to justify saying that a fem Warhawk is "better" but I wanted at least one othe loyalist fem primarch. Also, this lets me keep the yuricest between her and Magnolia (Magnus)
Magnus (Magnolia)- speaking of the red cyclops, I think having the biggest primarch be fem is just phenomenal, also it adds a woman confidently attempting to uptain more understanding of the universe as a whole, being very scientific in her approach only to be called sorceress/witch in the persuit of knowledge. And in the end, only to be driven mad trying to get even the smallest bit of control.
(Also, as mentioned above, a huge bonus of it keeps my Khan x Magnus ship gay and better, yuri)
-Leman Russ(Freya) OK, so I feel Feya works better than her male counterpart only because it would be almost poetic. Having her raised by a mother wolf and so she takes that role over for her sons(legion).
Again, these are just my opinions, so if u disagree, that's totally fine! 😊 I love sparking discussions and seeing where other people's heads are at.
And sorry if this isn't really coherent. I'm kinda writing this sleep deprived and starving. 😅
Imma make ramen now 😆 🤣
Clearly had my priorities straight on Valentine’s Day lmao
That charity stream added 10 years to my life, watered my plants, fed my dogs, paid off my car, cooked my dinner, finished my essays, wrote a whole 276 page novel, & gave me a dopamine rush the likes of which I doubt I will ever feel again.
i enjoy rewatching kristen’s scene with buddy because like. imagine your locker just got tagged and ur trying to be diplomatic about it because you’re in a public hallway so you try to keep appearances right? you’re running for president! but the sticker was of ur rival’s party and not even for her campaign. anyway you ignore that because this pasty rotten proselytizer has just mentioned to you apparently absolving himself of whatever horror his spells have wrought in assigning agency to..god? by the raising of his hand in a twisted form of praise? and your brain is going a mile a minute trying to connect the hazy frayed edges of thought he’s leaking out (grades are of the material world)(i pray before during after football games we win)(helio doesn’t make mistakes, kristen)(helio’s holding onto us tight)(they’re all gonna go straight to hell) and you are looking into a mirror of your past and seeing the zeal simmering underneath his gall now. how dare he? really? (every cleric has to have some kinda deity, right?)(i don’t feel any control over life) and in your head you see yolanda, who severed ties to her divinity to teach with compassion and a fairness that must’ve been in itself holy, dead. (i don’t hold tight, ‘cause i’m in someone’s hand.) and you worry about bucky, about what he could become without you holding him tight (i’m happy to look after him.) and your muscles tense up as you smile politely, a smile that doesn’t quite reach your eyes stony, impassive, like the wall you’re building to keep this serpent from striking at those you love. (careful.) and you, ready to defend, say, i’ll fucking show you.
I still have tons to say about the Garashir Goes Canon™ moment in Lower Decks so here is my big meta post about it! Below the cut is a meta discussion about the penultimate Lower Decks episode, contextualizing what it means for something to become canon.
To be clear, this is a mostly positive post with analysis included. You’ll see lots of love for Garashir and Lower Decks and also oodles of fandom meta below the cut, since we have a complicated relationship with Paramount. My analysis and graphic is based on a recent lecture about Star Trek canon I gave at KiScon!
First, I have to say that both Unification and this Lower Decks episode following mere weeks after of my lecture panel at KiScon titled Fuck Paramount, about what Star Trek canon really is and what its place is in relation to us as slash fans, is absolutely mind-blowing timing. I wish everyone in both the K/S and Garashir fandoms had been able to attend it because it was absolutely designed to serve as a framework for both of these major fandom moments. And also it was just funny as hell. But most importantly, it was relevant, and existed to give us a sense of understanding when navigating Paramount hell, particularly when they play Gay Chicken (will they, won’t they — most of the time, they won’t).
Since not every single Star Trek fan on this website was at KiScon last month, I want to expand on that a little more here, this time in Garashir context, since last time it was centered on K/S, though Garashir came up several times! When I was giving my lecture, I asked the audience what it would look like if K/S were made canon tomorrow. Everyone had different ideas—but the most common theme that came up was sheer distrust of Paramount doing it justice.
For those of you that are reading this, the thesis of Fuck Paramount was that you as a fan and a viewer have more control over what is and isn’t canon than you think, and that our role as fans is to take ownership of our stories back from corporate interests. I also developed a four-sided framework to describe how we interact with canon to take power back and make sense of canon. Both Unification and the very, very fresh Lower Decks episode have already been controversial for a number of reasons, the primary one they share being: “Wait… does this make this canon?”
So far it looks like the main reactions for this Lower Decks episode (especially considering how sudden and late in its run it is) are mostly “HOLY SHIT THEY REALLY DID IT” and “I AM DISAPPOINTED BY THE MERE SCRAPS.”
And my position on it is that both of them are completely reasonable reactions that don’t contradict one another! I’m going to make the case for both sides as I try to explore the implications of this episode with respect to the episode’s subtext, corporate storytelling, and so forth. I’m not going to go too much into the academic aspects, but I am happy to make the original slides available for anyone who is curious about my canon analysis framework.
