odo-apologist

[odo-apologist]

We need to think about retro punk Kochanski more

[odo-apologist]

Spin the 17th century death wheel and tell me how you died in the tags

[odo-apologist]

It's always "Ace Rimmer" this, "Ace Rimmer" that - WHAT ABOUT MELLIE????

LOOK AT HER!!!!!! She's so beautiful I'm actually melting oh my word - 🫠🩷

[odo-apologist]

hello, clothing store? yes I would like to purchase Dave Lister's entire wardrobe

[odo-apologist]

The thing w Adric and Tegan is they are absolutely each other's least favourite person aboard the TARDIS and I think Adric thinks Tegan genuinely hates his guts but like. She took his death the hardest.

[odo-apologist]

the leap back couldve been such and emotionally impactful episode if they had kept scott bakula's fat fucking wagon in that white morphsuit OUT of the shots where he has to say goodbye to his wife as ziggy counts down the seconds until al dies

[odo-apologist]

Have I mentioned I love Kes so far. bc I already really love Kes

[odo-apologist]

[odo-apologist]

Sillies

[odo-apologist]

Ah, thank you for response! As I mentioned, there are a good deal of TNG episodes that I haven't revisited, and I do believe the person on the podcast may have interpreted Picard and Worf's remarks in that episode as a lack of sign language used in the Federation, whether or not that was the intended meaning

Thank you for the resources as well!

So one of the things I like about Star Trek: Deep Space Nine, which I think is somewhat underappreciated in the audience because it clashes hard with the utopic vision of the future, is that the Federation is in many ways still systemically and culturally ableist.

I think this is explored best in S02E06's "Melora," obviously.

This episode starts off with Dax being shocked that the replicator contained a schematic for a wheelchair, because no one has needed one in three hundred years. Bashir answers that no no no lol, Federation replicators in fact cannot make wheelchairs based on their built-in libraries, and that the wheelchair is a schematic that their incoming wheelchair user coworker sent over to have replicated for her on arrival.

The rest of the episode explores how this utopic vision of the future that the difficult-to-accommodate disabled are not a part of has absolutely de-normalized the cultural concepts and accommodations surrounding some disabilities, thus creating complex and seemingly anachronistic institutionalist-era realities in the space future.

This is, to me, deeply interesting because it highlights a very real conversation around pursuing cures against pursuing accommodation.

It's basically acknowledging the threat of the Gattica style shit currently engaged in by dudes like Elon Musk and these freaks

(for those who don't recognize them, these are weird pro-natalist yuppies who claim they've done shit like genetically engineer their kids for high IQs, a scentifically impossible thing. they are, unsurprisingly, very racist but in a SoCal-Berkeley way.)

becoming so normalized in society that we effectively engineer out the majority of "defects." Everybody starts off with a happy healthy life as defined not through accommodation and infinite diversity in infinite combinations, but through the elimination of variation that would necessitate different cultural practices, different architecture, different understandings of life worthy of life, blah blah blah.

It's not "in the brilliant shining future nobody has to be disabled," it's "in the brilliant shining future the disabled aren't allowed to exist, and we don't have to think about them" lol.

But! Geordi LaForge!

Well, Geordi is born blind in a context where blindness can be perfectly accommodated, debatably even cured, via his wundervisor and / or surgically implanted eyes. In fact, in the movies, which do not exist sorry, Geordi gets them eyes stuck in and in so doing even loses the cultural signifier of his blindness, as well as situational considerations of blindness.

Further, Geordi is in this unfortunate weird space a lot of disabled characters in science fiction are, where his prosthesis is considered cool enough that it passes some kind of ableist vibe check wherein the character is no longer necessarily received as "disabled" by the audience. It's a cool cyberpunk thing, and thus loses its audience association with disability in many ways, ala Adam Jensen's sword arms or the unexplored nature of voluntarily cutting off one's limbs to replace them with robot parts in Cyberpunk 2077.

Geordi "can do things," he just "has to do things a little differently." The "a little differently" here is defined as "wearing a thing on his face" and not a different process or method. We never see how Geordi lays out his quarters or prepares his uniform, tools, whatever in a way that makes it all more accessible for him; he readily assume the first thing he does in the morning is plug his visor in. Glasses.

It's a fun cosplay idea in a way a wheelchair isn't.

The thing is, when Geordi is without his visor, he's fucked.

