Archive of Our Own ^beta

Chapter Text

The Why of It

It seems presumptuous. I shall post and collate all my thoughts in one neat document because surely all of this will be needed by future writers.

Well, this is part of accepting that what I do is Art(tm)

I also have thought that this could be a resource for anyone who is trying to piece together their own headcanons or, better yet, trying to figure out how to do worldbuilding for their own ideas. I will do what I can to provide hyperlinks to outside sources, especially the ones that I think are helpful. 

Two things compel me. One, Benedetto Croce's Aesthetic As Science of Expression and General Linguistic. The second, a quote from "Fan fiction and the bourgeoisification of creativity":

Fan fiction (and mass culture more generally) has the appearance of a democratization, because in a way it is progressive. Tesco is a beacon of modernity, shining a light towards an idyllic communist future; and yet communist food stores will not stock mislabelled horsemeat and slaughterhouse scrapings. And, just as mass culture brings a canon of sorts to the people, so fan fiction brings the active component of access to culture to the people; and yet communist writing communities will not be devoted to a canon determined by the bourgeois mass culture industry, but will have access to the best in the arts as reference points they share with their comrades.

The idea of canon has held value and may still have some value. But given the treatment of many aspects of Star Trek as of late, I am wondering if the canon itself is only useful now for us to tell ourselves the stories we need. If the cultures and characters we love are being stripped of meaning and context to then be flattened into some kind of ouroboros of nostalgia and simulation, we are getting a canon of Star Trek that has nothing to say. I hate that. I hate the idea that Star Trek, one of the very few stories still popular that dares to envision a hopeful future, would have nothing to say to us now.

I really don't know how much this will help to further this goal of helping people depart from the canon as it is determined by Paramount. But I do hope it will help a little.

The Why of It (you are here)

Governance - Some thoughts on what makes the Federation even possible

Material Culture and Historical Notes - Creating something that the reader will understand and recognize while also playing with how information degrades as it is passed along through time

Empirical Science - Where the science meets the fiction and why I have to ignore a lot of what I know

The Quartet - Notes on the four main characters from "Piper At the Gates of Dawn"

The Spyhunter - Notes on the character from "Portrait of the Spyhunter As A Young Man"

The Spy - Notes on the turncoat spy from "In A Lonely Place" 

Supporting Characters - Notes on the other characters across these stories

Art and Culture - Earth - Thoughts and musings on life on the Federation's Earth

Art and Culture - Vulcan - What I have been trying to pull together about life on Vulcan

Art and Culture - Qo'Nos - Life for civilians in the Klingon Empire

Art and Culture - Ferenginar - Everyday living before and after Female Emancipation

Art and Culture - Bajor and Cardassia - What I imagine as two cultures unfortunately intertwined through colonialism and its aftermath

Chapter Text

Governance

Something I feel has turned into a foundational error is trying to understand how The United Federation of Planets (UFP) itself might work as a form of governance. We're going to assume the Federation is like a real sort of federalist system where the planets themselves are mostly independent and various planets decide how much they can contribute in resources. The real-life examples for this are limited, but we can look to NATO, The European Union, or the African Union for some object lessons.

Sovereignty is one of the central questions. Gene Roddenberry was an American who was going to approach this from an American perspective. For worldbuilding and narrative, canon offers feeble details which point to an approach by showrunners to just treat the UFP like the US, a nominally federalist system making a turn toward neo-colonialism governed by a unitary state. By definitions, these still count as federalism.

However, the joy of Star Trek is a hopeful future. As Manu Saadia writes in Trekonomics, it is an odd fantasy for being about a government that works for everyone. And for an American, the fantasy is that our resources are people are used to do objective good for others, not to ruin lives and enrich a privileged few.

When I imagine day-to-day life for the average UFP citizen on any planet, things just work. How this plays out on different planets provide all sorts of opportunities. On Earth, there may be an administrative state, but this question of sovereignty has come back. Municipalism becomes the practice; a city or town acts with the support of Earth’s government, but they are allowed to directly interact with any other planet when it comes to their immediate resources. Locals are allowed to hash out resource partitioning and create their own agreements. There may be layers of bureaucracy for handling the minutiae of running government, but these layers do not hold inherent powers.

On the macro-level, a seemingly small administrative state that coordinates these planets all working together. It is about the most efficient use of resources which is to get these planets to talk directly to each other. This is probably the greatest miracle and least believable part. Two cultures able to seamlessly work together despite never having contact with each other before and coming away satisfied with the relationship built. To work, this must be all around and through the UFP government. Like the layers of bureaucracy, you can imagine various layers of mediating diplomacy. Sarek and Lwaxana, for example, are ambassadors representing their planets to the Federation. But they are not the end-all-be-all ambassador. Instead, they are one of many in a deep diplomatic corps that each planet maintains, but they can lean on the UFP infrastructure to help grease the wheels.

One could even imagine that the UFP is a Confederation of federations. Previous treaties and unions could have been incorporated as part of the support structure for making things work.

Your names for it can vary. For the purposes of my own writing, I have chosen to call these The Data Consortium and the Legal Consortium. The Legal Consortium is the nerve center that coordinates and feeds through every single legal system across the UFP, ensuring a process represents their planet at their best. I also would see it as one of the best friends to anyone interacting with the Federation. There is a vested interest in making sure things go smoothly, and additionally a guiding principle of equity and egalitarianism. The Data Consortium is the nerve center for coordination and routing of information from the intelligence service. And they are also a consortium because they work very closely to ensure that they don't fuck around and start doing evil shit. But, that also creates a complicated state apparatus which allows evil shit.

Truthfully, I do not care for Section 31. Jamie Babb wrote a magnificent essay which articulates everything wrong with it better than I could. At the same time, I must admit something: spy thrillers are exciting and interesting. Star Trek was created in the shadow of the US bombing Japan and tacitly threatening the rest of the world with our testing. Spies and secret agents became “better” because it is a way not to upset things too much while also furthering a government’s goals. Whether I like it or not, Section 31 is here and it opens up a lot of troubling possibilities that undermine Star Trek’s conceit. So, we must work around it somehow. I think it is more interesting to have a system which is very gray. While Section 31 is a hateful symptom of the compromises of war, I imagine the Data Consortium is an attempt at "keeping a clean house."

Sometimes, there are extrajudicial killings. Oh, but rest assured, there was a very lengthy and well documented process. The assignment granted to a field analyst will present a series of options and, perhaps, death of the target is one of the options. The field analyst works at their own discretion. There is a mile-long trail of paperwork. And more importantly, if you are a family member, you can ask for such a thing! Because you deserve to know why your loved one never came home! Is it bad that that State still believes itself to have the moral authority to kill a citizen? I do not know how to answer that, but we cany try to engage that question.

