#ghItlhpu'wIj

[worflesbian]

sci fi is when women in tank tops are covered in grease and sweat and are shouting at people and racing against time to save lives

[worflesbian]

there've been a few throwaway jokes in various episodes about klingons not bathing that are obviously meant to be derogatory but of course me being the way that i am i immediately thought hey how can i turn this into a worldbuilding thing. and i thought yk i heard that chinchillas cant get wet cause its bad for their health, which i looked up and is apparently bc theyve evolved super dense fur to live at high elevations in the andes. and it turns out Qo'noS is largely mountainous and prone to high winds.

so my hc is that klingon hair is super dense and thick and takes forever to dry once its wet (which tracks bc look at it), plus the typical high winds and arid heat on the continents interior would crack wet skin as it dried, so getting wet is typically something best avoided. funnily enough chinchillas clean themselves by dust bathing in fine volcanic ash, and Qo'noS is an extremely volcanic planet so i think the whole thing works out pretty neatly and im incorporating klingon dust baths into my belief system from here on

[worflesbian]

this woman tugging the children out of the way/putting herself in front of them as the klingons walk past.. they're just going somewhere do u think they're gonna attack your kids unprovoked? it's such an interesting detail establishing how klingons are perceived by federation civilians but also worf's served on this ship almost a whole season do you shield your kids from him too? did you used to?

[worflesbian]

also really interesting to me the way that everyone is always like 'b'elanna you should embrace your heritage more' 'b'elanna why don't you like being klingon' 'come on these three fun facts we learned about your culture make it seem so cool' until she says hey i have to induce a coma so i can enter my people's afterlife and save my mother. and then they say woah there we meant you should learn some drinking songs or wear fur more often not this crazy shit. like yeah putting yourself at risk of death may seem a little extreme but klingon culture is always extreme! fundamentally klingon culture as it stands in the 24th century is incompatible with a lot of federation values and morality, which makes it very interesting but also very difficult for starfleet officers to accept anything but a heavily diluted version of it and i don't think that some of the voyager crew realised until this episode that encouraging b'elanna to accept her heritage might mean her doing things they can neither accept nor rationalise.

it's one thing to tell her she's wrong and that they wouldn't reject her for being klingon and another thing to confront a cultural obsession with death.

[worflesbian]

and of course im always insane about the worf side of things. people joke a lot about fucknasty klingon sex but it must for real mess you up to be surrounded by aliens more fragile than you and to get accustomed from a young age to being uncomfortable in your own body because it's always been too big and too solid and too quick to break things it touches. and then as you grow up the only people who are into you are the ones who are willing to look past these things that obviously make you undesirable, or the people that want you because they're looking for exotic and dangerous. no wonder he shuts people out and tries to turn it into something intentional, something he can brush off.

[worflesbian]

the conversation that follows this is classic insanemaking data insights on the subject of personhood but i was so struck by the preamble here. data's been casually asking some pretty hard hitting questions about faith and religion all episode which could very easily be considered insensitive ("has your spiritual crisis gotten worse after the return of your people's saviour was revealed as a fraud? asking out of personal curiosity :D") but rather than brush him off worf answers honestly every time, even at one point telling him he doesnt feel he can give him a useful answer, showing how much he cares about data's desire to learn more about faith. i love their friendship so much because i feel like with anyone else worf might be just a bit more defensive to cover this massive uncertainty, but he trusts that data only ever means exactly what he says and would never judge him for his answer. imo theyve got real autistic solidarity and it means. So Much to me!

[worflesbian]

my (mostly unserious) vision for post-ds9 ezriworf friendship is that she eventually starts working on like, the equivalent of a class action lawsuit against the symbiosis commission and every so often he'll show up on trill for emotional support and they get coffee and she vents about how grueling the whole thing is and he encourages her and tells her she's fighting valiantly for justice. and the symbiosis commission (who are keeping tabs on her) are like. why is the number one threat to our operation regularly meeting with the klingon ambassador. what in gods name are they planning

[worflesbian]

i really wish there was more acknowledgement of worf being made ambassador at the end of ds9 cause like. that was basically kehleyr's job and now it's his. and before he met jadzia he knew of curzon dax because he did the same job. and losing his parents was the reason he grew up among humans and has the experience needed to do this job. all the losses in his life have led him here and do you think he's thinking of them? and trying to make it worth something? trying to make them proud?

