el-im:

ok no one cares but i am once again thinking about how andrew j. robinson’s writing in a stitch in time fundamentally changed the the way i’ve come to view garak and how i interpret the “Of all the stories you told me, which ones were true and which ones weren’t?” / “My dear Doctor, they’re all true.” / “Even the lies?” / “Especially the lies.” interaction from the wire (which initially i was very thrown off by). by suggesting that the stories garak fabricates are indicative of how he chooses to define himself, i think the stories from the wire serve specifically to illustrate what garak most covets/coveted in life, and that they contain elements of the circumstances/relationships/motivations/etc. that garak never had, or were beyond his reach. by making up these particular circumstances, garak is juxtaposing his words against the actuality of his life, and by that comparison his lies demonstrate the truth of his relationship with tain, his work in the obsidian order, and his personal convictions…

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romulanfucker:

so is it sad that he’s a good tailor because it means he’s truly lost his sense of who he used to be in the order and everything he based his self-worth on has crumbled before his eyes and left him only a menial job,

or because it means he has the skills to settle down and live a normal life but knows he’ll be forever haunted and never truly happy that way,

or because the futilism of blowing up his own shop when it served him well is painfully reminiscent of enabran’s self destruction after a successful retirement,

or because this life of simplicity and stability and regular customers that are almost friends has begun to make him into a good person and his recent actions have taken steps to undo all that,

or because the tailor cover and therefore his appearance as a good man is lying in tatters before him and he knows he can’t lie about it to the people he wants to lie to let alone himself,

or because he realizes he could have avoided all this pain and paranoia if he’d taken another path but he can’t change time so all he has is his unmendable regret and burned up pieces of Julian’s pants

edelweiss-in-space:

A study of gender ratios in “Star Trek” series - based on episode transcripts - by Dr. Birko-Katarina Ruzicka (lets_boldly_go on Twitter)

Find the full analysis done in #Python here:

https://t.co/L2ngOpXMqT

irresistible-revolution:

*struts into the room in full garashir clown makeup* i was watching the garashir clip from “inter arma enim silent leges” where garak teases julian about his optimism and reflecting on the differences between garak and sloan, as well as between what andy robinson called garak’s “seduction” of bashir, vs sloan’s efforts to recruit bashir to section 31, and realized that (as others have pointed out) for all his ribbing garak does not, actually, want bashir to lose his ideals. if anything, garak wants to use the powers at his disposal to help bashir hold on to those “optimistic” values.

in “cardassians,” bashir gets frustrated when it seems like garak is using him to for his own ends, and while this is partly true, ultimately all of garak’s machinations and computer-hacking and spying in that episode result in bashir getting to do something he actually loves and values: bashir gets to reveal dukat as a liar and prevent a political coup and forestall corruption. similarly in “the wire” as this gorgeous meta points out, garak throws “lie” after lie about his horrific past in bashir’s face not so much to belittle the doctor’s compassion but to make sure bashir is able to make an informed decision. “you need to know who you’re trying to save,” because i respect you, because i don’t want you to compromise your values, compromise who you are, even if it would save my life. 

in “our man bashir” he tests julian over and over, and when julian rises to the challenge and proves he can, in fact, make tough decisions, garak stops trying to force his hand and instead follows along with everything julian wants. garak weaves these intricate stories and intriguing lies around julian not to toy with him, but to give him a chance to hold on to his values. garak knows the world is harsh and banally cruel to people like bashir, so he uses what he has at his disposal to give bashir the opportunity to practice standing up for what he believes in. robinson was right that garak is giving bashir “a political education” - because garak cares about bashir and wants him to hold on to who he is. he wants bashir to grow some teeth, not so he can become like garak, but so can remain more firmly who he already is.

