Just some nerd who's fallen absolutely head over heels in love with Star Trek ^_^
My blog is 60% Julian Bashir, 25% other DS9, and 10% TOS; a smattering of all other Trek shows makes up the rest. (As of Feb '25, non-Trek stuff will mostly be posted to my sideblog, @notastackofbooks.)
I write fanfic (i.e. torture Julian) both here and on AO3. Please note that dubcon/noncon fic ideas are regularly discussed on this blog - if that's not for you, please don't follow me!
ASKS: I love getting these, but I'm awful at replying quickly! If you've sent me something on anon, you can check my #Andi answers tag to see if I've replied.
Prompts are not currently open.
-> More things you might see from me under the cut ->
I try to keep a somewhat organised blog - here are the tags you can use to see my original posts:
#Andi writes: mostly Julian-centric h/c ficlets (although the comfort doesn't always materialise…), with a mix of longer bits of fic or drafts I haven't proofread yet.
#My Trek Musings: headcanons, meta and other random thoughts I've had about Trek. Lots of Julian, but also other DS9 stuff, TOS, and a smattering of other Trek.
#Fic ideas: these range from single sentences to multuple paragraphs - please consider any as a free-for-all prompt!
#Andi sings: I have a ukelele and like song-writing. (Including Confession, in which Garak tries very hard not to tell Julian he’s in love with him, and Magnificent, where the Niners grieve Jadzia Dax.)
#Andi’s spreadsheet project: all posts regarding my statistics inquiry into what names the DS9 crew mostly use for each other. Masterpost here. (Currently up to Season 3; very much on hiatus.)
"Spider-Man New York Stories: The Fashion Consultant" ✨️ A funny and lighthearted Spider-Man and The Nanny crossover story, by yours truly✨️
A story for the 90's people! In case you don't know, The Nanny was a 90s TV show, starring Fran Drescher, which took place in New York! So... of course I had to write this.
I started this story almost a year ago 😭✨️ I need to be faster when making comics HAHAHAAHHS
I think Vulcans should nuzzle their faces together when they like each other but it's like, not something you do in front of other people. That's something to do in private or if you're a little kid.
Babies don't really know how to do this properly and are prone to just headbutting their parents/siblings instinctually. They want to 'get closer' to what they feel telepathically emanating from the people around them.
This nuzzling is a form of telepathic communication but it's very unskilled (a baby can and will do it) and you only get broad feelings/thoughts from it. But that's alright bc typically the only feeling/thought you're hoping to get from or communicate with such an action is 'I like you'.
I really don’t want to open this can of worms because Tumblr hath no fury like people called out on their political performativeness but it is literally driving me up the wall to watch people react to Serkis’ ‘keep Tolkien white’ commentary by insisting twice as hard that Tolkien would descend down to earth and dropkick the entire Republican party to hell or whatever, just because they want to ensure that a piece of media they enjoy isn’t seen as being morally impure. Case in point: I have seen at least five instances of Tolkien’s ‘I hate apartheid’ valedictorian address being used as a ‘counter’ to Serkis being racist, including by actual news outlets.
Except it’s only ever the ‘I hate apartheid’ line that’s shared, and not the actual quote in its full context. Because here it is:
If we consider what Merton College and what the Oxford School of English owes to the Antipodes, to the Southern Hemisphere, especially to scholars born in Australia and New Zealand, it may well be felt that it is only just that one of them should now ascend an Oxford chair of English. Indeed it may be thought that justice has been delayed since 1925. There are of course other lands under the Southern Cross. I was born in one; though I do not claim to be the most learned of those who have come hither from the far end of the Dark Continent. But I have the hatred of apartheid in my bones; and most of all I detest the segregation or separation of Language and Literature. I do not care which of them you think White.
Which is to say. This isn’t exactly the antiracist quote of the century, to say the least. This is a white South Africa born man and a white Australian shaking hands and going ‘omg we relate’ and expressing what is a very, very mild ‘segregation is not great’ opinion in order to convey his thoughts on an academic subject, ie the confluence of language and literature. Using race to make a point about his own subject of interest, in his own interest, which is, amusingly enough, what a lot of ostensibly well meaning progressive seem to be doing.
I also think that some of the general surprise around ‘what do you mean large swathes of the Tolkien fandom are incredibly conservative!?’ in lib/left Tolkien fandom is the result of a tendency in said parts of the fandom to transpose one’s own progressiveness onto Tolkien and turn a blind eye to things like, say, the Shire being a very specifically mid-century British racist construct that is very, very clear in its politics, often going so far as to insist it’s anarchist or an ideal society or whatever the fuck… and then getting really Pikachu-meme ‘but they’re misreading it’ every single time a conservative explains exactly what it is about the legendarium that they really love, and get surprised when someone uses the Shire being a racist construct to do more racism. It is 2026 let us do away with ‘I don’t see colour’ interpretations of media, I beg. Nobody is cancelling you for enjoying a book that is not kind to race. Most of the books I love are not kind to race.
