Can we talk about Joran Dax? Because damn he gets it rough.
The first time we find out about him, we learn that he was a top graduate of a prestigious music academy and a famous and respected composer and musician. He was also a hard person to deal with and had a very changeable and unpredictable temper.
He was host for the Dax symbiont for 6 months and it went so badly that upper level Trill kept expecting him to reject attachment to the symbiont. The fact that he didn’t was a huge deal that showed that moreover Trill were capable of being hosts than there were symbionts in need of hosting. This fact being public knowledge was likely to lead to harm to the symbionts, so it was decided to hide it by putting out information that Joran was kicked out of the candidate program and erasing all data about the joining.
That bad reaction I mentioned? Being joined made Joran increasingly violent and paranoid. He killed the man who made the suggestion that they say he was kicked out of the program. Dax was then moved to Curzon, along with memory blockers so that Joran and his actions would be forgotten.
We find this out when the memory blockers stop working so well and they search out the information to save Jadzia. The blockers are completely removed and she accepts Joran as part of her, welcoming his image with a hug that nearly brings him to tears because he’s so happy to be recognized and included.
The next time we see him is when Jadzia is going through a ceremony to “meet” the other hosts. They have to do the ceremony with Joran in a holding cell because he’s dangerous and tries to manipulate and hurt both Jadzia and Sisko (who is his temporary form).
The next time after that where we see him is in the seventh season where Ezri is investigating a murder and needs Joran’s help to learn about the murderer’s psychology. Also, he apparently has at least two more murders than we learned about the first time. And he spends a lot of time trying to convince Ezri to kill someone for the hell of it.
Now, the first time we learn of him he was a guy who was difficult to live with because he was a temperamental artist. And he should not have been joined. It was the joining that set him on enough of an edge to commit murder. Any other time we hear about him, murder is the only thing mentioned. This complex character whose tragedy comes from being joined is reduced to the single word “murderer” – and his actions when we see him back it up,
The host doesn’t “live on” in the symbiont. All that remains is shadows of the impression left on the symbiont. The joining with Joran was a bad time for Dax as well as Joran. All Dax can remember of him is this violent, paranoid man and that’s all the Joran that lives on in Dax is.
Morality is doing right, no matter what you are told. Religion is doing what you are told, no matter what is right.
Today the Memory Exchange is in a small private library.
The room isn’t very wide but it’s long, twenty-five feet maybe, which gives it an odd fairy-tale grandeur. It smells delicately of spice and flowers. Thick rugs are carefully placed along the hardwood fioor, softening your footfalls as you step inside.
The lovely hand-built shelves are covered with beautiful books. There is no snobbery here. Exquisite leatherbound tomes cozy up to creased airport paperbacks. Fanzines and museum catalogs share space, medical manuals and star charts, graphic novels and multi-volume histories. Here, all are equal, and all are beautiful. The colors of the books’ spines, the occasional splash of gilt lettering, seem to glow in the indirect light that spills in through the windows that line the right-hand wall.
The Exchange is the library itself. All the books, row upon row, all of their promise. Their pages are a link between past and future, between hearts and minds. Between the covers, words flow, time bends, and reality is … an interesting suggestion at best.
Smaller, low shelves have been used to wall off several cozy-looking nooks along the room’s length. The best of these is equipped with a comfortable-looking settee just beneath a picture window. A coffee table in front of it is already host to a number of intriguing-looking books. The curtains are alternating panels of red and teal, embroidered in gold, and give the light spilling over the upholstery a stained-glass quality. Outside is a garden in riotous bloom.
The Keeper is behind her desk, at the end of the room nearest the big double doors. Her headscarf is wine red, her dress a vivid blackberry color, and her eyes are the color of ink. She is busy flipping through a stack of heavy, old books, researching something, but she doesn’t mind that you are here and smiles when you approach the shelves.
On the settee, what at first appeared to be a cushion or piled blanket is actually some unfamiliar sort of wild cat, solid black with tasseled ears and eyes the shimmering green-gold of peacock feathers. She sees you and stretches, showing you a belly spotted in an even deeper black and sticking her long back legs out before rearranging herself into a shape that takes up less room.
Next to the other side of the settee is an octagonal Moroccan tea table, set with a steaming teapot and several glasses on a tray.
