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incorrectly-quoted-queers · 3 years

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Star Trek: Discovery "That Hope Is You Pt. 2"- And So It Begins

How wonderfully fitting so that my personal blog needs can match the Star Trek episode I wanna talk about! Serendipitous, right? Anyway, here we are on a Thursday to begin a new weekly thing I want to do for my sanity: Star Trek Thursdays! I know that isn't the satisfying alliteration that people might want, but Thursdays have been my least favorite days of the week since I was like, 6. My theory is that Monday is dreary, but fine, Tuesday you start hitting your stride, Wednesdays are neat because they're like the sweet spot of getting your act together, Friday is the last day of the work/school week, and of course the weekend is... the weekend. But Thursday is this weird spot where my excitement for the week is running out of steam and it's like, a lame tease for Fridays. So I've always hated it. But as my career has been doing better, I made a quality of life decision where I will go to work slightly later (sorry if that's flexing my freelancer privilege) and extend my morning tea drink and watch the most recent Star Trek. And with the final episode of Star Trek: Discovery's third season, I will start by doing a little writing warm-up each Thursday! So, these new Thursday blogs won't quite be reviews or personal blogs or just reactions, but a sort of blend of the three depending on the week. We got the gist? Okay? Okay. Now I'll get to talking about the actual episode and WE BETTER because I really liked this one. Let's start with the bad just to get it out of the way. I am bummed and concerned about the implications of Saru leaving Discovery. At the very least, it didn't feel clear that he'd be coming back to the ship and that greatly upsets me. Doug Jones is arguably one of my favorite actors and Saru was the anchor that made me adore Discovery even at its weakest points. While I know people come and go (like we always knew Pike was temporary) the thing is that Saru felt so... integral to Discovery. I can understand wanting to finally make Michael "Captain Burnham" finally, and she definitely deserves it. I'm just v stressed about possibly losing my favorite lanky alien. What I liked about a lot of this season was a decrease in the Kelvin inspired action-bonanza. Yes, Trek always had some action going on, but I appreciate more episodes that focus on societies and ideals and curious science. While the rest of the season was better than others, this final episode was pretty hardcore action-y and it was... fine? I just don't prefer it. I think Osyraa might've been the best Discovery villain so far and her death felt just sort of... anti-climactic. Like, I think a charm of old Star Trek villains is how the captains would run into them and then some time would pass, they'd evolve or become scarier, and they'd find new ways to tackle them. I was kinda hopeful that could happen with Osyraa & the Emerald Chain. But alas, she's just... dead. I'm meh on the new uniforms. I've always been a big fan of the old ones, though. NOW TO THE GOOD! Disabled super-genius is *chef's kiss*. Give me that sweet, sweet representation. The b-plot of Tilly and the crew trying to blow up the nacelles felt really older Star Trek and I like it. Owo+Keyla always makes me happy, but also Owo+Keyla is not confirmed either so 0_0 The baby family unit of Adira, Stamets, and Culber makes me very happy. Also making Gray a real character over time also makes me happy. He's probably going to end up a hologram and I am very okay with that. I want to see more of them. I think after all the trials she went through this season, Burnham absolutely deserves this captain's post. I also am so happy that a captain gets a love interest. It's good comeuppance for all the BS struggle she's had to deal with. Not just this season, but the past 3. It feels like we got a weird 3 season prologue to how the proper captain got their chair and it's kinda weird but I also kinda like it? But maybe I'm at a point where I'm attached to the crew enough to be like "yep, this is good". So, as Captain Burnham's adventure begins, so does my Star Trek blogging. (As well as a couple other secret things I hope I can talk about more in the future). But for now, I'm settled. Next week (until I am graced with a new season of something something Trek), let's start at the beginning of TOS and go from there. ....And yes, that means we're gonna get real gay.

PS: Anyone else get gay Kelpian vibes from Sokal and Saru?

#Star Trek #Star Trek Blogging #Trek #Star Trek:Discovery #Discovery #Stamets x Culber #Holo Gray #Gray x Adira #Captain Burnham #Discovery spoilers #Star trek spoilers #That Hope is You pt. 2 #Saru x Sokal #Burnham x Book #Owo x Keyla

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mia-cooper · 5 years

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2018: Fanfic Year in Review (Part 1)

Listing my favourite fic I've posted each month this year. (You’ll note there are only 9 fics on this list, for reasons I’ll explain below.)