I genuinely don’t have the energy to go deeper into it now because I and others have been beating this drum for ages but like man. Man. I’m not surprised by Serkis’ comment. I don’t really give a shit about what Andy Serkis says and does because if I was the kind of person who gave a fuck about Andy ‘I felt like an ethnic minority on the Black Panther set’ ‘I somehow interpreted Animal Farm in the most ridiculous way possible’ Serkis’ opinions on anything, let alone race, my life would be much sadder. I think the adaptation will be an enshittified money-grab, and I will probably embrace cannibalism when McDonalds inevitably starts giving out little Gollums with every Happy Meal. Again.
What I am surprised and disappointed by is how the liberal-left reaction to this shit is to always and forever just either pretend it doesn’t exist in the text, or is the result of a complete misreading. So seldom is the response ‘fuck me, this book has some real wild thoughts on race, let’s see how we can engage creatively with that in an adaptation’. Which has never happened. In fact, all your thoughts on Amazon and lore faithfulness and other adaption criticism or applause aside, TROP, the only Tolkien interpretation that has directly engaged with race has thus far done so very, very badly, and only on a surface level. Why?
Because the loudest parts of liberal Tolkien fandom is not interested in exploring race as it exists in the text, to explore it progressively, to engage creatively with the structural conservatism present within the very construction of Middle Earth. They’re interested in concessions that change very little: you can have your brown elves, as long as we don’t have to think about the implications of foundational aspects of our beloved world, which we relate to greatly and do not wish to think about why we relate to it beyond our own experience of encountering the text.
No, it’s always either an insistence that the Racists are Wrong because the Text is Pure, or a slight, grudging concession that Tolkien had ‘a few racist elements’ but ‘nothing like the racism of today’. Of course it’s nothing like the racism of today. Tolkien isn’t writing in 2026. It was the racism of yesterday, and it is very clearly written into the text. Tolkien is not your mildly problematic grandpa. Tolkien was an Oxford don with an enormous, wide-ranging cultural impact, and refusing to acknowledge that is the misreading, not the pointing out of or engagement with structural racism within the text.
There's also a version of this where people cite Tolkien's 1938 letter to the German publisher, ie the one where he refuses to confirm he's of "Aryan" descent and basically tells them to fuck off, as the other canonical "proof text" that Tolkien Was Not Racist, and it does the same flattening as the valedictorian quote. It's a great letter, very ‘get thee gone from my gate’ but it is also a letter about refusing a specific, legally coded Nazi racial category, not a statement about the internal racial logic of his own fiction.
Nobody is saying Tolkien was a fascist white supremacist Nazi. Hell, Tolkien’s own thoughts on military atrocity in general is pretty clear in the depictions of the escalating kinslayings. But people love to conflate "hated actual fascism, said so on the record and is very evident in his fiction" with "therefore the legendarium contains no racialised hierarchy," as though those two things have to rise or fall together, when they don't. You can be sincerely, personally opposed to Nazi race science and apartheid violence and still write a mythology where moral and aesthetic worth consistently map onto a Northern-European somatic ideal. Because the racialisation Tolkien both inherited and passed on wasn't Nazi race science, it was the broader Edwardian/interwar philological raciology he was actually swimming in, hell, drowning in, considering the Oxford environment. And I find it so, so frustrating how fandom keeps failing to make this distinction: structural racialisation and personal bigotry are not the same axis, and refusing to be measured on one doesn't clear you on the other.
The Southrons/Easterlings material is obviously the part most quoted when it comes to Tolkien’s ‘problematic elements’ except it's imo super telling how rarely it actually gets quoted compared to how often it gets vaguely waved at (except Charles E Mills. I love you Charles E Mills). Anyway “Black men like half-trolls," swarthy, slant-eyed, riding out of the south and east to serve Sauron… it’s the same mapping of good-north/evil-south-and-east you get in a dozen other early-twentieth-century adventure texts. And this imo actually undermines the "it's just medievalism, calm down" defense, because medievalism is a selectively retrospective construction of which past you're claiming and which one you're othering, not some sort of static, neutral historical styling.