Look at whatever you like. Put the books on the coffee table when you’re done. Or if you’ve brought some with you that you’d like to set down for a while, Tab will watch them. There’s rose cardamom tea, if you want it.
The Keeper’s voice is low and fine. Her smile is small and a little sad, and only stays long enough to make itself known, but her tone is warm and her eyes are so kind.
I’m sure you’ll find something to enjoy. And … just so you know, the book at the end of the room isn’t finished yet. You can add something, if you wish. I would like that.
She points to a writing desk at the far end of the room, where a large book sits on a book stand. There are several pens nearby, even a quill and a knife. The pages look smooth and inviting.
The laden shelves stretch away, so beautiful, so heavy with promise. The room is still and safe. Tea, a very large and accommodating cat, a gracious hostess who won’t interfere with unnecessary conversation, and a long afternoon with nowhere in particular to be.
What a fine thing it is, to be alive on this day.
Will you take a memory?
Will you leave a memory?
After over 16,000 notes on this post, I think it is obvious this tumblr is badly needed.
These are dark times. There are so many terrible things in our lives. The memories are heavy, the fears are very near, and sometimes they are hard to escape.
Put it all down for a time, and hold another, brighter memory. Take it to be yours, carry it near or far, for as long or as little as you wish to carry it.
The Exchange cannot take painful memories away forever, but you may set them down for a while and take another beautiful memory with you any time you like.
There are a lot of things that bother me with the Mirror Universe in DS9. I’m not sure I can really words it right, and I only have half an hour until I’m on duty, so I don’t really have the time either, but I’ll try and give a few big outlines and fill in some details tomorrow morning or Sunday (when I’m not on weekend duty).
1. It’s not a dark mirror of what we could be (and thus what we should be scared of). It’s what we are scared of. “Mirror Mirror” from TOS showed an empire instead of a federation. People were militarily subjugated and made to conform to the will of the rulers or else they were killed. The 60s was definitely a “conform or die” era with the Cold War going on and all of the tension around Civil Rights and Vietnam. “Mirror Mirror” was a warning of what we could become.
The history lesson Kira is given in the first episode with it in DS9 is basically “the empire demilitarized and was then taken over by the EVEN MORE MILITARIZED enemies.” Nothing has changed except for who holds the guns. It’s not a warning to watch ourselves. It’s a warning not to trust those around us. I hate it.
2. Opposite or just alternate? Evil!Kira is crazy, pan, and completely oversexed. “Smiley” is O’Brien. Just, you know, with a history of slavery. The characterizations of the alternates makes me really uncomfortable. Definitely more on this later.
3. History won’t bring everyone together like that. With the changes since TOS, there would have been a huge number more differences than Jake not existing. It was something that bothered me in the original episode – it made no sense that the Empire and Federation were so completely different but still had a ship with all the same people on the same mission (more or less). Probably more here later too.
Right now, the black bloc protesters from the D.C. protest are facing a decade in jail and a fine (each) of $25,000. No one was hurt during their protest, but Starbucks and McDonald’s had to replace some windows and a limousine, a symbol of America’s wealth disparity, burned. And meanwhile, liberals are gleefully making memes of a black bloc protester engaging in the great American pastime of punching Nazis. Lots of people secretly really like the black bloc. If you doubt that, just Google ‘Richard Spencer gets punched in the face’ to see just how fond people are of the black bloc’s direct action approach to stopping Nazis in their tracks. And that’s what we need to do right now. Many progressives have been raised to tolerate outlandish ideologies in the spirit of inclusivity, but the far-right is now exploiting the sanctity of safe spaces in order to advance fascism, which will destroy our democracy. You don’t hug and coddle Nazis. It doesn’t work. Fascists only understand aggressive defeat. Radical protest creates the space for actions like the Women’s March. By pushing the Overton Window left, the black bloc makes the Women’s March look like a hyper-reasonable movement. ‘We’d better deal with these nice white ladies,’ some in power might say, ‘They’re nothing like those crazy kids dressed in black.’ I promise you: the Nazis don’t fear peaceful liberal protests, but they may think twice about marching in public if the black bloc is there to meet them.
