Baby Cardassian (fat Blind And Useless)

GARASHIR in LOWER DECKS 5.09 “Fissure Quest”

These boys came in a matching set swear. Same daddy issues HELLO??????

(In Purgatory’s Shadow)

(Doctor Bashir, I Presume?) the way these were aired practically back to back.

i really do want to see what the alpha quadrant yelp reviews for quark's bar are like. do they fuck with him. does he get 100% negative reviews from bajorans for working for cardassians

Do not doubt my power

[thank you @greggslife for knowing me, knowing I would know this, and for also recognising it]

I love the random replacements for clichés writers insert in science fiction shows. like when a 21st-century human would say "stop pacing you'll wear a hole in the floor" but in a space show the alien/future human says "you're oscillating like a Betelgeusian night badger" or some shit. like fuck yeah he is. amazing drive-by worldbuilding. I'm gonna spend the next half hour wondering why the Betelgeusian night badger evolved to do that

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.

Kira Nerys's relationships are so funny. Imagine your boss is a messenger to the gods. Your boyfriend is a cardinal, then your next boyfriend is the prime minister. You have personal beef with the pope. Hitler wants to fuck you. And you end up dating a mall cop.

The crash was sudden. Instinct brought him to his feet and took his eyes to the corners, the shadows--all empty. The world sharpened, every sound and movement painted across his senses in sudden vibrant color. Not an explosive. Ever since Ab-Tzenketh that was the first, quivering question his mind asked. Not an explosive. No steps, no voices. The walls were whole, and the silence remained undisturbed save for the quiet scrape of chair as the doctor stood. They stared suspiciously at one another across the stretch of table. “What was that?” Bashir asked finally. “You tell me, Doctor.” “You can’t seriously think it has something to do with me?” Oh, I can, Doctor. But in this case, he didn’t. The taut alertness in the doctor’s body was entirely unfeigned. “No, merely that you have the better hearing.” “It—it came from the kitchen. Sounded like crashing…or falling.” Garak’s fingers found the grip of the disruptor tucked at his hip and pushed through into the kitchen. The room stood as placid as he’d left it, a few dishes sitting innocent on the counter, a half-drunk bottle of kanar decanted and casting a long, still shadow in the moonlight. Room empty. Windows unbroken. Blinds drawn. But something—something is different— The teapot. He found her sprawled, hidden by the bulk of the counter, at the jamb of the backdoor. The door itself lay cracked on its hinges, and, outside, the nightlocusts screeched, grating across the grayscale silence all around. She’d pulled a shelf down as she fell, the ceremonial teapot scattered in jagged crumbs around her. Garak had seen plenty of corpses in his time. After a while, contrary to what most imagined, one grew inured. Eventually the glazed serenity of the eyes, the stiffness of the limbs, the eerie stillness of chest and mouth were mere details to be noted just as one might note height or eye color or symmetry of face. No, the sight of death hadn’t affected him for many years. What he’d never quite grown immune to was the sight of the dying. Shivering agony in the eyes. Fluttering, soundless lips. The clutch of hands…Loral… Every one of her gray hairs was still perfectly in place. It seemed obscene. “Garak? Is everything alright?” The human’s voice was small. “Oh, God. Is she—wait--“ Before Garak could object, the doctor was crouched beside him, finger to Loral’s ashen temple. He took two breaths, brow furrowed, then switched to her wrist. A terrible keening sound. The doctor’s voice transformed, calm and strong in a way Garak wouldn’t have thought possible for one so young. “Loral, listen to me. You may be having a heart attack.” She shook her head in silent terror. Pressed her hand to the center of her chest. “Yes, but it’s alright: I have everything necessary to handle it in the medkit downstairs.” Garak didn’t register what he was saying until the doctor’s urgent, commanding eyes pressed against his. “In the medkit downstairs.” Garak sprang to retrieve it. The medkit he found in the laboratory was Parmak’s, the rugged hide bag with the small stitching of the Hebitian sun on the corner. Garak had bought it when Parmak got his job with the Bureau. A gift. Had he left it here? Had he—

Focus, Elim.