I don't just mean the episode where he's trapped in a island with a Cardassian or whatever, I mean on the fucking Enterprise. Say they're in a crisis, he falls over, wangs his noggin on a console and breaks his visor. Look at the open layouts with no handrails leading anywhere, no braille or layout signage posted, nothin'.

How the fuck is he going to find his way to the turbolift?

These are not accessible environments for a blind bloke. These are accessible environments for a sighted bloke wearing glasses.

The thing to consider as well is, we know Geordi's blindness is absolute. Blindness in real life is pretty diverse, actually, and many blind people do have some vision. Not Geordi. So, all the lights that communicate where to go in a crisis mean fuck all to him.

And, considering how often the Enterprise is in crisis, crew members are cut off from each other or the ship, the practical realities Geordi has to deal with on away missions that are simply never accommodated - it becomes apparent that Geordi is considered effectively the same as any sighted crew member.

His disability accommodation is individual and his responsibility. Nothing is provided by Starfleet except, perhaps, new visors and free visits to Beverly.

The same criticism exists for my man Hemmer,

who is played by blind actor Bruce Horak, yes, but who exists in a similar state to Geordi. I doubt they considered Mr. Horak a consultant on blindness and how a blind crew member would work in their series, because again, his blindness is accommodated for by magical future thing that doesn't fucking exist. In this case, psychic senses or something (idk I've never watched nuTrek sober).

If you look at the environments he's in, or the situations he deals with on away missions, sans those Daredevilian supersenses he'd be shit out of luck.

They're so adverse to giving blind characters so much as a cane.

I'm not saying the inclusion of blind characters is bad or that we should not engage in these fantasies of disabled characters being able to live and work equally to able-bodied characters without the need for accommodation, necessarily. I'm certainly not saying every blind character should have a sighted support following them around or a dog or whatever. My criticism is not of the blind characters' individual accommodations not being up to my arbitrary standard as a sighted viewer lol.

What I am instead attempting to hightlight here is that the shows seem adverse to engaging in disabled / accommodative environmental design or in the more complex, social realities of disability, and that's something that the episode "Melora," the wheelchair user episode this post is about lol, addresses in depth.

Julian is a future space doctor who doesn't know how to comfortably talk to someone in a chair. That only happens in a universe where doctors don't encounter wheelchairs in their professional lives. That's a reality brought about specifically by the comfortable eugenicist realities of the future, where although due to a war the Federation draws the line at "enhanced" individuals, it obviously voluntarily engages in liberal eugenics to the effect of eliminating disabled life in many meaningful forms. Its society, where doctors seem to need an aide like this to do their jobs properly:

And idk! I think that's neat. I think that's a powerful flaw in the utopic vision of the future that Roddenberry and the others probably didn't intend originally, and that DS9, commendably, attempts to explore.

Especially because Julian was a lil autistic boy who was forcibly cured through similar treatment, and correctly identifies that this means the him who existed before was drastically altered for his parents' fear of actually accommodating him.

anyway this post was brought out of me by some dickhead saying Melora "breaks the setting" for them lol. bro they fought a eugenics war, they definitely didn't come out of that culturally unchanged. you're just scared of wheelchairs. fuck u

[odo-apologist]

[odo-apologist]

Two repressed mfs fall in love with each other

[odo-apologist]

[odo-apologist]

dude are you coming to the star trek future orgy i heard the grand nagus gonna be there. and i heard a android gonna be there. and i heard a vulcan is going through ponn far there. and i heard a Q gonna be there. and i heard the infection from the naked time is fonna be there. and i heard the betazoid ambassador gonna be there. and i heard captain archer gonna be there. and i heard a horta gonna be there. and i heard morn gonna be there. and i heard four andorians each of different gender gonna be there but they all transgender. and i heard blade is gonna be there. and i heard a changeling gonna be there and theyre attending as a condom. and i heard the guy with the feather in his hat from that Picard gifset is gonna be there. and i heard the feather from his hat is gonna be there. and i heard the irish woman who let riker fuck her feet in that one episode is gonna be there. and i heard an aquatic xindii gonna be there. and i heard chiana from farscape is gonna be there. and i heard that cubic robot that jeffery combs voiced in the cartoon is gonna be there. and i heard a tribble is gonna be there. and i heard the penis rock kirk held in the cave is gonna be there. and i heard a talaxian is gonna be there. and i heard there will not be a single orion slave girl bc thats fucked up you assumed that there would be a sex slave in the star trek orgy even if the writers are trying to back up and say well not. guys not ACTUALLY slaves we just called them that cause uhhhhh cause uhhhh cause uhhhh. theyre not really slaves.

