intrigueing

Finally returning to this great meme! I'll mush these two days together, because I have one answer for both: I don't have one. How could I choose a favorite or least favorite species? The question makes no sense to me. I think Cardassians were the best-written/best-thought-out species within the actual episodes, but that doesn't make them my favorites.

So I'll have to bow out with another wishy-washy ALL OF THEM. There are so many fascinating species in Star Trek, made all the more fascinating by how haphazardly they were slowly developed over the course of decades, gaining whole mythologies by static cling, bit by tiny bit. I love this sort of wordbuilding approximately ten times more than the most wonderfully thought-out pre-planned worldbuilding (sorry Tolkien, I love you too but...), because there is just nothing else like it.

( The Rest of the Days )

Okay, I'll break this one down by series.

TOS: Kirk/Spock. I wouldn't say I ship them, because to me personally, that term implies that I prefer them as a romantic couple rather than platonic friends, which I don't. I love them as platonic friends somewhat more than I love them as a romantic couple. However that's a bit like saying out of Ben & Jerry's ice cream flavors, I love Chocolate Fudge Brownie somewhat more than Chocolate Therapy. Also, ancient - I mean, uh, classic - Kirk/Spock fanfic was the first in-depth, emotionally-serious, explicit depiction of sex in fiction I had ever read (or watched), and I cannot overstate the (extremely, extremely positive) impact on shaping my understanding of how sex and sexual desire and romantic relationships could be a good thing rooted in good feelings rather than the weird, disingenuous, exasperating, romance-is-important-just-'cause-now-shut-up non sequiturs that I had seen so much of in Hollywood romance movies and YA novels.

TNG: I actually don't really have one. I suppose if Tasha lived, it might be Data/Tasha, but is that canon or non-canon? I almost ship Picard/Guinan, but in the end I know it's just something I like to occasionally think about, not read about or picture happening in the future. And I don't know if my thing for Picard/Q counts as a pairing. Mostly I think of it as one out of a never-ending list of ways that Picard fascinates Q and Q pisses Picard off (I will take all the non-sappy fanfic recs for this though. Hint hint.)

DS9: Bashir/Garak. Don't even have to pause for a millisecond to come up with that one. It is also one of a very, very small handful of non-canon pairings that I think could have actually, really, seriously, been canon without screwing up anything about the show or the characters if the showrunners hadn't been so skittish and "no homo!" I'm not certain a relationship between them would have worked out as something permanent, but I really think they could have had sex or a short-term doomed relationship or explicitly acknowledged romantic feelings and made it believable.

( The Rest of the Days )