The position Section 31 represents is also a credulous some people may take in the Federation, especially given the number of conflicts that keep happening in Star Trek. Thus, I treat Section 31 as cyclical. Perhaps every 50 years or so--enough time for significant turnover within Starfleet's admiralty--the idea comes back around: times are dire and in order to protect our way of life, a select few will need to sacrifice their morality and sense of self for us and we will give them carte blanche to do whatever is necessary. Section 31 gets reactivated. Ah, but this time, this time it will be different. This time we will get it right. They never do, Section 31 gets disbanded, and the people who remembered how bad it was retire. The cycle starts again. Whereas Section 31 presents us with cynical utilitarianism crystallized in Le Guin's Those Who Walk Away from Omelas, I think of the Data Consortium as more like a way to stem an addiction. Do we need a surveillance state? That question will never get answered because we can't stop. The constant tension is that we are striving so hard to do right, but progress won't be a straight line.

I made several decisions around the Data Consortium that I am unsure would work in practice, but they do seem fun. Example: one form of punishment is making people write everything long-hand. It's also a very important form of data control so everyone learns to write in a UFP language. The idea here is that in a world where so much is computerized and digitized with seamless translation, writing something on a piece of paper becomes a way to halt flow of information. Some things are so important that they must be written on paper and never added to a database. Some departments: Computational Fiedl Analytics (responsible for extrajudicial killings), Internal Services (the department responsible for bad shit getting exposed), Requisitions and Management (actually pretty accurate, because someone has to schedule meetings and order printer ink), Data Security, Risk Management, Quality, Personnel Resources (A goddamn HR department finally), Ethics, Field Litigations (the lawyers deciding whether or not an extrajudicial killing is the right move), I think Data Integrity, a few others. It's a lot of playful intrigue where everyone is still on the same side but the personality type tends toward people who like games and gossip and puzzles so the culture might be weird. Things hit different when you've worked in a corporate job or government job. A lot of it is so many goddamn meetings. Corporations disappeared so the government absorbed the language and culture.

In this structure, we have several competing powers that provide checks and balances on each other. Starfleet is one pole but the civil intelligence is another, civil legal is another, legislative, individual planets, and so on. Sometimes this is explicit, sometimes this is soft and implicit.

There is another fantasy embedded here: that the government of any planet would never be taken over by bad actors looking to burn everything to the ground.

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When discussing this idea of government and politics, I do think there should be room for conflict. Yes, Roddenberry eschewed conflict, but this stance insists that conflict and disagreement are always bad. On the other hand, JG Ballard discussed in his writings that human society needs to change because human nature includes certain psychopathological tendencies that need to be expressed constructively. Somewhere between the two is the truth, and I think there are also several axes I’m not currently considering.

The work of keeping Paradise running is hard. If you want to work with a number, try a ratio that for every one person in Starfleet, there are four people in the civilian government. I am at a loss of words to express how many people would be needed to make everything work. I wrote in Star Trek: Parks and Rec that the Federation should not work, and it does because everyone involves engages in a little magical thinking by believing in both the systems and the goals of peaceful exchange between intelligent species. Strange New Worlds presented an interesting idea that not every citizen thinks the Federation or Starfleet is perfect; unfortunately, there was no follow-up. For anyone playing in this setting, I think it makes sense to have people with different approaches. There will be people grousing about the state of things, and it is their right. The actual political structures and ideology of the Federation isn’t really one we can or should label beyond vagaries of post-scarcity utopian society. But, we can inject some commentaries into it. Marxist-Leninists, anarcho-pacifists, classical socialists, and more will have something to say. Why not let them? What arguments still hold some water?

The Starfleet we see in Discovery and all that follows will raise the hackles of previous fans. Personally, I was also not into it. But, they are also part of the canon. Even if I want to play in my own sandbox, the canon itself is a shared language and point of reference for other fans. With that consideration, I decided on this approach: yes, Starfleet did all those things I do not like and think are contrary to the original vision of Star Trek. Ah, but those actions should not exist in a vacuum. Civilians will disagree. Civil servants and government bureaucrats will disagree. At least now the conversation feels more productive. In addition to venting my spleen about my grievances, I can also try to consider the metaphors presented and set them in context.

Riffing on the idea of the Federation as NATO and therefore impossible on paper yet somehow working in practice, I have to assume that getting even the majority of planets to agree to anything is like herding cats: everyone has a very strong idea of where they want to go, and they will only go in the direction you want if they determine it aligns with their interests. Being a citizen of the Federation is like having a European Union passport, entitling one to freedom of movement between all planets, ability to settle without incident, and so on. That everyone agreed to this is absolutely astonishing and they probably have not been able to agree to much since. This is why I imagine that an exposure of Section 31 would cause huge problems. Maybe humans are happy with a spooky spy department that does evil shit to protect us, but what about the Andorians or the Tellerites or the Betazoids or anyone else? They may have their doubts, even threaten to withhold resources or not honor parts of the UFP charter in protest. This becomes the crux of the conclusion in Portrait of the Spyhunter as a Young Man and the continuing thread when the Investigator makes his appearance in Piper as the Gates of Dawn.

I do think it important to work within canon because of that shared language. Even Bourgeoisification does not reject canon outright as a concept; rather, I interpret it as merely rejecting who determines what canon is, especially when the ones determining it are the executives at Paramount and SkyDance who seem insistent on using Star Trek for toxic nostalgia.

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Where does Starfleet fit in, then? For me personally, it is just a way to get from Point A to Point B. Sometimes, it is a way to introduce my characters to other people’s characters. What fun!

At the risk of sounding like I’m dunking on everyone else, I’ve also thought of Starfleet as the place for people who are more comfortable with cognitive dissonance than everyone else. People who can do things that are ethically complicated and still say with a straight face that they believe in the ideals of the Federation. People who do seem to believe in a strong centralized authority. And perhaps, people who are venal and looking to expand their own ambitions. Starfleet, then, is the mechanism for expressing that psychopathology that JG Ballard has discussed.

I hesitate to share this bit because it can feel like a real disservice to the different series and their characters. Are Worf or Jadzia or Uhura or M’benga or even Mariner like this? No. They are what we already see onscreen. But, at least in the Admiralty and in this new era where Star Trek is mirroring cultural norms, canon seems to support this. People who could do a great deal of damage to civilian governments get quietly funneled to Starfleet on the grounds that sometimes to fight an asshole like the Romulans or the Cardassians, you need your own asshole. This is also why I see Starfleet as its own pole of power within the Federation. Like working, people can have lots of reasons for joining Starfleet beyond their own ambitions. Barclay’s reasoning seems to be that he was socially adrift and thought joining Starfleet would fix him. Some people just want to get away from where they are, like Riker. Whatever the case, I do keep coming back to the idea that Starfleet recruits and perhaps even rewards the types of people spiritually made from the mold of Khan Noonien Singh.

One thing I like about Star Trek has been (for a time) the repeated belief that no one is disposable. A person is a person is a person, full stop. Sociopaths and narcissists are still people who should be granted an opportunity to pursue their own betterment—whatever that looks like to them—and have places where they belong while also given the social structures needed to turn them away from harmful actions. Starfleet is gigantic, so who’s to say that there isn’t a place for them? And as I established, the civilian government is big too! Maybe that’s also a place for them.

