#SUBTEXT VS TEXT

[jinkieswouldyoulookatthis]

Subtext - Part 2

This is a follow-up to my previous post about subtext.

Subtext vs. Text

So, if the potential meaning(s) of subtextual elements is not part of canon, Jinkies, how can you say that Sam and Dean are canonically soulmates when the show never came right out and said that they were?

Great question! The short answer is that there is a difference between subtext and text that shows rather than tells.

Writers are always being told to "show, don't tell." But what the fuck does that actually mean? It means that good storytelling isn't just exposition. Sure, you can explicitly tell your readers/viewers a thing, it happens all the time, but if you want to really draw your audience in and make them suspend disbelief for a time, immerse them in your story, you want to show them things because that makes them feel the things. So instead of saying, "Bob went to the store and bought eggs, milk, and flour," you would instead, perhaps, describe Bob coming back with shopping bags that he unloads, pulling out eggs, milk, and flour, and putting them away in his kitchen. The fact that Bob went to the store and bought these items, while unsaid, isn't subtext. As the writer, you just chose to show your reader the results of an action instead of talking them through the steps of that action.

Likewise, in the episode Dark Side of the Moon (5x16), the writers show us that Sam and Dean share a heaven by having them be able to find each other without breaking out of their individual heavens, a thing that they show and explain to us through Ash as needing to happen to jump from one person's heaven to another's. But Dean just follows the road through his heaven and it leads him to Sam... because they're in different parts of the same heaven. Taking Ash's metaphor of Heaven being like Disneyland a step further, both Sam and Dean were in the Winchesterland heaven portion of Heaven, just on different rides within that portion of the larger park. Then Ash says, while looking pointedly at the two of them, that special cases like soulmates share a heaven. So while the story did not say, "Sam and Dean are soulmates," it gave us the equation, explained all the variables, and just left us to fill in the answer on our own because they had faith in our ability to do the basic math. Turns out that faith wasn't 100% justified, but whatever, not everyone is good at math.

So in this case, Sam and Dean being soulmates is a part of canon even though they never came right out and said those specific words in that order. It is text that is shown not told.

Text, in a written work, is the actual words used, whether those words are describing actions, dialog, or setting a scene. While subtext is the space between and underneath the words where implied additional meanings can be found, if one chooses to go looking for them.

A great and fertile ground for subtextual readings can be found in discussions about Sam and Dean's sexualities. Because while the text only tells and shows us both brothers being heterosexual, there is a lot of subtext that speaks to a lot of people in support of one or both of them being queer in some fashion. Queer readings of either character are valid head canons with lots of support that can be pulled from the subtextual elements of the show. There is room within the story for a lot of subjective readings, even though all the canon tells/shows us is that they are heterosexual cis men.

Now I know a lot of you may screech to a halt here and start objecting that I am putting a subjectively heteronormative read on this. Yeah, I know. Unfortunately, the entire issue with the heteronormative bullshit that we all deal with in the really real world on a daily basis, is that it is the default presumed pov. This is changing (thankfully) but Supernatural was created before that shift really began in the collective consciousness, so the default presumed pov of the show is a heteronormative one. That is how the show was created, the filter through which it was written and acted and presented. And while reading it from a different pov is valid, it is not going to be in line with canon... it would be head canon.

Again, HEAD CANONS ARE VALID even though they aren't canon.

[aveline-amelia]

I guess we're doing this again....

So, I recently saw someone say that they believe Mycroft isn't attracted to Lady Smallwood and that he only had sex with her (which he textually hasn't, by the way) because "he owed her".

And I am sorry, but why would you prefer Mycroft having sex with a woman he doesn't want to be having because he felt coerced and pressured over him having sex with a woman because he enjoys having sex with women?

Isn't that much worse?

There is no textual evidence Mycroft ever had sex with Lady Smallwood or any woman, or proof that he had or has sex at all or that if he had it was with a woman. Be free. Headcanon away. You believe he's a virgin? You believe he's not? You believe he was popular at campus because he gave people sexual favors (yes, I saw that one too)? Fine by me.