Tolkien's medievalism is specifically Northern European heroic-elegiac medievalism, the "Northernness" he talks about loving as a kid, and that aesthetic preference is not extractable from the racial hierarchy it produces on the page. You cannot keep the aesthetic and disclaim the politics because as in all art, the aesthetic is the politics, that's what "structural" means as opposed to "incidental”, and I just wish that many extremely clever people who understand this in a contemporary sense would allow themselves to feel uncomfortable and look at it in a beloved text.
Jackson's trilogy didn't invent racialisation in Tolkien, hell I think he even softened some of it because the Scouring is straight up impossible to adapt without it being very clear about its politics, but his adaptation does go quite some way make the existing racism legible… casting, costuming, choreography and cinematography does the same racialised sorting the text does, and does it visually: Uruk-hai as a kind of grunting brutalised, brutalistic mass, Haradrim on oliphaunts as a fairly straightforward Orientalist boogeyman, and the Fellowship itself photographed like a Pre-Raphaelite fantasy lmfao. Serkis isn't introducing a new interpretive layer with his commentary, hell Serkis was in all those Jackson films as well! Serkis is being very clear about what aspects of the legendarium matter to him, and that aspect happens to be the whiteness of it all. And I genuinely cannot understand why the huge ‘scandal’ around his comment is not that someone said the quiet part, but that saying it out loud is what became the scandal, taken as some kind of transgression against Tolkien and all his readers with Good Politics™️, rather than the quarter-century of adaptations, readings, and analysis of the text that wordlessly encoded the racism and got called faithful and dedicated for it.
I didn’t want to go to author is dead territory but. Fandom discourse keeps reaching for authorial intent as the arbiter of textual meaning in exactly the way most of these same people would reject in any other context. Everyone is a massive New Critic the second the author in question is someone they love. But Tolkien doesn’t need to have consciously intended a racial hierarchy or a white nationalist mythology for the text to functionally produce one, for it to be so loved by conservatives and ethnonationalists who come fifty years after his time.
Intent is not even a contested position in literary theory, it's just the very basic understanding that "text has ideology independent of authorial intent". The insistence on relitigating Tolkien's personal feelings as though that settles the structural question is wild to me, and I find it so extremely unproductive how liberal fandom reaches for this constantly, repeatedly chanting Tolkien’s few vaguely liberal statements that read far less liberally in context. But I guess the alternative, ie reading the actual construction of race in the legendarium on its own terms, requires giving up the fantasy that the thing you love is politically inert. And it’s just so sad man. Like I fucking love the legendarium, and I think insisting on its moral purity is the worst thing you can do to it.
I think my entire argument can be summed up in a few questions. Why do conservatives keep saying "I love Tolkien" completely unashamedly, in a way they don’t realy say about most other ‘canonical’ twentieth-century texts, while we on the left have to perform a whole apologetic dance before we say it? What is it that they embrace about the text, that we have to occlude in order to express an unproblematic ‘love’? Why do we have to disavow parts of a text to claim we love it? Who are we performing to? What are we losing in focusing so hard on this performance?
This is why the Serkis-style comment, or the Rings of Power casting discourse, ends up being the deepest engagement we collectively get in fandom terms. Because both "sides" of that fight are actually shallow in the same way, just from opposite ends. The right-wing backlash to diverse casting is, repulsively, responding to something absolutely present in the text: a defensive crouch around a racial aesthetic it identifies as being under threat. The liberal-left response, the "just add brown elves" gesture, claims the problem to be one of representation and casting rather than structure, which is precisely why the racial elements of The Rings of Power satisfies no one and changes nothing.
You can put actors of colour in Númenor and Harfoot villages and yet the underlying moral framework of who is coded as inherently noble and who as inherently monstrous, whose skin colour the textual narrative uses as a standin for corruption, stays completely untouched. Again, see my TROP link above, with the jihadi-coding of the villains. Because that framework isn't located in the casting of an adaptation, it's located in the construction of Arda itself and physiognomy-as-morality at the level of the prose itself, constantly present throughout the text. Casting a Black actor as an elf doesn't do anything to the fact that "evil race coded as racially other" is still sitting right there in the Southrons and the orcs, unadapted, undiscussed, doing exactly the same work it always did, and this work takes on a new look in post-2001 adaptations.
So what you get is two adaptations of the same tiresome insanemaking discourse rather than two different arguments: the right defends the racial aesthetic as the substance of their love, and the liberal mainstream defends the fantasy that representation-level tweaks constitute engagement with race. And so, nobody actually produces the adaptation that takes seriously what nonwhite Tolkien scholars have been saying for decades, which is that you'd have to touch the orc/Southron/Valar/Valinor/blondeness architecture itself to ever productively have this conversation. Not diversify who plays the good guys, but interrogate why "evil" in this legendarium has a face and a hair colour and points compass east.
