Tag: deep space nine

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[As much as I love DS9, I always thought season 7 had some major problems. Firstly, the space magic that had been on the backburner for the whole series just went nuts with the pagh wraiths, Sisko suddenly being half-prophet, and that book. Dukat’s arc that season never fit well with his character to me since he was an entirely different kind of evil up until that point. Then Odo going back to the founders was sending him back to a people who had done nothing but try to manipulate him by killing his friends so he’d join them and who disapproved of the way he lived his life. It’s a good thing that’s balanced out by how great the rest of the season is.]

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[I don’t think Dukat was really evil until after his daughter was killed. And even then, he had had a mental breakdown and was hallucinating, so I don’t think he was fully responsible for his actions.]

Oh my God what the FUCK anon Dukat was responsible for the deaths of millions of Bajorans during the occupation, and he wanted Bajorans to thank him for it. In fact Ziyal was his daughter from a Bajoran woman during the occupation. Like what the hell. The man is a known mass murderer and rapist long before his daughter was even born, and he wasn’t evil? What does someone have to do to even count as evil in your eyes?

Saying Chief O’Brien only likes his wife Keiko “for the sex” is SUCH a disgustingly misogynistic thing to say when we actually watched this couple be loving and supportive toward each other and work maturely through child care, Keiko’s career, Kira’s surrogacy, and all the other ups and downs of marriage. A Miles-Keiko-Julian-Garak polyamorous relationship is an awesome idea that should not be tainted by your refusal to acknowledge Miles and Keiko’s relationship as genuine, you sexist fuckwad.

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[The idea of 7th season Jadzia being promoted to captain of a ship and thus only being in some DS9 episodes would have been a good one. It could have built on the character work from “Change of Heart.” The promotion would have gone to Worf, but instead they pass him over for her. That would have created believable, complex, but ultimately surmountable tension between Worf and Jadzia.]

Thiiiiiis. Also, if Jadzia had lived she and Worf could have had a child. Imagine the emotional stakes if the baby was on DS9 for a while with Worf since it’s a slightly more stable environment than a starship, though barely, before having to be evacuated to the Trill homeworld to be with Jadzia’s family. Ezri could even have made an appearance as counselor on board the evacuating ship, assuring Worf that she will make sure the infant would be cared for until arrival. We would have gotten to see Worf as a father, seeing him manage a wartime long-distance relationship with his wife, the two of them more determined than ever to win the war so their child can grow up in peace.

Jadzia could have died at the final battle in a brave sacrifice, showing us just how high the stakes are. Maybe she could message the Defiant one last time, telling them what she’s about to do, and while Benjamin hesitates Worf doesn’t skip a beat, telling her that he will sing songs of her courage. Jadzia says, with infinite emotion and a bit of humor, that she knows he will. We see her ship destroyed and Worf sings to her honor as the battle rages on. We see a different side emerge later on, however, when he is alone and views her prerecorded good-bye message.

We can even have Ezri as the new Dax by having Jadzia and the other survivors of her ship being beamed away in emergency transport, but Jadzia is too gravely wounded to wait for a more suitable host. Ezri can consent to be implanted with the symbiont out of compassion even though it was not something she wanted or was prepared for, just like in the original Season 7. Then she can give Jadzia’s final words to Worf, Benjamin, Julian, Kira, Quark and everyone, telling them that she was thinking of them to the last.

But when Worf asks her to go see the baby with him, Ezri hesitates a long moment before saying “no.” His wife is dead, she tells him gently, and Ezri has her own life to live as Dax. She’ll meet the child later on to tell them more about their mother, but it would be cruel to everyone involved for her to be involved deeply in the child’s life. Besides, she says with chirpy attempted humor, she can barely walk around safely and won’t be leaving the symbiont center for a good while.

Then it finally hits Worf that his wife is gone, the mother of his child is never coming back, and as we gaze into his stricken eyes we see the weight of the future the two of them must face without her. The losses of this war are irrevocable and devastating.

When Worf accepts the position of the Federation’s Ambassador to Klingon he says he will be in regular communication with the child and travel often to Trill, and when the child is older they will join him on Kronos to be brought up in the other half of their heritage. Worf expresses his determination to be both a mother and father to their child, and to let them know what a brave and honorable woman their mother was. Benjamin, with great feeling, tells Worf he will be an amazing father.

Like, let Jadzia have agency in her own death instead of the
egregious random fridging we got. Let Benjamin’s insistence that they
push the final offense on Cardassia have actual, tangible consequences.
Jadzia’s death in battle would have shown the stakes of war better than
any number of ships exploding on screen.

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[I don’t understand why some people act so scandalized by Dukat/Kira. How is it any worse than popular ships like Spuffy or Reylo? Shipping the hero with the villain is nothing new.]

If someone is against Kira/Dukat, odds are they’re also against Spuffy and Reylo. Because those relationship dynamics are horrifically toxic and abusive and the majority of the people who are shipping them are doing so non-critically, with no acknowledgement of the fact that they are abusive and toxic, and also against the characters actual characterization – generally, the male characters are written as conflicted and pained and hurt, in need of love and forgiveness to achieve their redemption, and the female characters are reduced to a prop to advance his arc, giving her none of the characterization that she has in canon.

Kira/Dukat is among the worst of the worst, because of that horrible dynamic – at any given point in the show’s run, within the previous decade, Kira lived at a time where if Dukat demanded it, he could fuck her and she could only say no if she was willing to be executed. Kira lived through a time where literally, she had no option of consent had any Cardassian approached her and demanded that she sleep with them. 

Dukat wanting to fuck Kira is, to a Bajoran, equivalent to Hitler, somehow surviving WWII, telling a survivor of Auschwitz that he would fuck her. And I’m not citing Godwin’s Law here, Dukat was literally compared to Hitler by the show’s producers. To the Bajoran people, Gul Dukat is their answer Hitler. The fact that people look at the dynamic between them and say ‘yeah, they totally should be together’ is horrifying, because those people are literally saying that an abuse victim and her abuser should be paired up, generally on the idea that “she’ll make him a better man.”

It is not the victim’s duty to ever be personally responsible for their abuser’s redemption. Ever. And I say this not just to the Kira/Dukat shippers, but the shippers of the above mentioned ships and the ones like it throughout media. These are toxic and abusive relationships when they are about the actual characters in canon. And if you’re making up characterizations wholesale to justify your ship, maybe you shouldn’t even be shipping this one, because it means you don’t actually want these particular characters together,  just characters who look like them, but are not based on the actual canon characters.