There is subtextual evidence for the Smallcroft thing. But subtext isn't text. Subtext exists to be deniable. It's how queer people got their writing past the censors. Most subtext has an alternative explanation, either through a surface reading or an alternative reading. Sometimes one is more or less believable. It depends on your perspective.

Faith!Eurus saying the word "sex" after Lady Smallwood said Mycroft hasn't made it up to her doesn't mean she literally told him he has to have sex with her or that he owes her sex.

That is coercive. That is rape culture and it makes my skin crawl.

Them putting on their coats isn't actual proof they had sex. If you want to believe they had or that they're dating, that is also fine. But don't feel the need to believe in it if it causes you actual distress.

And no, it has nothing to do with Lady Smallwood being newly widowed or her being around 20 years older or the fact that Mycroft has (next to) no dating experience. But all of that certainly doesn't make it better.

And not to pull the "if the genders were reversed" card but we all know what the reaction would be if we talked about an older experienced man and a younger less experienced (and read as both queercoded and possibly neurodivergent) woman.

[missbiddle]

Got approved and assigned a supervisor for my Xena: Warrior Princess research thesis 😎 bring it on

[puppyeared]

i feel like im not making any sense but does anyone else feel like there are stories that let u run with them and ones that spell everything out for you

[cleromancy]

god ppl trying to claim jasons "we're the not so different you and i" villain speech to mia WASNT incredibly unsubtle subtext... that they went through the same trauma... like he says theyre alike. she says he knows nothing about her. he lists what he knows. and then he repeats that they're alike.

that's only barely subtext and not text itself, man. trying to argue that isn't the intention that jason was also a csa victim is just willful misreading at that point

[elephant-in-the-pride-parade]

Shout out to the new trekkies who are gonna watch Prodigy first and get invested in the J/C ship. Because they are all gonna get it in their heads to watch Voyager afterwards, to get the references and see how these characters got to where they are in 2385...

Endgame is gonna be a special kind of whiplash for them.

[mirai-desu]

As a huge friends to lovers enjoyer… it makes me so sad that the message of MSATD became don’t ever fall in love with your best friend or it will ruin your friendship 🥴

Like, they had William fall in love with Eliza too deeply too fast for the pacing that what RN/TPTB wanted (their apparent opinion, not mine obviously), despite the fact they are the ones who wrote that pacing. Like the call is coming from inside the house babes--

But then William felt like he had to leave the whole ass country because he couldn’t be around her anymore (and mind you, while he was still recovering from being shot and being in a coma!!!) because he felt like she didn’t return the same feelings at the same level as him, and that fucking sucks so much ugh

Like no matter “the why” this all happened, that’s the ultimate message and it’s horrible and hurts and I hate that they have perpetuated this.

Especially when you SHOULD be friends with your significant other, no matter at what point you fall in love.

And yes, Eliza's characterization ended up being all over the place thanks to shoddy writing, but she DID love him back, RN just refused to let her voice it, because she though that would ruin the show. HA.

And if they were going for something like "well sometimes it doesn't work out" ... if the show is about their bond and everything they've said before, then why just not make it actually tragic and kill him off then??? So what, they just don't fight for each other??? make it make sense

anyway it really doesn't matter which way you slice, it this whole thing still just sucks

[and I needed to get this rant out of my drafts because they are going to start S5 promo soon and I simply want nothing to do with it at all]

[br1ghtestlight]

I can't even be mad bcuz there's not that much ableism in bobs burgers.... everybody kinda loves tina without question. Same for all the kids

[sakucrossing]

Another day, another post misinterpreting why Sakura wanted a rivalry with Ino.

[scare-ard--sleigh]

i don't have it in me to rant about the villainization of joseph chr*stiansen ft. the opinions of r*bert small anymore, the smallies have won, i will take my manipulative puppetmaster youth minister and ride him into the sunset. i mean ride him. i mean wank off. i mean ride off.

