Set a Course, For Memes

i need a recepticle for my opinions. apologies that you have to see it Main Blog is hegglespeggles.tumblr.com 

[fantashic]

Average Deep Space Nine A plot: "What are you willing to sacrifice for the chance at a better world? Who are you willing to hurt? Will the pain you cause now outweigh the peace that it might bring? When both choices are bad, and you do what you think is best, can you live with yourself after? Could you live with yourself if you made the opposite choice?"

Average Deep Space Nine B plot: "What do we do with all this hot sauce!?"

[pencilscratchins]

please tell me every bit of ds9 drama

oh theres simply too much to cover in one post, so i will limit myself to spreading the legend of Andrew Robinson's fan fiction

So; it's the mid 90's and known character actor Andrew Robinson was just cast as Garak on Deep Space Nine: a one off character, intended to have a single episode in season one. Cut to 1999 its the final season of the show and Garak gets a special send off as a fan favorite recurring character in the shows final moments. How did that happen? Well, the short answer is: Andrew Robinson is bonkers and I'm obsessed with him.

Okay so in order to frame this, you have to know that Andy Robinson? is an ActOUR okay? he is like a well and true, trained classical performer and as such, he would often approach roles (regardless of size) with complete conviction. Garak was no different. He practiced a technique that a lot of older actors would use. Andy wrote a journal from the perspective of Garak to get a feel for the character before he even APPEARED on the show! Andy literally wrote over 200 words of extremely detailed backstory for Garak. Again, NOBODY ASKED HIM TO DO THIS. BUT he showed up to the DS9 writers room with this CHARACTER BIBLE of his gay lizard OC and said "hey i wrote all of this about this one off character that you tricked me into playing because I originally auditioned for Odo, didn't get it, and pressured me with money to appear as Garak (story for another time)," and it was all SO GOOD and the writers loved it so much that they literally couldnt help but keep him on the show. (also, clearly, the writers loved his performance and audiences loved the character, so there was a lot of support of keeping him on the show but really: its all because Andy put his whole ass into this show LMAOO)

Garak's backstory as written by Andy was hugely influential in how his character would later be developed and tons of ideas that Andy wrote about became real canon for the character; and he later expanded the bible into a longer story which would be published in 2000 in the novel "A Stitch in Time."

BUT THIS ISN'T THE END OF ANDY'S WRITING! as the show continued and Garak's popularity grew, Andy became a super popular guest at cons. Clearly a talented writer, Andy would (in his free time) write one shots of Garak's pre DS9 life and inner thoughts on the station, and READ THEM ALOUD AT CONS! While I can't vouch to any of these stories being explicitly Garak/Bashir romantic in nature (though if you attended any of these cons and have more info, please share it) Andrew's writing became a thing of legend. In fact, he and Siddig (who is a gem) actually cowrote a play called "The Dream Box" about Garak and Bashir that they would act out at cons! INSANE! (needless to say, this was less than thrilling to the infamously homophobic producer of 90's trek, Rick Berman who was vocally against Garashir and didn't like Andy very much at all)

In a truly incredible move, Andy and Sid's regard for fan fic was again shown this past year when the two of them teamed up to perform two fics over zoom, vocally supporting fandom creators and reiterating their love of Garashir as a ship.

[ponett]

you just don't get shit like this with 8-episode streaming seasons

[kremblor]

On "Random Thoughts" and remembering this is the episode where Tuvok decides he's just gonna share a bunch of violent thoughts with a random dude.

Like, Tuvok is just THAT Vulcan. Everyone else all "science science science" and Tuvok out there like "violence violence violence"

I mean, he controls it, but you know that man has studied everything he can in regards to combat and tactics. Let him lose and things will get interesting.

No but really, Vulcans have a whole philosophy based on logic in order to ensure their violent impulses do not get shared. That they do not act upon them. They created their entire culture and society to be all about preserving themselves through logic and avoiding the violence of their history. They strive to keep their violent impulses at bay. So much so that Vulcans fear humans when they come across them - ENT got into that one I got a post on it - because of how they remind them of themselves. Meanwhile, Trek frequently gives us the Vulcan Ambassador or the Vulcan scientists or the Vulcan priestess but we rarely actively see the other Vulcans that must be out there. Then with VOY they hand is Tuvok on a silver platter "here is the Vulcan who wrestles with the violent thoughts and impulses and instead of embracing other paths of logic embraces learning about them in order to control them" and that is POWERFUL.

[stra-tek]

[brat-q]

[lordmccoveycove]

Hi there. Have a Moopsy.

[gettheorion]

[smaragd-torony]

self-reminder for this months grind

[coraniaid]

During the ongoing Buffy rewatch we've been talking about and around a few interconnected issues.

The fact nobody outside the core gang seems particularly worried about all the signs of vampire activity (even if you don't jump to 'vampires' as your explanation, surely the number of students who just go missing or the times the school or the Bronze is attacked by PCP-abusing gang members with sharp teeth should worry people much more than it seems to?)

The fact that Willow and Xander never talk about Jesse after The Harvest, and Cordelia never talks about her dead boyfriend Kevin after Prophecy Girl, and nobody talks about Buffy's fellow teen delinquent Sheila after School Hard, and nobody talks about the fact Angel killed Theresa after Phases, and nobody seems to have noticed when Harmony became a vampire, and so on.

The general lack of preparation for vampires on the part of people who really should know better (whether that's the gang continuing to meet in the school library despite it being attacked by vampires multiple times in the show's first fifteen episodes, or Buffy not doing anything about the fact a vampire came to her house and attacked her mother in Angel except hunting down that one specific vampire, or characters who know vampires are real repeatedly walking around Sunnydale at night without even carrying crosses with them...).

