#i support kai winn (women's wrongs)

[bethebi]

It would get so spicy

I’m not sure they would’ve known about each other’s deeds but just imagine a word fight between two smiling liars who also has an atmosphere about them that you’re not going to wake up next morning *3*

[bagheerita]

finally finished DS9 and decided to post some thoughts in one big blob

I was honestly about to give up on season 7 and put the rest of this show to the side for a few months, but then Ezri and Worf have a 3 episode arc sorting out their relationship, only talking to each other because they're marooned/imprisoned, and I was so charmed by them being loud and messy that I managed to bull my way through to the end. I love the two of them as friends, they are adorable. 

I actually really like Damar and his arc, and it’s pretty rare I say that about a character who killed my favorite. 

I feel like the reason Section 31 exists, and they keep forcing episodes about it upon me, is because they wrote themselves into a corner with inventing the changeling disease to kneecap an unbeatable enemy and didn’t know how else to fix it/end the war except with secret secret spies. 

Ezri has this whole speech she gives to Worf about dismantling structures of power and I feel like they needed to end the show before anyone was like, hey the Federation kind of sucks and we should definitely do that. 

Garak’s mom showed up and everything was good in the world again.

Ezri and Julian are like “can’t deny the chemistry.” lol babes that's called being a young attractive allosexual. "Chemistry" is what Worf and O'Brien have in all the scenes where they're mocking you.

I’ve never felt the truth of the phrase “I support women’s wrongs” so intensely as I do with Kai Winn. I love her and I want to give her everything. I didn't love her getting assaulted by Dukat, but when she knows everything that's happening and chooses the pah-wraiths anyway, yes fuck it up. When she poisoned Dukat I was like, hot damn if this character dies as a footnote in someone else's quest for power I will forgive everything that this show has put me through because of him. But we can't have nice things. I did like that her last act was to choose to take their victory from them, and give Sisko the clue he needed to beat them.

I do love Martok but I feel like he’s going to be about as good a chancellor as Robert Baratheon was a king. 

Odo is The Last Unicorn, but with brain-melding: he’s going to share his experience of loving a mortal with the other immortals. I still don’t “get” him and Kira as a couple, their relationship literally went from -20 to 100% after a single all night conversation locked in Jadzia's bathroom and no actual onscreen development, but at least I believe that they believe they’re in love. 

Why the ever loving fuck is Julian so obsessed with the Alamo. Every time they bring it up I want to grab him and Miles and shake them. I get that it's supposed to be some sort of metaphor for fighting a hopeless war, but really? You want to go up to the fake room where you can do/be literally anything and you're going to repeatedly reenact a battle where you die to defend your right to have slaves and practice settler colonialism??? Even in the last episode they’ve won the real war and they’re still obsessed with reenacting this old battle. They also spend that one episode trying to figure out how to win the Alamo… babes, that actually happened: it’s called the Battle of San Jacinto- learn some actual fucking history, your side won the war. This isn’t about metaphors anymore, the metaphor has failed, now Julian just has a neurosis.

The Dominion War plot line goes on for way too long and there is so little internal emotional catharsis. (Maybe because for me the things that were supposed to be cathartic just induced more rage? 🤔) The ending was fine as far as character wrap ups but felt pretty rushed considering how long it took us to get to this point, and I really think they needed more time to handle the denouement. The overall pacing of the episodes/seasons is terrible: you wasted like a season and a half puttering around, with whole episodes where you forgot to mention the war; you added in mirror-verse episodes without bothering to use them for story or character development; Quark is one of my favorite characters but there are too many episodes about Ferengi shenanigans that do not impact the actual plot; there are whole scenes and arcs dedicated to a character who does not (within the internal logic of the show) exist. And then you slammed all the development into the last half of the last season. I'm not surprised now that I forgot this entire show after watching it while airing because it’s emotionally exhausting. I've compared DS9 to SGA in the past, but the Dominion remind me of the Ori: You've killed the enjoyment I found in this show and have made it a chore to watch.