[asidian]

I've seen a lot of talk about how hell affected Edwin's pain tolerance, but not very much breaking down how it seems to have affected the way he manages emotion. So to that end, here we go:

Edwin Payne vs emotions (and how his no good very bad helltime messed with him something awful)

Dead Boy Detectives does a very good job early on of establishing the fact that Edwin is not particularly good with people. He's stilted, he's repressed, and though he can be incredibly kind to the people he cares about, he can also be quite abrasive, particularly to those he doesn't know well.

Time and time again, we see Charles step in to be the face man. Charles is the one to greet the clients, to take note of their names, to set them at ease. Charles is the one to support Crystal emotionally, and his interactions with Edwin seem to imply that he's done the same for Edwin, over the years. Charles has to remind Edwin to mind his bedside manner, and he explains to Crystal that Edwin forgets how to talk to people sometimes, because of how long he spent in hell.

In short, these boys compensate for each other's strengths and weaknesses in a lot of ways, and Charles is very much the one doing the emotional heavy lifting in this partnership.

And there's a reason for that, laid out in the text and subtext all throughout the show, and the narrative handles it brilliantly.

Edwin's actor does a fantastic job in expressing the character's reactions – or rather, lack of them. Because in the most shocking scenes throughout the show, Edwin often doesn't seem as horrified as the others in the face of events that ought to be horrific. In the Devlin house, he seems as though the murders scarcely affect him. When the jumper at the top of the lighthouse throws herself down, he's downright composed in comparison to everyone else.

And Edwin repeatedly shows or expresses that emotion makes him uncomfortable. When Crystal and Charles are fighting in episode five, he requests that they set their feelings aside until the case is finished. At the end of the episode, he says that the day has been entirely too full of emotions for his taste.

So, what is it specifically about emotion that bothers him so much?

In hell, emotion meant an awful, bloody death.

Panicking over potential incoming horrors? Nope, sorry, too loud. Dead again. Having a sobbing breakdown in a corner? Nope, sorry, too loud. Injured and trying to keep it down so it doesn't get worse? Nope, sorry, that's too loud, too.

Again and again, we see Edwin trying to tamp down on his emotions, but also, tellingly, trying to keep his emotions subdued and quiet.

When Charles finds him in hell, he's crying without making a single sound. When Esther starts to torture him in episode eight, he doesn't scream at first. He's trained himself out of making noise when something hurts or frightens him.

Of course he wants to set emotions aside until the case is done. He's spent seventy years learning what happens if you don't. You take care of business first. If, and only if, there's an after? That's when you let yourself feel.

Early on, when Edwin and Charles need to find the correct book but Edwin is unable to access their office due to the Cat King's bracelet, Edwin is upset. He's frustrated and out of sorts, blocked from making progress on the thing he knows he needs to be doing – hurting himself trying to get his arm through the mirror until Charles stops him. It's Charles who has to step in and help him calm down. It's Charles who has to remind him to breathe through what is very likely a panicked throwback to those times when if he could not solve his way out of a problem, it would very literally get him killed. In this scene, we get a brief glimpse of how Edwin looks when he starts to lose his grip on his rigid control.

And that's before we even get to these things:

Because as awful as the doll spider was, it wasn't the only thing skulking around the Doll House. Charles stumbles across misery wraiths when he goes to rescue Edwin from hell – and we know from the Devlin house episode that Edwin is extremely aware of what they do and how they operate. They were in his space, looking for despair to feed off during a time when he had it in spades.

Taken all together? It's an absolutely heartbreaking picture.

This boy seemed a little socially awkward before his death, from what we see of his time before hell. But afterward? He's had seventy long years of having to teach himself to regulate his own emotions, under pain of excruciating torture if he didn't do it well enough.

With an object lesson like that, over and over again, for literal decades, it's no wonder that Edwin has such a hard time navigating emotions and everything surrounding them.