For me, personally, this makes everything more interesting. People disagree, people are flawed, people lie to themselves all the time. Again, those imperfect impulses of human nature do not go away. The future is still bright, and we still have a lot to learn. The difference is that now, we have a society that makes it possible for more people to keep trying.

Chapter Text

Material Culture and Historical Notes

Is capitalism the root of all human evils and woes? Looking back at history, the answer is no. However, Star Trek under Roddenberry’s direction presented a future where such ills were few and far between. More importantly, they were no longer institutional.

Gene Roddenberry never quite put it this way, but his future could be placed next to the one we think of when we discuss total liberation: we have overcome capitalism, patriarchy, colonialism, racism, heterosexism, cissexism, disablism, ageism, speciesism, and ecological domination. To Roddenberry, this was as deep as the individual. This is why he made a point of not showing crewmembers in conflict. (I would also suggest another thing: he served in the Air Force where group cohesion determined everyone’s survival. Space is no different.) When we are comfortably planet-side and hanging out with our friends, we may act differently. There is also no way around the fact that a story where no one has any conflict is just very boring.

Richard Evans described the movie Breakin’ 2 as what he hopes life is on Earth in Star Trek. People of all body types and shades, dancing together and having a grand time. Whatever you think of the actual movie, I do think this evokes the ethos on Earth. It’s just fun!

So far as I can tell, the prevailing wisdom across the various canon, beta-canon, and pseudo-canon works is that these ills have not disappeared, but they are far less frequent. Loath as I am to acknowledge it, Jean-Luc Picard’s backstory includes a mother who had a severe mental illness and committed suicide as a result. Whereas this is an unfortunate commonality in our time, I would expect this to be shocking in a way I don’t know I could convey in words. It would seem unthinkable. Everyone the Picards knew would find out and everyone would talk about it for months, maybe years. I imagine an intense memorial service not just for the immediate family but also for the community to help them process this tragedy. The Original Series gave us a glimpse: death—of any kind—was treated with weight even on an episodic TV show. We expect our characters to be stoic about these things, but the truth is that we are wired to find death shocking and traumatic. The same goes for all the other violent crimes and evils of humanity; sexual assault will not be eliminated, but it would be enormously reduced and treated as the violation that it is.

We do have another consideration in the Star Trek world—one could see this as existing in the shadow of an apocalyptic event. The Eugenics Wars and WW3 led to use of nuclear weapons and breakdown of states. For a writer, now comes the painful decision of deciding what was lost to war and carnage; what survived, then, is probably the hallmark of one’s own self-indulgence. I am not above it either! Any real-life song referenced in my writing is one I like and therefore I am suggesting that in this glorious future, the music I like is what survives.

Were I handed the reins of the franchise and allowed to create my own series, I would have to consider that history and culture are a long, meandering game of telephone. Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart wrote a variation on “Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star” and while we do not know exactly when the original song was written or by whom, this artifact by Mozart tells us that it was already popular by his time. Thus, at the risk of being overly self-indulgent, we must establish some rules:

First, limit yourself to a national archive. I very much want to believe that the Library of Congress in the US would survive WW3, but you can imagine others if they have a digitized collection. When considering what would survive time and war, I have thought about limiting myself further to only songs with published, archived sheet music.

Second, no original recordings. For creating a TV series, the practical reason is that covers are cheaper than the originals. But we can also use it as a worldbuilding tool. My favorite example is this: In 1928, Finnish musician Eino Kettunen writes lyrics to “Ievan Polka” or “Eva’s Polka.” Due to copyright issues, the words are considered under copyright until 2024. But, someone can do a cover. In 1996, the band Loituma records their own version with their own words, still calling it “Ievan Polka.” This recording gets popular online, and people make their own versions with Vocaloids. The song itself gets paired with an animation and now it’s the “Leekspin Song.” A few years later, Turkish street musician Bilal Göregen makes a video of him singing in Turkish with the very same tune. I love this. We can reflect in Star Trek that human culture is iterative and so as some meanings get lost, other people come along and give their own meanings.

Third, and this one is so difficult: picking a song that could be interpreted multiple ways. In our contemporary world, Me Against The World by Tupac Shakur is about the perils of being Black in the United States, and this meaning is obvious because we are living in that context. Give that song a couple hundred years of removal, and what will our Star Trek characters think? If we overcame racism, can they connect with the pain Shakur describes? My answer is no. So much time has passed, and society has changed so much that it won’t feel the same. But, other parts of the song may resonate. One may connect with the description of hopelessness or the horror of life under a fascistic state. They will recognize his use of poetic devices. Perhaps the original recording has been lost and only the words remain, and they may try to reconstruct what his music would have sounded like. It will be imperfect, but it will reflect the person trying to do it.

I have tried to extend this to religious practices. I haven’t encountered it, but eventually some of my choices will not make sense to some readers. Why does this Muslim woman have sex before marriage? In our contemporary world, these are unusual and maligned. In the Star Trek universe, we have abolished the institutions which make these things unpalatable. If women want to have as much sex as they want with other consenting adult partners, there is no stigma because Islamic jurisprudence has also purged itself of the same societal ills. I disagree with Gene Roddenberry that a utopian future has no religion. In fact, I think that encountering aliens would make us more religious, or at least differently religious. And in the case of ethno-religions, changing would become the past of least resistance as well as the path of survival.

I do want to dig a little into this. Roddenberry’s family background was Catholic. Christianity’s dominance in Europe and its colonized descendants has created the false belief that someone could have an “absence” of culture. It is his own lack of recognition in his that Roddenberry’s “non-religious” future still had a lot of Christian window-dressing. Rather, Roddenberry and many others are culturally Christian. I also must point out that people who are “irreligious” or have “none” as their religion is defined against Christian standards. These are details to consider when projecting into the far future as you may write about a place in Star Trek where most people are irreligious but are culturally Christian or culturally Buddhist.

On the topic of things changing over time, there may be people who rise to enormous fame in 300 years who are middlingly famous these days. Weird Al Yankovic is famous, but it is a kind of fame which still allows him some privacy and autonomy. But, in 300 years, and if the Library of Congress does have his work, he may be the most important musician from our era. Why? Consider everything stated before. His parodies are not just artifacts but preservation tools, allowing researchers to reconstruct music which may have been only previously referenced in the historic record. The song “Word Crimes” alone could be a master’s thesis because it provides a blueprint for linguistic shifts happening in English during the 21^st century. I admit, it’s a cute example, but it is one I think about the most because it is also playing with who he is as an artist and how futile it can be to ever really capture the past as it was lived.

Chapter Text

The Quartet

In writing these four, I knew that I needed to explore aspects that I felt were deeply lacking from canon. I also needed to crystallize the characters to keep them consistent. When I am trying to ground myself, I keep this in mind: They’re not too far from Team Cockroach on The Good Place.

Vudic ibn Talok Jalal.