I do like that what ends the war is Julian’s determination and Odo’s compassion. You've proven the Founders wrong, but this entire plot thread was so poorly handled that I don't know that anyone remembers one mention from four seasons ago about why this war even started and, honestly, standing on a planet where you just murdered millions of children it's kind of not enough. I like that they let Garak kill the last Weyoun, and I adore the scene where he lets Kira take the phaser, but honestly he deserved more. It wouldn't solve anything, and I think there's a nice parallel in Garak's fears inspiring him into attempting genocide being incredible grounded in reality and the Founder's similar fears being negated, but he deserves it, the head Founder deserves to be torn into tiny pieces by grieving Cardassians, and I deserve to watch it. (I also desperately want Garak to find out about Section 31 and the changeling disease just so he can be like, "Oh so when I try to commit genocide I get 6 months in jail, but when the Federation wants to commit genocide that's okay?")

I don’t know who on the production team is so invested in Mark Alaimo getting a paycheck, but by the end Dukat as a character has long outlived any interesting qualities he may have had at one point. The final battle shit with the pah-wraiths was pretty underwhelming; except for the deeper exploration of Winn's motives that this season has allowed for, "The Reckoning" was such a better structured episode. (At least at this point they've let Kira go off and be awesome without being forced into episodes with Dukat. The sheer amount of abusive old men sexually attracted to much younger women in this show is frankly unnecessary; I will never be able to unhear Curzon say he flunked Jadzia from the symbiont program because he wanted to bang her, and Dukat’s relentless pursuit of Kira especially/even after we learn he sexually assaulted her mother is disgusting.) 

I have mixed feelings about Sisko, and his character having a “white savior” role with the Bajorans. Like, I guess it’s a cool twist that he’s a black white savior, maybe that's the best the 90s can do, but also can we decide to not write stories where we give foreigners positions of power over recently subjugated peoples??  I was feeling pretty yikes about it especially after the beginning of this season and learning that he was basically genetically bred by the Prophets for the position, but… I dunno, I’m probably not someone who can or should have a deep opinion about this. I do like that arc for him as a character outside of what it means for the Bajorans, but his ending feels too open. I wish we got to know more about what he learns from hanging out with the Prophets, and I wish that the great "sorrow" he suffers from disregarding the visions felt more concrete. Kassidy is really the only one sad about this, Sisko seems excited to exist outside of time. (And I feel like a lot of the "yikes" of the character could have been fixed by making the character be Bajoran? You wouldn't need to invent a reason why he was chosen by the Prophets. He could even have been raised on Earth and still have those ties, and I think it would have made the pull between his duty as an officer and his duty as the Emissary more interesting. Also can you imagine if Jake and Ziyal were both half Bajoran and hanging out with each other??? But they don't pay me to write shows.)

Why do Miles and Julian have the gayest final montage? It's literally the first of the montages and they start it up over "The Way You Look Tonight" and I was just like... wtf did I accidentally put in a fan video? Miles is the only person in a relationship who has a montage without any mention of their significant other, though I guess Worf's does jump from his first meeting with Sisko straight to season 5 clips so they didn't mention Jadzia either. I love that Miles and Julian have such a deep friendship, and I feel like this show could use more interrogation of the concept of love and the fact that platonic love/friendship is just as important as romantic love, but the production has spent so much time "no homo"ing every relationship they can think of that it just comes off as bizarre. 

All the bts things I’ve read about this show pretty much amount to the production being like “we had no idea what we were doing with this character” which, when combined with the failure to manage season structure and some of the utterly bonkers episodes this show threw out there, leads me to believe that pretty much anything I enjoyed about this show comes from the actors. This is definitely a show I feel like I’m going to be “rewatching” through fanfiction and gif sets before I ever rewatch the entire show again. 

[ikilledamanforthisurl]

i know hating on Kai Winn is like lame and uncool and nobody supports women's wrongs of me but she's like if they put my mother in my television

[bijoumikhawal]

"how is “as long as the body still walks around, it’s fine if the person is entirely gone” somehow ethically a more chill thing????" Is an especially relevant point because we've already seen an episode with Julian that tackles a very similar idea in season 3, with Life Support. Julian makes it clear that if he keeps replacing Bariel's organs, for the sake of what Kai Winn and Kira want without regard for his quality of life, he's doing something he considers wrong and gets to a point where he refuses to keep doing it.

