are holodeck characters horny by default, or is it something you have to adjust in the settings menu
Originally settings, but Star Fleet got sick of people breaking it trying to get the horniness jusssst right so they made it default
my train of thought is like. if you give people a Horny Meter, they’ll just slide it up to 100%. but no one really wants that. That’s Way Too Horny. i bet the horny slider tells you it’s set at 100%, so people stop trying to push it up, but it’s really only set to like a reasonable, more manageable amount of horny. starfleet engineers would set it to just the right level of tense, Will-They Won’t-They slow burn.
That makes sense. You’re right, people would totally go 100% horny. Starfleet engineers are doing us all a service
are holodeck characters horny by default, or is it something you have to adjust in the settings menu
Originally settings, but Star Fleet got sick of people breaking it trying to get the horniness jusssst right so they made it default
my train of thought is like. if you give people a Horny Meter, they’ll just slide it up to 100%. but no one really wants that. That’s Way Too Horny. i bet the horny slider tells you it’s set at 100%, so people stop trying to push it up, but it’s really only set to like a reasonable, more manageable amount of horny. starfleet engineers would set it to just the right level of tense, Will-They Won’t-They slow burn.
are holodeck characters horny by default, or is it something you have to adjust in the settings menu
Riker is like, That Guy from every story i’ve ever heard from lesbians and ace women that goes like “in high school i told myself i had a crush on a guy because i thought he was the kind of guy i was meant to be attracted to”. he’s like, tall? and he has a jawline? guys in movies have jawlines. his eyes could be described as “piercing” when he doesn’t look like a smug piece of shit. he logically must be hot.
like. i tend to headcanon almost every woman as bi, because 1) i’m bi and i’m biased and 2) they’re all intended to be straight and fall in love with dudes, and making them bi is an easy and painless way to be able to relate to that at all. but Deanna Troi is a lesbian, and riker is a demon taking the form of her internalised heteronormativity. every character who fucks riker and leaves by the end of the episode is a lesbian coming to her senses. no one attracted to men has ever looked at riker as a sexual candidate. he looks like a chore. he’s the product of a writing room full of men all with unhappy unsatisfied wives going, “what do women like?”. Women Like Bad Boys, Right. so let’s make him the Absolute Fucking Worst. he’s like they tried to write Kirk 2.0, taking all the bits that straight men thought made kirk attractive. women must love guys who fuck around with hot space women. that’s what makes him hot. women must love bad acting on characters who seem constantly frustrated. he does sports is sports a character trait? Make him an Alpha Male, women love that, none of this ‘brave, smart, selfless hero who tackles serious ethical dilemmas’ nerd bullshit.
jake sisko as a character is the antithesis of wesley crusher and the ultimate evidence that child characters can actually be well executed even in shows such as star trek, as long as you develop them as, you know, actual kids instead of insufferable genius special boys
concept: t’pring and michael were childhood friends. t’pring views michael as a big sister figure and comes to her for advice. whenever spock and t’pring interact, spock always drags michael with him at t’pring’s casual request. they all space-skype each other and gossip about mutual acquaintances while sipping hot chocolate from champagne flutes.
advanced concept: T’Pring had a huge lesbian crush on Michael
t’pring: spock your sister has aesthetically pleasing features and a gifted mind. i would trust her logic on most things
spock: please refrain from this topic.
t’pring: it is logical to discuss her merits. she is heavily involved in both of our lives. is she going to be here today? where is sh
vulcan naming conventions are inconsistent, but the surakian tradition is generally two-syllable names, men’s s____k, women’s t’p___. so, yeah, t’pose is a completely reasonable english transliteration of a traditional vulcan woman’s name
to expand on this a little, the original memos actually say that vulcan mens’ names should be five letters, s???k. this is where you get “shrek is a vulcan name” discourse.
however, that doesn’t really scan. vulcan names aren’t meant to be written with the latin alphabet, after all, and vulcan script looks like this —
— if you can find anything that’s clearly a letter here, never mind delineating five of them, you’re a better man than me.
