#sumptuous

Why hello there

Thank you thank you thank you thank you thank you thank you for noticing that lolol

This Julian bought into the propaganda harder than canon Julian I think. At first because that's all he's ever known. I do think he'd be encouraging people to fully assimilate because it "worked out" for him. He just remains willfully ignorant to how many colonists and assimilationists operated (aka real fucked up). Which I think part of it is self-defense because it can hurt to realize so much is a lie.

I grew up proud of who I am but we live in a fucked up society that tries to get us all to buy into racism from birth. Racism is built into the damn foundation. For some people, it's easier to go along with what they've been told and carry that cognitive dissonance for their whole lives. For others, it takes them a long time to realize they built a house on a foundation not only still sinking but built on the bones of their ancestors.

Julian is the latter in my opinion.

As an audience we get to retcon Julian's reasons for being on DS9 with the augment reveal but "real frontier medicine" and "this is where heroes are made. Right here, in the wilderness." It revealed a lot about him and I wanted to keep that in the story where I could.

Also, it was the DS9 writers for sure, but I was always side eyeing the fact they got Miles reenacting British historical events with Julian, but they never reenacted anything specifically Irish when we also know Miles is very proud of his family history.

So thank you for noticing those details. It was something I wanted to expand on a lot, but I just had to let it go or I'd have written like two books.

I had a whole subplot of Julian dealing with Eddington whose taking Sisko to court constantly out of jealousy. Because Sisko is not only a free man, but he has accolades and status from his time fighting for the British army. But just like in the show there is a level of disrespect because yeah sure, go on Commander who should be already a Captain and an Admiral before 40, go ahead and work at the edge of the "wilderness."

It would be during those conversations with Sisko that Julian would have some epiphanies. He'd still love England (aka the Federation) and not be able to fully renounce what they're doing, but he'd be on the path toward caring about human rights beyond just his own experiences and sphere of influence.

It was a balancing act because Star Trek can be very ahistorical when dealing with the past. If we didn't have Avery fighting to show Black people and history in a fuller way, we probably wouldn't have gotten an episode like Far Beyond the Stars.

Julian is Julian at the end of the day. I tried to keep his character as close to canon as possible ~for many reasons~.

But as you can tell, in order to bridge the gap and get 1600s Julian more educated on these issues, I'd have had to really really expand when the heart of the story was a focus on Julian and Garak.

And as much as I want to have his character confront these topics in depth, it would be a lot of heavy lifting to get him there with nuance so it wasn't suddenly too OOC.

Let's just hope that genius in any universe cracks open a damn history book someday. (Why the fuck were they playing holosuites at the damn Alamo????)

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