Toxic whiteness. Yes, seriously, fellow white people, it is super high time we all actually did something about toxic whiteness.
So anyway, I was having this argument with my father about Martin Luther King and how his message was too conservative compared to Malcolm X’s message. My father got really angry at me. It wasn’t that he disliked Malcolm X, but his point was that Malcolm X hadn’t accomplished anything as Dr. King had.
I was kind of sarcastic and asked something like, so what did Martin Luther King accomplish other than giving his “I have a dream speech.”
Before I tell you what my father told me, I want to digress. Because at this point in our amnesiac national existence, my question pretty much reflects the national civic religion view of what Dr. King accomplished. He gave this great speech. Or some people say, “he marched.” I was so angry at Mrs. Clinton during the primaries when she said that Dr. King marched, but it was LBJ who delivered the Civil Rights Act.
At this point, I would like to remind everyone exactly what Martin Luther King did, and it wasn’t that he “marched” or gave a great speech.
My father told me with a sort of cold fury, “Dr. King ended the terror of living in the south.”
Please let this sink in and and take my word and the word of my late father on this. If you are a white person who has always lived in the U.S. and never under a brutal dictatorship, you probably don’t know what my father was talking about.
But this is what the great Dr. Martin Luther King accomplished. Not that he marched, nor that he gave speeches.
He ended the terror of living as a black person, especially in the south.
I’m guessing that most of you, especially those having come fresh from seeing The Help, may not understand what this was all about. But living in the south (and in parts of the midwest and in many ghettos of the north) was living under terrorism.
It wasn’t that black people had to use a separate drinking fountain or couldn’t sit at lunch counters, or had to sit in the back of the bus.
You really must disabuse yourself of this idea. Lunch counters and buses were crucial symbolic planes of struggle that the civil rights movement used to dramatize the issue, but the main suffering in the south did not come from our inability to drink from the same fountain, ride in the front of the bus or eat lunch at Woolworth’s.
It was that white people, mostly white men, occasionally went berserk, and grabbed random black people, usually men, and lynched them. You all know about lynching. But you may forget or not know that white people also randomly beat black people, and the black people could not fight back, for fear of even worse punishment.
This constant low level dread of atavistic violence is what kept the system running. It made life miserable, stressful and terrifying for black people.
White people also occasionally tried black people, especially black men, for crimes for which they could not conceivably be guilty. With the willing participation of white women, they often accused black men of “assault,” which could be anything from rape to not taking off one’s hat, to “reckless eyeballing.”
This is going to sound awful and perhaps a stain on my late father’s memory, but when I was little, before the civil rights movement, my father taught me many, many humiliating practices in order to prevent the random, terroristic, berserk behavior of white people. The one I remember most is that when walking down the street in New York City side by side, hand in hand with my hero-father, if a white woman approached on the same sidewalk, I was to take off my hat and walk behind my father, because he had been taught in the south that black males for some reason were supposed to walk single file in the presence of any white lady.
This was just one of many humiliating practices we were taught to prevent white people from going berserk.
I remember a huge family reunion one August with my aunts and uncles and cousins gathered around my grandparents’ vast breakfast table laden with food from the farm, and the state troopers drove up to the house with a car full of rifles and shotguns, and everyone went kind of weirdly blank. They put on the masks that black people used back then to not provoke white berserkness. My strong, valiant, self-educated, articulate uncles, whom I adored, became shuffling, Step-N-Fetchits to avoid provoking the white men. Fortunately the troopers were only looking for an escaped convict. Afterward, the women, my aunts, were furious at the humiliating performance of the men, and said so, something that even a child could understand.
This is the climate of fear that Dr. King ended.
If you didn’t get taught such things, let alone experience them, I caution you against invoking the memory of Dr. King as though he belongs exclusively to you and not primarily to African Americans.
The question is, how did Dr. King do this—and of course, he didn’t do it alone.
(Of all the other civil rights leaders who helped Dr. King end this reign of terror, I think the most under appreciated is James Farmer, who founded the Congress of Racial Equality and was a leader of nonviolent resistance, and taught the practices of nonviolent resistance.)
So what did they do?
They told us: Whatever you are most afraid of doing vis-a-vis white people, go do it. Go ahead down to city hall and try to register to vote, even if they say no, even if they take your name down.