Note: after this I'm talking about sex and the view of sex as well as sexual ethics and assault

Its also notable in the case of Melora that Jadzia encourages Melora to be in a relationship with Julian. Personally I think it's a solid episode for examining how a doctor can be compassionate to patients but still fail to fully understand disabilities they don't deal with (modifying her chair, for example, and offering the treatment but still ceasing once she wanted it to). I think it would have been better if they nixed the romance, but they were still trying to make Julian live up to the original concept of a play boy (? I forget the word for "straight male floozy") which is probably why it was included.

I do think it's overblown for the above reasons- ST writers don't know or understand medical ethics well, even in the episode I just mentioned it's not about medical ethics so much as it is the Ship of Theseus. To be bitchy this folds in to my distaste for people that single Julian out as a sex pest (including in situations where hes actually not in control/the victim) or imply his sexuality is morally bad- a lot of the characters who have done similar things are white (and more likely to be considered neurotypical). Like, in the sane show Ezri starts sleeping with a patient it's implied she is actively seeing in a medical capacity (who, coincidentally, is Julian) but I don't see as much discussion about her ethics- and I would like to.

I think I've compared the way Geordi and Julian’s romances are treated before but in all honesty the writers don't do the same level of character assassination for Julian they do for Geordi afaik. And even then with the worst Geordi romance I still got the vibe that whoever wrote it though that Geordi was behaving acceptably (at least in the first episode). There's a lot of things people ignore or don't think to examine depending not on a characters behavior, but instead what a character is.

Given that two of the unethical instances mentioned are sexual/romantic I think it's pertinent to think about how Trek fans discuss assault and coercion. There's a lot of air given to Melora, Sarina, Ziyal*, and Kira's mother (which tbc, is a good thing), but significantly less to Jake, who has been groomed by older women twice (who were played by white actresses), to Kai Winn (who was a victim of rape by deception from Dukat), and Julian (I have talked about IWWH before and mentioned the Ezri problem). There's a pretty obvious difference with these two sets of characters- two of them are male, specifically brown/Black men, whose assaults are treated differently in the culture we live in, especially when the perpetrator is a woman, and one is a character audiences don't like (and her assault is apart of a storyline that doesn't get much discussion). And yes, AFAIK what the fake Dax** did in IWWH counts as assault, and i have explicitly seen people use the same shitty victim blaming language to talk about Julian trying to get away from her as they do for male assault victims irl.

*= conceding that Ziyal is a weird case because the conversation is specifically around redirecting her sexuality or reinterpreting the nature of her and Garak's relationship from its intention. It's a mess and I don't think there's a "right" way to deal with it.

**= Dax also gets more air because the way her and Julian’s relationship was written is really fucking stupid and makes them both kind of worse characters if taken as intended- Julian for chasing after her and Dax for "secretly enjoying" the attention and giving Julian mixed signals, but is distinct because it's not assault or coercion or anything regarding ethics (well... until Ezri starts sleeping with one of her patients) so much as it is poorly written and relying on tropes that tend to be misogynistic. Me saying that episode contains Julian being assaulted and harassed doesn't mean I think discussing how Julian behaves inappropriately to Dax is bad. It just isn't an example of that behavior.

Do we think Julian’s reputation for lackadaisical medical ethics is justified or overblown? I vote overblown, because while there are a couple of very questionable cases with Melora and Sarina, most of the time he’s a dedicated professional. 

[mugasofer]

Some examples of this in Star Trek:

- Bajoran culture is shown to have negative elements, personified by the conservative Kai Winn. In one episode, we learn that Bajorans had a caste system before the war, and when it gets brought back Kira ultimately realises that part of their religion was terrible and should be rejected.

- The Klingon cast of Discovery include a guy who's disrespected for being albino, and ultimately they end up fighting against conservative elements of their culture to try and improve and unify it. (I'm skipping over a lot of badly written plot there, but it does happen & the show is very clear that the right-wing Klingon elements & traditions are bad.)

- There are Cardassian dissident refugees in DS9. IIRC they even successfully overthrow and reform their government before the Changeling-led Klingons mess everything up.

- IIRC TNG had some kind of dissident Romulans who wanted to reform their culture and reunite with the Vulcans (I haven't seen that episode); ultimately by the time of Discovery's future they succeed. Admittedly arguably this is a change towards tradition but it is a rejection of the status quo.