[ohmerricat]

since we’re having an active discussion about racism in doctor who now. what is going on with the 1 million academy era thoschei fanarts where theta (the one that grows up to be good) is a blonde curly haired white blue eyed angel boy and koschei (the one that grows up to be evil) has straight dark hair DARKER SKIN THAN THETA dark eyes and looks asian most of the time. what is Up with that. are we not examining these stereotypes at all. nowhere in the source text(s) does it actually say which race either of the pair were, especially, as we know, race on gallifrey is arbitrary and meaningless…

of course, the argument could be made that this is intentional and reflects the perception of these characters vs who they actually are. i.e. theta was the rowdy troublemaker, theta killed torvic and got away with it by scapegoating his best friend, meanwhile koschei was the thoughtful child that was bullied and ignored, and this early trauma impacted the way both of them turned out. but somehow i doubt it.

somehow i don’t believe that academy era fanartists are making a deliberate commentary on the way that Whiteness will often allow a teenage delinquent to get away scot-free after breaking the rules in a way their counterpart of colour would have been punished for. which would actually make sense and, if this is the case, i’m all for white theta and asian kosch. but — after all — in my humble opinion, there should be variation. gender, too. we don’t know what they were like when they were children. one thing we should be wary of, though, is accidentally falling into the deeply socially-ingrained tendencies of white supremacist subtext. it’s time to leave the bubble

[luminnara]

Feyd Rautha headcanons plsss

Like what was his upbringing and training like? How did he become what he is?

Okay I think about this A LOT and I just wanna say that I know people argue a ton about the original Dune book(s) vs the older adaptations vs the new DV movies, and these are just my thoughts! Frank Herbert was a great writer and he gave us complex characters with tons of subtext, but the original Dune was also published in the 60s and the other best known older adaptation is from the 80s, and both have some definitely outdated and not great stuff was used to show how bad a character was (like the Baron having an affinity for uh young boys who look like Paul 😬). I think that DV made some really smart changes to these characters that are more in line with contemporary thinking, while also remaining true to what Frank Herbert was trying to tell us about them—like the Baron is a Bad Man and Feyd is angry and impatient and definitely wants to kill him. ANYWAYS leggo, this is long and my thoughts jump around a lot but I hope you enjoy!

WARNING for some talk of SA! Also mentions of violence and murder and cannibalism, the usual stuff

The more serious ideas that are backed up by text and movie evidence:

Feyd-Rautha was taken from Lankiveil, a Harkonnen planet ruled by his birth father Abulurd (Vladimir’s younger half brother) by his uncle, Baron Vladimir. Feyd definitely knows this, and knows that Glossu Rabban is his older brother…so imagine all of the conflicting thoughts he must have surrounding his own position and future. On the one hand, he was taken and raised by his uncle so that he could inherit the title of Baron. On the other hand, he was taken as a punishment to his father. There must be resentment there, towards both his father and his uncle, and even his older brother. Even though Feyd was essentially chosen to become something more than Rabban, he grew up away from most of his immediate family. Even though he was raised to become Harkonnen royalty, imagine how he might have turned out if he had remained with his father, who had renounced the Harkonnen name.

He was brought up in a cruel and harsh environment. He was made into a killing machine, partly because of Harkonnen customs, partly because Vladimir enjoyed the carnage, and partly because it was the only thing a young Feyd ever knew. As a young man, he loves killing and shredding because it feels natural and is second nature to him, but does he ever wish he had known what it was like growing up in a softer environment? Food for thought.

He hates his uncle. In the book, he attempts an assassination. In DV’s part two, he mentions to the Baron that he should kill him, and the Baron laughs. Vladimir finds it amusing that Feyd would say something like that, because he knows he’s got Feyd under his thumb. Perhaps Feyd is even scared of him.