His error didn’t occur to him until he was halfway back up the stairs. The door swept open in the moonlight. The screech of the insects… Damnit, you might as well have handed him the keys to skimmer and drawn him a map to the shuttleport. But, to his relief, the only move the doctor had made was to prop Loral’s back slightly with a tablecloth. He sat beside her talking in low, gentle tones. The boy…hadn’t taken it. As easy an out as he was like to have, and he’d stayed. Perhaps he’d believed that bit about the theta-band detonator after all… Inside he quaked with a terrible mix of adrenaline and gratitude and fear, but the hand that extended the medkit to the doctor was as steady as ever. He looked at it with detached admiration. “Thank you, Doctor.” The human didn’t respond, lost in the medical scanner. A probe’s mistake, Elim. He could hear Tain’s voice, sharp with disgust. Sentiment has dulled your wits. Trying to stay out of the doctor’s way, he sat and took the old woman’s hand. Now’s not the time, Father. The medical scanner beeped worryingly. One didn’t have to be a doctor to recognize the urgency of the alarm. Loral’s eyes lolled in fear. Make yourself useful, for the love of State. You may not be able to handle her heart as the doctor can, but you can handle it in your own way… He forced a light expression. “Loral, if you wanted a day off, all you had to do was ask.”  A tug in her cheeks. Good. “You’re not to die until you’ve finished preparing the cakes for Union Day… and, you know, thinking on it, I haven’t the first clue how to steam those K’r’rausian silk tunics. Imagine! Me on Union Day without my silk tunics, Loral! A true tragedy.” The dry exhale of what might have been a chuckle. “No, I’m afraid you’re going to have to stick around a bit longer, my dear.” For the briefest of seconds, he felt Bashir glance up from the scanner. Their eyes met and something stirred. Deep, from a place he barely recognized. He hoped the doctor saw the same respect reflected back at him.

Excerpt from AlphaCygni's Garashir AU fic "Proof"

Illustration by me, @bleuuughhh-blog

Have this thing!

I find myself doubting my ability to choose an excerpt of the appropriate size and type to best represent this story and the scene I drew for it; not so long that it impedes on AC's delicately built intrigue, nor so short that it's impossible to get one's footing in the text. I doubt my ability to represent this scene well enough not just in my excerpt but also in my artwork: I doubt if it's detailed enough, well enough composed, *legible* enough.

What I don't doubt, however, is the stunning quality of the story from which this scene comes, nor the extent to which I will endorse it and sing its praises. Hats off to you @alphacygni and your phenomenal fic from years ago lol. It's irreparably changed my brain chemistry and my standard for both romances and tragedies alike. I hope you don't mind the continuous art posts and tags because I definitely have more scenes to create and share!

Anyone feel free to ask me for Garashir scribbles BTW. I do art for a living and doing dumb lil doodles helps me relax and sometimes get out of artist's block. Still exploring and learning in this absolutely wonderful fandom 💕

Click the first image to see the hairs on Bashir's lil head better

Sorry I acted romantic and delusional again, you can kill me if you want

I still have tons to say about the Garashir Goes Canon™ moment in Lower Decks so here is my big meta post about it! Below the cut is a meta discussion about the penultimate Lower Decks episode, contextualizing what it means for something to become canon.

To be clear, this is a mostly positive post with analysis included. You’ll see lots of love for Garashir and Lower Decks and also oodles of fandom meta below the cut, since we have a complicated relationship with Paramount. My analysis and graphic is based on a recent lecture about Star Trek canon I gave at KiScon!

First, I have to say that both Unification and this Lower Decks episode following mere weeks after of my lecture panel at KiScon titled Fuck Paramount, about what Star Trek canon really is and what its place is in relation to us as slash fans, is absolutely mind-blowing timing. I wish everyone in both the K/S and Garashir fandoms had been able to attend it because it was absolutely designed to serve as a framework for both of these major fandom moments. And also it was just funny as hell. But most importantly, it was relevant, and existed to give us a sense of understanding when navigating Paramount hell, particularly when they play Gay Chicken (will they, won’t they — most of the time, they won’t).

Since not every single Star Trek fan on this website was at KiScon last month, I want to expand on that a little more here, this time in Garashir context, since last time it was centered on K/S, though Garashir came up several times! When I was giving my lecture, I asked the audience what it would look like if K/S were made canon tomorrow. Everyone had different ideas—but the most common theme that came up was sheer distrust of Paramount doing it justice.

For those of you that are reading this, the thesis of Fuck Paramount was that you as a fan and a viewer have more control over what is and isn’t canon than you think, and that our role as fans is to take ownership of our stories back from corporate interests. I also developed a four-sided framework to describe how we interact with canon to take power back and make sense of canon. Both Unification and the very, very fresh Lower Decks episode have already been controversial for a number of reasons, the primary one they share being: “Wait… does this make this canon?”

