A perhaps silly idea I had back in 2017...
The Founders are a shapeshifting race that runs an expansionist space empire and so are the Skrulls. DC's Durlans would fit the shapeshifting part, too. They've faced prejudice like the Changelings, but they don't run an empire.
One species has a space empire with a bird motif and a sprinkling of Roman Empire terminology and the other is the Romulans. Sure, the Romulan Star Empire never seems as multi-species as the Shi'ar, but no reason it couldn't be. Might want to drop the link to Vulcan, though...
Turning to DC comics for the Federation species, I'll note the somewhat emotionlessness and computer-like logic of the Vulcans and Brainiac's people, the Coluans.
The other other identifications I thought of, but some are too similar to add anything particularly interesting (The Khunds and the Klingons) and some distant enough to be suggest substitution (Thanagarians and Andorians. Thanagarians might stand-in for Romulans, too, depending on which version we're talking about) but you get the idea.
I hope somebody - maybe even myself - pointed out back in 2017 that the Romulan intelligence agency is literally called the Tal Shi'ar.
ReplyDeleteAnd I love the idea of a Wold-Newtonesque space campaign. Did you see the two comic series' where a bunch of Lantern refugees planeshifted to the Abrahms-Trek 'verse? At the end the realized that the Federation had just discovered their universe's Krypton . . .
The Picard series has continued the storyline from the JJ Abrams Star Trek movie, and so the Romulan homeworld has been destroyed by a nova, and all surviving Romulans are refugees with an understandable bitterness toward the Federation for promising to save them and then failing to do so. Which casts them in a totally different role than they had before.
ReplyDeleteI always found the relationship between the Vulcans and Romulans interesting. They're not really different species, just different cultures, like if a planets' worth of pre-Federation humans had founded a new starfaring Empire shortly before Earth cleaned up and went straight. (It's kind of like Mirror Vulcan exists in the same universe as regular Vulcan, I guess.)
One thing I liked in Deep Space 9 was the effort to show individuals from some of the more repressive worlds enjoying the opportunity to sample the cosmopolitan pleasures of the station, like that friendly trio of Cardasian scientists who were really looking forward to eating some alien food.
Seems like there are some Kree - Andorian parallels you could draw. Aside from both being a pleasing shade of blue, they're both cultures with a fairly strong warrior/military tradition and a lot of respect for disciplined behavior.
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