The Baron is, and was, cruel to him. In the book, after the failed assassination attempt, Vladimir tells his nephew that if he agrees to stop trying to kill him (lol), he’ll step down and let Feyd have his position. BUT he kills his darlings as a punishment (who in the book are female slaves, who act as his lovers)

I already have a ton of headcanons about his darlings in the DV movies, and I really think that Feyd cared for them. So imagine that your own uncle WHO YOU WANT TO KILL takes away the only things you care about?? That’s fucked up man

The Baron abused Feyd to some degree, very possibly sexually—I’ve seen a lot of people pointing out how heavily this is implied by the subtext in both the book and part two. Feyd is actually a complex character, but neither Frank Herbert nor DV really spelled that out, and you have to dig a little and think about it. While I obviously don’t want ANYBODY, even fictional characters, to experience something like SA, I think it does add to the depth of his character and gives more fuel to his rage. It also shows us just how terrible Vladimir really is. I’ve seen it suggested that this is part of what Margot Fenring means when she says that Feyd is sexually vulnerable, but I take that comment to more mean that he opens himself up to the possibility of harm a LOT in bed and that’s when he’s most emotionally vulnerable. BUT I don’t think those things are mutually exclusive

NOW THE MORE FUN IDEAS THAT I ENJOY (fun is a subjective term here lol)

Feyd-Rautha has a vulnerable side, and it’s very, very guarded. It’s buried so deep he may not even be aware of it.

He really does care for his darlings, and that’s the closest thing he feels to love. It’s a possessive, ownership kind of love that we would consider toxic irl, but they’re the only things besides his weapons and power that he cares about.

He doesn’t revere his weapons, but he respects them. They’re not personified, but he appreciates a good killing tool, and likes to take care of his knives.

He views lives as very black and white. There are people who can be killed (slaves, servants, rivals, his uncle), and people who ABSOLUTELY cannot be (his darlings, an SO, his hypothetical children)

He views everyone else as weaker than him, and it’s partially because his uncle would never LET someone as important to his plans as Feyd be harmed, so Feyd rarely feels that his life is actually in danger. Almost everyone he fights in the arena is drugged, and it isn’t like his trainer would fight without shields. He’d be confused and intrigued by someone who could actually defeat him, and he’s so into the art of war and battle that he would respect it (but also be upsetti)

He spends a lot of time watching and calculating in silence. While he’s impatient and has a short temper, he likes to learn about things that interest him.

He’s up to date on Giedi Prime beauty trends and sets a lot of the standards himself. He gets massages and spa treatments regularly and has been known to undergo more serious procedures.

While he doesn’t partake as regularly as his darlings, he occasionally consumes human flesh and blood and doesn’t think it’s weird, because he views almost everyone as lesser than him, so eating them is akin to eating livestock. Alternatively, I could see him going down the “I feel so overwhelmingly deeply about you that I must consume you body and soul” road about someone special but I really don’t think he’s got that brand of romance in him lol

Like lady fenring said, he is, in fact, sexually vulnerable. In the bedroom, he can let out his emotions, and sometimes they’re ugly and sometimes he needs to not be in charge for the night. He leaves himself open to manipulation and harm. Man just really needs a good hug tbh

Canonically hypersexual as a result of trauma

Is harsh as a result of a harsh upbringing, one that looked comfortable from the outside but was anything BUT for him. Beneath the surface, he’s messy.

Aggressive because he’s always had to be to survive. His uncle probably wouldn’t have killed him because he was always integral to Vladimir’s plans, but did a young Feyd know that?? NO

is NOT well traveled. He’s lived on Giedi Prime his whole life, has probably seen Lankiveil, which is cold and watery, and has been on Arrakis, but I think he would NOT know what to do if he was on a lush green planet. All he knows is harsh, extreme environments. If you plop him down in a meadow, he will have NO clue what to do

As a child, he watched his uncle kill anyone who inconvenienced him. This definitely warped Feyd’s concepts of kindness and the value of life.

His childhood was just unbelievably strict and harsh and at the same time he was spoiled in certain ways, and that has led to him growing into a pampered yet still caged man

He would LOVE to slaughter his uncle and feed him to his darlings

In an arranged marriage, something about his spouse would have to suddenly intrigue him, and then he would be HOOKED. He would sink his teeth in and refuse to let go. Opening up to someone who isn’t one of his darlings would be strange and difficult for him

Remember how I said he isn’t used to fighting sober opponents? I think that once he gets a taste for fair fights, he becomes a little addicted to the thrill of it and the power that those victories bring him, and he loses interested in drugged fights. After a lifetime of living under this uncle’s thumb, the control he has over someone’s life and PROVING that he’s better and stronger and meaner than them is the most validating feeling he knows.