Go ahead sit at that lunch counter. Sue the local school board. All things that most black people would have said back then, without exaggeration, were stark raving insane and would get you killed.
If we do it all together, we’ll be okay.
They made black people experience the worst of the worst, collectively, that white people could dish out, and discover that it wasn’t that bad. They taught black people how to take a beating—from the southern cops, from police dogs, from fire department hoses. They actually coached young people how to crouch, cover their heads with their arms and take the beating. They taught people how to go to jail, which terrified most decent people.
And you know what? The worst of the worst, wasn’t that bad.
Once people had been beaten, had dogs sicced on them, had fire hoses sprayed on them, and been thrown in jail, you know what happened?
These magnificent young black people began singing freedom songs in jail.
That, my friends, is what ended the terrorism of the south. Confronting your worst fears, living through it, and breaking out in a deep throated freedom song. The jailers knew they had lost when they beat the crap out of these young Negroes and the jailed, beaten young people began to sing joyously, first in one town then in another. This is what the writer, James Baldwin, captured like no other writer of the era.
Please let this sink in. It wasn’t marches or speeches. It was taking a severe beating, surviving and realizing that our fears were mostly illusory and that we were free.
I think I’ve reblogged this before, but I’m doing it again. Even growing up on the South Side of Chicago, going through a public school in which most of the students were black, and in which Martin Luther King was a celebrated hero who got his own honors and assemblies every year, even then I was never taught this.
People keep tagging me in that crack post about all the reasons Vader never managed to find Obi-Wan in twenty years, and I realize it’s crack so I’m not gonna reblog it and ruin people’s fun, but y’all, there’s a very simple reason why Vader never found Obi-Wan.
He wasn’t looking.
That’s…that’s literally it. He wasn’t looking. He didn’t care. Tbqh, he didn’t care about a single damn thing in this life until he heard the name Luke Skywalker.
I know the EU makes this whole huge deal out of Vader’s epic and undying hatred for Obi-Wan, but it just flat out doesn’t match with what we actually see on screen in ANH. Vader is, more than anything else, apathetic. He goes to take out Obi-Wan because Obi-Wan has literally shown up on his doorstep, so that’s probably the thing to do. His fight with Obi-Wan is frankly pathetic when compared with any other lightsaber duel in the six movies – even the duel on Bespin, when Vader was fighting someone he explicitly didn’t want to kill, was more dynamic than that Death Star fight. His dialogue during the fight with Obi-Wan sounds almost rote. Like, okay, I’m fighting my former Jedi Master, these are probably the things I’m supposed to say.
When Obi-Wan dies, it’s because he chooses to do so, not because Vader has actually overpowered him. And Vader’s reaction to his death is mainly nonplussed. He pokes a bit at the empty robes then shrugs it off because he’s got more important things to deal with right now.
There’s this tendency in fandom to want to make the tragedy of Anakin and Obi-Wan a tragedy of two people who went from close friends to bitter enemies. But that’s really only true at Mustafar.
I think the true tragedy of Anakin and Obi-Wan, in the end, is a tragedy of two people who cared for but never really understood each other. Obi-Wan dedicated the rest of his life to shaping Luke for the ultimate destruction of the monster Obi-Wan felt he’d helped create. But Anakin…the tragedy in his case is really that Obi-Wan went from being a friend and mentor to, ultimately, someone who just didn’t matter to him much at all.
And in some ways maybe that’s even more painful than the usual fandom understanding.
Hi, its me again, the annoying plant scientist who spends way more time thinking about Cardassians than is probably healthy. In my previous posts on Hebitian and Cardassian agriculture, I discussed what type of agronomic systems those societies might use. But I didn’t really discuss what KINDS of plants might grow on Cardassia.
Obviously, I needed to rectify that oversight.
Its been hypothesized by the fandom (i love you all) that Cardassians are similar to a class of extinct earth creatures known as therapsids. The therapsids have characteristics of both mammals and reptiles – similar to Cardassians, and Cardassian voles. Thus, I thought, hey lets look at the plants that exist in the same fossil strata as therapsids (Permian Era, for those who would like to do their own research) and extrapolate that Cardassian plant life might look like that.