- Enterprise has T'pol frequently clash with Vulcan culture over things we know will become accepted, like mind melds. Although eventually they did an "actually the real original tradition was liberal" thing where they found Surak's ghost. IIRC ultimately she quits her job with the Vulcan government because they suck so badly & joins the Earth proto-Starfleet (keeping the same actual duties of course.)

- Again on Discovery, Saru learns his people's whole religion & way of life was wrong & dumb and overthrows it.

- You mentioned Spock, but the alt-Timeline Spock in the nuTreck films was much more pointed in flipping off the bigoted vulcan science council and going to work for Starfleet instead than canon Spock ever was.

- I'm not sure if this counts but I couldn't remember how the ds9 homophobia metaphor episode ended - Dax decides to come out as space gay & Sisko says he'll support her, but then her partner doesn't want to & leaves. So, a loss, and Dax didn't become a space gay rights activist either (because its a one off episode never spoken of , but she didn't exactly decide her culture was right after all! It's made pretty clear that they're not actually.

- IIRC Enterprise had a Klingon scientist at one point that was pissed that the traditionalist elements were gaining power.

- DS9's Ferengi are frequently at odds with their culture and ultimately reform it somewhat - better rights for women etc. Rom explicitly rejected most of it in favour of a middle way with Starfleet values.

So overall I do think this is a problem the show has, but it's not as universal as you're implying.

on the neoliberal status quo treatment of aliens in TV sci fi

I’m especially looking at TNG and later Star Trek with regard to this, but I’ve seen it elsewhere. Are hyper-traditionalist alien cultures, really a way of talking about traditionalist *Earth* cultures without offending members of said cultures? Like, when we get to “Proud Warrior Race” types like Klingons… if you make them human - we can’t get away from the fact that we’re dealing with cultures that in real life would believe in stuff like honor killing and probably be run by competing groups of warlords. I feel like alien culture portrayals actually got *more* conservative in the last couple of decades, given that Spock was allowed to get out of his arranged marriage and was allowed - by the narrative - to buck Vulcan mores a bit as a hybrid. I feel like some modern takes are weird about this because people are so aware that aliens are human stand-ins that they don’t let them just be aliens, and there’s the necessity of not portraying them insensitively *because they map too closely to traditionalist human cultures.* They’re afraid to make negative commentary about cultures that *do* practice compulsory arranged marriage or are super collectivist/clannish to a degree that produces corruption or nepotism or severe classism/casteism in real life, or would actually be rabidly homophobic. The traditionalism in an alien culture must *never* be commented on, never presented as fundamentalist or negative in any way, the alien must never actually be *hurt* by it. If an alien culture has some kind of casteism then only characters from the most regarded castes are ever portrayed as mains. There isn’t really room for tradition-breakers or people oppressed *by their own culture* in this kind of a narrative, nor people who are in asylum *because their very existence breaks the rules of their culture.* Obviously, this is some kind of a mental block for most of us at this point in time. Maybe I have a very limited sampling. But this is something I keep running into that annoys me and is part of what I talk about when I mention that so much mainstream sci fi actually reinforces the neoliberal corporate-friendly status quo and isn’t as progressive as it looks on the surface. Show me an alien who’s on the run from an arranged marriage or something *and doesn’t just go home to do their duty at the end.* (UGHS at the way Shar was written in the DS9 books. I realize lots of people disagree with me. But I wrote a whole ass character as fix-it fic to show just how fucked up this actually was, *given that I’m a person from two threatened cultures* who faces breeding pressure, and I then let my character deal with a custody battle at the end of said marriage that’s the levels of nightmare that can ONLY happen when you’re trying to fight for custody within a traditionalist culture and you’re NOT the gender that has the power.) Show me an alien who’s among humans *because their very existence* breaks the rules of their homeland. Show me an alien who’s actually someone who would be a real asylum seeker or refugee (and before you say “Bajorans” - it’s not because some other species invaded them). The flip side is portraying alien cultures that are WAY MORE permissive than we are - or way more accepting of various things - but then, we’re *still* not really allowed to sympathetically portray characters that break the rules of their own culture.