Icon by @ThatSpookyAgent. Call me Tir or Julian. 37. He/They. Queer. Twitter: @tirlaeyn. ao3: tirlaeyn. 18+ Only. Star Trek. The X-Files. Sandman. IwtV. OMFD. Definitionless in this Strict Atmosphere.
i LOVE how unapologetically Angry julian bashir gets to be on Deep Space 9 sometimes!! like. yes pick a fight with kai winn on the behalf of your patient!! get mad when people disrespect you and your friends!! pop off king
Dr. Bashir is a really funny character just because of how the writers seemed to juggle him around like a flaming bowling pin and everything, but one thing I appreciate about him is that Julian is one of the most compassionate characters in DS9.
I was just sitting here thinking about the way he treated Garak and Miles and those Jem'Hadar soldiers and I can’t think of any characters that had the same empathy and real genuine care for others like he did.
Like, yeah, he can be a little weird sometimes, and he doesn’t always make the right move to make the people around him happy, but the episodes where he helps Garak and Miles when they’re struggling and risks his life trying to free the Jem'Hadar….. Those are seared into my brain. No one will ever be Bashir.
Pulaski’s thoughts in Enigma Tales say it best here.
i bet julian bashir has some real chicken-scratch doctor handwriting, but i also bet he taught himself to write messy on purpose at age 15, because his parents never would have accepted anything less than perfectly neat script when he was a kid
Get ready for one of the most useless posts on this website.
Alright, I saw a post a while ago about how it doesn’t make sense to write Julian Bashir as “blushing” because he has a darker skin tone. Now, this isn’t a call out and the information that the poster (I can’t remember who it was) was trying to convey is describing Julian (or any dark-skinned character) as “flushing pink” doesn’t really make a whole lot of sense. And that is true.
However, I wanted to very briefly talk about blushing with darker skin. I am a few shades darker than Julian, but I absolutely can blush. In part because blushing is a physiological response. If you’re writing from a character of color’s POV, obviously, we can feel blood rush to our cheeks.
But it also absolutely can be visible. It’s true that I don’t flush pink, but because of the blood flow to my cheeks on my darker skin, I do, in fact, change color. I am also a person who occasionally wears blush, and because of my skin, I do not pick pink shades.
To lightly demonstrate, I’m going to use my inner wrist (which is slightly closer to Julian’s skin tone than the rest of my body). I have one picture of the color I use, one picture of the blush sampled on my skin, and one of the color when it’s blended out. (Forgive my skinny little wrists)
oh also i definitely picked up on the trans vibes in “doctor bashir, i presume?” bc like, i’m predisposed to that and also i was looking for them. but i think the most trans vibes i got from julian’s status as a genetically enhanced person was actually from “inquisition” when sloan would not lay off the fact that julian’s refusal to disclose his status as an enhanced person is akin to a lie by omission.
this bit specifically:
SLOAN: This man concealed the truth about his illegal genetic
enhancement for over thirty years. He lied to get his medical license. He lied to get into Starfleet. He lied to you when he came
aboard this station and he’s been lying to you ever since. SISKO: He did eventually come forward and tell the truth.
SLOAN: That’s right, he did. Why? Why? What made you confess? Was it
because you realized that it was your duty to be honest with your
captain?
BASHIR: No.
SLOAN: Was it because you felt guilty about having lied to him for so
long?
BASHIR: No.
SLOAN: Then why did you come forward?
BASHIR: I was found out.
like fuck, as a trans person this bit hit harder than anything else we’ve seen about bashir’s genetic enhancement. bashir has talked at length about the pains he took to “pass” as a non-enhanced person so he wouldn’t be barred from the life he wanted over something he couldn’t control. and to see the vitriol with which sloan delivered this… it’s obvious he views not being told personal information he feels entitled to as the same as julian lying to his face. the whole exchange is very trans.
So I think Sid said this, or it was attributed to him, that Julian is someone who struggles to differentiate between platonic friendship feelings and romantic or sexual feelings and I’ve always integrated that into my understanding of Julian as a character because it feels authentic and true to how we see him on screen.
I think Julian is someone who very easily falls into and out of infatuation and doesn’t have a great personal understanding of what love looks like once the infatuation dies. Which like. I know you’re gonna be like, but Emily, he was engaged to Palis! That shows commitment! He was with her for a long time!
And like, sure.
