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#cosmic-llin – @little-brisk-archive on Tumblr
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the continual discovery of fresh types of nonsense

@little-brisk-archive / little-brisk-archive.tumblr.com

PLEASE READ THE RULES call me soph (she/her) ἰσδάνω δ᾽αὐτᾶς ἄγαν ἄγχι: τερπνά φαίνεταί μοι πάντα λέγει γένεσθαι -- sappho, probably (x)
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It is impossible to narrow down to one scene/moment BUT a few standouts include, Kira's reunion with the O'Briens and her hug with Jake in Families, literally the whole of the OT3 Chair Fic, all the wonderful dancing in A Sign of Rigor, that time you wrote incredible thoughtful beautiful fic about my Tumblr fancast and made Jeris Dwyna into a real person, Lwaxana Troi and Kimara Cretak...

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i love how you just. straight up refused the brief here. no gods, no masters, says tumblr user cosmic-llin.

there's a reason so much of my trek fic is dedicated to the same person and that reason is you are a fucking inspiration! talk about stories bringing about friendship; it's a long time now we've been making things about star trek women together, long enough that it's weird to remember there was once a time when i knew about star trek but not about you.

and so to close out this extended exercise in making my friends be nice to me about my writing, here is the start of ‘families,’ a story you prompted that turned out to be one i really needed to write. it was ten years old in april, but its basic problems and desires are still the ones i’m always thinking about. thank you for making it happen.

Families are difficult, especially when they are unusually shaped.
That’s what Kira Nerys is thinking, as she sits at the desk she still calls Sisko’s, warming her hands on her morning raktajino and spending a tenth consecutive minute staring at the photograph on her console screen. She smiled, at first, at Yoshi’s earnestly knit eyebrows, the pudgy sweetness of him, sitting on a wide porch in the sun, chewing on the stuffed sinoraptor she gave him when the O’Briens left Deep Space 9. Then she thought how much he’d grown in one short year, how much of him she’s missed and will keep on missing, and her smile soured into the grimness that now sits at the back of her throat.
Keiko and Miles must have meant well, sending her this substantial file of photographs and infant artworks. A thoughtful gift thoughtfully timed, in honor of approaching Peldor. The note from Keiko was full of all the minute details of Yoshi’s daily life, but the only words it spared for Nerys were I hope you’re well. Miles signed beneath his wife, and he at least wrote love, yet still there is no questioning the simple fact that family is not a word either of them thinks of in connection with Kira Nerys.
She is the unusual shape of this family. The uncomfortable protuberance that disrupts its neat quadrilateral nucleus.
She lays a tentative hand along the edge of the image, considers displaying the photograph, thinks better of it. Kisses her fingertips and presses them to Yoshi’s forehead, closes the file, and slides emphatically back from Sisko’s desk. She stands and taps her comm badge.
‘Kira to Bashir.’
She has business to attend to.
*
Families’, 2011
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Please could I have an indulgent Star Trek fantasy about Mirasta Yale

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the thing that makes this hard is that mirasta yale is canonically already the fulfilment of the most indulgent fantasy about mirasta yale: she gets to go with them! she stays on the ship! her own wildest dreams and also my perpetually frustrated desire for the enterprise to keep its alien-friend-of-the-week are both already fulfilled! so really all we can do is expand on that—imagine her in ten forward with beverly and deanna and guinan firing every question she’s ever had about interplanetary civilizations at them faster than they can answer, in engineering with geordi giving geordi exactly what he loves best which is a captive audience for extremely arcane warp mechanics lectures, sticking her nose into every lab on the ship and gathering up every detail she can absorb until she knows more, broadly, about the state of research aboard the enterprise than anyone else and finds herself doing, de facto, the same job she was doing at home, a kind of ship’s science minister who can collate all of that specialist work and relay it in generalist terms, and make sure all those specialists are communicating the important things with each other, identifying underresourced projects and knowing how to promote them so that they get what they need, identifying gaps that can be filled by collaborations she’s in a position to arrange, doing everything she loved about the work she did at home only she gets to do it in space, on a starship, among peoples and ideas she’d barely ever dreamt of. the indulgent fantasy of mirasta yale is just... mirasta yale!

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3, 20, 25, 32!

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3. What is the best fandom you’ve ever been involved in?

answered! (stars trek, obviously)

20. Any ships which you surprised yourself by liking?

answered once, but there are always more. a lot of the ones that come to mind are het ships actually – janeway/paris is a good example, and tom and b’elanna too for that matter. Things Involving Tom Paris Generally, i think we might safely say. (i refer you to the ‘he’s dumb af and she pegs him / area man in awe of his amazing wife’ quadrant of this graph.)

25. What’s your most popular fanfic?

also answered once; second place is this cj/toby breakup romance which i am glad to say is still making people angry by doing exactly what it announces it’s going to do, right there in the tags.

