#They are the parents of my blorblo | Explore Tumblr posts and blogs

my-jokes-are-my-armour · 1 year ago

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I don't really know why I suddenly returned to my old series during my vacations, but revisiting some Star Trek series I consumed in my teenager years to late teenager years made me realise something : I always loved the character that was the most unearthly for each series. Spok, Data, Odo, Seven of Nine.

And then I stumbled on that on a reddit thread...

I feel so seen 😅.

I won't go to much for Spok and Data (for the moment at least), but they were almost my first blorblos ever ☺️. I may come to Seven though.

I wanna talk about Odo today and especially in a ace point of view.

Important : this is just a character analysis through my own experience and how i connected not any formal lecture on the subject !

Note : I will switch sometimes between "he" and "it" for Odo. As his specie is basically a fluid with technically no gender at all. He primarily imitated a male person and stayed that way. Has Odo self gendered male in the end ? Maybe. Let say he is gendered that way in the show. That's why I use "he".

A little bit of my trekky journey

The funny part is that I was a real trekky for many many years. My father wanted me to discover the show he liked when he was younger and I became the 2.0 version of him, being obsessed with it ☺️. My parents kindly participated with my passion. They bought me the first parts of the officials Star Trek files. But then they choose to teach me the value of the product they were offering me with work.

I didn't have pocket money except from my grand parents sometimes. So they told me : you do things in the house, we give you a bit of money for it and you can buy your own stuff with it. It was 10Fr for each helpful stuff.

Needless to say, I became very good at washing dishes, cooking and doing the laundry very early 🤣. I needed 70Fr, which is about 10-11€, every two weeks to buy my files and VHS. It became a bit harder when we switched to euros, because 10Fr became 1€ earn for the house chore, and the price of the files grew rapidly... So I never finished that collection. But as you can see I have a solid one lol. They kept the VHS collection as I had no place to store it when I first moved out.

I remember liking a lot this period because I could buy my stuff and then we had a cool moment of bonding together with my parents watching the VHS in the weekend.

The sad part is that is that I never could complete my collection. Too expensive to a point. Saddly, I don't have much about Odo in my files, except for its Starfleet one and worse for Seven of Nine, with nothing at all. But I guess the character was not added yet to the show. I had very few VHS of Voyager at the time.

First impression on Odo and comparison to Data

As many I guess, I wasn't really thrilled at DS9 in the first place, but rewatching it, I found it extremely good now. I had the same feeling with Voyager which I was really appealed to, once Seven was added to the crew.

Those four characters I relate to the most have in common a rejection or a lack of comprehension of human emotions or behaviours. But Odo was different in a way that I can recognise a lot of myself nowadays in terms of development around my own journey discovering my sexuality.

I remember that when I first saw its design I was like. Oh they are trying to make a new Data character.

But no, it is very different. Odo has emotions, strong emotions, and understands them but he cannot fit, because basically it is not humanoid, he is a sentient puddle of goo... It learned to take a humanoid male shape to interact with the most common form of sentient beings around and the equipment of the ships.

If his shape technically makes it difficult to express clear emotions as he is sleek as butter, he can, and does it a lot. So he is not an emotionless or emotional repressed character (although in some aspect yes... 🤔). And through the series, Odo grew on me for its grumpy personality hiding a very sensible and traumatised being.

There is a common ground between Odo and Data in the fact that they are "unique" creature of there kind evolving around people and trying the best they can to be a part of the community. They have a similar arc or steps of development : strange to others, link with some people, explore emotions, try to mimick what they don't understand, link with more, acceptation, deep frienships to even love experiences, sacrifice. But they have opposite feedbacks and starting points.

Data don't feel per se and even with the integration of the emotion ship he has a lot to learn. But he is ready for all experiences, to learn to feel, and explore humanity.

Odo doesn't need to learn emotions, he already feels. But he begins his life among humanoids with abuses. Everything that he has learned to become more "human" comes from pain. So even if he tries to fit, he is extremely shielded and tries to prevent other to see how vulnerable he feels in reality, to escape the inevitable pain if he is not what people expect. Also, Odo can connect with people only if he makes the constent effort to be something he is not.

They are both children learning, but one of them is beginning his journey with strong traumas. So each of their step towards fulfilment is hard but not for the same reasons.