But if the talk about this goes on as it does, and continues between Tolkien the Pure versus Tolkien the Misread, there will never be anyone willing to make that adaptation, and we’ll go on forever in a sisyphean climb, where both the reactionary embrace and the progressive denial are just two versions of refusing to read the same damn book. Basically, I think we on the left etc need to stop treating "is Tolkien racist" as a yes/no gate you have to clear before you're allowed to enjoy the books, and stop acting like enjoying problematic media makes you a fascist. We need to start treating the racialised architecture within Tolkien’s world as the actual object of study, same way you'd read imperial romance or Forster or Kipling or Haggard, without needing to acquit or convict the author first.
Which means we have to name the conservatism specifically rather than gesturing at "some outdated attitudes," trace where it comes from historically (the philological Northernness Tolkien grew up steeped in, not some special personal failing that reflects badly on you), and then ask what an adaptation would look like which dramatised that rather than smoothing over it or weaponising it. We have to let go of the idea that critical engagement is disloyalty, and let go of the idea that loving something requires defending its honour. We need to get the resilience needed to engage with the idea that a work can be both formative and ideologically compromised at the same time.
We don’t need to resolve that tension into either adoring hagiography or totalising cancellation. If we do, we're going to keep getting “keep the Shire white” Serkis soundbites and “hooray we cast a brown elf in our we-invented-elf-jihadis show!” news cycles standing in for a conversation that hasn't actually started yet, and ngl buddies I have to say I personally will be biting people the next time I see yet another rendition of the same damn response-reaction cycle start again because everyone, both the conservatives and the left, wants the things they love to be a reflection of themselves, and will twist themselves into pretzels to ensure that remains the case.
two hundred million A Stitch In Time fanfics and yet ZERO for star trek beta canon novel 'Abyss' where some mad scientist augment guy makes a Julian Bashir clone so that they can make babies together??!?!?
If you're someone who wants to be able to find (or avoid) ships while reading on AO3, odds are good that a fan coder out there has created a user script that could help you out.
User scripts are similar to extensions. You add them to your browser to automatically adjust web pages for you. User scripts allow you the opportunity to personalize them, however, which is wonderful for things like AO3 filters.
Here are a few that might be worth a look:
AO3 multishipper saviour - if you want to read about a particular character in a relationship without specifying any other person. The relationships can be specified to be romantic or platonic or both.
AO3: Reorder Ship Tags - Automatically reorders relationship tags on work blurbs so romantic ships (/) always appear before platonic ships (&).
AO3 Relationship/Character Highlighter - highlights the ship/character you’re looking for if they appear in the first two relationship/character tags.
AO3 romantic relationship savior - hides all romantic relationships in sort & filter page that has "/"
AO3 First Relationship Tag Filter - toggle on the script if you're browsing a relationship tag and all the works that don't have that tag as their first tag will be hidden. Works on both romantic (/) and platonic (&) relationships.
AO3 relationship savior - hides works that have too many relationships in them.
AO3 Only Show Primary Pairing - will hide fics that don't have the designated pairing listed first in the tags.
AO3 Only Show Primary Pairing (Auto) - The difference between this and Neeve's script is that it automatically detects the primary pairing, little to no configuration needed.
AO3 Show every pairing except THAT one - Remove relationship tags from script which you do not want to read.
Hey Star Trek fans, I need some advice on something
If someone posts a fic on Ao3 with the Kirk-era characters where it can be read as either the original series version or the reboot movies version without impacting the story, how would you prefer they tag it?
How to tag?
Tag as just "Star Trek"
Tag as TOS only
Tag as AOS only
Tag as both TOS and AOS
Tag as whichever the author envisioned while writing it
Look. I was being flip, but also, ha ha only serious.
If I am writing AOS Kirk, you should be able to tell. If I'm writing AOS Spock, or Uhura, or McCoy, or Scotty, you should be able to tell. (Chekov and Sulu are admittedly more difficult due to smaller amounts of screentime in both timelines). I should be able to drop a scene on you, unlabeled, and have you know who these characters are.
Which Kirk is this?
In the officer's mess that evening, Jim flung himself into a chair between Spock, who was reading a paper draft from Astrophysics, and McCoy, who was reading a novel on a padd. Sarek took a much more sedate seat across the table. "So," Jim said, taking an obnoxious crunch from an apple, one arm across the back of Spock's chair. "Ambassador. Want to tell me why you threatened the Romulans earlier?"