But he also cut and run the first chance he got because he couldn’t let her actually get close to him. He couldn’t actually marry her. Because it would be dangerous to allow that kind of intimacy and day-in/day-out access to his life while trying to keep his augmentations a secret. Julian is someone who struggles to make and keep relationships because of the masks he is required to wear to keep himself (and his parents, by association) safe. The price of his augmented “greatness” is easy authenticity. It’s the presumption that at the slightest mistake, he could lose it all. It’s the presumption that his true self is undesirable and sinful. That his true self besmirches the ideals of the Federation and Starfleet.
When attachment and emotional intimacy is not inherently safe, it’s easy to idealize the idea of the rush of infatuation and the suddenness of falling in love. (Ask me how I know.) When you’re not practiced at relationship building, every person you meet who is nice to you can become The One. And you do it again and again and again and again because you don’t know the first thing about nurturing a relationship or how to make the effort in a relationship let alone how to have a relationship with boundaries, without enmeshment, without codependency. You might not even know what you want, you just know it’s not what you came from.
Julian just… kind of gets adopted by the rest of the DS9 senior staff and community. He’s taught how to have these relationships and how to build friendships that aren’t based on proximity and societal pressure cookers and trauma bonds. And we see him come into himself throughout the show! One of the positive character developments for Julian is that he is able to form these relationship bonds and feel secure in his friendships even as the war destroys him emotionally on a fundamental level.
Anyway circling back to your actual question, lmao.
I think Julian is perfectly capable of having casual sex with his friends because he doesn’t necessarily disassociate friendship from sex. I think he becomes immediately infatuated with anyone who tries to top him and regularly tries to dive headfirst into being codependent with anyone who shows him even the smallest amount of kindness which. *Gestures vaguely at his family of origin.*
But yeah. I think it’s entirely possible for someone to be able to have casual sex with their friends because sex is just something you do with your body to have fun, but also be susceptible to tripping and falling into that pool of endorphins with a fun interesting stranger and be like.
Is this my future spouse?
Which is why I personally think any scenario where Julian becomes even the slightest bit aware of his feelings for Garak and then shoves that shit right back down is very fun for me. Because when you have very few healthy committed romantic relationships modeled for you you tend to either miss the forest for the trees or figure out you’ve essentially been in a relationship for years and are so scared of messing it up or reading the situation wrong that you just refuse to read it at all. Because you have Julian and Garak just taking turns having moments of realization and just going, nope. No. No no, not gonna dig that up today. No thank you. While getting even further into the… whatever the fuck you call that.
Until you finally name it and then get married five months later.
“I slept with Garak last night,” Julian muttered into his hands.
“What, for the first time?” Miles scoffed.
There was a long silence.
“Oh Jesus, really?” Miles poked him in the shoulder. “Julian? You’re having me on.”
“I’m not,” Julian groaned, still not looking up. “I really did it.”
“Julian…I thought…” His friend took a deep breath and let it out slowly. “I thought you were…I dunno, since a few years ago, at least. You’re joking, right?”
“Miles, what the fuck are you talking about?”
“I’m talking about you and Garak! I thought you’d been,” Miles made a vague hand gesture, “for ages! You’re really doin’ my head in, to be honest.”
“Oh my God. Why would you think that?”
“Well! I don’t know, you’re awful close. Have been for longer than you and I have been friends, even. And you obviously…I mean, you flirt with him. He flirts with you. Constantly. I had to learn to put up with it, and that wasn’t easy, mind you, but I care about you and he’s…you know, he’s good for the war effort. So I made an effort. But you’re seriously…you’re seriously telling me that you just now got together last night?”
“Miles, I don’t see what’s so hard to believe about that.”
“You were in prison together!”
“Well! That doesn’t mean we had sex!”
“Yeah, but considering the obvious…you know…attraction, I would have figured. I dunno. Stop looking at me like that, you’re the one who’s sleeping with a -”
“Miles!”
“I wasn’t gonna - I was going to say ‘spy.’”
“Okay, okay. But that’s not the point. The point is…” A horrifying thought occurred to Julian. “Wait, does everyone else think we’re sleeping together too?”
Thinking about Julian just freely expressing affection…. like yes in a garashir context but also in general. He’s so full of love and he isn’t afraid of it
IDK what other autistic people are like but I just. I love my friends so much and I love touching them and talking to them to the point where a lot of people will assume I’m dating a close friend. And I think Julian is like that.