First, I’d imagine thick swampy rainforests made of giant plants similar to clubmosses, quillworts and horsetails.
These plants don’t bear seeds, instead they produce spores in large cone like structures. Also, they have green trunks, made up of leaf pads (scars from where large leaves fell off). They’d have few branches – only a little branching at the top of the plants.
Its my hypothesis that the original jungle like vegetation on Cardassia was primarily made up of these plants. Hebitians might have bred the plants to have edible cones, leaves or rhizomes (underground stems – think potatoes). Since the spores of these plants tend to contain oil (in fact they’re highly flammable), early Hebitians might have bred plants to grow larger spores, with higher oil content.
Assuming that Cardassian plants, like earth plants, experience an alternation of generations, and assuming their plants reproduced in a similar manner, these plantlets would have needed a wet environment to allow their antheridia to swim to the archegonia (these are the haploid generation plants). Thus, they would have been some of the first casualties of the devastating climate change on Cardassia.
However, they still exist on the Ba’aten Penninsula, in some private gardens, and in the large botanical institutes.
The Cardassian/Hebitian diet changed drastically after the climate change, as these plants were no longer available. Instead, Cardassians switched to a more meat/grain heavy diet – based on the plants that had once only grown on the drier areas of Cardassia – and the animals also found there.
I don’t have any strong headcanons about the dryland plants of Cardassia, so if people wanna contribute, feel free! (Just let me knooowww about them.)
you know, if palpatine ever showed vader the death star schematics, wouldn’t vader – being a mechanical genius – have been able to pick out the flaw with the reactor shaft?
imagine palpatine launching an evil monologue while vader stares at this gigantic flaw, sweating
well, i got the same feeling. imagine vader just standing there, not listening anymore, only staring right at this super. obiovious. (to him) USELESS FUCKING FLAW and just not saying anything. maybe he should say something. sheev’s probably testing him or something.
but as emperor’s monologue drags on, the fact that no one here, besides vader, is aware of the issue is becoming more evident.
darth “everything proceeds as i’ve foreseen” sidious didn’t notice it. he’s staring right at the reactor shaft. he’s not seeing it. so vader keeps mum.
then rebels steal the plans and send a couple of x-wings against the friggin’ death star. as far as tarkin’s concerned, it’s like sending a couple of flies to stop an avalanche. and our man vader in that moment is like, “welp, i suddenly discovered my new calling as a flyswatter,” and gets the fuck out of that station
“Is… Is no one else seeing this? Someone on the design committee must have seen this. Tell me you’re all seeing this.”
“Seeing what, Lord Vader?”
“The huge obvious…”
You know what? Screw these guys. I told them this budget-killing monstrosity was a bad idea.
“Obvious lack of any place to get a decent coffee. This thing is the size of a small moon. Would it kill you to call Starbucks and tell them to open up a location in it? I hate Imperial-issue coffee.”
But imagine this is a meeting with the engineers, including Galen Erso (Krennic was not invited, of course. Mostly because Vader doesn’t feel like dealing with his simpering).
Galen is already sweating bullets, trying not to think treasonous thoughts, lest Vader picks them up with his Sith Magic.And then the seven foot tall monstrosity asks:
“Is no one else seeing this?”
Erso is about to quietly hyperventilate. He couldn’t say anything even if he wanted to. Fortunately, the other engineers are innocently clueless.
“Seeing what, Lord Vader?”
“The huge obvious…”
There’s a suspenseful pause. Galen takes advantage of it to plan what’s he’s going to say to Lyra, if they meet beyond.
“…obvious lack of any place to get a decent coffee,” finishes Vader.
Erso is too shocked to do anything. Which is fortunate, otherwise he might’ve collapsed to the floor right then and there.
After the meeting, Galen stumbles into his room and retrieves a bottle of space vodka from its hiding place.
This is why I hate the Empire, he thinks hysterically, chugging the alcohol straight from the bottle.
He hopes Vader chokes on his coffee.
Darth Vader: the most quietly yet violently nettled person alive. Forget about hatred and widower-grief and regret and all that. At this stage, it’s just pure annoyance at being (evidently) surrounded by complete and utter simpletons. Very Faustian, really.