He never shows mercy, because no one has ever showed it to him.

[machinesonix]

Somehow I have made it this long without realizing that none of the screen adoptions of Dune so much as mention the Butlerian Jihad. Like I guess it's burned into my brain so hard I sort of assumed it was part and parcel of the universe. Don't get me wrong, I think that's probably the first thing you learn if you want to dive deeper into the setting, but it still hits me like if the LotR movies showed us the big flaming eyeball tower and was like ‘Oh, that's why there are bad things, but don't worry, that's just background stuff.’ Yeah, you can understand the movie, but if the story is just like Frodo vs. The Witch King you are losing out on any of the conversation about the corruptive allure of power or theological undertones. So without further ado let's pretend this is for the benefit of interested new fans roped in by the movies and not part of my desperate attempt to silence the howling specters of literary analysis that live in my blood.

The Butlerian Jihad is an event set ~10k years prior to the events of Dune in which humanity won their freedom from the machines that they had enslaved themselves to. As a result, it is a religious taboo to create a machine that thinks like a human. That's frankly the bulk of the information presented by Frank Herbert in the text without dipping into books 7+, but whether or not those are canon is frankly an enormous can of worms, which really makes sense when you consider the size of the worms. But boy howdy, Frank loved his subtext and parallelism. Everyone has a foil character, every theme is hit from multiple angles, and Villinueve has been doing an excellent job of capturing a lot of that in repeated imagery and dialogue. The Butlerian Jihad happens off camera, but it's themes are absolutely critical to the big picture.

The Butlerian Jihad was a holy war. It was not merely a rebellion against the machines, it was a crusade against them. The prohibition against thinking machines isn't just a law, it's in the pan-universal Bible. Absolute psychopath Pieter DeVries himself claps back at the Baron for insinuating he might have a use for a computer, and this is a guy who has been hired specifically for his preternatural absence of morals. Let's hold onto that idea for a minute. 

Probably my favorite scene in the first book is the one where planetologist Liet-Kynes is dying out in the desert. As the last of his strength fades to dehydration he hallucinates conversations he had with his father concerning terraforming Arakkis for human habitability. He's told that the means are not complicated. There is already enough water on the planet, the Little Makers just have it all trapped deep underground as part of the sandworm reproductive cycle. You just need to isolate enough water to start irrigating plant life, and once it's established that'll keep the water on the surface on its own. The hard part is making sure everyone on the planet is environmentally conscious enough to foster a developing ecosystem. Nobody can drink any of that water while it's being collected, because they'll just introduce it back into the water cycle where the Little Makers are. It's going to take generations, so that sort of water discipline is going to have to go above and beyond a social convention. People need to be willing to die before they'll take a sip and compromise the plan. Ghost Dad Kynes concludes that the only mechanism in the human experience to enforce this consensus is religion. 

In the context of this whole parallelism thing, you have probably noticed that the Butlerian Jihad is not the only holy war in the narrative. Paul sees a new jihad as the only way of creating a future where humans can flourish. Now you might be saying ‘Wait now, Machines. I thought the point of Paul’s holy war was to avenge Leto and disempower established power structures by taking away the control of the spice!’ And you’d be right. The thing is, without getting into spoiler territory, Dune Messiah is not going to be about how everything just gets so much better now that Paul has destroyed the economy, government, and untold billions of human lives. This isn’t the endgame. Dude can see the future and the way he does it involves looking into the past. Paul lives in a society defined by a holy war and his goal is to redefine society. 