If you know both timelines' Kirks, this should be easy to answer. This scene technically could fit into either timeline -- Sarek could easily be on the Enterprise for a diplomatic mission involving the Romulans in either one. No one's eye color comes up. No one, aside from Kirk, is doing anything out of place for either timeline....but Kirk is. He is wildly out of character for one timeline, and not at all out of character for the other, even though both Kirks would say what he is saying here. It is in how he says it, what he does surrounding that question. You should be able to tell, and in fact, if you know both canons, I will be very very surprised if you can't.
These characters overlap, which means that for varying lengths of story, they might be so similar that it's hard to tell -- but they're not the same. Kirk is by far the most distinct, but all the others have noticeable differences that make their interpersonal dynamics different, their word choices different, etc. AOS Spock is more volatile than TOS Spock, probably because of (a) trauma and (b) being almost a decade younger. AOS McCoy is less racist about Vulcans in general and is less pissed off at Spock in particular. AOS Uhura has a much bigger chip on her shoulder and is hostile to Kirk most of the time; TOS Uhura and Kirk are solidly mutual friends.
I read (and write) in both timelines and I'm dead serious when I say that if something "works for both", it doesn't. It can't. Tag it however you like, I guess, but I'd strongly suggest you think about who you intended it to be when you wrote it and tag it that way, because if you did even a quarter-assed job of characterization it won't read like the other one, and your readers will be able to tell.
I don't know if you intended for this to sound rude, but it kinda comes off that way.
I'm asking because in the particular fic I'm writing, the Kirk-era characters aren't the main focus; it's going to be a crossover with a different series, written from the pov of the other characters. Because they aren't the primary characters of the work, there won't be as much characterization for them, hence me asking the question. If they were the focus, of course I would put more time into how they're written and it would be clear which version I'm trying to portray.
I don't think prev came off as rude, but I think they are failing to understand your goal here.
They said in another reblog that even two lines of dialogue from Kirk in outsider POV is enough to tell and I agree...if that outsider POV is focused on Kirk. Yours isn't! They even agree with you for characters they aren't fannish about -- they say its harder to tell with Chekov and Sulu, and those guys have a lot more than two lines!! They failed to see that you're writing a Star Trek fic that doesn't care much about Kirk.
And, like, say I agree that these adaptions give Kirk very different personalities (I haven't actually seen AOS so I don't have an opinion, but I'm familiar with this argument from other fandoms where I do have an opinion.*) Personality is not static! Especially as experienced by other people, it depends on the circumstances! If a bus driver returns my "Thank you!" with a curt grunt, they might be a rude person, or they might be a very friendly person who has a migraine right now. If you only interact with a person for two seconds (or just a hear a news headline about them, since it sounds like your characters aren't ever in the same room as Kirk) you probably don't have the context to tell.
Anyways, fandom tagging advice -- I would personally go with the metatag (that is, plain "Star Trek") and avoid the specific-adaption tags. This will put your fic in front of fewer eyeballs (because people searching the subtags won't see it) but it will also get you fewer readers who are mad that you didn't pick one adaption and stick to it. (Although I'm guessing most of those won't click on your fic anyways, since hopefully your tags & summary will make it clear that your fic doesn't have the characters/plot elements they want to read about.)
*in the main fandom I'm thinking of here where I'm VERY familiar with both adaptions and agree that Blorbo is characterized quite differently between the two, I've noticed that fic characterization depends more on which ships the author is into than which adaption they're writing for LOL
Thinking about if Julian had been pregnant with Yoshi and how that would have affected his relationship with Leeta. Can't believe I've never gone down this train of thought before, because it's actually super cute to imagine Leeta getting kinda overprotective of him. Especially since human pregnancies seem more difficult than Bajoran ones to her - she's horrified by the morning sickness!
And oooh - Nor The Battle, where Leeta's gone along to the conference too, and then the aftermath of her and Miles ganging up on Julian to Have A Rest And Recover.
Maybe a timeline where with Julian's increased closeness to Miles&Keiko and also his and Leeta's shift in dynamic they don't break up because of Leeta's feelings for Rom but agree to become non-exclusive. So Julia's trying to wingman for her (and it's disastrous at first because Rom thinks he's being warned off rather than encouraged). But later on whenever he and Leeta *do* get together, I can also imagine Rom being super sweet with Molly and Yoshi, even if it's a very weird feeling for him at first to start being included as part of the wider O'Brien family.
repost of my snoopy and data drawing i made earlier this year cuz i really liked it and today the artemis 2 launches so yay!!! we going to the moon!!! yes "we" i think am part of the team!!!
You guys he's fine. Stop asking if he's ok. It's the last episode and all of his friends are leaving, but, you know, he's here at the party which means he's totally fine. Look at him. He's socializing.
