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 htink its still so fucked up that we dont like.. Know what happened to sisko. i mean we do kind of but they just rlly. left. that. like actually i think its fucked how unmentioned ds9 is in general in star trek like everyone in tos got a very clean and cut ending, tng is still ongoing and we know where basically EVERYONE is at, you can pretty safely assume how everyone from voys doing and 1 or 2 chars got future appearances, but ds9? NOTHING. best we get is we know quarks turned out to be a franchise but we dont even know if hes like fucking alive or dead or not and thats IT. and its kind of insane because deep space 9 was one of the most important if not the most important parts of star trek history on the level of wolf 359 because the dominion war literally affected Everyone In The Whole Alpha And Beta Quadrant (beta quadrant being effected because of connection to the federation who were fighting the dominion mainly) and like we have No Fucking Idea how any of that is doing. wheres sisko? wheres the great link at and the surviving vorta and jem’hadar? how is ds9 doing? whats the state of cardassia? whats the state of ferenginar? hows bajor??? hows the klingon fuckung empire????? still with the federation so says lwds i guess! idk no one care apparently! *whistles and walks away*
Like, to follow up on that Insufferable DS9 People joke…I want to stress that I don’t personally endorse picking on New Trek series. Picard and Discovery and Lower Decks have all engaged me in different ways and pushed Trek in interesting directions (even if I found some of those directions infuriating) and I’m certainly going to keep consuming whatever narrative vegetarian microprotein Paramount throws fans like me.
But what I will say is that, for me, DS9 gets me in ways hardly any other tv series has. When we started watching it last year, amid all the cynical politicization of the pandemic and the police violence and…all that…I really wasn’t in a place to put my faith in institutions. So I appreciated DS9′s willingness to point out the ragged edges of the Federation, the ways its utopian rhetoric falls short. But DS9′s critical attitude toward institutions is coupled with a deep optimism about people. And this is why it’s become so important to me. The main cast is made up of people who fundamentally don’t want to harm other people, despite having to face the reality that some people do want to harm other people and that some power structures make it possible for those few people to do a whole lot of harm. Even Quark, who claims that every social relationship is an opportunity for exploitation, often ends up behaving in altruistic ways: he helps save the whole crew in Starship Down, he sets the resistance free during the occupation of DS9…And then you have someone like Kira, who in a lesser show might have been either forced to repudiate her terrorist past or, in a kind of Whedonesque twist, whittled down into a Badass Action Girl™, but who, in DS9, doesn’t have to do that. Doesn’t have to be that. She hurt people, yes, because that was the only possible response to an intrinsically violent colonial system, but she’s refused to make that capacity for violence part of who she is. Every time someone tries to get her to wax poetic about war (Thomas Riker, Dukat in ‘Return to Grace’, even–kind of–Jadzia, in ‘Blood Oath’) she’s emphatic: killing people kills part of yourself, even if, sometimes, that’s the only choice you have.
Anyway, I think it’s really unusual how DS9 manages to balance the individual and the systemic that way–to acknowledge that everyone has the capacity for harm, but that both intentions and power relations have a meaningful impact on the nature and extent of that harm. It allows the captain to collude in a murder in order to save the Alpha Quadrant, but never suggests that this one act makes him the equivalent of Gul Dukat.
It acknowledges the neocolonial attitude of the Federation and yet never draws a false equivalency between the Federation and the Cardassian Occupation. It lets the good guys fuck up profoundly and still never dilutes the idea that there is not, in fact, Zero Difference Between Good and Bad Things.
IDK. When we started watching DS9 last year I was slipping into a place where I couldn’t imagine any kind of future, and while obviously it wasn’t the main reason I decided to stick around–Em is that reason, always and forever that reason–it did give me something else to hold onto. A philosophical touchstone, sort of. The Federation will always be a work in progress, was what DS9 told me, but that doesn’t mean it’s not worth fighting for. And if you choose to fight–DS9 told me–there’ll be a whole lot of people fighting alongside you.
do you ever just. miss deep space nine. soooo much. but not in a “it’s been so long since ive rewatched it” way but in a “i literally wish i’d never watched it so that i could watch it for the first time again” way
I wanted to bring out something I’ve thought about a lot. That many of the DS9 characters share in having abnormal childhoods; hardships they had to deal with and endure. And in the end, I wish they had come to a better understanding of each other, because they had more in common than they thought.
I super, super love this. I …just have one question. How come you drew Worf with a Klingon adult? He was adopted & raised by two humans in Russia.
Because Worf was originally with his biological parents when they were killed, and he survived the attack. Hence the reason he was adopted by humans later on ^^
And thank you for the compliment!^^
I will always reblog this because it is awesome and heartbreaking.
