#vezda

Ummm CAT???

Been playing jesters with some friends (@celestialcherri mostly this is her fault) and came up with a new oc!! Their name is Vezda and they’re a cat jester of good fortune and happiness :)

Worse than that, the writers had to water down the Borg’s original concept almost immediately for dramatic interest; you just can’t have many compelling conversations with a faceless swarm announcing that resistance is futile. The Borg are great every so often, but it doesn’t take long before you want to go running back to the Klingons, Romulans, Vorta, or Cardassians—baddies with whom you can actually manage a compelling tête-à-tête about Great Power politics or competing cultural philosophies. It may have been the action-packed spectacle of “The Best of Both Worlds” that first drew me into Star Trek, but it is this—the intellectual back-and-forth, the radical project of trying to imagine yourself in the Other—that has kept me here these many years, and that I have tried to emulate in my own novel. So why is it, then, that on those rare occasions when Secret Hideout-era Star Trek has tried to actually introduce major new threats, so many of them have tended to be in the model of the Borg—monstrous, generic, doomsday villains? Let’s consider our track record: Discovery season two introduced CONTROL, an evil AI who wanted to destroy all life in the galaxy for reasons that were never made clear, with a catchphrase that sounded like someone ran “Resistance is Futile” through a thesaurus app. Picard season one ended with a brief face-off against a similar, extragalactic AI so powerful that it could scour all organic life from the Milky Way at the drop of a hat; season two ended with an even more generic threat from… something… that randomly opened a transwarp conduit that almost devastated the Alpha Quadrant for reasons that were never explored. And of course, the recent third season of Strange New Worlds has given us the Vezda, an enemy against whom reason and diplomacy are ontologically useless; they’re Evil, you see—“the evil that predates doing evil,” as Captain Batel memorably puts it in “New Worlds, New Civilizations.” Essentially, they’re the Devil: they desire only to wreak death and destruction across the Cosmos; the portals to their realm are kept in vast and ancient temples that seem to radiate menace; their leader, possessing the corpse of the unfortunate Ensign Gamble, goes about in a terrifying horned mask, compelling his followers to gouge out their own eyeballs for no apparent reason. And like all devils, there can be no reasoning with them; any attempts to understand their motivations or to seek peaceful coexistence are futile. They are, in other words, extremely one-note. 

it just doesn't sit right with me that the story would immediately place moral judgement on an entire species after only one encounter. they* (*edit: the writers) literally named the new species after a word for evil

don't get me wrong, sometimes a story can explore themes of pure evil really effectively. but not like this

isn't one of the main messages of star trek about not judging things by what they first appear to be? star trek never does things in black-and-white, so why was 'life is more complicated than good and evil' immediately dismissed? where's the morally grey area?

let me be clear, I'm not at all saying that violence shouldn't be depicted in fiction. I loveeeee how violence was explored in M'Benga's story arc, that was brilliant! that was star trek at its finest! but, in general, why don't all the starfleet officers get to battle with their own consciences over working for a paramilitary organisation which gives them big guns and expects them to kill people? sentient people?

this is not just about the vezda. I love a good zombie horror, but ethically? zombies are easy! they're scary mindless monsters which aren't actually alive, so our characters don't have to make any difficult decisions in relation to self-defence

and we see it in the way the gorn are presented too. these are beings who seem to act entirely on hunting instinct - they won't listen to reason, so the characters have to kill them because it's the only way!

simply put, snw is telling us that these aliens are the aliens the characters are allowed to kill, guilt free, because they're 'pure evil'

First of all, this is his fault. He let the Vezda out in the first place. Who knows what horrors he will still unleash on the galaxy.

I'm shocked he even recognized Gamble since he didn't give one single fuck when his eyes were burned out of his skull right in front of him. He just wanted to stay and play Indianna Jones.

I guess he had no plan except to dodge Chapel's calls and then stand around while the Vezda started taking control of this planet. Amazing plan, Korby. Really A+.

1660

🎐TEAM RIN🎐

Artist: @vezda, Writer: @aviss

Title: Between the Lines, Between the Sheets Word count: 9844 Rating: Explicit Warning: No Archive Warnings Apply

Tags: Established Relationship, Humor, Fluff and Smut, Porn with Feelings, Voyeurism, Crossdressing, Restraints, Dom/sub Undertones, Implied/Referenced Rape/Non-con, mentioned consensual non-con, Teasing, Edgeplay, Overstimulation, Enthusiastic Consent, Semi-Public Sex, Switching, 5+1 Things

Summary: It began with a book. Or, five times they borrow a kink from a book, with various degrees of success, and one time they come up with the perfect kink on their own.

when the oc rot is so strong you do ROUGH ANIMATION 🗣️🗣️🗣️🗣️