#and didn't entirely jive with my experiences in conversation as a religious minority

[kaesaaurelia]

balder12 replied to your post

“me, watching DS9 when I was 13-14: I like Kira, she’s angry and tired...”

Kira somehow manages to make all her casual space elf looks seem hot. You didn’t say much about the s1 finale so I have to ask - any thoughts on Vedek Winn?

Honestly the finale was kind of rough going for me?  Like, not as much as the labor camp filing clerk one (which hit way too close to home in a few ways, not least of which is that growing up, I had a neighbor who grew up in a Nazi labor camp and man I was so fucking pissed at the character who helped run the Cardassian labor camp) but there was a lot going on and I was having trouble saying anything, really?

Anyway this got long; sort of a ramble under the cut about religion and politics and metaphors.

Basically they brought up so many real life issues in that episode (offhand I can name evolution vs. creationism in schools, school segregation, a whole lot of different aspects of colonialism, orthodox vs reform religious teachings, and terrorism) and through it all -- well, obviously I wasn’t supposed to like Vedek Winn but I could not separate my distaste for her from my actual very squidgy embarrassed awful feelings in real life when people I want to be on good terms with assume I’m Christian, and then I have to decide whether to say I’m not and what kind of a conversation about Judaism and Jewishness I’m comfortable with, and then I run the risk of them trying to convert me; even if not, they might still try and fit me into the idea they have of Judaism as Diet Christianity, Now With Less Jesus.  (And the thing is, these people are almost always much better-intentioned than Vedek Winn, and they’re never extremists or anything.  They just want to get along with me, and they just want to think that I’m a good person, and that’s what they think good people are.  But they still make me very uncomfortable and they’ll never realize it.)

On the other hand I wonder a little bit if people who don’t have those feelings normally experienced them while watching that episode?  I kind of hope so, but also I feel like a lot of people who are culturally Christian and relatively socially liberal will be reading the Bajoran religion primarily as a stand-in for Islam in that episode, and secondarily as a stand-in for (specifically) Creationism and other aspects of fundamentalist Christianity.  (To be VERY CLEAR, I don’t want to equate this fictional alien sci fi religion with any real religions, I’m just thinking about how people might have interpreted it.)  They’re in a place where they can say, “what a strange backwards planet, glad I don’t live there, they remind me of this group I don’t understand at all, hopefully Sisko can show them the error of their ways by the end.”

And I feel more like, “Wow, this is where I have always lived, surrounded by people who can’t imagine I don’t share their culture and philosophy,” and then I have to ask, but wait, why are the Federation officers so surprised, why do they argue and get mad?  Can’t they just say “yeah, sure, the prophets, actually that’s not my thing but it’s totally okay if it’s yours but just, it’s not mine, I must have missed the prophets memo, ha ha, that’s on me, I really don’t want confrontation here, anyway, gosh, lovely weather on the promenade today, hope we don’t get rain, how ‘bout them holographic baseball teams.”  Because that’s what I do!  (Man, you don’t even know how many awkward conversations I’ve had about the Cubs trying to avoid making someone feel bad about my lack of their religion.  I don’t even like the Cubs.)

And then I realize, well, of course that’s what I do, I’m not part of a massive, well-armed empire that’s trying to absorb the people who talk to me like this into my culture.  They’re the ones trying to absorb my culture, in fact.  

And then Sisko makes his big rousing speech that assumes that, really, deep down, everyone kind of wants to be like the Federation, that the Federation being good is self-evident, and I’m like, “oh no, they ALSO can’t imagine people don’t think like them!  That is going to alienate the Bajorans as much as Vedek Winn is alienating the O’Briens and Sisko, and it’s all going to be a big mess, you can really only have one group of smug everyone’s-like-me-deep-down-assumers or it all breaks down because no one knows when to change the subject and talk about the space weather.”  And then it was fine?  I don’t know.  It was off-putting.

(I realize “it was fine” is a funny way to say “there was an explosion and an assassination attempt but fortunately no one died.”  In the end O’Brien was betrayed by a non-regular and Kira was sad but like, none of the main cast’s relationship was really in peril in the end, so... it was fine.)

I think also I was a bit taken aback that Kira identified so much with Vedek Winn’s interpretation and cause initially?  I think that would sit better with me if I understood more about Winn’s ideas than “wormhole science bad, it’s a celestial temple.”  Like, is there some kind of philosophy Winn puts forward that Kira found a lot of strength in?  Did she write beautiful religious poetry?  Was she willing to stand up to the Cardassians when most of Bajor’s religious leaders capitulated too easily for Kira’s taste?  I don’t know!  We don’t get any discussion of that, she’s just Misguided for siding with Winn, and then she changes her mind because she has eyes and Winn is obviously evil.

Also, actually, on a worldbuilding note I’m very skeptical about the sheer... organizedness and unity of Bajor’s religion.  You can’t tell me there wouldn’t be sects and splinter groups and a rival religion that decries the orbs and the so-called Prophets as some sort of evil force, and at least a few religions that don’t have orbs in them at all, and well-known temples with orbs that turned out to be like, quartz with LEDs and part of the very important temple ritual experience is eating shrooms so you still have weird hallucinations.

Anyway, back to Vedek Winn.  In the end, she was awful and I didn’t like her and I’m sure she’ll be back to be an asshole but, yeah, it was hard for me to parse my reaction to S1 as a separate thing from my own feelings about religion and politics, and it’s difficult to talk about some of that stuff for me anyway.  I have a lot of feelings and I’m not good at them.  I don’t really know if any of this was coherent but you did ask.