I am now a therapist on deep space nine and my job is to sort out the main cast. This is what would happen and how effective I have the potential to be based on their outlooks:
Sisko. Is annoyed about having to go. After session three he is name-dropping me in casual conversations with friends and thinks I am really clever but it's unclear how much of that is really just that I agree with his opinions. 9/10 point deducted because he treats me too much like a friend and too little like a therapist with a job.
Kira. Insists she does not need to go. Twenty minutes into session one she is describing the death of her father in intricate and pissed-off detail. 8/10 because any therapy at all is bound to be better than the status quo.
Dax. 10/10 but she does all the work herself and I begin to doubt why I am even in the room. Really just needs someone to talk at.
Julian. Lies to me the entire time. Asks me out at the end of session one and in a cruel twist of fate I am forced to turn him down in order to keep my job. Does not come back. 3/10
Jake. Talks to me about his dad and then talks to his dad about me and it kind of feels like I'm having a game of chess over the phone with the station captain. He doesn't really need therapy long-term but Sisko keeps making him go. I suggest switching to a by-demand schedule and tell them I am available whenever if something actually traumatic were to happen and Sisko pretends not to hear me. 6/10
O'Brien. Insists he does not need to go. Once he does he spends 40 minutes complaining about absolutely nothing and when I ask him to actually do something difficult he gets annoyed and walks out. Has to be reverse-psychologied into coming back. 5/10 but only because he has not done a single moment of introspection in his life and if I can't make him at least reflect on his own behaviour sometimes then I am a really shitty therapist. Points deducted because I hate him.
Worf. Insists he does not need to go but folds weirdly quickly when pressured. Insists it isn't working. He's lying. 8/10 I can work with that
Quark. Insists he does not need to go. Changes his mind to get out of some kind of scheme. Is crying 15 minutes into session one and gets so confused that someone seems to care about his feelings to such an extent that he forgets that it's like, my job, and not a personal favour I'm doing because I think he's cool or something. Asks me out at the end of session one. Comes back. 7/10 there's kind of a lot to break down here but I think I can do something about him
Nog. 10/10 and sometimes he brings me chocolates or an apple as gifts before the sessions. He argues that since the replicator is free to use this doesn't count as a gift and the only arguement we ever have is when I try to challenge him on that.
Odo. Promises to try things out of session and never does. Keeps asking me questions about the psyche of my other clients and whether or not they committed murder — notably Quark — and I refuse to answer. He thinks I'm evil because I keep client confidentiality and I think he's evil because he is a cop. Sisko has to ban him from my office. 2/10 and I don't know if it's his fault or mine.
Garak. whenever I try to email him to book a time there is mysteriously nobody by that name living on ds9 according to computer records. 0/10
Rom. forgets what I say two seconds after I say it. Hears what he wants to hear. 3/10 actual cartoon character
Dukat. he talks for an hour without letting me get a word in edgewise but little does he know I've bugged my office desk and this is all an elaborate ploy to get him to admit to seventeen separate war crimes. 10/10 sisko busts into the office and arrests him. Another great day's work.
The first, second and third reincarnations of Aideen from The Fate of Vilda Ravenhill. The first two didn't have names and were fully aware of their nature as two parts of a whole. The second pair are Agnes and Tide, and the third are Catherine and Nemo.
and suddenly it seemed like things couldn't get any better - a zine I made that possessed me over the better part of two days
The text is from an article I read that, in my vulnerable state made me feel shrimp feelings. Thank you @jadziadykes
The upside-down text (and) (suddenly) (it seemed like things) (couldn't get any better) isn't directly from the article exactly. Rather it's cobbled together from spare words and phrases I had after cutting everything out. There's no real flower symbolism going on either, they're just flowers from gardening magazines. I wanted the visuals to feel very happy and lush, to contrast the text and subject matter.
Still, you can't see anybody's face, because as characters that live in a different world to us we can't truly connect to them while talking about them like created thinga influenced by the whims of writers and directors (although they are.)
There is something very upsetting to me about how real life bigotry affected a fictional world so directly. Of course, bigotry has probably affected every single story ever written by anyone, but there's a difference between passive biases and an active change of plans like this one. Rather than negative stereotypes or uncomfortable implications, the case of Garak feels much more reminiscent of a real person not being allowed to do something because of bigotry; being prevented from taking their true form. That something like that can happen even in a world we (or at least I) often run to to escape the real world and it's problems is... Melancholic.
The way both Ira Steven Behr and the article talks about it is very telling; both using the phrase "letting the narrative run it's course." As if by choosing to straighten out Garak or choosing not to pursue the relationship between him n Julian, they were (rather than picking the right path instead of the left path,) changing the course of a natural river, or building a dam. Changing something that had a natural course to run, so that it wasn't allowed to.
Okay SO so so. I haven't seen TNG or Voyager yet but idgaf here are some thoughts and headcanons about languages and the Universal Translator in ds9. DO NOT CONFIRM OR DENY ANY OF THIS I am most of the way through s2 I want zero spoilers this is just headcanoning ok!!
First off Sisko and Jake definitely learnt Bajoran. For one, I think the Federation would have a chance to recognise that relying so heavily on a piece of technology to communicate could be dangerous if that technology should break down, so they heavily recommend all Federation personell who are stationed in places like ds9 learn the local language. Sisko conscientiously did, and Jake got a hang of it both in school and from Nog, who has a basic hang of the spoken version. So while Sisko and Jake start out communicating with Kira, Odo and any Bajoran officials through the UT, they eventually switch into proper Bajoran. Considering the show vaguely implies that Sisko is? Or at least lived in New Berlin (which is technically on the moon) for a while I have no idea if he and Jake actually speak English, or if it's like, German. I'll put a question mark after mentions of English just to be sure...