By the time the story opens, he would be around 60 but functionally in his late 20s/early 30s. As a Vulcan/Human hybrid, he is made in the mold of Spock as so many other original characters, including the infamous Lieutenant Mary Sue. Beyond being a metaphor for interracial children, I just thought it would be more interesting if he weren’t pale like every other Vulcan. We see Tuvok, so there must be some variation. His mother’s family is Punjabi, and he looks it too.

Despite now being one of the most popular characters across the whole franchise, I always feel that Spock’s writing (and by extension, Vulcans) was never quite right. My personal interpretation of the dynamic is one that is grim: both of his parents seem uninterested in supporting a child who felt both a part of and apart from his own culture, always held to a higher standard. I still think about his mother blithely saying in The Original Series that Vulcans are just “better” than humans. Anyone can write it however they want, but I think the unfortunate truth is that when writing this character, one must acknowledge that Spock’s parents failed him. We have seen a portrayal of someone still in pain as an adult through three different actors because his childhood was with parents who did not acknowledge his needs. Were they too involved with each other? Who knows. But we know that Spock chose Starfleet over sticking around his home planet for another solitary second. Moreover, he knows this on some level. With age, he made peace with that. Becoming an ambassador was a good thing! But they still failed him.

I know too many people whose parents failed them by not accepting that this person needed more help than the average kid. Frankly, I cannot bear writing that kind of story even though I understand that for people in that same situation, it can be very cathartic. I chose to take another way.

It helps that Vudic is born well after Spock who, by simply being alive, proved what was possible. I also ended up drawing on my own childhood: contrary to too many others, my parents did understand that I needed more help than other kids. They worked to help me, but they also worked on themselves. Many things are imperfect, but the result is that I didn’t feel a burning desire to run far away from them.

Vudic got the help. His parents benefitted from being regular people rather than extremely visible people like Sarek and Amanda. His parents also benefitted from seeing the mistakes Sarek and Amanda made. But most importantly, we see his family beyond his immediate parents like aunts, uncles, half-siblings, cousins, family friends, and his own friends. He is given room to make connections and make mistakes.

A larger point has been to get away from Starfleet. Like the others, Vudic is an artist. He went through years and years of rigorous training to become an expert in aspects of Vulcan culture. But what Spock experienced is there. It’s become subtler, but it didn’t go away. He became an artist because it came with more social latitude, yet even the artistic community may judge him more harshly for rule-breaking or deviation. Even if his parents were wonderful and loving, he still had to deal with classmates and colleagues who thought he was a freak of nature. His parents had to advocate for him as well as teach him how to advocate for himself. I am not sure how to write it, but I do imagine that when he was just old enough, a teen on the cusp of adulthood, his parents called in every single favor imaginable so that their son could meet Spock. Having original characters and canon characters cross paths is the staple of fandom. While the actual scene doesn’t interest me, I do like the idea of it because it is his parents doing their best while realizing that it may not be enough. For once, Vudic will get to meet someone who is like him, a hybrid. They had very different lives, but it is more to show their son that it does get better. There is a place for him. He is where he belongs.

I have gone back and forth about whether not he should have blue eyes like his mother. Helpful resources have pointed out that this is a tricky thing. Is it cool, or is it a very subtle way to inject White American ideas of beauty? I think if and when there is a final version of the fic, I will change the eye color. It’s an easy fix, and it still leaves room for what I cared more about which was using blue as a motif for him and his mother.

Doh’Val, Son of Carl, House Nakarmi.

Like Vudic, Doh’Val is made in the mold of previous Klingon/Hybrid characters, K’Eyhlar and B’Elanna Torres. Similarly, this is another character that was much more accepted by his family that what we got from K’Ehleyr and B’Elanna. A friend pointed out that like Spock, these canon characters are certainly stand-ins for interracial people, but something chafed her: they also seemed resentful of their Klingon heritage, and of course Klingons just happen to be darker skinned than other aliens. She read it as an interracial person (such as her own children) choosing to resent their alien mother (AKA my friend). It doesn’t feel right.

It also helps that while the other two maybe were around humans, Doh’Val grew up on Qo’Nos with Klingons. He has his father help him with his temper, but he’s also calmer compared to other Klingons. Like Vudic, he also spent time on Earth which meant learning how to play with human kids without hurting them. And like Vudic, he does find his way to get accepted into Klingon society.

But when thinking about it, there are two main differences: one, Qo’Nos is a place that relies on currency; once you make it to UFP space you can do anything but getting to UFP space from Klingon space costs money and time. His parents did their best to make sure he could visit family, but he couldn’t visit as often. The other difference is that, ultimately, Doh’Val is more insecure. He knows that he is different, and he knows that there is less room for him to fuck up. His mother has two sons by her first husband, and the parents of her first husband refused to acknowledge Doh’Val or his father. He feels that he is the second choice for everyone. He even noticed that when it came to writing music, he gets the less interesting requests and was never once asked to write an opera. But he wants to fit in and be famous and adored as an artist. He loves gossip and being in social clubs and going to performances.

Unlike Vudic, the timeline I have is such that Doh’Val would not have met K’Ehleyr or Torres. I don’t expect his parents to have the pull for him to meet Alexander Rozhenko, and honestly I can see someone writing Alexander as wanting to just ignore any humanness in him between the death of his mother and his father’s neglect. Others like him exist in myths. I wasn’t quite considering it at the time, but meeting another hybrid—any hybrid—would be life-changing, and why he is so struck by Vudic when they first meet.

I modeled Doh’Val a bit after Frasier Crane because we never really get to see a sophisticated, almost effete type of Klingon. He likes to fight but he doesn’t want to join the military. It was also important to me that he didn’t have the cookie-cutter body type. He’s heavier, he’s a little softer, and that’s desirable on Qo’Nos because that’s a culture that would desire people who look built like a brickhouse.

Seu Minjaral

I think anyone who saw Deep Space Nine would agree that Tora Ziyal deserved so much more. More characterization, more plot, more screentime, more everything.

I think Ziyal made the writers uncomfortable because she was living evidence of the sexual abuse Cardassians subjected the Bajorans to (regardless of how much Dukat tried to sanitize his own actions), and acknowledging that meant having to spell out exactly what the Cardassians were doing. It’s easier to write that Dukat really did love Ziyal’s mother than try to wrestle with the questions of power imbalance. Paired with the Bajoran concubines (sexual slavery sanitized for TV) that we know many Cardassians kept, Ziyal must have been one of many hybrids, not all of whom were cherished by their parents as she was by Nephem and Dukat.

This is the context I have given Minjaral. While his start in life was much harder than Vudic or Doh’Val, he did find a large community of hybrids who were working where they belong. He is shaped as much by this community as he is by the circumstances of his life.