[worflesbian]

deep space nine (1995): writes an episode about two immortal beings who are reborn into different lives but are torn apart by fate each time they fall in love

kate bush (2011): writes a song about two immortal beings who are reborn into different lives but are torn apart by fate each time they fall in love

ds9:

kate bush:

[worflesbian]

middle of thee night and im reading way too much into how worf and b'elanna's names are both bad anglicisations. it's obvious how wo'rIv became worf (you pull a six year old out of the rubble, ask him his name and write down his answer phonetically) but how does beylana become b'elanna? my moneys on john torres not being familiar enough with the klingon alphabet to transcribe it right on her federation birth certificate but nonetheless wanting it to "look" klingon so he threw a qaghwI' in there kind of at random. the unhinged point that im getting to being that worf's name is a reflection of his violent seperation from Klingon culture and imperfect attempts to reconstruct it from memory whereas b'elanna's is a reflection of how other people's warped perceptions and expectations of "klingonness" have been projected onto her overlapping and obscuring her own sense of identity since birth

[worflesbian]

fucking love this scene we get one (1) establishing shot of Qo'noS and then cut straight to am extended barfight. that's what it's all about

[worflesbian]

Klingon Hamlet, post 1

gifted to me by my very dear friend @section-69, this is an honest to god klingon translation of the entire text of hamlet that i'm planning to read and post about over the next while despite my middling at best grasp of the klingon language. particularly love the portrait of the "author" and the tangible love and dedication with which the whole thing was made.

image ID in alt text

[worflesbian]

mirror kira/mirror ezri based on this image of catwoman and her sidekick pussycat (supposed to have been done for femslash week but. well)

[worflesbian]

i think the actress playing miral does a fucking fantastic job but also. as the designated 'annoying about klingon racial politics' person i have to point out that she has really pale blue eyes. this isn't weird on it's own but it casts the simulations b'elanna runs in s7e11 lineage in a dubious light: in that episode, tom and b'elanna's child is predicted to have brown eyes and brown hair, until b'elanna removes all klingon DNA from the simulation which results in blonde hair and blue eyes. i never took biology but from the fact that we see b'elanna's klingon mother has blue eyes and her human father has brown eyes i think something is amiss!

voyager uses b'elanna's klingon heritage to tell multiple stories about race and racism through an allegorical lens, with lineage being a prime example. it's a story about how internalised racism can be passed from mother to daughter through the enforcement of eurocentric standards of beauty, without ever acknowledging that that's what it is. in their eagerness to tell this story about race while absenting race from the equation, the writers latch onto b'elanna's fictional, metaphorical racial identity in a way that actively erases her actual tangible one - for the purposes of the story, eurocentric beauty standards are replaced with 'human-centric', the 'undesirable' racialised traits b'elanna worries her daughter will inherit are all attributed to her klingon side. the idea that b'elanna's human side is latina and therefore her human traits are also racialised doesn't enter into it. the idea that her klingon mother has blue eyes doesn't enter into it. the point i'm trying to articulate is that klingons are schroedinger's racialised people of colour -- they can be played by white actors with blue eyes in one episode and be implicitly understood as a genetic source of racialised features in another.

i think the writers like this ambiguity because it absolves them of any responsibility when writing klingons as one-dimensional stereotypes, while also allowing them to talk around racism through vague allusions when it suits them. the problems with this are rarely more evident than when b'elanna's real latina identity is erased in order to focus on the more comfortingly distant metaphor of her klingon identity, because talking about fake alien racism is less uncomfortable than confronting real human racism.

[worflesbian]

middle of the night and im thinking about the worf-dax-martok-sirella-julian situation. the web of complications if you will

[worflesbian]

can't remember which episode it is where worfs talking to guinan and insisting that he's not going to try and date among the crew but its such a pet peeve of mine that people zero in on the "hardcore bdsm Klingon sex" implications of that scene and not on any other reasons why Worf might feel uncomfortable dating humans. and be resistant to someone taking apart the flimsy reasons he gives for that. almost like he's covering up an insecurity. almost like he was canonically bullied his entire childhood by humans and this might affect the way he sees himself and the way he feels other people see him.