sloan, on the other hand, wants to use bashir’s values, bashir’s love for the federation, to manipulate him into betraying the core of those very values. “section 31 needs men like you” - aka, men who believe what they’re doing is right, that the end always justifies the means, that they’re the good guys. wildly enough, sloan is the devil on bashir’s shoulder and garak is the angel. sloan wants bashir’s values to exist only cosmetically, whereas garak honors those values even when manipulating them could save his life. sloan tells bashir his name, shows him his face, reveals the organization he’s linked to, but lies about the true nature of who he is and what section 31 does. garak tells bashir stories about assassinations and torture that change every time he tells them, that sound almost playful, but are in fact true and honest, “even the lies?/ especially the lies.”

even in “inter arma enim silent leges,” garak uses their lunch date to implictly warn bashir about how intelligence agencies infiltrate seemingly “friendly” conferences. while the episode ends with bashir seemingly ambiguous about sloan, i think we can read his later decision to stop sloan and section 31 as a fulfillment of his “political education” aka the influence of his relationship with garak. through his and garak’s closeness, bashir has actually grown stronger in who he is, and is able to stand up for those values against hypocrites like sloan. even though garak and bashir hardly interact in s7, garak’s presence and influence are always in the background, protecting and guiding bashir through some of the hardest times in his life. 

terribleoldwhitemen:

just read in the deep space nine companion that when “the wire” first aired, fans felt it didn’t really reveal anything about garak. and like. preaching to the choir here on tumblr dot com but the whole POINT of “the wire” is that the quote-unquote truth of garak’s past isn’t actually important. the “truth” is not a location and a name and a list of crimes committed–it’s much more essential than that, especially when put into the context of garak’s relationship with bashir, which the episode literally revolves around.

garak is experiencing the worst pain of his life and desperately seeking help. bashir is offering, but even in extremity, garak can’t accept. he’s done things which he knows bashir would find abhorrent, and though he doesn’t want to die, he also doesn’t want to be saved unless it’s in full knowledge of the price of the life that’s being bought. he could accept that ignorance from anyone else, but not from bashir–not from someone he’s grown (against his better judgement) to care about.

so garak takes away the polite fiction of plain and simple tailor. he strips back bashir’s veneer of deniability and lets him make an informed choice about whether or not garak’s is a life he finds worth saving. “especially the lies” isn’t just pithy misdirection: contained in the stories garak crafts is everything bashir really needs to know, and on some level, bashir recognizes that. he takes the worst that garak has to give and looks it over and says–I don’t care. I’m going to save you anyway.

and i think that’s beautiful and you know what??? i do think that’s beautiful. I’m sure garak delights in the irony of it, later: that here in hostile territory, embroiled in misery and isolation, he finally finds–at the hands of a foreigner–some measure of the recognition and acceptance he’s craved his entire life.

sapphosewrites:

sapphosewrites:

Thinking about “The Die Is Cast” and Garak’s moment of “The fault is not in our stars, dear Tain” where he quotes Shakespeare

And at the start of “Improbable Cause,” he argued to Bashir that Julius Caesar wasn’t a good tragedy. Not just because he could see the end coming, but because Caesar should have expected he’d be betrayed. In Garak’s mind, any good leader would.

When he quotes to Tain, I’d always thought it was a moment that symbolized his acceptance of his connection to the Federation, that he wasn’t going to leave Bashir behind. But I somehow missed the more obvious, literal moment- Lovok has betrayed Tain, and Tain never saw it coming. Garak is watching the moment of Caesar play out and recognizing that it is relevant, and tragic.

The original quote is from early in the play when Cassius (the mastermind behind the assassination) is trying to convince Brutus to join in. He has a long speech discussing how, despite what the cult of personality pretends, Caesar is human and as such as human flaws. He has epilepsy, he can’t swim and is afraid to drown, he is greedy for power even if he won’t admit it.

Cassius says: “The fault, dear Brutus, is not in our stars, But in ourselves, that we are underlings.” He’s saying that it was not fate but them that allowed Caesar to rise so high above- and it is also in their power to lay him low.

When Garak quotes it, does he mean it in the sense of, “the fault is not in our stars but in ourselves [because we fucked up],” or is he seeing Tain as fallible and flawed, perhaps for the first time? No longer a mighty or mythic figure, but an inherently flawed man overreaching in his quest for power. Does Garak realize that the fault was not in his fate, but in himself, that he allowed Tain to control him?