I have talked about it before and will talk about it again: balancing the desire for verisimilitude against the fact that I am creating something to entertain. When I write Minjaral, I try to focus on him and his character rather than the individual traumas that he experiences. I have described him as having many scars, but I leave most of them to the imagination because I don’t find value in an exhaustive list of his various wounds. That becomes gratuitous. It was also important to me that Minjaral’s rescue from his family came via an outside party. I admit that it happens but when proposing in fiction that a child is somehow responsible for ending the abuse their family inflicts on them, I cannot abide that. Minjaral’s story is both about overcoming and about breaking the cycle; it was meaningful to me that his rescuer was someone who recognized his abuse because she had lived it too.

I was discussing with another writer friend about where the line is when something dips into the “grimdark edgelord” territory AKA exploiting taboo topics to shock and titillate the audience. I give hints, but I decided that readers wouldn’t gain much by learning the exact age of Minjaral’s mother when she gave birth to him. These facts were more important: his mother chose to keep him, his mother was in no way prepared for parenthood, and his grandparents only saw him as living evidence of what was happening to their people. In my head, I reckon her between 12 and 16. Perhaps it is gratuitous. Take it as you will.

When I first wrote him, I imagined him as someone intensely jealous of how good Vudic and Doh’Val had it with their parents. However, that doesn’t make sense for the story I want him to tell. He is someone who found the other side of heartache, and he did make a life for himself. In the rewrite, he marvels at his hybrid friends who came from such loving families, and they give him hope for his own planet.

Prina-Krax

Am I gonna talk again about characters who deserved more in Deep Space Nine? Correct. Pel introduced such possibilities. Alas, it was the 90s, and there was never going to be more than the most surface-level exploration of queerness.

This will sound a little trite. I decided it was important that our nonbinary cross-dressing Ferengi was chubby, curvy, and had big boobs. I see all Ferengi as a bit stocky. More importantly, I know so many queer/trans people who feel betrayed by their bodies for being unable to hide the features that mark them undeniably as “feminine.” Prina-Krax is a tribute to them.

Chapter Text

Something about Vulcan that unlocked for me was realizing that, like Earth, their society comes to us in the shadow of a civilization collapse. A mere 2000 years have passed since their last nuclear war. There is another consideration: life as we know it exists on a planet with a wide variety of biomes instead of a planet that is all desert or all wetlands

I explain this to myself as such. Not every part of Vulcan is habitable for the Vulcan people, and even places that once were are now covered in radiation. This is a place where beta-canon has given us plenty, and yet I can’t decide how much of it I should treat as “true canon.” I may change my mind later as I write the Vulcan arc. For the time being, I am thinking about what I can draw from real-life inspiration.

The Vulcans are a desert people because the desert was the most amenable to their needs. At some point, they may have expanded into the other biomes. Then the nuclear weapons came. Civilization collapsed. The desert remained relatively unscathed and people retreated there while the rest of the planet festered. After 2000 years, they found the technology possible to let them explore those irradiated places. As in the Chernobyl Exclusion Zone, what they found were places that still had grasslands and woodlands and wetlands. The technology was available now to resettle, but now with Surak’s teachings they ask themselves: is that really a good idea? Doing so could be part of what made them so bloodthirsty and barbaric before. There are scientific outposts, but thus far the agreement has been to do modest clean-up without the intent of making such places habitable for Vulcan resettlement.

When thinking about urban planning and architectural design on Vulcan, I think about these factors: Shade, noise suppression, windbreaks and aerodynamics, and some way to passively collect ambient moisture. Urban planning follows natural phenomena like the capillaries of a rabbit’s ear or the veins of a desert leaf. I imagine villages and towns with a crescent shape to collect moisture, similar to the water bunds in the Sahel. Each dwelling has its own passive collector for moisture, and then the large water bund is a shared resource for all to use when the passive collection does not provide enough water for a home. When a house collects more than it needs, the surplus goes to the bund. I also imagine that principles of urban planning will value community and socializing; Vulcans are The Logic Species but since they are also telepaths, I imagine there is a strong desire for group cohesion. Thus, community gardens and festival spaces.

As an adaptation to the fickle nature of the desert, parts of a town are modular. The buildings do not move, but there are a handful of main roads while the rest of them are created and destroyed as needed by citizens. Two families may show friendship by building a walkway between their houses and connecting it to a third family’s walkway. This means the walkways can disappear. Obviously, it is impolite to remark on these things in public except in the vaguest possible ways. That will not stop knowing looks and furtive gestures. Only when someone is within a home would it be acceptable to openly speculate on why this happened. (And in some cases, individuals may move a walkway and then quickly circulate to others that no, there is no ill-will, the walkway just needs to be repaired.)

Regarding arts and culture, Vulcan artists are deeply important to society because they adopt the role as conduits of material culture. Although logic and science are valued in Vulcan society, logic and science are salient facts of the universe; therefore, any person can potentially discover these facts. Scientists uncover these facts more efficiently than others, but it is also possible for anyone to become a scientist. However, artists and philosophers hold the history and customs of a people, things which cannot be replicated. If a people mean to live on, artists are accorded a special place in society because they are categorizing how Vulcan society examines itself. In the same spirit as what we see on the Star Trek series, anyone can engage with art as part of leisure and one’s own enrichment. To call oneself an artist means intensive study of Vulcan culture and customs (learning the rules before you can break them). They are conduits of history and culture, and their education includes teaching others about art. Not all of them are good teachers, but all are taught to appreciate any manifestation of art including the mediocre lute-playing of a scientist friend or the crude drawings of a child. All Vulcan artists spend years at Conservatory which helps them refine appreciation for all art while also giving them room to refine their interest. In the case of artisans like architects, they spend some time at Conservatory but quickly move into an apprenticeship.

The culmination of one’s education is entrance into the various guilds and organizations who represent these professions. The Society of Artists, the Architects’ Guild, The Historical Society, and others are super-structures for these professions similarly to how canon has shown us the Vulcan Science Academy. I do want to stress that I do not expect every single person on Vulcan to be part of some kind of guild for their profession. If we understand Star Trek and the Federation writ large as a society which allows people to pursue what gives them fulfillment, the society also understands that not everyone wants to be the best scientist. As much as our service industry denigrates workers now, there are people who do enjoy service work, and people who enjoy doing that as their job should be allowed to flourish in such professions.

Vulcan aesthetics have everything to do with their planet and their philosophy. Any art created should be both an expression of the artist and a means of educating the audience. It is understood that what the artist chooses to teach the audience and how the artist chooses to teach the audience is in and of itself an expression of the artist’s soul. Vulcan artists practice Surak’s philosophy in a way that seems contrary to how others practice. They may reject Kolinahr. They may write about the weaknesses of Surak’s writings. They preserve the history of the pre-Reform era and Nomad era in ways they deem logical. The goal here is to continuing challenging what society is for the sake of society’s betterment. Surak was a great thinker, but he was not a god, and his texts should not be treated as immutable. Perhaps it waxes and wanes in acceptance, but I imagine that Vulcan which does circulate various journals and publications containing intense, tete-a-tete exchanges of philosophers and artists arguing for and against various aspects or interpretations of Surak. Anyone can read these, and the professional assumption is that everyone argues from a place of good faith. To reflect Surak’s philosophy, Vulcan art is meant to be experienced. Smelled, tasted, touched–the art was made to teach. Vulcan aesthetics require art to have a functional aspect. For example, one might use a sculpture to teach someone all the textures of the rocks on Homeworld. In that way, Vulcan art is very connected to the planet. This includes using very little or no water. Paintings are made of sand and considered ephemeral. All other art is meant to be experienced with many senses such as touch, sound, and smell.

