First Contact

When you have a fictional man who's very good and gentle and compassionate but is also a BDSM sadist and has a lot of guilt and shame and general weird feelings about that... nothing sexier than that in the entire gotdamn universe

watching ds9 is great for many reasons, not least because sometimes i set my netflix to subtitles in my language when watching it with my family.

and as ever the translators have fascinating formal pronouns opinions. namely:

bashir and garak use the formal address (with the addendum that julian uses the formal-you directly. and garak of course says doctor a lot, which is extra-formal. interestingly, he doesn't always address him by title only! less diffident than it might have been.)

bashir and o'brien use the formal address (works very well with the development of their friendship + vr funny and tongue in cheek, it's great)

odo and kira use the formal address, up to and including during love declarations (as of season 3)

kira and o'brein do NOT use the formal address. baffling choice ngl. i think it's the only case when the ops team is informal w one another. i think the translator ships it guys.

sisko is formal all the time. except with jake i think. actually i can't remember if jake uses the informal w his dad. i'm pretty sure he does.

quark and rom use the informal!! which is quite interesting in terms of characterization. they are brothers!! it does a lot to set the tone.

quark and odo use the formal form in words but not in spirit, it's hilarious.

odo actually uses the formal with everyone.

dax and bashir use the formal.

even dax and sisko use the formal, including in private. this is the one thing i fully disagree with but it does add an interesting layer to their connection.

kira and dax use the formal. i don't even ship it that much but i will be honest, the formal-you is very gay here, as it can be. if you've been there you've been there.

i think kira and vedek bareil used the formal you! which is a normal thing to do with your boyfriend the religious figure i'm sure.

anyway i am choosing to incorporate all of this into my canon. standard has formal and informal addresses, as per my dodgy netflix translation. will update this post as it becomes funny.

There’s a post about how we need more female characters who genuinely care about people but are really bad at caregiving, and honestly that fits Kira Nerys really well. I’m thinking of Starship Down where she’s tasked with looking after Sisko and keeping him conscious when he has a head injury, and she just starts visibly flailing despite making an effort to hold it together. “Listen up…. because there’s going to be a test later” and then trying to keep him alert by droning on about duty rosters because she gets Task-Oriented when things are in dire straits and does not know how to scale things to a more personal level with someone she has a working relationship with.

Like, so much of how she deals with emotionally fraught situations is by getting up and doing something about them (even so far as traveling back in time) or just keeping busy to avoid dwelling on the matter at hand. When her father was dying, her response was to go out and kill some Cardassians about it, and then order another attack upon his death, rather than sit by his bedside. When Bareil died (pre-resurrection via mad scientist noodling) she went right back to work despite Bashir telling her she didn’t have to. It is a trauma mindset from someone who witnessed a lot of death and suffering and had no choice but to pick up and keep moving and keep fighting. And when she has to sit down and really focus on someone else’s vulnerability, it’s very uncomfortable for her. She cares very deeply about the people around her but she’s clumsy about it.

There's something so charming about a stack of PADDs in star trek because you know tablets didn't exist yet back then but they didn't want to use paper because it's not futuristic enough but they also want to show that they have a lot of paperwork to do thus the stack of PADDs which presumably was like a hybrid of stack of paper + floppy disks of the future. The retrofuterism of it all, I love it.

ODOODOODOODOODO

So. Nobody was kidding about S02E22 "The Wire".

The contrast between Jadzia having all that angst over having feelings for her previous host's wife and Ezri immediately fucking Worf is so funny. Ezri said she doesn't care if that fucking worm dies and she was right