Also Odo has a big journey about love and discovering what he needs and how different his experience is. He doesn't understand sexual attraction and mating. And the traumas make it even harder for him to figure out how it works for him. He needs a lot of guidance that he cannot always accept or precise rules to know how to function as expected in certain situations. He tends to toss aside violently (verbally) those who cannot give him that when he feels cornered.

I think there can be a lot of readings for this character for many people but, in my case, looking back at him now, I find that this strange position Odo had in a community, I subconsciously felt it on the sexuality part of myself. I couldn't connect with anyone, even my friends on the subject... I was the alien. I tried a lot, I mimicked but it failed and it made me sad, until I understood how it worked for me.

Which leads me to my next point.

Love stories and unearthlyness

Of all my blorbos in Star Trek, I feel like Odo is the most unearthly and in the same time the most relatable for me.

For my three other blorblos, I never been really interested in their love stories or sexuality - I was attracted for other things in them - but I appreciated that "love" was not much part of their main journey or that they discussed more about the general feeling than making out with other characters. But for Odo... dear lord! I dived head first in his loved stories because it was speaking to me. He has several love stories and some are central to his character. But in many aspects of this part I was finding myself in his struggles.

He had feelings for others, he could clearly fall in love sometimes, but couldn't experience it like everyone. He had some pationate kisses and some intimate moments here and there, but the love moments I connect the most were when he shared what he is with some characters, in a non flesh way, if I can say so.

If I could make some conclusions directly, I would say that Odo begins as a hetero asexual, sex repulsed, to demisexual after he discovers how to connect with people and he creates a deep emotional link with some of them. He even discovers that, even with members of his own race which have the perfect form to union for him, he doesn't feel anything because the emotional link is not there. And to discover that, he goes from mimicking and mimicking again and again, failing over and over until he muddles his way out of it, finding fulfilment and finally can love the way he needs.

The fact that he isn't humanoid, even solid, is central to him. He states so many times and tries to formulate in many ways that what we can see is not what he is.

For a long time he rejects parts of humanoid's interactions that involve feelings. He freezes most of the time when being hugged. And avoid people with those kind of behaviours.

Me in my corner 🥲👋. Not to this extend but the inconfort is real.

In a way those scenes have a comic aspect but for those who can relate to him, even little, this isn't as funny.

For him, a big part of these reactions comes from the fact that in his experience, what he doesn't understand and doesn't know how to react to, means pain. This is how he was taught in the first place. Also, he is so different in nature that his needs on the subject are totally unreachable. So he has to learn to find the middle ground to live his experience in a group of people that technically cannot match.

For the most part, he is pushed by his friends to open up to the experience of bounding first and then making out, which became the hardest part.

Through his interactions, he becomes more and more aware of how to express love and he shares with some people that way, but he discovers also he is so different than his love isn't understood. Misunderstood for what his feelings are, in nature for him to the others, and misunderstood for what he can feel sharing the physical love with his partners.

I was so heartbroken by some of those moments as the link is created but the difference is too big to make the link hold. And I was so rewarded in others when he is accepted as he is.

The main emotional links

- Quark frienship.

Odo develops some friendships and interesting connections along the way, but the strongest for me is with Quark.

Basically this is the bromance involving one grumpy and closed character, and another that is very loud and annoying to the grumpy one. They are opposite. Odo is order. Quark is chaos.

They have a love/hate relationship with a lot of humour resulting of their interactions but they read each other is many occasions and sometimes it becomes emotional.

I won't get over that face Quark make when Odo (fusionned with someone else's personality) freely expresses his affection for him ☺️. I could ship them all day.

- Garak friendship

Garak is a very strong character with many layers. Odo and him link for good through a very tough experience, as Garak needs to torture him at some point.

In a lot of aspect that illustrates what Odo went through to become a valid humanoid form. But this time we can connect as he is not a suffering in silence puddle but a visible hurting humanoid.

But Garak and Odo link because they mirror themselves, through pride, loyalty and betrayal. Through the pain they feel, hidden inside, and their sense of belonging, or should I say not belonging...

The pain Odo is enduring turns back on Garak and makes a difference for his future moral choices. Also Garak will keep Odo secret he learnt from the torture. The secret that makes then alike. They are homesick because they are desperately lonely. They are the enemy of the community they try to fit in because their species are.

