What's The Plural Of Odo

Something that really gets me about Benjamin Sisko is the way he’s just carrying the weight of the world on his shoulders at all times. He takes a backwater assignment that promises to be little more than a series of tedious bureaucratic maneuvers and instead ends up commanding the most strategically important station in a major intra-galactic war - and feels an immense amount of personal responsibility for the countless lives lost in battle, as seen in In the Pale Moonlight and The Siege of AR-558. He gets the role of religious figure thrust upon him and suddenly bears the responsibility of foresight and spiritual quests and shaping the future of an entire people who were initially foreign to him.

And he’s so often pulled out of linear time, and burdened with the knowledge and responsibilities of that untimeliness. When he gets trapped in the 21st century, ensuring the entire existence of the Federation - the institution that shaped him and gave him the values he holds dear - rests on his shoulders. In his vision in Far Beyond the Stars, he’s yanked through the fourth wall itself and learns firsthand the symbolic heft that his position as a Black captain on a space station holds, and resolves to continue fighting for the future to fulfill the dreams of Earth’s past. A past that is still, somehow, concurrent or parallel to his own. He gets taken out of sync with linear time and watches his son grow up without him and never be able to move on, and ultimately sacrifice himself to bring him back, and he can never tell Jake about it. Even the depth of his son’s love becomes yet another burden of knowledge for him to carry.

All of that and he is still a man. He is a man who is given the gift of insight that is far beyond what he was previously capable of imagining. He is timeless but he is still a linear being who is denied the rewards of linearity. He saved Bajor but not for himself. I just have a lot of feelings about it!

Tumblr working its magic as always.

the garashir pipeline

thinking about ‘big shoes’ again

rip to this kira from something nsft i'm probably never going to finish

People joke about DS9 A and B plots but this cut was bonkers

some of the 1 trillion kiras odos and kiraodos in my sketchbook right now. + dax julian 1ea

ive figured out why i like him so much- hes got the gender. oh to be a vaguely human-shaped goo with a deep gruff voice and the personality of a middle-aged suburban chainsmoking mother.

one thing i do find fun about garashir is that due to the schrödinger’s couple state they exist in throughout ds9, you can write about them getting together or having been together for ages and you can set it at more or less any point within the show and it can still be almost completely canon compliant with minimal changes.