[odo-apologist]

So one of the things I like about Star Trek: Deep Space Nine, which I think is somewhat underappreciated in the audience because it clashes hard with the utopic vision of the future, is that the Federation is in many ways still systemically and culturally ableist.

I think this is explored best in S02E06's "Melora," obviously.

This episode starts off with Dax being shocked that the replicator contained a schematic for a wheelchair, because no one has needed one in three hundred years. Bashir answers that no no no lol, Federation replicators in fact cannot make wheelchairs based on their built-in libraries, and that the wheelchair is a schematic that their incoming wheelchair user coworker sent over to have replicated for her on arrival.

The rest of the episode explores how this utopic vision of the future that the difficult-to-accommodate disabled are not a part of has absolutely de-normalized the cultural concepts and accommodations surrounding some disabilities, thus creating complex and seemingly anachronistic institutionalist-era realities in the space future.

This is, to me, deeply interesting because it highlights a very real conversation around pursuing cures against pursuing accommodation.

It's basically acknowledging the threat of the Gattica style shit currently engaged in by dudes like Elon Musk and these freaks

(for those who don't recognize them, these are weird pro-natalist yuppies who claim they've done shit like genetically engineer their kids for high IQs, a scentifically impossible thing. they are, unsurprisingly, very racist but in a SoCal-Berkeley way.)

becoming so normalized in society that we effectively engineer out the majority of "defects." Everybody starts off with a happy healthy life as defined not through accommodation and infinite diversity in infinite combinations, but through the elimination of variation that would necessitate different cultural practices, different architecture, different understandings of life worthy of life, blah blah blah.

It's not "in the brilliant shining future nobody has to be disabled," it's "in the brilliant shining future the disabled aren't allowed to exist, and we don't have to think about them" lol.

But! Geordi LaForge!

Well, Geordi is born blind in a context where blindness can be perfectly accommodated, debatably even cured, via his wundervisor and / or surgically implanted eyes. In fact, in the movies, which do not exist sorry, Geordi gets them eyes stuck in and in so doing even loses the cultural signifier of his blindness, as well as situational considerations of blindness.

Further, Geordi is in this unfortunate weird space a lot of disabled characters in science fiction are, where his prosthesis is considered cool enough that it passes some kind of ableist vibe check wherein the character is no longer necessarily received as "disabled" by the audience. It's a cool cyberpunk thing, and thus loses its audience association with disability in many ways, ala Adam Jensen's sword arms or the unexplored nature of voluntarily cutting off one's limbs to replace them with robot parts in Cyberpunk 2077.

Geordi "can do things," he just "has to do things a little differently." The "a little differently" here is defined as "wearing a thing on his face" and not a different process or method. We never see how Geordi lays out his quarters or prepares his uniform, tools, whatever in a way that makes it all more accessible for him; he readily assume the first thing he does in the morning is plug his visor in. Glasses.

It's a fun cosplay idea in a way a wheelchair isn't.

The thing is, when Geordi is without his visor, he's fucked.

I don't just mean the episode where he's trapped in a island with a Cardassian or whatever, I mean on the fucking Enterprise. Say they're in a crisis, he falls over, wangs his noggin on a console and breaks his visor. Look at the open layouts with no handrails leading anywhere, no braille or layout signage posted, nothin'.

How the fuck is he going to find his way to the turbolift?

These are not accessible environments for a blind bloke. These are accessible environments for a sighted bloke wearing glasses.

The thing to consider as well is, we know Geordi's blindness is absolute. Blindness in real life is pretty diverse, actually, and many blind people do have some vision. Not Geordi. So, all the lights that communicate where to go in a crisis mean fuck all to him.

And, considering how often the Enterprise is in crisis, crew members are cut off from each other or the ship, the practical realities Geordi has to deal with on away missions that are simply never accommodated - it becomes apparent that Geordi is considered effectively the same as any sighted crew member.

His disability accommodation is individual and his responsibility. Nothing is provided by Starfleet except, perhaps, new visors and free visits to Beverly.

