survival is insufficient

woc characters get put on a pedestal in their fandoms in a way that is so boring and itself kinda dehumanising. i dont just wanna hear about how they’re flawless queens, i want them to feel specific and real. and i understand why it happens, especially with younger fans, but fandom of these characters that’s oriented more around defending them from haters rather than engaging with them (beyond empty, repetitive adulation) is so… limiting and profoundly boring. you could explore these characters on their own merit instead you neglect any potential interiority, humanity, complexity in favour of letting rando haters be a hair trigger and building your faves up as impenetrable fortresses against them. and then its just girlboss with a coat of brown paint

Lookin cool

Wesley Crusher as a character is just so fascinating to me. He’s a child prodigy genius with no friends. A weird god-like time travelling alien starts stalking him when he’s fifteen. Because of this alien he ends up with a job on the federation’s flagship as a teenager. Over the next four seasons everyone proceeds to act like it’s completely normal that he works there now and no one ever questions the child labour of it all. The only people he’s close to are at minimum twice his age. He got the death penalty for stepping on a flower bed. He got stabbed through the chest and fully died once. His mother leaves him to be raised by their coworkers for a year when he’s just sixteen. He accidentally created new life while doing a science project one time. He technically failed his academy entrance exams twice but Picard still made him a full ensign anyway just because he felt like it. He was at the helm during the Borg attack and has to live with the fact that if they hadn’t found a last minute way out of that shit he would’ve crashed the Enterprise into the Borg ship and killed everyone on board. His last episode as a main before he goes off to the academy is about him nearly dying of dehydration in a cave and the whole time he’s just going “actually, I think I’m the luckiest boy in the whole wide world”. He finally makes some friends his own age and then he accidentally but recklessly helps cause the death of one of them. He participates in a cover-up to try and hide this but then he’s found out, gets held back a year at school and looses pretty much everything he’d been working for since he was fifteen. He burns out, becomes severely depressed and isolates himself from everything. He goes on a stereotype of a Native American Vision Quest, decides to drop out of uni and helps incite an uprising against the federation. It’s at this moment when he’s at his absolute lowest that the aforementioned weird god-like time travelling alien turns up and convinces him to leave behind everything he’s ever known to also become a weird god-like time traveller. This is framed as the correct choice for him to make. I didn’t even list half of the crazy traumatising shit that happened to that boy. About 95% of the stuff that happened to him is never addressed and the other 5% is only ever addressed briefly as they try to convince us that Wesley is fine, actually

The TNG writers seriously underutilized Picard's artificial heart. On a pre-warp planet or stuck in the past? Don't die. The autopsy will ruin everything. A shuttle's (or Data’s??) power cells are failing on a remote planet? Get the jumper cables. Someone stabs you thinking they've landed a killing blow? Wrong. Solid duritanium. Technology scavengers realize the most valuable piece of equipment is in your chest? Run fast. TSA checkpoint? Heart confiscated (unless you put it in checked luggage). Bad guys aim a compressed teryon beam at your chest? Boom. Dead (it's okay, he got better).

why am i dressed slutty you ask? to read classic literature alone in my room. mind your own business.

what do people without mental illnesses even think about

CAPTAIN JANEWAY JUST SAID RPF IS FINE???

Every so often I'm struck again by what an incredible job Whoopi Goldberg does playing Guinan. She was 33 when she first played her yet I have never once doubted that Guinan is a mysterious alien who is hundreds of years old. The effect even holds in screengrabs. How does someone manage to do that with their face.

star trek would be the ideal fictional universe to get trapped in because you'd explain your situation and they'd be like yeah makes sense. no further questions. fortunately we can use the mysterious warp signature emitting from this system's icy moon to counterface with the solar radiation and slingshot you back home

Dear diary today I genuinely cried because not only was I hungry and having a bad day I also thought too hard about the fact that Riker/Picard is a rare pair with less than 100 works on ao3. Real men cry over rarepairs.

Proud to say that since I made this post in September 2025, the number of Riker/Picard fics has breached the triple digits and now sits at 102 works! So proud of my bald friend and my fat friend!

106 works as of August 2026! I love my tiny community!