Artists are much more forgiving and less judgmental when people break societal norms. The artist community frequently includes people who are single and not interested in marriage, people who are partnered but not married, and people who have married despite additional barriers to conceiving children. Artists treat “infinite diversity in infinite combinations” as the primary precept of their lives and use it to derive all their logical conclusions. Infinite diversity, thus, will include combinations which seem illogical on their surface. Vulcan artists have specialized in anything that looks like art, even at the risk of being ostracized by larger society. An artist can specialize in the culinary arts by reviving cooking traditions. However, they run the risk of being ostracized due to giving a new meaning to food when food should only exist to nourish the body–any other meaning ascribed could lead to pre-reform philosophical leanings. Because of the high concentration of people with unconventional relationship notions, Vulcan artists have organized different Burning Man-like events. The actual event is every year: people in the throes of pon farr show up and give into their throbbing, biological urges. Different gatherings are held at different times and cater to different people. The events also have clear-headed people who are on their off-years to provide safety and set everything up for everyone else who needs to go nuts.

Vulcan architects are categorized as artists on the grounds that their work is still a manifestation of the self. Architects are part-laborer and part-artist. They treat architects as deeply important because of their work, and laborers have no division between them and anyone else. To become a Master Architect, the final trial is to build one’s Forever Home which satisfies all the individual needs and preferences for them and their family. They must build this entirely on their own, doing everything from laying the foundation to wiring the central computer. I included some lines in Star Trek Parks and Rec that architects were unusually strong even among Vulcans because of this work. They are built like navigational engineers—navvies—meaning that they still look like regular people but excel when it comes to strength and stamina. This is because the people who choose to build things. Obviously, the crew on a Vulcan building site will also have lots of machinery. What I imagine is that part of the Surakian philosophical approach is that to fully understand architecture, one must also fully understand their materials. That is why a Master Architect must build a home with their own hands. This is to avoid what has happened here in our time, buildings which are beautiful as works of art but damn near non-functional as buildings. Below is a selection from Star Trek: Parks and Rec where I describe some interior design. Obviously, I want everyone to read all of my words. However, if you don't have time but you want some of the worldbuilding, please look below:

In the consulate, Aafia got her first glimpse of Talok’s months of hard work. She walked on polished black stone floors and saw tall, broad mahogany shelves of everything the staff would need like tablets and printed books pressed flush against the sandstone walls. He had knocked out every interior wall to create a single open space where staffers had arranged their workstations. Various pieces of pottery were arranged as part of some aesthetic theory that she could not decipher. The entire back wall had been turned into a rose-tinted window with numerous thin, smoky quartz-colored panels which folded down from the ceiling to adjust the lighting within. From the ceiling hung russet, tube-like fixtures which also cast a rose-colored light. The doors to various parts of the consulate such as the toilet or skiff or so-called ‘leisure area’ were behind elegantly-carved fawn doors. His masterwork was the second floor he had added to the building; the lift and gently spiraling burnet stairs were next to the front door. For the first time, she heard the staffers talk at length in their mother-tongue. It was beautiful and unlike anything she had encountered in her life. How did the other consulates sound? Why hadn’t she taken any time to learn their languages?

In the pink light, Talok’s clothes looked like a fresh bruise and his skin was like autumn leaves; she was seeing him as he would appear on Homeworld. It felt more intimate than anything else they had shared up to that moment. The look on his face as he surveyed the room was the one he wore when looking upon his youngest daughter. He was at the bottom of the steps, offering his elbow to her.

She ran her hand along the smooth brown railing as they walked. The second level was empty of all furniture, waiting for the new staffers who would eventually come with its tubular light fixtures and mirror-like floor. Alone with him here in the red light, her brain gave her a fleeting peek back at the angel she had seen when they consummated their love. She closed her hands into fists to stop from caressing his face.

Talok’s fingers ran down her wrist to coax her hand open, and her heart fluttered as he led her into the one public display of love his people would not reject: their index and middle fingers held high, like two pairs of lips, tenderly pressed against each other. She walked five centimeters off the ground into Koss’ office.

Nearly everything in Koss’ office set flush against the wall with the exception of the low table at which he knelt, the table recessed toward the back of the room. Carpets and flat Balochi pillows were neatly arranged on the floor to delineate a sitting area. Fine ceramics and pottery stood in the four corners of the room. Without a word, Talok seated both of them on the pillows. Their paired fingers never separated.

Koss set down his work and joined them. “Master Architect, you return.” The consul spoke their shared language as a courtesy to Aafia.

An aside: I always imagined Talok as a little sly and teasing with his song once Vudic was old enough for such things. When the boy became of age, he was invited to a ritual with his father and other architects. They go to the desert and drink heavily and generally make merry in whatever way that Vulcans do. Vudic was expected to match their pace. It is a way to test and tease new architects. Vudic had not been training as apprentices had, so of course the drink went to his head. He awoke later to find himself almost alone; while the tradition is to leave the sorry architect in the desert with a few tools for reaching civilization, his father stayed behind at a distance. A bit of hazing from architects having sensibilities of artists but also pragmatism of manual laborers. Still, it was the first time Vudic recalls his father treating him as a friend instead of only a son, the true signifier that he was no longer a child. For that, Vudic cherishes this memory.

Within the subculture that make up artists, it’s important among Vulcan artists to have an opinion about Vulcan Love Slave. After it was published, having an opinion on the work became a shibboleth. As part of the subculture, artists will sometimes wear green and white. Green is daring for being the color of blood. White underscores this by being the color of bone. Parties for Vulcan artists involve going to someone’s home, seeing a bunch of art that is all put too closely together, and then standing in a tight circle talking about your interpretation of the art. If there is brandy involved, the conversation will turn to all the ways they wish that Vulcan society was different. Hosts are in charge of offering some good drugs, and it’s a faux pas to bring your own. (There is an impulse to giggle over the idea of Vulcans getting high. On the one hand, yes that can be funny and fun. On the other hand, humans take drugs in all manners of ways for our own leisure or to expand our own understanding of consciousness. Why would Vulcans be different, especially artists who have dedicated to exploring the edges of culture? Perhaps the mode is unfamiliar and very controlled compared to what we may think of when someone takes psilocybin or other substances.)

Vulcans do have theatre, but it is probably quite different from what Earth has in that they are not expected to emote. Vulcans may only use a specified language of gestures and stances, but they should never express emotion with their faces. Violence cannot be depicted onstage. Vulcan theatre will usually consist of philosophical debates similar to the Socratic dialogues, historical reenactments, or explorations of the morality derived from Surak’s philosophy. I haven’t given much thought to exactly how it would look, probably like a mix of Noh theater and classical Greek theater. Vulcan visual arts and music each include an entire genre dedicated to art attenuated to stimulate Vulcan’s telepathic abilities. This requires special instruments and technology, but it creates art and music which can only be fully experienced by other telepathic species.