The same criticism exists for my man Hemmer,

who is played by blind actor Bruce Horak, yes, but who exists in a similar state to Geordi. I doubt they considered Mr. Horak a consultant on blindness and how a blind crew member would work in their series, because again, his blindness is accommodated for by magical future thing that doesn't fucking exist. In this case, psychic senses or something (idk I've never watched nuTrek sober).

If you look at the environments he's in, or the situations he deals with on away missions, sans those Daredevilian supersenses he'd be shit out of luck.

They're so adverse to giving blind characters so much as a cane.

I'm not saying the inclusion of blind characters is bad or that we should not engage in these fantasies of disabled characters being able to live and work equally to able-bodied characters without the need for accommodation, necessarily. I'm certainly not saying every blind character should have a sighted support following them around or a dog or whatever. My criticism is not of the blind characters' individual accommodations not being up to my arbitrary standard as a sighted viewer lol.

What I am instead attempting to hightlight here is that the shows seem adverse to engaging in disabled / accommodative environmental design or in the more complex, social realities of disability, and that's something that the episode "Melora," the wheelchair user episode this post is about lol, addresses in depth.

Julian is a future space doctor who doesn't know how to comfortably talk to someone in a chair. That only happens in a universe where doctors don't encounter wheelchairs in their professional lives. That's a reality brought about specifically by the comfortable eugenicist realities of the future, where although due to a war the Federation draws the line at "enhanced" individuals, it obviously voluntarily engages in liberal eugenics to the effect of eliminating disabled life in many meaningful forms. Its society, where doctors seem to need an aide like this to do their jobs properly:

And idk! I think that's neat. I think that's a powerful flaw in the utopic vision of the future that Roddenberry and the others probably didn't intend originally, and that DS9, commendably, attempts to explore.

Especially because Julian was a lil autistic boy who was forcibly cured through similar treatment, and correctly identifies that this means the him who existed before was drastically altered for his parents' fear of actually accommodating him.

anyway this post was brought out of me by some dickhead saying Melora "breaks the setting" for them lol. bro they fought a eugenics war, they definitely didn't come out of that culturally unchanged. you're just scared of wheelchairs. fuck u

[odo-apologist]

Who wants to hear about my transfem egg reading of Malcolm Reed?

Here are my main points:

Nobody knows anything about him, not even his family. He seemingly has no life outside his job. He just... never seems happy. This could be a result of his identity being wrong, incomplete, a shell. He is insanely repressed.

Poor relationship with his family. His father had certain expectations for him (going into the navy) that he was unable to live up to, and he has this deep-seated insecurity and need to prove himself as a result (the incident with Hayes)

He cannot hold down a romantic relationship; he has had dozens of girlfriends, as seen in Shuttlepod One, and seems to have respected and cared for each one, but none of them worked out. In E2, his alternate universe self dies alone.

He is seemingly always trying to prove his masculinity. He gets into a fight with Hayes because he perceives Hayes as undermining him, and whenever he flirts with alien women in front of men it seems incredibly forced (Two Days and Two Nights)

He is implied to be passively suicidal. He constantly tries to sacrifice himself for the ship.

He has a crush on T'Pol, who is semi-canonically trans herself. This is the only romantic attachment that he has lasting more than a single episode or throwaway line. Could be gender envy.

In Shuttlepod One, he insists on shaving his face while trapped in a tiny metal pod with only one other person, which he explains as wanting to leave behind a presentable corpse. Could be gender dysphoria.

Put this all together, you have a miserable, suicidal man whose identity seems to be completely repressed to the point of almost nonexistence, who couldn't live up to his father's expectations and feels chronically inadequate in his masculinity, who cannot hold down a romantic relationship but has a long-term crush on a transgender woman, and who insists on shaving even when he thinks he's going to die in the void of space and never be found.

That, to me, sounds like someone who is trying to be a man because they don't think they are allowed to be anything else. Someone who grew up to become a family legacy, a Son, rather than a person. Someone who still measures their worth by how well they perform. Someone who, if they did a little soul-searching, might realize that she was never a man at all. Someone who might find joy for the first time in being a woman, not a Son, not an Agent, not an Officer. Just a woman. Estrogen would have saved her, thank you for reading.

[odo-apologist]

harry’s often the one who gets sent on the borg cube missions in a way i think is best described as part enrichment in his enclosure part parent (janeway) living vicariously through their child