I’m so glad most of you are here BECAUSE you want to listen to me talk about Julian Bashir incessantly because if you were here for any other reason I would be sure you were tired of this but this way I can be unleashed

Anyway

I am lucky enough to have a channel that plays Star Trek every night and they just run through the series in order and I let it run pretty much every night and fall asleep to it and have for like, 2+ years now

The side effect of this is that I have at this point seen DS9 all the way through like 3 or 4 times at least and there’s just. I’m Here, I’m Queer, I Love Dr. Bashir, there’s so MUCH there’s so many little subtle moments he has that you don’t even catch the first time or maybe even the second

He fiddles with his hands constantly when he’s talking or listening. He puts his feet up on consoles a LOT. People always call him Doctor or Julian or Dr. Bashir but no one ever calls him “lieutenant” (which is his actual rank) except for Enabran Tain. He’s the first person, and one of the only ones in the whole series, who takes Kai Winn to task directly to her face and he does not give a shit while doing it. In the first mirror universe episode where he gets sent to ore processing he gives his food to one of the other prisoners. In the episode where Odo turns into that monster thing and attacks him they ask him if there were any issues with the lights and he says he has no idea because he never turned them on for fear of disturbing his patients. In general as soon as he has a patient to care for he throws his own self preservation concerns right out the window. People try to intimidate him constantly but no one ever actually does. At one point he calls Dukat “Offensive” to his face. When Jake is hurt in the cave in in Nor The Battle To The Strong, when he comes to Julian is gently stroking his forehead. The amount of time he spends on the planet caring for Ekoria in The Quickening isn’t like, a couple of days, but several weeks. It’s one of the more legendary gifs from my blog but in that one shot from Trials and Tribbleations he really does have a middle aged male Bajoran officer basically in his lap with the guy’s head resting on his thigh. He IS already friends with O’Brien but the level of gentleness and caring that he actually shows Miles when he’s hurt or afraid is genuinely really special when you take it out of the context of the show and take their genders into consideration. Go watch a couple of the scenes from Visionary when Miles is waking up afraid in the infirmary and Julian is reassuring him and try and envision a male doctor looking at his middle aged male patient in real life even slightly like Julian is looking at Miles in that episode and process how unique whatever’s happening there actually is. There’s just SO MUCH there’s so much fridge content, so many things he does that are genuinely exceptional or unique, so many subtle GNC things and parts of his character that are so much more interesting when you take gender into account, so many little subtle things to unpack that tell you about him and so much of it is so easy to miss because it’s either quick or subtle or you don’t think twice about it in the show but it feels different when you reframe the context, try to envision any of it in real life. he’s just. He’s so special. You know he’s special from moment one but the more times around you take the show, the more little details you have the chance to notice the more special he seems.

this is what makes Julian so important to me and also one of the things I’m having the most fun with from a Cardassian perspective in writing Interpersonal Studies as far as the qualities that make him a Bad Human and now they’re not the same qualities that will make Cardassians think of him as a Good Cardassian because like

so the thing that people hate most about autistic people isn’t actually our difficulty with social cues, our tendency to be rude or boring because we’re too into whatever we’re talking about or that we’re ignoring or not seeing those social cues, or even that we often show greater ability in areas that to us are mundane or unimportant but NTs fetishise enough that they become insecure about our comparative ability (eg mathematics or verbal analysis)

the thing that NTs hate about us most is that like. if we’re driven by a code of morality or ethics, we cannot and will not be budged from it, and the places in which that code comes up are seemingly - to NTs - unpredictable.

and i think of that every time I see people try to argue with Julian (this also applies to Kira ofc) and do their best to explain or convince them that they need to do this other thing despite their moral positioning

Julian, you have to kill the Jem'hadar. Julian, you have to let your friends die. Julian, you have to stop doing medicine and start doing this. Julian, this way is more logical. Julian, this way makes more sense. Julian, this is war, this is crisis, there’s no time for your bedside manner or your bleeding heart here

and 90% of the time he doesn’t even ARGUE. He doesn’t even BOTHER to argue, he just says, yeah I’m not doing that, see you later

and he keeps doing medical care on strangers, on Jem'hadar, on “doomed” people and “lost causes”, on saving people he hates more than anybody just as keenly as the people he loves

because it’s not just resolve or strength of character that makes him resist people’s arguments - there’s nothing in them to resist. you can’t convince someone like Julian that his morality or compassion needs to be put aside by talking to him about practicality or politics or anything like that. you either have to force him into an ultimatum where he’s choosing one morality over another - eg when Garak tried to force his hand - or you pretty much have to knock him out and drag him away, and good luck with that.

Julian is one of the most cheerful and flexible people in the show, he’ll genuinely go along with anything, he’s curious and driven and he loves meeting people and learning about them and telling them about himself, and he’ll go do something new to HIM whether it’s a traditional “adventure” or not, especially if he gets to go with someone he likes. but at times like this, he becomes utterly inflexible, RIGID, and you can’t fucking budge him for love nor money, and it makes me so emotional that that deeply adhd-autistic core of care and focus and pure, agonisingly strong emotion drives a man who touches everyone, who strokes people’s hair and squeezes their shoulders and quotes poetry and smiles and teases - because it’s comforting. because he loves to connect to people. because he wants them to feel safe in his care

i regularly think about the ambassadors episode early on and how all those ambassadors came out of that Jeffrey’s tube calling him julian and treating him like their new favourite nephew - because I know, and you know, that for all the time they were stuck in there he barked orders at them to keep them still bc he’s a lieutenant commander and a chief medical doctor and It was a crisis scenario, and he also said absolutely everything they needed to hear even though they were frightened and uncomfortable and cramped and in pain

people brush off julian’s goofiness and social ineptitude but like… First, a lot of it is driven by social anxiety and probably RSD, you can see that with how much it fades the longer he’s on the cast, but shows up again with new people who intimidate him or make him uncertain

but second like. that ineptitude is in reading non verbal social cues or not stimming or levels of “appropriateness” from a Human NT perspective. a lot of aliens don’t have the same issues other humans have has - Klingons visibly appreciate a lot of his directness if not his humour, as does Garak - but also that ineptitude never comes from a place of genuinely lacking compassion. Julian bashir brims over with earnest love and care for everybody, EVERYBODY, he meets, and not only does that drive him, but he considers it his duty first and foremost to LET it drive him, no matter what people think or try to order him otherwise

i love him so much it hurts