Coming soon: another post where I'll pick my favourite fics posted by other writers in each month of the year, which will (hopefully) help other writers feel good and (also hopefully) give readers something new to enjoy, or remind them to revisit a favourite. (This one will be hard because of all the quality fic that’s been posted this year, but I’ll do my best!)

All I ask from you is if there’s a fic you enjoy/ed on either list, mine or someone else’s, please give it a kudos or comment, especially if you haven’t done so already. ♥

My 2018 Fic Review Roundup

January – Queen of Swords (T)

ST:DSC, ST:MU | Mirror Burnham x Mirror Lorca, Mirror Georgiou x Mirror Lorca

Okay, so I didn’t have a whole lot of choice for this month because this was the only fic I wrote. Nonetheless, I don’t hate it. I’m grateful to Discovery for exciting my spleen over the Mirror Universe status of Gabriel Lorca (about which I am still, and will forever be, bitter) as it was the only thing that inspired me to write about anything during my post-Christmas mental wasteland.

It’s about Mirror Michael Burnham’s competitive, twisted affair with Mirror Lorca, but it’s really more about the toxic relationship between Burnham and her foster mother, Emperor Georgiou. It’s about escaping abuse and trying to find a new, better way, but not having the tools to do so. It’s about being caught between loyalties and being unable to choose. And there are some heavy Macbeth references in there, but I see Michael more in the role of Hamlet, though her fate at the end of the story is ambiguous.

February – Open Hand (M)

ST:VOY | Janeway x Chakotay

This was another dry month for the muse, so again, I had only one choice for Fic of the Month, and it was one I’d never planned on writing. @writtenndust commented in a discord chat about the role played by Janeway’s and Chakotay’s hands in a number of episodes throughout the show (these are the things we shippers analyse in crazy detail), and I suddenly couldn’t stop thinking about hand-clasping being the most contact we saw in canon between these two and how many opportunities were missed, and then I climbed inside Janeway’s head as she was debriefed post-homecoming and she got very introspective about it.

I really like this fic. I like its melancholy feel, Janeway’s self-understanding and her calm acceptance that sometimes you don’t get the fairytale ending. And I like that we do get the fairytale after all.

March – Warmth and Colour (T)

ST:TNG | Guinan x Lwaxana Troi

Once again, the only fic I published all month (are we sensing a pattern here?) This one was for @gluecookie for the Trek Rarepair Swap, and I don’t mind admitting that it took forever to get into. I absolutely love both of these characters but I’d never thought about shipping them before, and I couldn’t word for some reason, and the more I tried to find the right angle the more twisted up I got. In the end, though I’d wanted to give my recipient something meatier, I ended up with a pretty light story full of banter and a couple of slightly more serious personal revelations.

The most amazing thing about this story? My recipient not only loved it, they gifted me back with fanart they drew themselves. This is the most wonderful thing that can happen to a fanfic writer! (Incidentally, I’ve been lucky enough to have been gifted a soundtrack for The Bitter End by @cheile and a moodboard for Laced and Bound by @supernovacoffee and I couldn’t be happier about it.) And I’m actually planning a sequel to Warmth and Colour, hopefully sometime early in 2019.

April – Displaced (T)

ST:TNG, ST:DSC, ST:MU | Lorca x Garrett

What do you know, I have two fics and two drabbles to choose from this month!

This is one of the weirder fics I’ve written. It not only involves an impossible pairing (Rachel Garrett is from a different century to Gabriel Lorca), it’s set on an alternate plane of existence: both of them are dead, and they meet in some kind of limbo or spiritual waiting room. Each of them has one last chance to connect with another human being, but then each gets to make the choice between life and death.

This story is also an attempt to explain what happened to Prime Lorca, and it’s not a happy ending; there’s a sequel, In the Wrong Light, that’s a whole lot darker than this fic.

May – Abandoned (M)

ST:VOY | Janeway x Torres

Wow, May was a great month for writing – I bashed out 10 fics in 3 fandoms at a total of over 25,000 words! This was mainly thanks to the inspiring prompt memes on tumblr – a kiss + a ship and six sexy words – and consequently, most of these works veered on the nsfw side. (I have a stack more prompts to write to in 2019, as well.)

As for a favourite? I’m going to have to go with Abandoned. It’s set during Year of Hell, one of my all-time favourite Voyager episodes, and it’s hurt/comfort and angst, and it’s about love that’s unspoken and complicated but no less real for it. And I like B’Elanna being the strong one for the captain, because in canon we only really get to see Janeway being strong for her.