(Even if he does, he is still loyal to the end. Brutus felt guilt and regret about the killing of Caesar, after all.)

meatmensch:

sigynpenniman:

scientific-tricorder:

Thinking about “Inquisition”, and how this:

[Image description: Text from a script that reads ‘With that, Sisko turns and walks out. Bashir stares after him with a leaden feeling his stomach. After a beat, he turns and hammers a fist into the cell wall.]

turns into this:

[Image description: A gif of a clip from the show. It shows a containment cell on Deep Space Nine, the force field activated. Julian Bashir stands despondently in the cell, leaning against the back wall. He slides down the wall to sit on the ground and brings his hands to his head.]

and what that says about Bashir’s response to the situation and his mindset and feeling of anger (or lack thereof) and how Alexander Siddig (and/or the episode’s director) interpreted that.

I might try and put some of those thoughts into words later, but at this moment my brain is not cooperating.

something something the show really wanted Julian to be aggressive and a weird flavor of toxic masculinity a lot of the time and Sid took all of that and managed to subvert it or just refused to play it and turned Julian’s anger into something painful and human instead of toxic and violent

something like that

(Also Julian does this sad wall slide move more than once in the show and I think there’s something to interpret there too but I’m too sleeby)

it’s really interesting how often the writers tried to get julian to be toxically masculine, and how sid was like “lmao no! that ain’t him!”

one of the reasons i think julian is such a compelling character is that he has all of this potential to be a very angry and violent person. he has childhood trauma to the tits, many people don’t like him and find him unpleasant, he deals with a lot of hate (internalized hate included) for being genetically engineered, and he’s fighting at a capacity he never wanted to fight at, in a war he never wanted to be a part of.

he never lets the pain that he feels manifest in a violent way.

even around the end of the series, when he’s withdrawn and feeling depressed, he’s still a very gentle person. i think this is one of the many reasons trek’s target audience doesn’t like julian. the average cishet white male’s toxic masculinity isn’t validated by him. i think this is also one if the reasons queer people connect with him. we know that masculinity isn’t aggression and violence, that it is gentleness and love.

irresistible-revolution:

bakasara:

irresistible-revolution:

it’s like…not to be that person but it’s suspicious, alarming and depressing how throughout the show julian’s character is almost never allowed connection to other characters of color or his own racial heritage in a meaningful, sustained way, and the one time we get to see an indelible connection to brownness - i.e him being the son of two brown people - the ensuing storyline immediately hastens to douse that connection in mistrust and criminality such that we’re encouraged to think julian’s only link to brownness is one that’s maybe better repudiated entirely and idk i just. can’t vibe with it.

interestingly one of the more recent episodes I watched in the rewatch is Far Beyond The Stars and I feel like the issue you bring up and FBTS are two sides of the same coin.

without at all dismissing the merits of fbts when it comes to the writing of Sisko/Benny, it was so frustrating to see Julius/Julian entirely cut out of the conversation in the Racism Episode About Racism. This was a context where the writers would be reminded of Julian’s brownness as they navigated the writing of the episode, and when faced with the opportunity/pressure to engage with it, their response in the face of something they couldn’t reduce to pre-existing discrete categories they were familiar with was complete avoidance.

I felt like Julius projected so much discomfort from the writers in terms of placing him within a discourse of racism and of racial representation in fiction. In the episode he’s often left without a contribution to make to the ensemble scenes, and he feels tacked onto the group of in-story writers (as in Kay, Macklin, Herbert, etc.). Among that group of six, the narrative space Julius occupies is the only narrative space that isn’t put in any express relation to racism and racial representation. He is the only character of those six to be completely excluded from naming/discussing racism+racial representation explicitly (even Macklin/Miles gets commentary about his own relationship to racism and racial representation in fiction, even though he doesn’t make the comment himself). The most we get to signal that Julius has stakes in the conversation is one comment about representation in general/of other categories (namely women, and it’s a negative comment that is never challenged), a suggestion that Benny open his own publishing company, and some mounting irritation towards the end when Douglas fires Benny - the difference with everyone else in the group being, again, that unlike the others none of it is put in explicit relationship with racism.