Kira, of course, originally refuses to learn English(?) (or whatever our Federation people speak) on purpose, but picks up a few words whether she likes it or not. Having been a freedom fighter without access to a UT probably also led to her picking up a lot of Cardassian in her efforts to fight back against the occupation. Also, I bet Cardassian as a language is also going to have an impact on Bajoran as a language whole. At the very least, there would have to be a conscious effort to prevent that for it not to happen.
Rest under cut cos it's long;
Speaking of Odo, Bajoran is technically his first proper language, but he speaks with an unidentifiable accent and sounds a little bit like he's in the Bajoran equivalent of a 19th century noir detective novel. The UT interprets this as a British accent when translating to English(?). He probably also understands Cardassian if I understand him at all, having lived with them for years. (Also, he semi-canonically took it upon himself to learn both written and spoken Ferengi, probably for the express purpose of spying on Quark, so jot that down.)
Similarly, Curzon Dax was the kind of person who learnt to speak a lot of languages, but not write them. Klingon among them, but he also might've picked up some Bajoran at some point. Jadzia Dax completed upon his knowledge, and since she loves people she loves learning spoken languages too. She likes to impress her alien friends by showing them what she's picked up.
I'm also guessing O'Brien still struggles with Bajoran and relies much more heavily on the UT to communicate (he's just seriously uninterested in language, and feels a bit bad but not bad enough to make the required effort. He has so much other shit to do anyway.) Keiko probably had to sit her ass down and learn proper Bajoran to be able to run that school, though.
And as for Ferengi and their language, this isn't supported by canon in any way, but in my head they definitely have a known pidgin language in Alpha. So many traders developed one on Earth, and several are still in use today, so it's unavoidable that they'd have some sort of simple language that they, and also pretty much any tradesperson in Alpha would know and use to communicate when doing said trading. It's common knowledge almost everyone who does intergalactic business picks up after a while (although Ferengi can definitely be credited with a lot of its creation.) Not only does this make it easier to trade even without a UT, it's also useful to be able to drop from the pidgin into Ferengi to be able to talk without anybody who isn't also Ferengi understanding you (to scold your idiot brother for example.) I imagine the pidgin is very simple, structured and like, almost legalistic, while Ferengi is much more fluid and expressive (and also includes a lot of sounds as tone indicators! I mean Ferengi hiss. There's gotta be traces of that in the language itself.)
Since Quark doesn't carry around any visible device or piece of tech that could actually hold a Universal Translator, I assume he either doesn't use one or keeps it in a pocket or something. Either way, he knows passable Bajoran, passable English(?) and passable Cardassian, and probably bits and pieces of just about everything else. His one and strongest weapon is his word, after all. He does have a distinct accent/messes up more than most though (jack of all trades master of none), and also has a nervous thing of switching between languages when threatened. (Say, flipping between Bajoran and English(?) if Sisko and Odo are both getting on his ass about something at the same time.) Quark's language habits and Rom's apparent inability to parent his child have NOT been good for Nog, who speaks broken just-about-Everything and starts out heavily relying on the UT to communicate before Jake's second-hand schooling gets the better of him.
Anyway, I'm not sure about Julian. I think probably, he has learned Bajoran, although slowly and to begin with not all that well, because he keeps getting distracted by all the other shit there is to learn, and is much more interested in medicine or biology or tennis than say languages. His eagerness does not quite match his actual skill, ensue comedy hijinks. Unlike Sisko, Julian's ultra-British accent is definitely the actual language he speaks, though.
When he talks to Garak specifically, he just speaks English, and Garak just speaks Cardassian. You might think a spy would bother learning the language he's surrounded by, but I imagine Cardassians rely much more heavily on the UT than others, due to the cultural norm of valuing their own language so highly. It is the best one, after all, so why bother learning any other languages? Garak, still being heavily affected by all that propaganda, has never really had the thought of trying to speak it, although he's picked up parts here and there. He's already convinced there isn't much he could do that would make Bajorans on the station hate him any less, anyway, and he tells himself that as soon as he makes it back to Cardassia he's never going to leave the place again. Either way, he and Julian probably face the biggest language barrier out of anybody on the station, and it leads them into a lot of discussions about etymology and translation work along with the usual book reviews.
I also imagine Cardassian as a language is very sharp and sounds structured, with each syllable being clearly spoken, "barked," as they say. But I also wonder if maybe its a tonal language, making it so that most words have several meanings depending on how you say it, and probably also the context in which it's said. The UT kind of struggles with this (Cardassian being a devilishly difficult language to learn) and that's why almost every Cardassian we hear in ds9 sound like they're either flirting or plotting to kill you. Everything is a little bit vague.
Me and my buddy @himbosimpraccoon like to bounce our ideas off one another and help each other with writing, and we've been doing so for a not-insignificant amount of years at this point. This time though, we ended up writing the same topic, so we decided not to spoil one another as much as possible, and post them at the same time as gifts to one another so we could compare how we tackled the same scenario. And... Well.
Chevy's is called Witness-less Me, and mine is Franklin's Gull. We posted both yesterday! You should read them! Yay!
