Ah, “Alter Ego”, The Episode Where Tuvok Is Stalked By An Alien Incel Who Got Too Deep Into RPing.

I must confess that one of the things I’ve always found interesting about Kuvira is how she expresses her gender identity within her role as the head of a revolutionary nationalist army. After all, modern military hierarchies tend to be drenched in masculinity even when they attempt to be egalitarian. At the same time, while revolutions offer the possibility of dissolving old roles and limits on behavior, they also tend to keep a few and develop some of their own. (There’s also the whole issue of how right-wing movements tend to describe the order they are rebelling against as “decadent” and effeminate, while their own movements offer a “healthy” masculine alternative. Of course, Korra never dug too deeply into the gender dynamics of Kuvira’s army, so any speculation would on this would essentially be building castles in the sky. What I can say, though, is that I’ve always felt Kuvira’s character design was harkening to this idea of what you could call “the soldier as woman.” She dresses and presents herself in such a way as to show that she and her army are one, even to the point where the only major difference between her and her soldiers is her collar and the armor on her upper back. At the same time, she isn’t trying to erase her gender and appear masculine/androgynous. She even keeps her hair long and tied up in a bun rather than shaving it off or going for the army-standard undercut. I think all this is what people have been getting at with this “butch/femme” discussion, but I don’t think that’s the best way to look at this particular issue. All that said, I’m not exactly a fan of this outfit from the upcoming comic.

I’ve always seen Kuvira as a woman with a rather austere sense of dress. As I pointed out above, instead of wearing a uniform with gold braid, sheets of medals and ribbon, or a cape and pauldron with elaborate armored segments like in her concept art, she wears a uniform that’s basically the same as every other one in her military. While this outfit isn’t too flossy or “femmy,” the tailoring, color coordination, and that big belt buckle feel a little too...well, bourgeois for Kuvira. It’s simple, yes, but it’s still an outfit you have to put together when you get up in the morning. Personally (and this is just my inner dirty socialist talking), I could easily see Kuvira rocking the zhongshan (”Mao”) suit, or something more akin to the military tunics Stalin wore in the 1920s and 1930s. (Hmm...Jenros, I think I have a Kuvira picture I’d like to pitch to you...)

Question: Why do people call Kuvira butch? Because she has muscle and doesn’t wear dresses or some shit? Are all women with muscle a butch?

Cause really when I think of butch I think of women who are suuuper big and muscular (rocking that T) like Zarya and Scorpia. Kuvira is more or less just a well built/toned female who looks classy as hell in anything she wears. She’s not super duper feminine but she’s not really butch either. She’s more or less in the middle.

The fact that ProZD sounds exactly like Jason Alexander disturbs me greatly.

thought this was an odd choice for the new trailer

Original post by airlesscell

@nick-nocturn, isn’t this basically what Keratin Garden was?

a beauty guru that is haunted by a demonic entity

Something to keep in mind when watching ENT is that Archer is a contemporary of all those starship captains from the late 22nd and early 23rd century that got their crews killed or committed horrendous Prime Directive violations that Kirk and Picard had to clean up a century or two later. Hell, Archer’s probably the one who gave the Iotians that gangster book.

Captain Archer’s smugness is so annoying. Especially because he is so wrong. They go down to the planet and all get high and paranoid off some chemicals in the air, and Trip tries to kill T’Pol.. You know, chemicals that they might have detected with a probe, but fuck caution you know

Hmmm.

I don't understand how tumblr works.

The mirror universe, transporter accidents, other parallel universes, time travel, cloning technology operated by unscrupulous doctors and scientists, the holodeck...the list goes on and on.

The “would you fuck your clone?” question is so uncomfortably real in Star Trek because of the Mirror Universe.

@coppermarigolds eeee! :D

I had to break in my new Surface Pro and make a quick shitty sketch of Kuvira as Iden Versio because how the shit has no one made the resemblance yet?

I mean they both fall in love with top notch dork ass engineers too what more do you want

Fun fact: in the early stages of production for “The Pegasus”, the script initially called for the titular Pegasus to be a new ship design that was essentially a Ambassador-era take on the Miranda/Nebula-class hull profile. However, budget and time constraints led the TNG team to go with an Oberth instead. All that exists of this original Pegasus is an quick sketch Rick Sternbach did, and it’s neat to see it come to life in a roundabout fashion through this model.

Apollo-class for Star Trek Bridge Commmander

Custom-tailored sweatsuits for chilly tanks. :3

Super heavy tank

As someone who has an interest in sf/fantasy depictions of WWI, I’ve been puzzling for years as to why authors dabbling in steampunk have been reluctant to tackle the conflict. My own theory is that steampunk is, at heart, an American creation, and the Great War is an event that has mostly vanished from the American consciousness. For most American writers, steampunk is a fantasy world set in an imagined version of 19th-century Britain or America which draws more from other stories than from reality, and the question of international politics and war doesn’t really come into it. That said, I have found British authors working in steampunk to be far more willing to broach the subject of World War I, both because the war had such a huge impact on the British national psyche, and because it ties into the greater question of what Britain is, its relationship to the empire, what role Britain has in the world after empire, and so on. As for examples, two authors stand out to me. While a hard sf writer by trade, Stephen Baxter’s steampunk excursions always seem to be haunted by the war. His 1993 novel Anti-Ice is for the most part a romp about a 19th-century excursion from the Earth to the Moon thanks to the titular substance, an exotic form of antimatter. However, by the end of the book the use and exploitation of anti-ice has led to Britain, France, and Germany locking themselves into a Cold War-style nuclear arms race. His 1995 book The Time Ships is a sequel to the The Time Machine that riffs in all manner of ways on HG Wells’ work, but the middle third of the book is set in an alternate 1938 where the First World War has dragged on for decades, transforming Britain into a dystopian state influences by Wells’ most pessimistic views. (While I haven’t read Baxter’s 2017 followup to The War of the Worlds, entitled The Massacre of Mankind, some of the elements I’ve seen, like a police-state Britain and a bloody Russo-German war in Eastern Europe, suggests that the Martian invasion of the original book has become the Great War of the sequel’s world.) For something a little more literary, Ian R. MacLeod’s Aether duology, The Light Ages (2003) and The House of Storms (2005), is set in an England where a magical substance called “aether” has locked the country (and by extension the rest of the world) in a sort of static industrial revolution for centuries in some ways reminiscent of Keith Roberts’ Pavane (1968). Change does eventually come to this static eternal England, sadly in the form of a civil war whose depiction draws heavily from that of the Western Front.

I didn’t include it in the list of favorite stories because I like it more in idea than in execution, but Caitlin R, Kiernan’s story Goggles really hit me hard.  She says it was her idea of where all steampunk is leading, but most authors don’t want to admit: the conflict that became World War I in our world destroys the steampunk world in technologically advanced nuclear fire.  I read it yesterday and I can’t get the concept out of my head.