From that comes a strange friendship rooted in suspicion but understanding.

And by the end, even Garak wanna help Odo finding his way through his love experiences.

- His love story with Lwaxana

This one is rewarding and heartbreaking to me. Lwaxana is a Betazoid with a huge libido. She crushes on Odo who tries to avoid her at all coast as she tends to cornering him into a physical interactions and a need for mating that doesn't suit him at all.

But she is the first to show him he can be loved as he is. We discover with her that he is ashamed to be different. That he doesn't want people to see him in his natural form (liquid) even when overdoing staying in a solid form is painful to him.

But stuck in an elevator with Lwaxana he refuses to return to his natural state in front of her, even if he reach his limit. She teaches him that she also is more than what people sees, and offers him a safe place to be what he is.

Much later, they develop some bounds as she is trying to escape her husband who wanna take the baby she carries as soon as she gives birth. At first he is guarded, but Lwaxana finds her way to share some soft moments with him, in a way he didn't know he was capable of. She needs confort, he doesn't know how to give her. Cornered, he find a way.

That moment unlock some other moments where she participates in his own way of bounding as a shape-shifter. They are on common ground, with no sexual things in the middle and they are happy together.

He offers to marry her to counteract in a legal way the fact that her current husband has a property right on the child she carries. And during the ceremony, this is the first time he expresses his love for her.

First he tries mimicking what is excepted of him, telling that she is intelleigent and beautiful. But the husband, present to the ceremony to stop it, sees through it and Odo finally tells the way he feels. Even his friends that know him for years are embarrassed to discover on this occasion how lonely he was feeling all this time and that they don't know him that much, whereas this woman who he met so little changed his life for the better.

This love is sincere but as an empathe she understands than Odo does not love her the way she needs. Odo would be fine with her company, sharing moments like they did before. But she needs more than he can offer her.

He loves her. But she is in love with him. And he learns that is different and not sufficient. Also she spotted his true repressed feelings for Kira, who I would speak about after. So she breaks with him.

She did it in the most gentle way she could, but I had this experience, without knowing that I was actually asexual and it hurts a lot. I tried. I made some tough choices for me, just to be rejected without explanation (or one that I couldn't understand fully on the moment). The real explanation was that I couldn't give the man what he needed. But he never realised how much efforts I put in this relationship and it broke me in the end. So this is what I see there.

- The love of his life, Kira

Kira is a very strong character that can be harsh to others, because of her own harmful past. She is passionate and all fire sometimes. She is very loving and tender on the other side.

The development of this story is more classical, with two people loving each other but don't express their feelings, waiting for the other to make the first step to no end.

There are misunderstandings and errors made on both side, they struggle, living their life away from each other, having other experiences, but then true love wins (almost).

This is the kind of love he is ready to betray for. This is the kind of love she is ready to let go for his happiness.

Kira is the one Odo wants to connect the proper way for this to work and all his struggles in other love relationships prepares him for that and in the same way prevent that from happening for a long time.

They learn each other progressively but the guarded nature of Odo is an obstacle. In the end, she is the one he finally opens up to everything that he is, even if the experience may not suit a humanoid form. It happens when Kira realises that Odo doesn't think she can love him the way he really is.

I love deeply that moment when he takes a pure energy form and envelopes her and she responds with wonderment and joy.

Kira proves her love for him several times, especially in the way she knows him and respects how he is. She is the one to understand the best his pride and need to keep some things hidden. She puts words on it when he can't so other wouldn't hurt him trying to make him react in a way they consider better.

They are two hurt people who learn the shape of the other through love.

Unfortunately like most of pure love stories, it is doomed. He has to return to his people to save the entire species so... they won't live together happy ever after. But we learn at some point that his love for her never faltered, even centuries later.

I love those kind of story with pure feelings and emotions ☺️.

From nothing to something

They had unearthly creature before in Star Trek, but when they were not machines, they were almost exclusively humanoid for evident reason of human playing them 😅. I liked the different society point of views making points for our own. But to me, Odo is the first really unearthly main character. Because he is technically not relatable in his true form.

How should I connect emotionally with a puddle ?

And for a very long time, in the show this is the underlying issue Odo has with everyone but for the reversed reason. He is puddle, how could he connect with solids ?