Sculptures are the most prevalent form of visual art. These can be made from anything, not just stone but also any three-dimension material such as cloth or computer parts or any recycled items. In fact, there is a long tradition of cyberntic and wearable art on Vulcan since art must serve multiple functions. A common art form is to take a slab of black rock, sand-blasted to a mirror polish, and then setting in much smaller stones to create intricate designs. All of this is done with either polishing or laser cutting the holes such that the stones will fit perfectly and not need any glue. Because art is multifuctional, the idea of having spaces set aside only for art is not against their aesthetics. However, the art must be grouped based on theme such that a person walking through the gallery would learn a lot of different information on a particulate subject. The art is arranged to maximize both space and enjoyment of the art, making Vulcan galleries seem overstuffed compared to Earth galleries. Any placards for the art will provide the name, the artist, and process by which the art was created. What information is being conveyed has been sufficiently explained by the art and the audience is expected to divine the artist’s intention.

On the topic of pon farr, I write it like a manic episode of extended PMDD. TOS did give us some hints that Spock’s behavior had changed weeks before the audience learns what he is experiencing. I believe canon has suggested that first pon farr isn’t until a Vulcan is in their 30s or so, but that seems strange. I imagine that it happens toward whatever is considered the end of puberty when a Vulcan is in the transition from adolescence to adulthood. One must balance things here because it may be a bridge too far to create the possibility for a teenager or even tween who has lust that brings on insanity. Puberty is a spectrum, but allowing that possibility says more about us as writers than about the real world.

Whether or not pon farr is actually fatal seems up for debate. I think that it is not necessarily fatal by biology. However, it can make someone so risk-addicted that it is far more likely to result in death or mutilation. A person in pon farr is not in their right mind, and it creates complex ethical dilemmas. For example, you’ll see that Vudic chose to make Doh’Val the focus on his pon farr. While Doh’Val seemed interested and even enthusiastic, there was a moment where he said wait and Vudic did not listen. Where is the line of consent? Could Vudic even consent in the first place? What is the remedy for a violation that cuts both ways like this? By contrast, Talok takes several preparations ahead of time. When writing those scenes between Talok and Aafia, I sought to veer away from the tropes of pon farr as sexual violence with no recourse. But if Vulcans are so much stronger than humans and are so overcome with lust that they may overpower a partner, what to do? I decided to go with bondage and discipline, and I’m very happy with how those scenes turned out. They have emotional weight, but they’re light because they are between two people who have gotten opportunity to discuss and develop rapport.

Where does this leave marriage? It is canonical and reinforced several times that marriages are arranged by families when the children are very young. Compared to everything else Vulcans do, this feels regressive and weird. It could be one of the few artifacts of the pre-Surak past that was never shaken off. Maybe Surak, in all his wisdom, made a flimsy argument that Vulcans need to keep arranging marriages for their children, or maybe he was even the one that introduced the idea. Whatever the case, there are many ways to go with this. “Marriage” for Vulcans may not mean the same thing as it does on Earth or in other cultures; “marriage” simply means the person you are paired with for your first pon farr. Or maybe people don’t agree on it and the definitions are fluid.

I still haven’t really worked out the details on this. In Star Trek: Parks and Rec, we have a monogamous couple but I have to explain what would make this person available. Thus, Talok’s first wife. There’s precedent—Sarek himself seems to have had three different wives including the unnamed “Vulcan princess” who was mother to Sybok. We also know that divorce is possible according to “Amok Time.” But that does leave open the question of what a bachelor does when pon farr hits and he has no partner. One excellent fic on AO3 suggests a matching agency. I love it. Great idea. I was more vague: Talok had “personal arrangements” with friends he trusted. Vudic, later, did the same whenever he could not attend his regular Burning Man event. I see nothing wrong with sex work being part of culture.

I do want to tackle the subject of sex work, but I think that will need to be its own section.

Chapter Text

When it comes to aliens as allegory, this one feels like both the easiest and most misunderstood. In the words of DS9’s producers, the Ferengi are US. Humans today. And specifically, Americans. I feel obligated to address the perception of antisemitism in their portrayal. I don’t see it because I think their portrayal lacks certain key characteristics, a big one would be lacking a homeland. But, I also understand any fellow Jews who see them and feel like we Jews are the butt of the joke. I have no idea if it was coincidental or deliberate that all the Ferengi we meet on DS9 were portrayed by Jewish actors and was it deliberate to show that they’re not antisemitic or as a weird in-joke. I have no idea.

With the direction that DS9 took the Ferengi in, what we got was a classic throw-back to an alien we can use to critique our own culture while flying under the radar of would-be censors whether they work for studio executives or government organizations.

We should start with what Ferengi culture looks like before Rom’s reforms. Exaggerated America, certainly. I imagine something around the 1880s during one of the economic booms in the US where capitalism ran rampant and gender disparity was severe. I drafted a first-person account from Prina-Krax about what it was like being female on Ferenginar before the reforms, and I felt it was important that while sexual assault was not rampant despite females not being allowed to wear any clothing in public, being female meant always being on display and scrutinized. And like in the 1880s, females of wealthy families could buy their way out of certain obligations like not wearing clothes and having privacy. We also get hints from the show that paint Ferengi culture as much like our bygone years: marriages are a mechanism for resource acquisition and allocation, and people are valued according to the vagaries of the monetary system. Contrary to some of the misinformation about bygone eras, I think Ferengi would also be interested in waiting for marriage until a female is both biologically mature and has gone through the necessary learnings she needs to run a household. Males are busy with extracting profit out of each other, but someone must cook and make clothes and take care of children and manage whatever profit does come in. No one is marrying their daughters off until they can get the highest possible dowry, and they can ask that by having a daughter who is well-versed in domestic needs and healthy enough to birth children, both of which come with age. Families may also provide value-added by teaching their daughters to read or play music or make jewelry. Most of what one can imagine from late 19^th century America and Europe would slot in well. (Note: This would include some harmful ideas around sex. Top versus bottom implies maleness versus femaleness and therefore one’s position within a hierarchy. Rape between married couples is not acknowledged. I say 1880s because of the capitalism, but culturally we may liken them more to ancient Greece.)

