so many ds9 references in the latest lower decks episode 🥺🥺🥺
laaanat-deactivated20220929
so what if i overuse “🥺” emoji??? dont little things in life make u go “🥺”???
omg 😳 i didn’t expect people to love the worf doodles this much ily
Romulan Joe...
having watched now nearly 6 seasons of DS9 and read some interviews with alexander siddig, especially the ones where he mentions how the producers were unhappy with julian’s unpopularity as a character and tried to “fix” that by throwing in the genetic-enhancement storyline and moulding him into DS9′s version of data (which failed, because siddig refused to play along, for good reason) the obvious conclusion is that a team of white american (largely male) writers were utterly unprepared to write for the kind of masculinity siddig embodies and brings to the screen through his portrayal of julian. DS9 is a show with a rich range of masculinities, which is what makes it so interesting to me despite the very low number of female characters. with sisko you get an imposing but also gentle black southern masculinity, o’brien is the down-to-earth irish soldier, odo is the gruff constable - all of these are familiar masculinities to white american writers to some degree, and what’s unfamiliar to them gets filled in by the actors, such as brooks making the conscious decision to play sisko as a soft, sensual man who has no qualms about expressing emotional and physical affection to his son and father.
but with julian - you can just tell they’re throwing shit at the wall hoping it sticks, trying to translate his masculinity for a white american audience. so we get fuckboy relentlessly pursuing jadzia and later getting with ezri (sigh), james bond fanboy, augment with improbable math skills, british history fanboy with miles o’brien - and none of them really seem to fit, right? because julian isn’t just a british man, he’s a brown british man. he’s not just british, but also arab and african. and he’s not just any kind of brown british man, but one with a posh london accent who’s a brilliant doctor who’s also very - shall we say metrosexual in his gestures and general affect. all of this means that no, you can’t just slot julian into any of the familiar british masculine tropes listed above, because his race and class and affect interrupt that translation. from a viewing perspective, this makes the character seem odd, awkward, embarrassing and sometimes creepy - because siddig is having to act his way around these tropes without addressing the racial element in the room.
in julian’s character we get a brown british man of arab/african heritage wanting to escape into james bond and british soldier fantasies, who pursues but is absolutely terrible with women, is awkward and self-involved, and has flashes where you get to see how lonely and alienated he is. the writers could have, if they had addressed siddig’s race and nationality, leaned into that. instead of asking us to buy julian’s affectations at face value, they could have explored why he fantasizes about white imperial masculinities, why he’s unsuccessful with women, why he’s lonely, why he’s ashamed of his success but also desperate to succeed. the dissonances in julian’s character make sense if you acknowledge that his race and gender has its own unique registry that’s different from sisko and o’brien.
it’s also unsurprising that julian’s character comes alive the strongest when he’s paired with another version of Unfamiliar Masculinity: garak. it’s why their scenes together, and especially episodes like “the wire” and “our man bashir” resonate so strongly. garak’s presence helps harmonize and focus julian’s character by calling attention to the fact that both of them are embodying Outsider Masculinities. but of course, the garashir connection worked until its erotic subtext started to become too obvious, so they shut that down and spent the next few seasons trying to shuttle julian’s character back and forth between British Soldier, Heartthrob and Augment, none of which really work, which is why julian ends the series looking and feeling incomplete, even hollowed out a little.
tldr; even if they’d never made garashir explicitly canon (and frankly, seeing how they write romance i’m glad they didn’t), they could have done julian’s character justice by continuing to 1) acknowledge the raced and gendered affect of his character and its specific ties to british history and 2) continuing to give him and garak more scenes 3) giving julian more scenes with young people like jake, and with benjamin sisko, or quark. to his credit, siddig does the best he can with the awkward material, and it’s (imho) this tragic dissonance between his onscreen presence and the tone-deaf writing that produces a character so compelling to explore in fanworks. but damn, when i think of what julian bashir might have been in the hands of writers who were informed and engaged with british colonial history and the masculinities it produced….
#i
just. i keep getting stuck esp on what they tried to do w/ him in the
first few seasons and how heavily against siddig’s grain they try to #push the character. and how on the other hand you can feel siddig constantly negotiating and resisting #this
weird box they push him in where they try to make julian this
repository of (Anxious) White Masculinity Aspirations and Preoccupations #that is clearly familiar to the writers but foreign to him #esp.
considering sid’s own implicit awareness as an actor of the
intersection between his masculinity+race and his gnc physicality #AND his tendency to choose to perform relaxed and softspoken masculinities in touch with emotions #vs his general discomfort with machismo or heavily anxious/hard masculinities #which
at best he approaches with humor - but clearly with julian he wasn’t
being asked to give a heavily humorous or parodic performance #like it’s insane how much the things that are compelling and feel meaningful and authentic about julian are so often #sid’s own work - times and spaces he carves out of this mold julian’s otherwise being crammed in by the writers/prod #esp.
in the first few seasons. not bc they stopped trying later but bc i
will concede that he gets given *something* later occasionally #gotta be honest im mostly thinking of hippocratic oath and the quickening #bc
as pointed out at the same time the writers’/prod’s prepccupations with
the character’s perceived heterosexuality were soaring so like… #sid had to negotiate that terrain next (tags from @bakasara
)
I feel like these tags sum up my thoughts and feelings about getting to know and understand Sid better and the realizations I had about Julian after that better than I could in words
just kira. nothing fancy