32. Do you listen to music when you write or does music inspire you? If so, which band or genre of music does it for you?

i find music both helpful (in providing background stimulus while drowning out distractions) and motivating (in setting mood or pace), but i find it hard to identify the right music to write to. almost all of the writing of ‘the smaller worlds’ was accompanied by a combination of HAIM and emmylou harris. the former—heavily textured ambivalent pop—is almost the ideal writing music, except when you need something slower. beth orton is also a staple. i did a huge amount of my academic writing from like 2003-2009 to the brandenburg concertos. before that, it was portishead. i suppose the formula to be derived here is ‘absent a harpsichord, heavily textured electronic sounds accompanied by a female voice’.

i am very much in the market for writing music recommendations (music recs generally, really). what are you all listening to when you write?

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Deanna Troi, jefferies tube

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She’s deep in the bowels of the Enterprise, profoundly lost, before it occurs to her that she has never heard of Jefferies tube navigation trials as a component of performance review.

She slaps her commbadge. “William!” The answer she receives is laughter: Will’s and Beverly’s.

Beverly’s voice: “Where are you?”

“The hell if I know!”

Then Will’s: “We’ll find you.”

“You two have a lot to answer for.”

In the silence she can hear the look they give each other.

“We’ll make it up to you,” they say in unison.

She can’t say she doesn’t like the sound of that.

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Tumblr wouldn't let me send a reply so have multiple asks: My immediate reaction to this was both "YESSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSS" and "NOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO" simultaneously, and that continued throughout the fic?! I was like, oh, as I read I'll pick out a few bits I particularly like, but I couldn't because I couldn't realistically pick out, uh, the ENTIRE THING, BUT, THAT SAID, the whole bit from "'Yes,’ B’Elanna admits, a little desperately" up to "exactly the danger she’s trying

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to steer them out of" is just SO vivid and painful and so in character for both of them. I mean, "When someone disobeys her in a way she doesn’t find exciting." PHEW. OUCH. And the bit with Carey and the plasma fire? And "‘Captain!’ B’Elanna finally shouts, ‘I can’t say no to you!’" OH GOD, that felt like a slap reading it, too. Also this line "But she only stares at her, gripping her shoulder the way she does when she comes up against a problem she can’t see a way through" IDK why but it's
doing so much?!?! That whole bit is doing SO much. And I love the last line so much. So yes in summary YES GOOD.

i know have TRULY been writing for the wrong fandoms, when i’ve been writing at all, for way, way too long because i realized when i read these that i had forgotten what it feels like to have @cosmic-llin react to a fic. what a fucking treasure you are, darlin <3 <3 <3

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If you're still taking writing asks, 3, 14, 19?

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14 & 19: answered! (do you like, have things in common with @walkthegale​ or something, do you two know each other)

3: What is that one scene that you’ve always wanted to write but can’t be arsed to write all of the set-up and context it would need? (consider this permission to write it and/or share it anyway)

she asked, readers, because weeks ago i sent her a load of agonized texts about something i want to write about b’elanna torres and kathryn janeway but can’t be arsed to set up and she said ‘you could write that scene anyway,’ and i love her for asking because it is characteristic of her love language to simultaneously 1. carefully and thoughtfully pay attention to and remember something quite specific no matter how inconsequential and 2. troll the fuck out of you in the same gesture. 

what i texted her about is wanting to write the obvious femslash fic that is ‘resolutions, but b’elanna’, which i’m not saying i’ll never do no matter how many other people have done it before, but what i’d become obsessed with was the scene that kept playing in my head of the aftermath. a version in which there is no fast and simple snap back into command structure and assigned roles, in which janeway deludes herself that they can carry on as they have been and b’elanna finds it completely intolerable because when it was just the two of them she could adjust to kathryn as just a woman, find her way into an intimacy of almost equals, but back on the ship she’s absolutely losing her mind without the clarity of the command relationship, which she absolutely cannot reconcile with the naked-in-bed-together relationship. just this one specific version of all the usual tropes of rank and prohibition and the tension between the woman and the office and all of that.

so okay, i wrote the scene. by which i mean i wrote about 1700 words very fast, and don’t think i got it right, but we’ve promised to try embracing rough unfinished things around here, and anyway you’ll know the key line when you see it. bad news is this did not get it out of my system and i’m still fucking obsessed. here you go: 

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Pyjama headcanons for Star Trek characters? Existing pyjamas can be rendered non-canonical if you so choose.

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tfw you make a ten-year friendship out of extremely in-depth conversations about the meatiest material in star trek and then also she’s just like but do you know what we haven’t discussed. pajamas. let’s put pajamas on the fucking table. 

and she’s right.

okay, so i hope we can all agree that one canonical pajama tendency that can never, ever be changed is jean-luc picard’s slutty little short-shorts-and-wrap-shirt combo. no one thinks there is anything about this that is in any way short of perfection, correct? 