So far it looks like the main reactions for this Lower Decks episode (especially considering how sudden and late in its run it is) are mostly “HOLY SHIT THEY REALLY DID IT” and “I AM DISAPPOINTED BY THE MERE SCRAPS.”

And my position on it is that both of them are completely reasonable reactions that don’t contradict one another! I’m going to make the case for both sides as I try to explore the implications of this episode with respect to the episode’s subtext, corporate storytelling, and so forth. I’m not going to go too much into the academic aspects, but I am happy to make the original slides available for anyone who is curious about my canon analysis framework.

Why It’s Enough

On one hand, this episode is done well. Undeniably. It’s a lot of fun. I have also said many times before that the only way I’d want K/S or G/B to become canon is if they suddenly randomly drop the info that they were married and don’t bring it up again, because otherwise they might do more harm than good! This was an example of it done incredibly well, in my opinion.

This episode serves as all the confirmation you could possibly really need of Garashir. Yes, there are quite a few gimmicks involved—it’s all AU, all the way. Garak is now a surgeon from another dimension, and Bashir is from an entirely different dimension, and also not really himself, but a hologram. Here’s how they’re introduced:

WILLIAM BOIMLER: “Elim Garak, a brilliant Cardassian Surgeon—and his husband, an emergency medical hologram based on Dr. Julian Bashir.”

What I really love about this moment is that it actually does more than it looks like it does, at face value. For most of us, our first instinct is to go, whatever, he’s based on Bashir, he’s not even the real one! But what they did here was brilliant—it serves as implicit confirmation that our man Bashir is also bisexual, and loves Garak. He is indeed not a corporeal human being, but as the DS9 episode where the LMH is designed based on Bashir tells us, the hologram is designed and based on who he is. It has his personality traits. Interviews are conducted to make sure that the hologram is as authentic and true to the real thing as possible:

O'BRIEN: “You mean this programme is going to have all of his personal likes and dislikes?” ZIMMERMAN: “That is why we bother to choose a human template in the first place.”

William Boimler, from the prime Star Trek universe, doesn’t say the EMH is based on some Bashir, he says this one is based on Dr. Julian Bashir. Again, this serves as clear confirmation that he is modeled on recognizably the same character from DS9. They’re not that different in essence from their prime universe counterparts, or it wouldn’t be fun for the writers or the audience. We learn that Garak is still former Obsidian Order. They are still the same people, in essence. They may be AU characters but the point is for them to be similar to the originals, or they may as well just have been some guys!

The important thing, for me, is that it’s a clear, unambiguous acknowledgement. It’s played straight. Well, not straight—but not as some elaborate joke or filled with contempt. It doesn’t tease and doesn’t dance around the issue and wink and nudge, begging the viewer to question whether or not they’re together. That much is made immediately very clear. In the episode, AU Garak and AU EMH Bashir are a married couple, and they kiss. Every moment of their relationship is sincere, the comedic moments being not about the fact that their relationship exists, but about the dynamics it brings to the story. It also tells us very clearly that they’re not even from the same universe, and that their compatibility remains nonetheless:

HARRY KIM: “Are they from the same reality?” CURZON: “No, but they love to brag about how statistically unlikely their marriage is.”

Again, I tend to see this as a positive nod to the compatibility of these characters rather than a brush-off that says the prime universe Garashir couldn’t be together. And then Garak tells us his universe’s Bashir is like the original: still a racquetball player and competes with Chief O’Brien—again, revealing quite a bit.

And the B-plot is about them squabbling, acknowledging very clearly to us that Cardassians really do just love flirting via argument, which serves as a brilliant nod to everyone who complained for three decades that the DS9 writers never really admitted that Bashir and Garak were just flirting. Finally! The writers seem to understand quite well what’s important to us, even if this isn’t the ‘Real Garashir.’

What satisfies me ultimately is that this doesn’t in any way look like a rejection of the possibility of Garashir in the prime universe. It looks to me like it supports the text, not a mean-spirited denial that it could only happen under bizarre AU circumstances. To sum it up with another Boimler quote:

BOIMLER: “The multiverse is just a rehash of stuff I already know.”

Hm… :)

And as I pointed out in a prior post, the whole point of the episode is to show that even in different circumstances and worlds, the love characters have for one another remains a constant and is utterly transcendent. The episode straight up tells us that some relationships are so powerful that they span dimensions and realities, and then Garak and Bashir say they would follow one another to any reality!

