Fun fact: Una McCormack (author of The Never-Ending Sacrifice, Enigma Tales, and many more) was actually Ds9 fanfic writer in the late 90s/early 00s. It got her noticed by Pocket Books and commissioned for a story which led on to her later novels.
hey do you guys wanna know why i became such a strong proponent of “cardassians have tails”? it’s not because i’m a Big Fuckign Scalie, or because i want the aliens to be more alien, or because the idea of having a prehensile tail is so goddamn cool, or even because i’m Literally In Love with the fat gecko tails i’m seeing on some of these garaks you guys are coming up with.
all of those things are true, but i have another reason, that’s much simpler and sillier. it’s the fact that cardassians have a particular unique style of dress that would make a lot of sense with tails.
like, with the exception of military uniforms (and i have to admit that’s a big exception; many, perhaps even the majority of cardassians we meet on ds9, and all of those we see on tng, are in uniform) but with the exception of military uniforms, most cardassian clothes have a sort of skirt-like aspect to them.
male typical clothes are almost all tunics of varying lengths; garak definitely has one that goes down as far as his knees.
(sorry for the blurry screenshot, i was looking to highlight the length of the garment, not take a well composed shot)
now, this one is unusually long, but over half of garak’s outfits - probably over three quarters, actually - are composed of a tunic and pants. and we know that, unusually, garak is actually a reasonably typical cardassian in this aspect of his life (his dress sense), if for no other reason then the makers of star trek work with shoe string budgets and reuse costumes regularly, meaning that we have seen a number of civilian male cardassians wearing garak’s clothes. female cardassians, too, are inordinately likely to wear dresses, particularly longer dresses with looser skirts.
these sorts of clothes provide the perfect way to have a hole in the back of your pants, tights, or underpants for a tail while still preserving your modesty. the tail can be free from clothing yet with the base hidden under the skirt of a dress or tunic.
cardassian civvies are perfect, simple tail-outfits.
This is a really good point. I dug up some more screencaps:
The fact that all these are ‘open’ in the front and longer in the back makes perfect sense with them having tails.
*puts hand on shoulder* if you write g*rashir and your solution to get them together is to kill ezri, honestly fuck you
I take it I’m not the only one who was bothered by this in “Alone Together,” then.
…people can just break up, you know?
But in Alone Together it wasn’t even to get them together, because we were basically baited to think they would finally get together and it never happened. Ezri was killed to…establish that Julian was bi?
People have other past relationships. Couldn’t he have had a boyfriend at the Academy? Or recently?
Amen to all of this.
Also, I’ve never heard an actual queer person say ‘I had never thought I’d be attracted to the same gender…’ More often than not, it’s ‘oh, I’m queer? Well now that friendship and those feelings and all that stuff make so much sense.’
Cecil. She/her. During the day I sit in libraries staring at books. During the night I write queer fanfiction with a historical slant.
Some not-so-random facts: Gay space lizards are the best lizards. Star Trek is my life. I have too many DS9 ships. Classic Who and the Eighth Doctor Adventures make me grin stupidly. Kelas Parmak is the best. I will defend historically accurate portrayals of Alan Turing to the last drop of blood. Likes and asks end up in the name of @apolesens-otheraccount, because Tumblr doesn't have a way of changing which blog is your primary one. Nothing happens over there - this is the one to follow.