(image description: screencap from tng episode ‘the devil’s due’ in which jean-luc picard stands in his slutty little short-shorts and wrap shirt, with an awful lot of his chest exposed, in a laboratory setting where geordi is turning around like ‘uhhhhmmmm captain? we love the slutty pajamas but this is a work environment?’ anyway thank you ardra, we owe you one.)

it’s also hard to argue with sisko’s dramatic jewel-colored robes, julian bashir’s boyish matching set, or riker’s royal-blue crepe situation.

the women, however, are another matter. who in the costume department was under the impression that women only ever wear silky pink nighties to bed? beverly, kira, and janeway are in particular need of help in this regard. you all understand that i say this as an ardent devotee of beverly’s incomprehensible sleep bow—i literally carry it with me always because my housekeys are on a keychain adorned by a screencap of same, which @cosmic-llin knows because she gave it to me—but as a matter of realism and practicality, not to mention defense against completely nonsensical femininities, i can’t in fact condone it.

there are good reasons you might want to develop individually tailored jammie headcanons for each of these women, but i think the actual answer is that none of these women have time or energy to change their clothes for bed, not to mention that they absolutely cannot be arsed, and all three of them sleep in their military-issue underwear (grey briefs and tank for bev and jway, presumably white and elaborately latticed for kira). the same goes for dax, for b’elanna, for michael and tilly, for seven and raffi and agnes, and most of the trek women i can think of.

deanna is the only one i can imagine sleeping in pretty, lacy things, and maybe sometimes she does, but most often i imagine she sleeps naked, or wearing one of several oversized garments she has stolen from will, or beverly, or tasha, or honestly anyone she’s ever shared space with in any intimate way. girlfriend’s closet is full of other people’s shit they think they’ve lost. but she too is often simply exhausted at the end of the day, and just passes out in her undershirt and pants most of the time.

in conclusion: men of star trek are extremely high camp at all times in their sleepwear, per canon, while the women of star trek wear things that actual people would actually wear to bed if they led the lives those women lead.

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Tell me some of your favourite Star Trek guest characters!

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HARD Q, BABE but okay. here are some picard love interests who deserved better: 

  • VASH! swashbuckling adventurer hero! i love that she’s a criminal who loves being a criminal and is still (at least in her first appearance) presented as a sympathetic character on this prissy-ass show about nineteenth century morality; it lets us see her graverobbing as wrong and still enjoy her as a criminal. i think she’s also a great love interest for johnny stickuptheass picard, and i would love to live in a world where the deal was we got one vash adventure per season and it was always the same: vash shows up out of nowhere, they have an adventure, at some point beverly steals the date, vash dashes off to her next crimes. just that. that’s all it has to be!
  • NELLA DAREN! listen i think she should learn how to lock the door to her lab or at least put up a little sign that says ‘experiment in progress please do not open the door’ BUT in every SINGLE other respect she is a completely perfect individual who has never done anything wrong in her life. like vash, she is a fully realized character in her own right, with a personality and everything! and the only reason people hate her is because they have Bad opinions about how the relationship between crusher and picard should work. ‘lessons’ should end with her saying to picard, look, this is your shit and you gotta deal with it, my career is here and i’m gonna keep doing experiments so learn to knock before you open the door and let me know when you grow up, meanwhile imma be talking to beverly.
  • LILY SLOANE! it is hugely to alfre woodard’s credit that lily sloane transcends the box first contact tries to confine her to; she is written basically as a foil for picard and not much else but she has a toughness and an intensity and an intolerance for bullshit and a certain kind of casual comfortable butch swagger that is otherwise missing on tng and for that matter star trek in general (kira notwithstanding) and i just love her entire energy. i would REALLY love for her to get to chill in the 24th century and have some quality adventures with the whole enterprise crew and especially deanna.
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I like ten bajillion things about you, I like the way you use words, both in, like, actual writing and in conversation both written and verbal, I like how kind you are and how generous, I like how you let me rant at you about things, I like how you talk about things in a way that makes me want to know more about the thing, I like that you are good to hang out with in basically any setting, I like your face and the fact that you chose the joint-best tattoo in the world and also you are VERY FUNNY

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you are good and nice and smart and also cute

idionkisson replied to your post

oh my god, like, everything??? where do i even begin. first of all, you are like---fiercely, uncompromisingly compassionate in a way that i really really admire and am moved by and strive ("strive" is such a silly word imo) to emulate. and your rhetoricbrain makes my way-less-skilled but equally-enthusiastic, i think, rhetoricbrain go mmmmmm. like, oh my god, please talk about texts (tv shows and books and tarot cards and everything else) forever. i also just love (cont)
like...pretty much your every post. you really don't need me telling you is good riter, lmao, but i love your voice and your, idk, ~style. also you are just fucking hilarious, i can't tell you how often your posts make me laugh out loud.