In my panel-lecture, I said, “[Paramount’s control over the text] suggests that certain readings require their endorsement or confirmation to be true.” But this doesn’t feel like that to me, and so I accept this. It leaves room for possibilities of all kinds, and opens more doors rather than closing them. I can appreciate that.

I also spoke about how canon isn’t one thing—not a binary yes or a no, and that there is no singular meaning. I call this multiplicity:

“Multiplicity is about the continuous proliferation of ideas and the rejection of the text as having a single meaning. It rejects mere viewing or the consumption of media in favor of dialogue and participation rather than a one-way communication.”

This episode served to defy singular interpretations of the text. It tells us that there are infinite possibilities and it took a route that challenges the single-story interpretation of Garashir = Not Canon. It made room for new perspectives and affirmed what “the stuff we already know.”

Why It’s Not Enough

Now for the other side of the coin: why it’s not enough. As exciting as it is to have this kind of confirmation from the current writers for Star Trek in a frankly increasingly conservative storytelling environment, it’s still disappointing for many people that even in the most progressive Star Trek that exists, they cannot or will not openly state that the prime universe Garashir got the ending and acknowledgment they deserved. 

It feels like begging Paramount as a corporation for scraps and thanking them for what really doesn’t feel like enough—it stops short of full, sincere, complete validation of Garashir’s queerness. As I said in my panel, it’s normal for us to want confirmation from the writers and creators that what we’re seeing is real and not just imagined, even when the role of fanfiction is for us to transform canon and reject it ourselves.

It’s absolutely exhausting for us to say we see something that is continuously denied by those who ‘own’ the story in favor of mass appeal, and to me, that is a legitimate perspective that can coexist with the idea that fandom is designed reshape the canon to fits its own needs, and that we don’t need confirmation from the creators for something to be true. Fandom exists to defy corporate ownership of stories, but to have to fight for mere moments where marginalized perspectives are foregrounded causes anger for good reason. We may not need confirmation from them, but saying that we should never expect anything from Paramount releases the corporation of accountability and obligation to respect the audience and their own characters. We should be able to expect and trust that these characters and their relationships can be done justice by those who have the privilege of steering that ship.

It’s one thing for me to say that this episode affirms the reality of Garashir, but it’s also true that prime Garashir probably could not be given complete canonization because this is the best way they knew how to ‘get away with it’ all while maintaining its mainstream and popular appeal with heteronormative audiences that would have a problem or reject it if it happened to ‘real Garashir.’

Slash fans, for decades, have existed in the lane of compromise—firmly between having our truth validated and entirely rejected in favor of a Star Trek that is designed to be sold as a product to as many people as possible. Rarely do we receive more than a bone tossed to us by the powers that be, and when we do receive it, it’s on their incomplete terms, often with massive concessions made to make it happen. For Garashir to receive their blessing, they had to twist it into an AU. The reason they could do this episode is because it gave them the neat plausible deniability to also say this has nothing at all to do with prime Garashir, so that it didn’t entirely alienate audiences who wouldn’t support a queer narrative.

This is their way of having their cake and eating it too. In some ways, it looks like they’re just trying to make everyone happy, but the story shouldn’t have to make everyone happy, and a compromise can really just feel like everyone loses, or like prioritizing the status quo again. For decades, the status quo has always left those with marginalized readings of the text unhappy, sidelined by a narrative that is supposed to be progressive and supposed to look to a future where queerness is natural and not taboo. And if this is the best they can do, it’s only reasonable that it should still sadden us, disappoint us, anger us. It’s hard not to resent that reality.

What Now?

I urge folks to continue negotiating the text, as I did above in the first section. I made sense of it in a way that fits my understanding of Garashir! You do not have to assume that there’s no more to it than that because it was all that was said on screen. We don’t have to look at canonization as the final say on the text. My perspective is that we should take it as a wonderful and deserved affirmation, and continue to transform the canon as we see fit. This is your time to decide what it means for these characters. Personally, I see it as a massively positive step forward. Just remember that where canon is concerned, you are in control of what it means.

Canon is still transformable, multiplicative, negotiated, and timely. Holders of the ‘IP’ are only one piece of the puzzle where the truth of a story is concerned. So take this as a beginning to more, not an end! As I like to say, “canon is a means to an end, not the end itself.”

Also, please don’t hesitate to add your thoughts, questions, comments, or anything else. I hope you enjoyed this meta post, if you read this far.