As I've argued, I don't think there's a particularly strong in-universe justification for any of this. I think it's just baked into the show's premise to a pretty large extent (Buffy can't juggle an ordinary life at school and her destiny of fighting demons and vampires at night unless she's allowed to have a fairly regular school life, which significantly limits how much the mundane world can be allowed to react to signs of the supernatural) and that some of it is just of the consequence of the show being a loosely serialized work of network television (Sheila exists within School Hard but not beyond it: they only signed the actor up for one episode and they don't want to confuse casual viewers by mentioning her later). The show itself doesn't really want to dwell on the fact Xander and Willow had a close friend who died, because that's not the sort of story the writers are interested in telling. So we get a quick line in The Harvest from Giles to the effect that "people have a tendency to rationalize what they can and forget what they can't", and we're just not meant to think too much about the fact that regular attendees of the Bronze will have witnessed multiple vampire attacks and lost several friends there and yet kept coming back to the Bronze night after night.

I think it would be interesting, though, to imagine a slightly different version of the show. One which leaned a little harder into the horror elements all of this implies. What if, instead of just appealing to some supposed human instinct to rationalize the inexplicable away, the show told us that the Hellmouth itself was the reason people kept acting like this? What if, just as the supernatural energies of the Hellmouth attract vampires and demons and impossibly giant insects, they also have a corrosive magical impact on people's memories? (We know, after all, that this sort of thing is not something the show would later shy away from: Jonathan in Superstar, Dawn's whole deal in Season 5 and beyond, whatever the mysterious and largely unexplained connection was between Ben and Glory, ...)

Imagine a version of the show where Giles told us in The Harvest that the Hellmouth itself was actively trying to make people forget about vampires. As the Slayer, Buffy is immune to this effect, and with careful preparation and training (which is what the Watchers do) or just a bit of luck combined with some very traumatic experiences ordinary humans can also fight off the effect to some degree, but most people on a Hellmouth will:

Forget about seeing any vampire's true face minutes after seeing it

Forget about seeing anybody turn to dust (and not think too hard about what that person was doing before or why they suddenly aren't around)

Have very vague memories of anybody who is bitten by a vampire: they don't necessarily forget about them completely, but they definitely don't remember seeing them bitten and (unless talking to the vampire they became) they generally don't think about them at all anymore (no funeral, no wondering where the body is, no wondering what they're up to and why they're not around right now)

What if Willow and Xander (and eventually Cordelia, and Oz, and a few other people like the members of the vampire-worshiping Sunset Club) were -- because of a combination of sheer luck, and their repeated close escapes from vampires, and people who knew the truth being at hand to explain right away -- mostly (but not entirely) immune? What if Buffy tries bringing up Jesse's death at the end of The Harvest, to tell her new friends how sorry she is she couldn't save him, only to be met by puzzled looks, or a vague recollection from Xander that ... oh, yeah, Jesse was a kid he used to know when he was younger, but he must've moved away at some point and Xander hasn't thought about him in years? What if Buffy does remember Jesse, and Kevin, and Sheila, and Theresa, and every other classmate who was killed by a vampire, but she doesn't ever talk about them because she knows from experience that nobody else does. (She doesn't know if Giles forgot about Jesse too and she's too afraid to ever outright ask.)

What if the Hellmouth itself is always exerting a constant pressure on people who should know better that makes them forget about crosses and holy water and not staying late after school? What if that's part of the reason vampires come to Sunnydale: even if you're not interested in ending the world, it's a great place to be a vampire because the Hellmouth is aware and (in some sense) actively on their side? What if the reason that only the Slayer can stand against the vampires and the demons isn't just a question of physical strength: what if it's not just carelessness that means people other than Buffy regularly walk around Sunnydale in the dark without even trying to protect themselves? What if, after he loses his soul, everyone but Buffy starts to forget about Angel too? What if the reason Giles needs to keep consulting his books for details on Angelus or Drusilla and Spike and never seems to have the information to hand is that the Hellmouth is constantly trying to make him forget everything he knows? What if the reason the Initiative start collecting vampires and demons in their underground base isn't to construct some ridiculous super-soldier: what if until they started doing that, they'd go out patrolling, fight several vampires each night, then all march back to base and confidently report that they'd had no encounters that night? What if Sunnydale's police know they're covering something up but can't ever remember exactly what it is, or that some of their fellow officers went to investigate reports of gang members hanging out in the cemetery one night and ... well, don't seem to have been around much since then? What if Joyce can't even remember the time a vampire attacked in her own house, so Buffy knows there's no point telling her mom the truth because even if she staked a vampire in front of her she'd forget all about it the next day?

To be clear, this isn't a headcanon as such: I don't think this is what's going on in the actual show at all. But I think this version of the show -- a version that leaned into the episodic nature of the early episodes and the absurdities imposed by the need to maintain the masquerade, and deliberately amplified the horror aspects of that and how it contributed to Buffy's increasing sense of isolation -- would have been pretty interesting.

[justsomeguycore]

knock knock

[dismembered-jackalope]

who's there

[justsomeguycore]

deez

[dismembered-jackalope]

sigh

deez who ?

[justsomeguycore]

deez are the voyages of the starship enterprise

[gothinkdexign]

[nonbinaryriker]

Full Romulan Dictionary from Archive.org

[yubsie]

It's a shame they never brought Q back on DS9 after Worf joined. I feel he would have been excited about Sisko's "We can hit Q" policy.

[vamptits]

she was at the club. it didnt change anything. it didnt save anyone. there were just too many forces against it. but it still matters that she was at the club.

[vamptits]

[shoreleave]

"When I was younger, I was terrified of [doctors]."

[moo9395]

I’m actually screaming WHAT this is in incredible

[shoreleave]

"When I was younger, I was terrified of [doctors]."