rather, i’d like to suggest the typical transliteration of a vulcan man’s personal name will most likely fit a {C}CVC.vc format, transliterated S[VC.v]k, assuming a traditionally minded family as well as modernity not fucking with pronunciation too much—remember young diot coke, born 1379? her name written today would probably be denise cook.
assume for a moment that surak is a good example of a traditional name; sarek, then, is uncorrupted in modernity. [ˌsʊɹˈʌk] and [ˌsaɹˈɛk], i guess? ipa will be the death of me one day and i’m absolute shit at vowels. but both of these names are S[VC.v]k, if you’ll accept some very ad hoc use of standard symbols.
there are names that don’t fit this model, though. spock; tuvok; stonn. we’ll throw shrek in here too.
tuvok is the easiest one to consolidate, of course: CCVC.vc, and the name [ˌstʊvˈɑk] drops its /s/ over time to simply [ˌtʊvˈɑk]
spock, stonn, and shrek are single-syllable, five-letter romanizations. immediately a problem becomes apparent, though; spock’s romanized /ck/ is the same as what is elsewhere romanized simply /k/ — the generalization of {C}CVC.vc as “five letters” throws off what would otherwise be romanized as “spok”; similarly, stonn is… presumably not displaying gemination, as romanizations typically drop it (see óðinn -> odin or the names of the dwarves in lotr for examples of consonant reduplication denoting gemination being dropped); as such we should probably see his name romanized as “ston”.
spock and stonn, normalized as spok and ston, are both CCVC. shrek is CCVC as well; remember /sh/ is /ʃ/ in ipa. so you have, in order, [spɑk], [stɑn], and [ʃɹɛk].
i would argue that spock and shrek are names which, over time, experienced vowel reduction; they’re not invalid names, they simply aren’t the original forms of them. diot and denise.
spock, then, would be derived from the name [ˌsʊpˈɑk]. the vowel loses prominence until it’s no longer pronounced at all, or only barely pronounced.
possibly this is due to a slight complication of the guidelines; not simply {C}CVC.vc, but {C}C’VC.vc. that is, not [ˌsʊɹˈʌk] but [ˌs’ʊɹˈʌk]; not [ˌsaɹˈɛk] but [ˌs’aɹˈɛk]. [ˌst’ʊvˈɑk] becomes [ˌt’ʊvˈɑk]*, and spock maybe originally was [ˌs’ʊpˈɑk].
see, /p/ really loves turning into /p’/; it probably happens in your speech all the time. so [ˌs’ʊpˈɑk] maybe gets functionally pronounced as [ˌs’ʊp’ˈɑk], and that’s a lot of ejectives in one syllable, so down the line it becomes simply [sp’ɑk].
shrek experiences a similar, but not identical, vowel reduction, with the likely protoform [ˌʃ’ʊɹˈɛk] becoming [ʃ’ɹɛk].
stonn is a bit of an odd case, obviously, as it doesn’t end in /k/ at all. i might argue that it’s diminuitive; like naming your kid joe or joey instead of joseph, you might name your kid [st’ɑn] instead of [ˌst’ɑnˈɛk]. this may be especially common if it’s typical vulcan pronunciation is actually [st’ɑŋ] and indicative of a dialect shifting word-final /k/ to /ŋ/; in a dialect where [ˌst’ɑŋˈɛk] is being pronounced [ˌst’ɑŋˈɛŋ] anyway, fuck your _# /ŋ/, who needs it? thus, stonn still feels complete as a name despite technically being a diminuitive.
*note that ipa /t’/ and the element /t’/ in traditional vulcan women’s names are not the same thing; /t’/ designates what in ipa is written /tʔ/ or /t’ʔ/. t’pose is [tʔpoʊz] or [t’ʔpoʊz] and, structurally, i suppose, C.CCVC, where women’s names are likely constructed C.CC{C}V{_C}; that is, T’P[{C}V{_C}], allowing t’pau ([t’ʔpaʊ]), t’pring ([t’ʔpɹɪŋ]), t’pose ([t’ʔpoʊz]).
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