On the topic of architecture and urban planning, we get a few hints in the series. I’m taking the same tact as with other planets and suggesting that maybe other biomes exist on Ferenginar, but all of civilization is in the places with the most rain. There are two kinds of settlements: cities, and suburban sprawl. The idea of any rural area that hasn’t already had its utility maximized is silly. Considering the Ferengi diet, they also can compartmentalize whatever insect husbandry and crop growing they need for producing food and other goods. (I would personally find this place a nightmare. I loathe suburban sprawl.) One detail I was proud of was including wide, deep gutters between vehicle streets and sidewalks. That just feels right. When envisioning the city that the quartet visited—a city I chose not to name—I imagine somewhere that feels loud without being loud. Plenty of noise suppression or targeted sound, but the lights and kinetics and everything else seem to assault the senses. Some horrible mix of Reno and Macau. The interiors we see in Deep Space Nine are not covered wall-to-wall in advertising: the behind-the-scenes explanation is that no one felt like making the ads, but we could take some interesting directions here. Perhaps Ishka is wealthy enough to purchase items that do not advertise to her. Perhaps in their pursuit of classical capitalism, Ferengi companies have already collected the data and found that they would be spending a lot of money for no return when constantly advertising to people inside their homes. Perhaps no one had thought to do that yet because they’d be advertising to females who don’t have their own money. Another note on interior design: I think that there would be new sensibilities that emerge considered in competition. One is that “mid-level car dealership manager rococo” that we have discussed. The other is a bit strange but more subtle where an interior designer treats the home as an extension of the female and decorates “her” (the home) as a reflection of what females are allowed—clothing for furniture. Skirts for chairs, slip covers, sheer curtains for windows that look like veils, walls painted to have masks, and even trinkets advertised as jewelry for furniture.

When thinking about life after Rom’s reforms, I imagine America’s in the 1920s and during Roosevelt’s New Deal. As I recall, Lower Decks also confirmed an obvious extension of these reforms where, with Rom and Leeta as leaders, Ferenginar pursues a closer relationship with the Federation. This is also why I imagined Nog as the Federation’s representative and Ishka as Ferenginar’s representative. I want to give some credit to Rom that these decisions aren’t just because the two are family. Ishka shown herself to be extremely shrewd and forward-thinking. Nog has the credibility of a Starfleet graduation, an officer’s commission, and commendations during war. They really are the best choices for fostering that beneficial relationship.

Economic mobility for females is the big one. I called in The Grand Bargain in Piper because I imagine that even if Rom could wave his hand and will these things into existence, there would be pushback. We already see in DS9 that Ishka was engineering buy-in from other corners of Ferengi society, and eventually that was going to mean some compromises. They did a similar New Deal-style social safety net including literacy programs and work training and even make-work programs. But there were compromises. In Piper, Leeta admits that they had to sacrifice queer/trans people to get the reforms. I love Leeta as a character, and I am sympathetic to anyone who objects to this characterization. If someone has a fic where she fights for queer/trans people and also gets full emancipation for everyone, send it to me. What I see for two radical reformers is a culture wherein some people benefit greatly from keeping things as they are, and they are very good at keeping things as they are. Just like what happened following the broad-multifacted fight for civil rights in the 1960s, Ferenginar is in the same fight—do they continue in this hypercapitalist manner that demands conformity to strict, impossible ideals for capitalist reasons, or do they turn toward abolition of norms to embrace characteristics which cannot be quantified the way money can. In that context, what was there for Leeta and Rom sharpen into view. Some ideals had to be sacrificed, and the loss of these ideals weigh heavily on our noble leaders. Everything comes with a price.

Some possible things one can play with—

Garment Laws – When there was no clothing for females, it was seeing to tell who needs to oppressed according to their biology. Now anyone can wear clothing, so enforcing the hierarchy means creating laws that define what is the boundary of maleness and femaleness. I went with this one because clothing has been a proxy in fiction for broader statements about how different identities intersect and how those in turn intersects with cultural expectations. Prina-Krax’s own journey is all about gender, and so I can signify that in some way in every scene where they appear. The Garment Laws are a means of control ad I can show my character constantly negotiating that control.

Other Sumptuary Law – I did not explore these, but I am certain we can create all kinds of bizarre reasons why males can’t buy certain things and female can’t buy certain things.

Caste Laws – The Ferengi may choose to impose a rigorous structure

There may be others but I would have to meditate on that.

But the reforms go through. And I think that it is going to be a huge change for Ferengi. Economic mobility requires so many boring support like literacy programs, make-work programs, and vocational training. Anything to keep the market from freaking out. I realized something even more important—there must be the option for females to say no to all of these things. For a group of people who have been robbed of autonomy for so long, they must be allowed the opportunity to make bad decisions. This presents easy opportunities to comment on certain American women who have been champions of the anti-feminism movement. The Ferengi religion doesn’t seem to appeal to some kind of higher omniscient power, but there can still be some gestures at “biology” and “the cosmic order” when females use their new rights to loudly proclaim that Ferenginar was better before all of these reforms. The flipside is also possible, playing around with how circumstances are creating new ways for people to talk to each other about their own identities. Male and female lose the previous cache needed to reinforce the hierarchy thanks to the economic and social changes, and now there may be discussions of how one can transgress those boundaries.

On the topic of fashion, anyone who enjoys the Ferengi loves their fashion. I refuse to let their love for outrageous colors and design fade. By God, the females of Ferenginar deserve to be just as tacky, if not moreso! We are presented with a fun inverse of our own culture: the traditional look for females is zero clothing while “decadent” or “modern” females are covered head-to-toe. As Prina-Krax noted with dismay, one’s state of undress becomes a complex political statement. The way I imagine Ferengi fashion for the modern female is about obfuscation and confusion. Shapeless dresses, shiny fabrics, loud jewelry, veils, and tights are starting points. New makeup that creates different patterns, body jewelry, but really anything that may repel “traditional” sensibilities.

Like us, of course, there is some kind of high culture versus pop culture. For all their grievances, Prina-Krax does not hate Ferengi culture and finds value in the musical traditions. Something that I think would make this more interesting is suggesting that every Ferengi, even one like Quark, has perfect pitch. When it comes to music, then, Ferengi culture focuses on purity of sound and silences. Above all else, the goal is a pure tone that is exactly 440.00hz or 230.00hz or so on. Composers like Philip Glass, Moondog, and Terry Riley would be starting points for trying to conceptualize this kind of music. But, there is still popular culture with music engineered to compel behaviors: want to buy a thing, want to go to a place, want to sign up for a subscription, and so on.

I think of all of this, what would be most fun is having someone from the Federation or Starfleet try to take in this milieu. I tried looking up some comments from non-Americans who visit our loudest cities and marvel at what we value. Our intrepid musicians dealt with it well enough, in part because they had each other to rely on and quickly found the queer/trans scene. The Spyhunter, on the other hand, had a much harder time. There is some key that I do think should come with whenever someone leaves: a precipitous mood drop. We Americans (and the Ferengi) seem to surround ourselves with as many sensory inputs as possible, both a function of our need for enrichment and because capitalism benefits from a populace that always seeks sensation. For the Spyhunter, negotiating the constant inputs was a job in and off itself that when it was over, he fell into a depression. Even if someone had a grand time on Ferenginar, I would expect some version of what people call “con drop.” The intensity and sudden removal seems like a shock to one’s nervous system.

The sensory overload is something I think about the most. American-style capitalism has been insidious, and I think there is much one can do with the Ferengi to skewer this fact.