Because the writing is perfectly capable of making Julian’s britishness salient to the character (and often does so through a western conception of heroic imagery, e.g. bond, battle reenactments) but typically refuses to make his brownness salient at all, by the time DBIP comes around there is no celebration of his brownness to contextualize what happens in the episode. Hiding behind “colorblind” writing makes it so that the one time his brownness is brought up, it’s in relation to familial abuse and crime, and Julian is given no other chance to show a positive connection and intimacy with his brownness as you say. Similarly, hiding behind “colorblind” writing actually means he is written as white throughout the show, e.g. OMB, and eventually that fallacy becomes an excuse to avoid engaging with his relationship to race, white supremacy and media representation in the “issue episode” that focuses explicitly on these themes. To the paradoxical effect that he is singularly excluded from the conversation altogether while the other black characters and the white characters are allowed and granted poignant commentary.

yes! all this. also, i say that bashir is “brown” (even though the actor’s half sudanese and his sudanese family are black, which would technically make him black too, though i’m not sure siddig identifies that way or has felt like he can) precisely because this is how “brownness” usually shows up in the western cultural imaginary: either as racially unmarked, vague exoticism that provides a buffer between blackness and whiteness, or criminality/danger/threat - i would say for most of the show bashir is in the former category while the augment storyline places him firmly in the latter EXCEPT the writers aren’t interested in unpacking how “a brown man cheated his way into starfleet by being inhumanly smarter than all these regular folks” aligns perfectly with anti-affirmative action narratives and xenophobic discourses about brown people in STEM. siddig has stated in interviews that they were trying to make him the next spock/data/seven of nine - well, none of those characters are brown and so their bodies don’t signify the same way bashir’s does onscreen.

another, earlier episode where this happens is “Past Tense” (which i liked, because we get so few sisko x bashir episodes - another way the writers’ racial bias shows up) where bashir is absolutely confounded by earth’s history of violent classism. now i get that part of what makes the episode work is the older sisko informing younger bashir about “history.” but why wouldn’t bashir be familiar with, say, britain’s thatcher era? brown people in britain have faced and continue to face violent racial repression. why wouldn’t bashir, who has two brown parents, not have any context or framework for any of this? (i did like that they didn’t give bashir a white parent because there’s a lot of interesting and complex history of brown people in africa, but again - just because siddig said he didn’t truly feel arab until after 9/11…why doesn’t bashir have any awareness of racial history?)

i’ve mentioned it before but i do think bashir wanting to be “raceless” would have been an interesting facet of his character that even ties into his augmentation, and again - the pre established lore is there! the “eugenics wars” were concentrated in the global south, particularly parts of africa, asia and the middle east. it would have been astonishingly simple to connect bashir’s desire for colorblindness to his and his parents’ shameful, dangerous connection to that particular racialized history - a history that’s a huge part of trek, and that’s even briefly invoked in the same episode where they reveal bashir as an augment!

FBTS was a huge missed opportunity when it came to exploring bashir as someone who’s specifically racialized, although i appreciate what the episode did accomplish wrt to blackness and afro-futurism. i think that episode should’ve been a two parter though, which would have given them more time to flesh out the different characters. i also know that avery brooks was an older, experienced actor who made specific requests and choices around how sisko’s blackness would signify, in a way that i’m not sure the younger, less experienced siddig was empowered or self-actualized enough to do at the time (though i find his disdain for the augment storyline, specifically the attempts to make bashir into the next data, super interesting and perhaps an early manifestation of his own frustration with the writers’ racial blind spots?)

anyway, there’s a lot more than can be unpacked in a single tumblr post. i’ll just end by linking this excellent, excellent essay by british-somali poet momtaza mehri on the vexed histories and modernities of blackness in the arab world, specifically this quote which seems on point for bashir’s chaarcter: “The difficult pleasures of incoherence cannot be reconciled with until they are articulated.”