June – To Those Who Wait (M)

ST:VOY | Sekaya x Phoebe Janeway

This is actually a work in progress – I’ve planned another three chapters – and it fits into a larger universe of loosely-connected stories that @jhelenoftrek and I have been blathering about for over a year now and we are definitely going to get started on the series that brings them all together in 2019, aren’t we Helen?

Anyway, I’m fond of this story. It was a birthday present for Helen in which I tried to combine a number of her favourite things because she’s one of my favourite people, and it’s the only Sekaya x Phoebe Janeway story on AO3, which is kind of cool. And Phoebe is sexy and angry and mouthy, and Sekaya is gorgeous and lonely and rebellious, and Mark is weird and self-aware and ridiculously in love with Kathryn, who’s damaged and brave and brittle, and Chakotay is confident and sarcastic and big-brotherly and has no idea of the tragedy that’s in store for him and his sister.

And J/C pass like ships in the night long before they meet in canon, and their siblings have a passionate, tempestuous one-night-stand which (spoiler alert) isn’t going to fit the one-night-stand category in the end.

July – Trigger (E)

ST:VOY | Janeway x Chakotay

Another fic prompted by tumblr memes, and one I’d been wanting to write for quite a while. It’s not my only Equinox-inspired fic (another of my favourite episodes) and probably won’t be my last. I wanted to explore Janeway’s loss of control in this one – her anger and bitterness and rage, and the way she takes them out on the people she loves – and I wanted more of Chakotay supporting her publicly but in private, not backing down one whit.

And I wanted really hot sex. Hopefully I achieved that.

(August and September are fic-free because I was posting The Epic. I’ll come back to that one.)

October – Nothing Like a Dame (T)

ST:VOY | Paris x Torres

Ah, fictober, how I loved you. For those who don’t already know, I decided to embark on fictober at approximately 8pm on September 30, despite having a thousand other things I should have been committing to. Just to make it trickier, I also decided I would write a missing-scene ficlet to every single daily prompt, and I’d keep it canon-consistent and in order of episode airing. As you can imagine, this was quite a challenge, and resulted in me producing almost 29,000 words in a single month.

Of these 31 ficlets, I think this one is my favourite. The two protagonists aren’t even really main characters on the show – they’re mindwiped alter egos in a World War II holodeck program – but they’re still relatable both to the show’s characters and to the world today. What ‘Brigitte’ experiences as a collaborateur horizontale is the kind of thing women go through in every war, and what ‘Bobby’ learns from her is a lesson a lot of men in power today could stand to learn.

It’s also given me an idea for a Killing Game-based fic series, so stay tuned for that, sometime in 2027, probably.

(November is fic-free because I hate the only fic I posted that month so much I deleted it from AO3)

December – Desperate Measures (E)

ST:VOY | Janeway x Chakotay, Janeway x other male, Chakotay x Seven, Kim x Seven

I mean, I had to include The Epic. And strictly speaking I’ve been writing it for well over a year, but it counts. At over 70,000 words so far – my longest fic to date – it absobloodylutely counts.

This is an Endgame-fixing post-DQ action adventure featuring angst, romance, conspiracy, drama and smut. Perfect for the holiday season, right? (And no promises, but I’ll do my level best to finish it before the end of January!)

______

Coming soon: My favourite fics by other people for every month of 2018

Happy reading (and reviewing)!

#miawrites #2018 year in review #on writing

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aion-rsa · 3 years

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Star Trek: Discovery Season 3 Episode 11 Review: Su’Kal

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This STAR TREK: DISCOVERY review contains spoilers for Season 3, Episode 11

As the season finale looms on the horizon Star Trek: Discovery attempts to begin pulling together its disparate Season 3 plot threads into something like a cohesive story. “Su’Kal” brings the villainous Osyraa and her Emerald Chain back into the picture, investigates the mysterious Kelpien ship that sent the distress call a few episodes back, and finally gives us an answer to what likely caused the Burn in the first place.

If this all feels a bit crowded and overstuffed, that’s because the hour tries to do too much, cramming in a ton of primary exposition alongside its more action-oriented B plot. Plus, if you had “the Burn was somehow triggered by a radioactive Kelpien child who lives in the holodeck version of Plato’s cave” on your Discovery Season 3 bingo card, well – you’re a smarter viewer than I am.

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But, hey, at least Tilly gets to sit in the captain’s chair at last. (In the Prime universe, at any rate.) Take joy in the small things, folks.