Putting it all together you can see what I mean about the Butlerian Jihad being essential to the themes even though the story never shows us a thinking machine or a narrative beat where the absence of computers changes the outcome. It helps us see the big picture. I’ve seen a lot of dialogue lately on whether Paul is a tragic hero or a consummate villain and I’m not here to answer that, but I am here to underline the critical detail. Paul intends to be seen as a tyrant. Just like Kynes’ hallucination says, religion is the lever to make a value stick around forever. He wants to traumatize humanity to hate chosen ones and emperors the same way the machines traumatized humanity to change them forever. The Water of Life ritual doesn’t invert his values, it lets him realize these visions of war are the means, not the ends. He is absolutely not happy about it, but this is Paul’s terrible purpose. 

[boyquiet]

i think that we need to get over the narrative that you can’t have gay villains because that’s a harmful stereotype because there’s a huge difference between “this character is gay and a bad person” and “this character was written specifically to equate being gay and being evil/depraved/degenerate”. it’s just such a narrow minded view of fiction that leads to people afraid to write queer characters as anything less than morally perfect and then to a bunch of palatable but bland and boring queer characters that are arguably worse representation than a gay villain because they are not allowed to do anything wrong. while it is important to write all types of gay characters a work isn’t instantly “problematic” because the villain is queer and the hero isn’t. I think this is also related to the idea of subtext vs text in gay media and how I see a lot of people get mad bc the homoerotic subtext isn’t made canon without considering the context of it at all—sometimes creators make artistic decisions for reasons other than that they didn’t want the gay people to kiss because they’re homophobic. well written queer subtext can be better than a canon gay couple with no personality or relevance and a queer villain can be a better queer character than a gay hero because the characters in-universe morality isn’t inherently tied to how much care they are written with and the quality of “queer representation” isn’t determined by the amount of times they kiss on screen.

[vintagetvstars]

Andrew Robinson Vs. Brent Spiner

Propaganda

Andrew Robinson - (Star Trek: Deep Space Nine, Murder, She Wrote) - "literally who was doing it like him!! hired to appear in one ds9 episode (after failing to land the role of odo), he parlayed it into becoming the show's most beloved recurring character... @ all other actors: get on this man's level." Full text propaganda included below the cut

Brent Spiner - (Star Trek: The Next Generation) - Not only is he a terrific actor, having created one of Star Trek's most iconic and beloved characters, he's a great guy in real life - witty, personable, wonderful to his fans (source: some lovely chats I've had with him at conventions); he is also an author - his book Fan Fiction (hehe) is a fantastic dark comedy, a semi-fictionalized telling of an... incident in 1991 - and he's a hell of a singer! He released a CD of 1930s and 40s pop standards (also in 1991) titled Ol' Yellow Eyes Is Back - see video propaganda

- No Negative Propaganda Please -

Master Poll List | How to submit propaganda | What is vintage? (FAQ)

Additional propaganda below the cut

Andrew Robinson:

literally who was doing it like him!! hired to appear in one ds9 episode (after failing to land the role of odo), he parlayed it into becoming the show's most beloved recurring character.

he’ll happily tell everyone who asks, or even doesn't, how he was intentionally playing up garak's sexual tension with bashir from the get-go. he emoted like a king through all that makeup. he got so into his character he wrote an entire tie-in novel about him, based on in-character diary entries he'd been writing to flesh out his performance on the show. he and alexander siddig wrote an original play about their characters to perform at conventions (you can read it here!) and did live zoom readings of fanfiction about their characters including one where they're married, even collaborating with the author to edit it and add additional dialogue to make the character voices more authentic. @ all other actors: get on this man's level.

“When I walked on set to do the very first scene with Sid, I saw Sid. And he was one of the most beautiful young men I have ever seen in my life. And I thought, wait a second. Wait a second…I wanna fuck this guy. This is what this is about. Forget about the spy shit, I have no idea what that means. That's no action, I can't play that. But if I wanna fuck somebody, I know how to play that. And Sid, god bless him, the moment I put my hand on his shoulder…he felt it, and he picked it right up.” -Andrew Robinson on playing Garak for the first time

“The important thing about Garak is that he lives in the subtext. Again, with the iceberg analogy, the substance of Garak is what you don't hear. It's what he doesn't say. And in order to make that work, you have to have something real about the character.” -Andrew Robinson in an interview with The Great Link

Brent Spiner: