Bagheera

I'm sorry. The title is very appropriate (you'll see) yet very misleading. I see you thinking now: ah, this must be a cracky, light-hearted romp! Possibly with musical interludes! That's because I didn't come up with it: Erin did. If I had come up with a title, it would be something earnest and overly serious, like this fic. Well, at least it's not a pun containing the letter Q.

Title: Jean-Luc and the Technically-Navy Dream Coat (No Really It's Made Of Thought Matter)
Fandom: Star Trek: Next Gen + Star Trek: Voyager
Pairing: I ship P/Q with the power of a thousand suns... in an entirely platonic way
Rating: some canon P/Q scenes have higher ratings than this
Length: 4528 words

Beta-read by x_los. This is set between the first Next Gen movie (the one with Kirk) and VOY: "The Q and the Grey", in which he wore a different uniform, but that was clearly for Janeway's benefit. Written for xparrot. The prompt was "learning/teaching", which turned out to be more difficult than I thought at first.

( But this wasn’t a hypothetical encounter with your average god-like alien. This was Q on his couch close to midnight. Whether Picard wanted it or not, it was already personal. )

Hello from France. The weather has turned less beach-y, and there's only so many medieval cities like Carcasonne you can go sight-seeing in, plus I feel like I could write something. So here's a little prompt game I cooked up.

List A is a list of Pairings, Fandoms or Characters I'm feeling in the mood to write. List B is a list of prompts. Pick one item from A and one from B and I'm gonna write you something :)

List A:

1) Pairing: Doctor/Master (any version)
2) Fandom: Bernice Summerfield
3) Pairing: Xavier / Magneto (X-Men Movieverse)
4) Fandom: Game of Thrones / A Song of Ice and Fire
5) Pairing: Picard / Q (ST: Next Generation)
6) Character: Data (ST: Next Generation)
7) Fandom: Journey into Mystery*
8) Pairing: Clark Kent/Lex Luthor (any version)
9) Fandom: Avengers - Earth's Mightiest Heroes
10) Character: Loki (any version)
11) Fandom: Star Trek – Voyager
12) Fandom: Star Trek – Deep Space Nine

*I’m only up to Manchester Gods, so no spoilers for Everything Burns in comments, please!

List B

1) souvenirs / mementos
2) learning sth / teaching sb.
3) blind faith / doubt
4) stealing / giving gifts
5) old age / long distance
6) harm sb. / help sb.
7) revenge / redemption
8) giving orders / serving
9) playing games / deadly serious
10) freedom / captivity
11) alternatives / experiments
12) art / artificial
13) shadows / mirrors
14) strangers / meetings
15) magic / childhood
16) power / force
17) wild / tame
18) saint / dragon
19) betrayal / proof
20) disguise / revelation

RPG friends and I have started a project lately - watch (all of) Star Trek. Well, we've started Voyager and TOS, I'm not sure we'll ever get around to TNG and we've already nixed Enterprise. So how about a Trek meme?

( all 30 days in one post )

Written for the Space Crossover Challenge multiverse5000.

Author: bagheera_san
Title: Birth, In Progress
Fandoms: Star Trek (TNG)/BSG (2003)
Rating: PG-13, gen
Summary: "I had a brother just like you."
Prompt: Data and Cavil.
Word Count: 4570 words

Notes: Despite the title, this work is very much complete. It has spoilers for TNG up to Insurrection and for the entirety of BSG, including the finale.

Birth, In Progress

I'd like to get another anon meme fic betaed, does anyone feel up to it?

It's this fic, which is short, gen and a Doctor Who/Star Trek crossover. The characters are Ten, Q and Picard, so familiarity with Next Generation would be great!

That evening of playing the Star Trek RPG a while ago made me re-watch some DS9, which is my favourite Star Trek series.

(Classic Trek is great if you watch it with other people and can laugh about the Ancient Times. TNG had Picard, Data and all the good Q episodes, but the rest of the cast is BORING. Voyager has tons of lame episodes, although the Doctor and Seven rule. But DS9 is love.)