replicarters replied to your post

sssoooo many things. certified qt pie, would be smol sneeb if were a catte, Good Person who uses words i have to google, always has a different vantage point to look from, likes all the right space women

bluemoonrabbit replied to your post

I like your "voice" on this site, it's distinct and pleasant. I can always tell when it's a Soph post. Also since that time you called yourself a depresso bean, I have been unable to use any other phrase for myself.

darkbloomiana replied to your post

I think you're quite smart and funny and a good writer. I love your enthusiasm for language (see: SNEEB) and the Walker woman, ofc.

carawj replied to your post

You are brave, and you are brilliant, and you keep going. And you are always kind, and you give so much time and energy and thoughtfulness other people.
bookgazing replied to your post
You are so honest & brave
And I love that you are so into complex female characters and share that enthusiasm for them around (second comment because gdi I hit enter accidentally).
havingbeenbreathedout replied to your post
I like your validations of female crankiness (lbr, my crankiness) and how that simultaneously coexists in you with unabashed enthusiasms.
fanchonmoreau replied to your post
I like that you make me feel safe when I talk to you and also your fierce love of nicola walker
lanteanwraiths replied to your post
i like your furious defence of fictional ladies, and your thoughtful advice for real ladies, and also your excellent face
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7. Do you prefer to read one book at a time, or several at once?

For work, I couldn’t possibly read one book at a time. For leisure, I do prefer one at a time but I am currently reading … between three and five, depending on how you count. (The copy of Moby-Dick that has taken up permanent residence in my bed, for example, is more of an always-reading than a currently-reading.)

12. What is your reading comfort zone?

Smartly crafted YA SFF with ladyprotagonists; smartly crafted not-YA SFF with ladyprotagonists; novels of ladymodernists; historical fiction of a very particular sort that I don’t know how to identify. In that order.

15. What is your policy on book lending?

Book-lending requires trust. I have to trust not only that you will care for my book, but that you will remember that I lent it to you, because I won’t. Also I will get angry if I lend you something and you don’t read it, because don’t you know a direct order when you see one, you illiterate traitor?

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Cosmic-Llin and The Valkyrie Directive chat about Keiko O'Brien

After her fantastic guest post on Keiko O’Brien, the wonderful cosmic-llin and I decided to have a chat about Keiko - it ended up spanning everything from her relationship with Miles to her career to what we would have liked to see more of for her, and everything in between. I hope you enjoy reading it as much as we enjoyed having it. :)

thevalkyriedirective: Oh, wow, I googled her to bring up her Memory Alpha article (never know when you need reference or an episode name) and after suggestions like ‘keiko o’brien actress’ or ‘keiko o’brien star trek’ we have ‘keiko o’brien annoying’.

How sad is that?

cosmic-llin: Ugh, that infuriates me. :( Keiko gets so much stick and I can’t work out what the problem is. I think people see her as shrewish because she and Miles fight, but to me it seems like they both give as good as they get.

Also I’ve seen her get hate from Miles/Julian shippers for being in their way, but canonically we’ve seen Keiko actually encourage Miles to spend time with Julian.

thevalkyriedirective: I’ve never been able to figure it out either! She’s labelled the ‘nagging wife’ but I think the problem is that unless she’s a passive, dull, unemotional woman, it doesn’t matter what she does, it’s seen as ‘nagging’ or ‘annoying’.

I’d be pretty pissed off too if I moved to a run down old space station and had to give up my career and raise my daughter there.

But the strangest thing is, she isn’t always nagging or annoying or anything like that - sure she gets exasperated sometimes (it’s called being human! and being in a relationship!) but she’s the one who thinks to set up a school for the kids on the station, she makes the most of a difficult situation!

And as for the Miles/Julian shippers… There were more than a few episodes where she very actively encouraged them to hang out, sometimes even without them realising it.

cosmic-llin: Yeah, I think it’s significant that they’re basically the only married couple we see on a regular basis long-term.

I think if Keiko was in the show just as a cool botanist/teacher, without a connection to Miles, perceptions of her would be different, but because she’s in the box marked “wife”, people interpret her character in certain ways that they wouldn’t otherwise. Any conflict she has with Miles is assumed to be her fault, when actually half the point of the O’Briens was that they were a realistic couple who DID fight sometimes but resolved their differences because they loved each other.

I see a lot of people claim that they fought ALL the time and that Keiko basically never gave Miles a moment’s peace, but actually watching their episodes together that couldn’t be further from the truth.

thevalkyriedirective: You’re absolutely spot on - they’re probably one of the most realistic couples in Star Trek.

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