Why It’s Enough
On one hand, this episode is done well. Undeniably. It’s a lot of fun. I have also said many times before that the only way I’d want K/S or G/B to become canon is if they suddenly randomly drop the info that they were married and don’t bring it up again, because otherwise they might do more harm than good! This was an example of it done incredibly well, in my opinion.
This episode serves as all the confirmation you could possibly really need of Garashir. Yes, there are quite a few gimmicks involved—it’s all AU, all the way. Garak is now a surgeon from another dimension, and Bashir is from an entirely different dimension, and also not really himself, but a hologram. Here’s how they’re introduced:
WILLIAM BOIMLER: “Elim Garak, a brilliant Cardassian Surgeon—and his husband, an emergency medical hologram based on Dr. Julian Bashir.”
What I really love about this moment is that it actually does more than it looks like it does, at face value. For most of us, our first instinct is to go, whatever, he’s based on Bashir, he’s not even the real one! But what they did here was brilliant—it serves as implicit confirmation that our man Bashir is also bisexual, and loves Garak. He is indeed not a corporeal human being, but as the DS9 episode where the LMH is designed based on Bashir tells us, the hologram is designed and based on who he is. It has his personality traits. Interviews are conducted to make sure that the hologram is as authentic and true to the real thing as possible:
O'BRIEN: “You mean this programme is going to have all of his personal likes and dislikes?” ZIMMERMAN: “That is why we bother to choose a human template in the first place.”
William Boimler, from the prime Star Trek universe, doesn’t say the EMH is based on some Bashir, he says this one is based on Dr. Julian Bashir. Again, this serves as clear confirmation that he is modeled on recognizably the same character from DS9. They’re not that different in essence from their prime universe counterparts, or it wouldn’t be fun for the writers or the audience. We learn that Garak is still former Obsidian Order. They are still the same people, in essence. They may be AU characters but the point is for them to be similar to the originals, or they may as well just have been some guys!
The important thing, for me, is that it’s a clear, unambiguous acknowledgement. It’s played straight. Well, not straight—but not as some elaborate joke or filled with contempt. It doesn’t tease and doesn’t dance around the issue and wink and nudge, begging the viewer to question whether or not they’re together. That much is made immediately very clear. In the episode, AU Garak and AU EMH Bashir are a married couple, and they kiss. Every moment of their relationship is sincere, the comedic moments being not about the fact that their relationship exists, but about the dynamics it brings to the story. It also tells us very clearly that they’re not even from the same universe, and that their compatibility remains nonetheless:
HARRY KIM: “Are they from the same reality?” CURZON: “No, but they love to brag about how statistically unlikely their marriage is.”
Again, I tend to see this as a positive nod to the compatibility of these characters rather than a brush-off that says the prime universe Garashir couldn’t be together. And then Garak tells us his universe’s Bashir is like the original: still a racquetball player and competes with Chief O’Brien—again, revealing quite a bit.
And the B-plot is about them squabbling, acknowledging very clearly to us that Cardassians really do just love flirting via argument, which serves as a brilliant nod to everyone who complained for three decades that the DS9 writers never really admitted that Bashir and Garak were just flirting. Finally! The writers seem to understand quite well what’s important to us, even if this isn’t the ‘Real Garashir.’
What satisfies me ultimately is that this doesn’t in any way look like a rejection of the possibility of Garashir in the prime universe. It looks to me like it supports the text, not a mean-spirited denial that it could only happen under bizarre AU circumstances. To sum it up with another Boimler quote:
BOIMLER: “The multiverse is just a rehash of stuff I already know.”
Hm… :)
And as I pointed out in a prior post, the whole point of the episode is to show that even in different circumstances and worlds, the love characters have for one another remains a constant and is utterly transcendent. The episode straight up tells us that some relationships are so powerful that they span dimensions and realities, and then Garak and Bashir say they would follow one another to any reality!
In my panel-lecture, I said, “[Paramount’s control over the text] suggests that certain readings require their endorsement or confirmation to be true.” But this doesn’t feel like that to me, and so I accept this. It leaves room for possibilities of all kinds, and opens more doors rather than closing them. I can appreciate that.
I also spoke about how canon isn’t one thing—not a binary yes or a no, and that there is no singular meaning. I call this multiplicity:
“Multiplicity is about the continuous proliferation of ideas and the rejection of the text as having a single meaning. It rejects mere viewing or the consumption of media in favor of dialogue and participation rather than a one-way communication.”
This episode served to defy singular interpretations of the text. It tells us that there are infinite possibilities and it took a route that challenges the single-story interpretation of Garashir = Not Canon. It made room for new perspectives and affirmed what “the stuff we already know.”