The thing is that Odo is seen through the filter of those who are the norm. And we meet him when he has a stable apparent relationship with others. We learn the underlying struggles and pains he experiences, discovering the differences. And those differences are relatable because we can question ours.

The thing is that we don't see for a long time that he hurts to be different as he appears rejecting or snobing humanoids. Attack is the best defense...

And as I said before, this comes from how he learned to adapt.

His very existence is "nothing" and he has to grow from that in a very traumatising way.

He learns very late that his own people abandoned him to be found by humanoids as an experiment to connect with us. But if he was aware of himself, he wasn't aware of anything else. Changelings are not meant to be alone. They live in total fusion in a sort of sea of them.

So from the start, he is fucked up. And those who found him didn't understand it was a sentient creature for a long time. They experiment on him as it was a inert matter. He exists but has no properties that we can attribute to a living organism.

He was found and labeled as "unknown sample / nothing" in cardassian (Odo'itil - in short Odo). He was one of its kind in a world of entities that couldn't understand him and that he couldn't understand either. So basically he experienced torture until he found a way to communicate, through changing form and mimick. But yet again the experiments continued until it was proven to be sentient.

Odo has a lot of resentment from that period.

Ironically, he was not a good shape-shifter, that why his face looks the way it is. And his face is a pale copie of the face of the man who experimented on him, this harmful "father". Also he kept the name Odo as designation. Nothing.

His relation with his "father" is very conflicted. The first time they met after Odo went away from his lab, it triggers a very powerful unconscious emotional response. And his father recognise the extend of the harm he did to him, and he never was aware causing it. He finally found a way to bound with this man, recognising that his father loves him and is hurt from the cold separation. Odo doesn't forgive totally but he opens a door to a future collaboration.

I like the evolution of his psychology around it and through his name also. He explains that at first when people called him Odo, he was hearing "nothing". So for him, people considered him to be nothing. And when he made some real friends, he finally came over that pejorarive meaning around his existence, he began to hear a name.

He achieved to become something out of nothing.

The desire to link and the demisexuality

Odo doesn't know much about himself except that he is. Though he has a need to link with other that comes from his own nature. He doesn't know where it leads.

His first links are made in the most humanoid way possible. He doesn't want to be weird. He is mimicking some things to share moments with others, like drinking or eating. He doesn't need to and cannot really absorb things. But he does it anyway and find some fulfilment to simply be with them, talk and share.

The Changellings (his species) don't like solids forms of life and abhor connecting with them. They are almost repulsed by the idea of binding physically with a solid, because their link (fusion) is much more. But the links Odo makes aren't physical ones.

While he doesn't know the existence of his own species, Odo has the same internal repulsion over everything that imply physical link, so especially everything around sexuality, because to him the way it is done by humanoids is uncanny. It lacks something but he doesn't know what exactly. But he knows that what is the most strange to him is realated to the love feeling. For him what he observes from people in love isn't what he experiences and all physical attraction is weird and disgusting.

He often verbally states in a very crude way that he doesn't understand the need humanoids have to mate and they biological needs for pleasure. Also their rituals to link for love is the most abstract thing to him. He acknowledges the feeling, not what can accompany it.

But he does develop feelings for others and some attraction. He is even attracted to female humanoids in general. He doesn't want to make out but he can experience a kind of pull and curiosity. But as soon as he has to interact and he recognises attraction from the other part, he bails. He has to be forced into something to begin to understand bits of it.

He continues to live the experiences about linking with others the same way he was taught to interact with people in the first place. Meaning, escape from pain to find where it doesn't hurt. And it is painful to see him to go through that for love too. He naturally tries to avoid pain where he thinks it is and ends up in being forced into a situation extremely inconfortable for him, struggling to find the best way to find a new balance in his emotions and in sensations in which he finds no pleasure.

When he meets Lwaxana, she is the most disruptive and invasive person ever. He doesn't have any feelings for her and she is forcing her way through him to get that response out of him. But she is the first to see what is the problem and offer a solution that his not harmful to him. She is the first whose love reaches him. And he began to love her in his own ways. This is not enough of course...

When he meets his people, he experiences the first fusion of his life and the experience is the definition of what he needs. But... soon he realises that even if this is the equivalent of his biological needs, he doesn't feel for it at all. Later, after some other steps in his journey to discover love, he tries to share with a Changelling what he has learned and the experience is unconclusive for both of them. The Changelling doesn't feel anything for the act as a solid. Neither does Odo, even if he is sure he made it right. The Changelling tries to force the idea that their natural way of linking is the best for him and he has to abandon his humanoid habits. But still he doesn't feel that way. Like yes, this is the most rewarding thing except there are no feelings.

