Ashley (Aug. 2023)

I used the Rootstock crew as a way to write fanfic for various different series (I mean, that's where the name comes from), but it's really anchored in the world of Star Trek at its core, something that was easy to do because of the very permissive worldbuilding - compared to other sci-fi or even superhero stuff, there's a relative lack of truly galaxy-threating events.

Even though I adapted Ashley from some of the superhero stuff I'd done, she ends up being a different character just because of the situation she's in - she's the token human in a group of extraterrestrials, kind of a humourous inverse of the Spock/Worf dynamic. I wanted to pick her in particular because I thought it'd be nice to have a trans woman of color in a role that really has nothing to do with being a trans woman of color, and really emphasize her as an example of "normal human".

One thing that does come into play, though, is that she's from the 2000s, since that's how I've used her to express a bit of my own exasperation at Star Trek fandom - especially people who point to it as their one true vision of a utopian future. I've never been a fan of utopias. I don't think we should put any existing work of fiction on such a high pedestal, especially one that often reflects a specifically American zeitgeist - we should always be trying to account for the perspectives of the many, many people who live in this world today, whether they're on TV or not, and that means we can't have one single vision of what the world is like.