But every time I watch that shiny show, it's followed by woe: Star Trek is one of those fandoms that are a) pretty large and b) don't have much quality fic. The purple prose and OOC fluff abound. Instead of playing with the vast universe, authors write awful, silly porn. It's like Star Trek fandom as a whole said, "We were here first, so we don't have to be any good." Is it too much to ask for long, plotty, well-written Picard/Q or Garak/Bashir?

You can say what you want about SV, but at least that fandom has a billion good, long fics. And great porn.

That fic which was actually supposed to be a short, slashy episode tag to "Frontier in Space" has now turned into a plotty (for certain definitions of plotty... I'm not sure bastardizing the plot of "Planet of the Daleks" counts), not terribly exiting gen piece of 13000 + words - but at least it's getting written. And there's lots of touching and psychic hi-jinks, so it counts as subtexty. However, the fic consists of 90% dialogue. Jo, Three and the Master are talky people. (The rest is them getting locked up. And arrested. And kidnapped. And locked up.)

My RPG meetup tried out the Star Trek RPG for the first time this week. It could be pretty fun, but we spent about five hours creating our characters, so by the time we started actually playing, we were all a bit tired. Nevertheless, true to Trek, we immediately got into ethical arguments while fighting those Breen. (Should we set our phasers to stun? Should we set them to stun even if we're firing at a spaceship? Are holograms people? Do holograms have feelings? Do people have feelings? Is it ethical to hope that there'll be Breen bodies left over to learn more about their biology?) I played a modified EMH.

I continue to spam you with Star Trek meta posing as essays. They're wonderfully easy to write because I don't have to spend 90% of my time researching and quoting secondary sources.

( Star Trek and questions of racial identity (original series, TNG and DS9) )
Footnotes:
*The biological definition of life hinges on these factors: reproduction (which Data achieves through his "daughter" Lal), response to stimulus, metabolism (arguably, Data "metabolizes" some form of energy) and growth. So whether Data is alive or not is difficult to say.
** Except his "brother" Lore of course, and the other versions of Data discovered in Star Trek: Nemesis
*** Actually, Sisko's mother is a wormhole alien, but she poses as a human to marry his father.
**** They "link" which is the closest changeling equivalent to sex.

Also, I need a Star Trek icon.

Someone expressed interest in these, so here's the first of my essays for my Cultural Studies course on Star Trek. The topic is Cold War, Vietnam and the original Trek series. Grammar corrections are highly welcome, as it's not yet handed in ;)

( Errand of Mercy, A Private Little War and The Omega Glory and the Cold War. )

I've long considered fandom (and the internet) a playground where you can safely try out things. Maybe "safely" isn't quite the right word, but it's still a lot less likely to get you in trouble than other social contexts. It's also like this awesome self-documentating social experiment, where, potentially, fascinating and new forms of social interaction happen. It always had internal politics, so now might be the time to get foreign politics. How does an anarchy do that? Is fandom like an anarchy? I mean, we have BNFs, and people you might call "organizers", but its all completely informal. But for me, fandom is definitely a kind of subculture, and in a way, internet/LJ fandom is pretty organized.

Oh, and about fandom. Today in our "Cultural Studies Star Trek" class, talking about interracial (not interspecies) marriages/relationships on Star Trek led to this:

Me: What about Scotty and Uhura?
Prof: No, that's fan fiction.
Me: *blushes rather a lot* (It was the first time anyone mentioned fanfic, I promptly outed myself through body language)
Other guy: But in the sixth movie, there's this scene, where Scotty and Uhura...
Me: Ah! So at the very least there's subtext.
Prof: Yeah, well, but then we've also got to take Kirk/Spock subtext into account. And there's certainly a lot of that.
Me: *dies of glee*

It's always so nice to recognize other fans. I mean, fandom fans. Not just people who watch a show, but people who know what subtext and shipping and conventions and stuff are. And for me, that's "us". I don't think there's any other social group I identify quite as strongly with.