At some point, because he choses humanoids over his own kind, killing a Changelling that was harmful to his friends, he is punished by his people and rejected. They made him human, keeping his imperfect face as a reminder to how bad he was even as what he was supposed to be. So he has to live like what they consider a poor and disgusting life. Odo has to learn a lot of things back but in the same time, he experiences for the first time some simple pleasures he couldn't grasp before. When he can finally revert to his natural form, he uses this experience to connect better with others has he understands now a bit more about their needs.

Odo is the one that has to make the extra steps in every direction. Steps toward humanoids who can learn to accept him and care for him but without fully understanding what he is and ignoring a lot of time is personal needs. Steps toward Changellings who can understands what he is and can offer him to fulfil a lot of his needs but won't understand some of them that are vital to him, like the need to be loved and to love, something that he developed staying with humanoids and that they consider a defect.

To both side, on the aspect of love he is incomplete.

The Changellings are purely asexual and sex repulsed, if I had to make a comparison. They are experiencing things completely detached from love in all its forms. In their norms, he has to remove the idea that this feeling is necessary to his existence. They try to cure him from that, educating him to the way his species do things. But to him their way to link is incomplete for his personal development.

On the other hands, to him, the humanoids are sexual beings with a lot of needs he can't grab. To their norms he is just not trying hard enough to get what he wants. They see his need for love, they recognise that he can feel, but the answer is often the same and not very helpful in the form that that is take. Try again. They don't acknowledge that pain and fear on this subject are two overwhelming obstacles for him and that they pushes are, more often than not, harmful. But with them, he develops those feelings, painful steps after another, finding the shape they have.

He cannot find fulfilment in both of the worlds he knows, until Kira.

Well, to be fair, he has an experience with someone else, with whom he falls in love. He has sex with her and discovers he can find pleasure in it. In the demisexual way. And that's the key for him.

But that person has to leave him behind. And as I explained before, his own experience of life made that kind of thing very harmful to him. That is a step that pushes him backwards for quite some times.

The thing I relate the most in this experience is when he asks the woman if he did good as it was his first sexual experience ever. She replies that she couldn't tell it was. And he is happy to have satisfy her needs and feel pleasure too. But for me, the way it is said is a lot like, I hope I did everything right as a solid demands it, so I won't be punished. Well I had this experiences too. Trying to match expectation and being punished for not doing good enough...

And what kills me is that Odo does good. He makes real progress and is about to maybe have a positive experience from it. And in the end he is punished by the events themselves, not that he didn't anything wrong on the thing, but he did wrong to have even tried...

So his first real step forward in his journey is rewarded with pain shortly after. Something he will struggle to overcome to try new experiences and many are pushing him. So you can guess the reaction...

But from this experience he has to learn that, for him, love is possible only if a strong emotional connection is made. He will need some more time to assimilate this.

And of course, in the end, Kira is the one that checks all the points.

After that he will try to overcome his problems to express his feelings and fear to lose the only one with whom failing would be too painful. And, once again, because he always experience the things the same way, it is cornered that he makes the final step.

In the end, he has to leave her but their separation, even if bittersweet, is tender, full of understanding and love.

Final word

I hope that I wasn't too boring with this long analysis for a character that is not in the fandom of this blog.

Odo is a complexe character, and quite gray. Yeah he did bad things too. I made this analysis through the specter of my reading of his sexuality mostly and my own experience pov. But this is a character interesting in many other aspects. He keeps a lot inside and when things come out we aren't really prepared.

I don't want to go specially far in the fandom online. I don't know what is the state of it really, and I stopped in the middle of Entreprise show as I didn't connect with the characters. I don't know either if you would like to learn more on my blorblos from the past. Those from Star Trek but I have some others. I inaugurate the tag "blorblo from the attic" for the occasion lol.

Have a nice day, and I leave you on a Odo Quark smiling to each other moment ☺️.

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#character analysis #odo #tw: abuse #tw: torture #for those who are sensible over the subject #long post #removing tag for less visibility #blorblos from the attic

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