The crew of the Discovery is surprised that there’s a life sign emanating from the abandoned Kelpien ship discovered in that mysterious nebula, but we shouldn’t be. This season has been extremely interested in interrogating whether Saru is the right leader for this brutal new future, and for weeks his arc has been foreshadowing a critical choice at a point when he clearly cares more about the needs of the one than the many. The moment of that test is upon him, and it may very well end up costing him his life, or the lives of his crew. (I suspect it will at the very least cost him his captain’s chair next season, but that’s just a shot in the dark.)

How Star Trek: Discovery’s BIG Twist Sets Up Section 31

By Ryan Britt

Star Trek: Discovery Season 3 Episode 10 Easter Eggs & References

By Ryan Britt

There was never any real question of whether Saru would jump at the chance to rescue the child that’s still trapped in the wreckage of that Kelpien ship. And, naturally, Michael can’t resist the opportunity to find out the truth about the Burn she’s been obsessed with since she arrived in the 32nd century, since she blames that event for the downfall of the organizations she most loved. It makes a certain amount of sense for Hugh to tag along since he’s at least a medical professional, but this is another of those installments where it feels as though Discovery simply enjoys constantly putting him – and Stamets – in mortal peril, for no other reason than because it can.

As noted last week, we were always going to miss Philippa Georgiou’s presence on this show, but I didn’t think the weight of her absence would be felt so completely this quickly. Truly, this episode would have been vastly improved by the presence of anyone willing to argue the more difficult points of the situation: That Saru and Michael’s trip into the nebula was actually kind of a stupid plan to begin with and that the smartest decision they could have made once they recognized Su’Kal’s abilities would have been to kill or otherwise incapacitate him in the name of preventing countless more deaths.

This is Star Trek, of course, so that plan would have rightfully gone nowhere, but the fact that no one even mentions the hard truths to Michael or Saru now is kind of a problem. (Except for Tilly, a little bit, as she at least tries to leave Michael and jump Discovery to safety – just a minute too late.)

What emotional heft there is in this story comes from Doug Jones who, thanks to an oddity of the program that protects Su’Kal that cloaks all visitors in skins that will be familiar to him, is for once allowed to convey every moment of Saru’s emotional conflict on his own very human face. The lack of the prosthetics he normally wears allows for a degree of performative nuance that he is not always afforded, and Jones sells every second of Saru’s personal grief and devastation over the things he sees.

The child Su’Kal – now grown to a young man – exists in a world populated entirely by holograms and computer simulations. He’s never been outside the ship he was born on and doesn’t even really understand the idea of “outside” as anything beyond the vaguest of concepts. He seems to spend his life trying to avoid the literal manifestation of a monster from one of his childhood storybooks and is painfully excited to meet Burnham, who he believes to be something new in a world that became stale long ago.

He is also, apparently, the source of the Burn. Which, admittedly, is not the answer to this season long mystery that I was hoping for, particularly since the planet he is trapped on is essentially made of dilithium, a twist which pretty much solves everything that was interesting about this season’s space politics in one fell and largely dull swoop.

Thanks to the combination of extended exposure to subspace radiation and the nearby dilithium nursery that has transformed him into what is essentially Star Trek’s take on Dark Phoenix. (The episode was not tremendously clear on the explanation for any of this beyond Hugh’s insistence that life forms adapt when they have to, so hopefully more exposition is coming, both about what happened 125 years earlier and what Su’Kal is capable of doing now.)

As the final credits roll, Sa’Kul remains a threat that no one knows how to neutralize; Saru, Hugh and Adira are trapped and slowly dying of radiation poisoning; and Michael and Book are left watching Discovery disappear, her spore drive now in the possession of the Emerald Chain.

Now what? We’ve got two more episodes to find out.

Additional Thoughts

If I were going to take my ship into a radioactive death trap, I would definitely take my amazing cat off of it first, Book! Protect Queen Grudge at all costs!

The fact that the Discovery now canonicallyhas what is essentially a veterinarian on board is the best thing. (This must mean that more people have pets, yes?)

Michael Burnham lecturing literally anybody about allowing their emotions and desires to distract from the needs of the larger mission is r i c h.

That said, Michael’s pep talk to Tilly about sitting in the captain’s chair in Saru’s absence was the sort of ladies supporting ladies stuff I always want to see in this franchise.

Tilly’s threat to self-destruct the Discovery before allowing Osyraa to have the spore drive was hardcore. I hate that her determination was undercut by the Emerald Chain just…apparently transporting straight onto the ship with no problem?

Sorry about the mind control, Stamets. You truly have the worst luck.

The post Star Trek: Discovery Season 3 Episode 11 Review: Su’Kal appeared first on Den of Geek.

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