I like the idea that sometimes when Luke is bored he’ll go to a place strong in the Force and ask Anakin’s force-ghost something about the Empire. Then listen to the disgruntled ranting with satisfaction, because his father’s experience confirms everything the Rebellion always thought about the Empire, with added emphasis on the incompetence.
And that sometimes, in a place strong in the Dark Side of the Force, where Luke has brought some poor padawan for their trial like Yoda brought Luke to the cave, and Darth Vader’s spirit unexpectedly emerges–not part of the trial but because this sometimes happens when Luke is around–and it looks like this is too much for the poor trainee too soon, Luke will step in and say “Hello Father. We were wondering if you’d tell us your thoughts on the Death Star.”
And 3 hours later, Luke and the padawan would emerge from the Dark Place, emptied of fear and marvelling at the boundless stupidity and banality that permeated every eschalon of the Galactic Empire.
Y’know, I feel like being the killjoy here.
I never saw the exhaust port as a giant, obvious weakness that the Empire was stupid to build in.
It’s a tiny two-meter wide exhaust port on something the size of a small moon, located in a recessed opening, with shields over it, surrounded by turbolasers. Oh, and the station it is on has a whole fleets worth of TIEs on it.
Complaining about it as this giant weak point always seemed to me the equivalent of pointing at a tank and going “that thing is a death trap. If someone walks up to it and puts a grenade down the barrel while there’s a round in the chamber, the whole thing will explode!”
And it’s like… yes? The idea is to not let that happen? The reactors have gotta have their exhaust ports somewhere. It’s an impossible shot even if you get past the swarms of TIEs and the flak cannons.
Sure, they didn’t count on the force. You can’t design your weapons based around the possibility of some Jedi making impossible one-in-a-million shots that’ll destroy them. Nobody would ever build anything, they’d just give up.
The problem wasn’t the exhaust port. It was Tarkin not having a better CAP.
The poor Imperial inspector who used that logic. “But.. but.. who would’ve thought someone could actually make that shot? It was a million to one shot!”
“A Jedi could!”
“But we killed all the Jedi! Blame the dudes who were hunting the Jedi!”
The next day an Inquisitor is at Vader’s lava palace conference platform pleading “Okay, we missed one. And it was a big one, a.. a… Skywalker but ALL the records said Anakin was the last of that family line! Who knew he had kids? Who could have thought to check around to see if a celibate warrior-priest had kids?”
1) The small reactor shaft above the main shaft was protected. It had ray shielding, and Red Leader’s direct torpedo hit was stopped by that shielding.
It started defended.
2) At the point of assault, the trench had cannons lining it, so somebody sat down and said “When an enemy attempts to fly down here, have them meet a faceful of blaster fire”. Lots of blaster fire, that fires down the line of a trench, and for which the sides of the trench must have been armoured to take a hit from those guns.
So it was defensible.
3) Y-Wings got murdered as they attempted the run. X-Wings got well murdered as they attempted the run.
It was capable of being defended.
4) Galen Erso was a terrible saboteur who built a giant fuse on the heart of the Death Star, and it took Jedi Junior backed up by the WeedDealerSpeedWagon to light the damn thing up… from a free throw line with an untargeted shot.
Vader must have been thoroughly annoyed “I TOLD EVERYONE THAT I COULD HAVE MADE THAT SHOT. IT’S NOT IMPOSSIBLE FOR SOMEONE WHO FLIES T-12s ON WOMP RAT HUNTS IF YOU KNOW WHAT I’M SAYING”
5). Seriously though, Galen was a design genius BUT THE BOOBY TRAP SELF DESTRUCTION DEVICE IS NO PLACE FOR MINIMALISM.
I figured Galen thought they’d send a team to infiltrate the place, not try to attack it with starfighters.
^^^
You are all giant nerds and I love every one of you.
Yeah, I took the new info as “you only need to sneak one small explosive in instead of dozens and hide them in hundreds of spots’ type flaw.
And POSSIBLY some mild finagling of the exhaust port, but I really don’t think Galen figured THAT was how it would go down. I think it only ended up as that hail mary because they ran out of time for the slower infiltration approach.
I think it all depends on how alive he thought he’d be at the time? Or how extensive a network he was able to finagle. Was the pilot the only one with doubts? Etc.
There's a Mirror on the Wall 