Why It’s Not Enough
Now for the other side of the coin: why it’s not enough. As exciting as it is to have this kind of confirmation from the current writers for Star Trek in a frankly increasingly conservative storytelling environment, it’s still disappointing for many people that even in the most progressive Star Trek that exists, they cannot or will not openly state that the prime universe Garashir got the ending and acknowledgment they deserved.
It feels like begging Paramount as a corporation for scraps and thanking them for what really doesn’t feel like enough—it stops short of full, sincere, complete validation of Garashir’s queerness. As I said in my panel, it’s normal for us to want confirmation from the writers and creators that what we’re seeing is real and not just imagined, even when the role of fanfiction is for us to transform canon and reject it ourselves.
It’s absolutely exhausting for us to say we see something that is continuously denied by those who ‘own’ the story in favor of mass appeal, and to me, that is a legitimate perspective that can coexist with the idea that fandom is designed reshape the canon to fits its own needs, and that we don’t need confirmation from the creators for something to be true. Fandom exists to defy corporate ownership of stories, but to have to fight for mere moments where marginalized perspectives are foregrounded causes anger for good reason. We may not need confirmation from them, but saying that we should never expect anything from Paramount releases the corporation of accountability and obligation to respect the audience and their own characters. We should be able to expect and trust that these characters and their relationships can be done justice by those who have the privilege of steering that ship.
It’s one thing for me to say that this episode affirms the reality of Garashir, but it’s also true that prime Garashir probably could not be given complete canonization because this is the best way they knew how to ‘get away with it’ all while maintaining its mainstream and popular appeal with heteronormative audiences that would have a problem or reject it if it happened to ‘real Garashir.’
Slash fans, for decades, have existed in the lane of compromise—firmly between having our truth validated and entirely rejected in favor of a Star Trek that is designed to be sold as a product to as many people as possible. Rarely do we receive more than a bone tossed to us by the powers that be, and when we do receive it, it’s on their incomplete terms, often with massive concessions made to make it happen. For Garashir to receive their blessing, they had to twist it into an AU. The reason they could do this episode is because it gave them the neat plausible deniability to also say this has nothing at all to do with prime Garashir, so that it didn’t entirely alienate audiences who wouldn’t support a queer narrative.
This is their way of having their cake and eating it too. In some ways, it looks like they’re just trying to make everyone happy, but the story shouldn’t have to make everyone happy, and a compromise can really just feel like everyone loses, or like prioritizing the status quo again. For decades, the status quo has always left those with marginalized readings of the text unhappy, sidelined by a narrative that is supposed to be progressive and supposed to look to a future where queerness is natural and not taboo. And if this is the best they can do, it’s only reasonable that it should still sadden us, disappoint us, anger us. It’s hard not to resent that reality.
What Now?
I urge folks to continue negotiating the text, as I did above in the first section. I made sense of it in a way that fits my understanding of Garashir! You do not have to assume that there’s no more to it than that because it was all that was said on screen. We don’t have to look at canonization as the final say on the text. My perspective is that we should take it as a wonderful and deserved affirmation, and continue to transform the canon as we see fit. This is your time to decide what it means for these characters. Personally, I see it as a massively positive step forward. Just remember that where canon is concerned, you are in control of what it means.
Canon is still transformable, multiplicative, negotiated, and timely. Holders of the ‘IP’ are only one piece of the puzzle where the truth of a story is concerned. So take this as a beginning to more, not an end! As I like to say, “canon is a means to an end, not the end itself.”
Also, please don’t hesitate to add your thoughts, questions, comments, or anything else. I hope you enjoyed this meta post, if you read this far.
the elusive samurai has no right to be as absurdist and funny as it is. Truly a story about a bunch of adults trying to find a kid they don’t know the appearance of and having said kid play tricks on them under the guise of childhood games to level up video game style.
A guy who may be god and is aware of PC culture gatekeeps, gaslights and girlbosses said kid along with a bunch of other children he collected and sets them loose on unsuspecting adults to murder them with the final destination being that somehow they’re gonna overthrown Japan.
i think this does get critiqued sometimes like I think we're supposed to see naruto's enduring loyalty to Sasuke as overall a noble/good thing but in the case of the uchiha massacre the uchiha's disloyalty to the village is used to justify their deaths and Itachi putting the village first is seen as a good thing i.e. loyalty to comrades is only good when they are loyal to the state which is deeply disturbing
I think it’s interesting how Shikamaru is basically saying that Sasuke is worth risking their lives for because he is a shinobi from the hidden leaf and therefore a comrade, instead of it being because he’s a kid who’s essentially being abducted by an incredibly dangerous enemy. He’s not a comrade in the sense of being someone he knows in a dangerous situation, but in the sense of being loyal to the hidden leaf, implying that once he fully cuts those ties to the village he will no longer be worthy of help/protection, which is exactly how he gets treated by Shikamaru and most of the Konoha 11 when he becomes a rogue ninja. Even the core ideas of loyalty and protecting one another are wrapped up in the nationalism of the show.
been thinking about my baby bro