Odo - Blog Posts
Space station full of nosy buggers.
fell victim to the siren song of editing the kiraodo. it will happen again!
forgot to post this yesterday because I kept getting swept away by her writing on every page, but. Nana Visitor the woman that you are
from Star Trek: Open A Channel: A Woman’s Trek by Nana Visitor
Screenshot redraw from Star Trek DS9! As a person who's favorite dnd race is a changeling can you guess who my favorite little guy is? Come on, Odo lives in a BUCKET, he's so silly and so dear to me...
i love lwaxana and odo’s relationship so fucking much. its the kinda thing where i think ‘oh they would have crazy queerplatonic shit going on’ except they do actually have crazy queerplatonic shit going on and it’s happening onscreen
There should have been an episode where Odo gets zapped while shifted into an object and the zap does something to his morphogenic matrix so he's stuck like that and the whole episode is everyone doing their best acting scenes with a mug or perhaps a bag
OKAY OKAY OKAY
So to shapeshift, right, is to become that thing, isn't it? I'm sure that's how the Founder, and later Odo explains it. The changelings aren't just pretending to be that thing, in a way they're being that thing?
Okay so I'm a little unsure now that I'm actually writing this out so the rest of this maybe isn't as much sense as I thought it was....
BUT. If the above is correct it suddenly occurred to me another reason other than 'lack of practice' that Odo could struggle to imitate humanoid faces...
Could it be that he has too much of his own, distinct personality? Becoming a humanoid is to become them, to understand them entirely as a person (which is why Founders are the perfect infiltrators, and also why they hate being solids: their changelinghood is eclipsed by their target's personhood, even if they do of course hang onto their objective and knowledge from being a changeling).
But Odo developed as his completely own person, first. Changelings in the link don't seem to have a sense of "self", they are a communal species, but Odo is utterly himself. And so could it be that he is unable to put aside everything that makes him him in order to become and truly understand another person?
Or, in other words, the changelings who don't see humanoids as being proper 'people' can treat becoming them much the same as becoming a bird - they are understanding a different sort of lesser life form, and the fact that a humanoid has its own thoughts and feelings is non-consequential because they are on such a different order to a changling's.
But the thoughts and feelings of a humanoid are so similar to Odo's that -- in a way, because he understands them more -- he has more of an awareness of their individuality and difference to himself, and therefore cannot imagine them the same way he does a bird. He is distinct, and they are distinct, and shapeshifting isn't about copying, it's about becoming, and Odo could never become someone else because it would mean becoming less than himself.
This is a ramble and I don't know if it makes any sense but it's lit up my brain and I'm definitely feeling like
i honestly barely ever think about the mirror universe EXCEPT to mull over my disappointment that we only got to see a little bit of mirror odo.
i also feel like had there been fewer budget constraints he could have been a little more monstrous, much more inhuman in appearance? but maybe that’s me and my unquenchable thirst for BODY HORROR.
this little thing they do lol, i think its just between them because i haven't seen it done to others
and, done on screen once! shortly after this screencap from Crossfire (for like a split second as kira shifts to face him)
if anyone can find more examples that would be appreciated :)
reading ds9 comic “fools gold” and have collected all the times the artists drew odo in the background. now for your viewing pleasure: tiny odo
“haha odo is so beige and bland and boring despite being a literal shapeshifter” like ok yes I laugh at those jokes too and find them funny I literally have no issue with them but sometimes I also wanna talk about how that’s kind of the whole point of his character.
like odo’s abilities and way of being is so unlike any other known species in the alpha quadrant that it’s shown to be disturbing and off-putting to a lot of people — or at the very least that’s what he was led to believe. like we see this in the alternate where mora tries to convince him he’ll either be locked up in a prison or put in a zoo to gawk at if he’s perceived to have committed any sort of crime or transgression.
so despite being able to literally become anything he can think of, he chooses his default presentation to be as standard, bland and uninteresting as he possibly can. male, always in a beige uniform, very standard hair cut.
odo is so plain because he was made to be afraid of being literally anything else
Fun fact!
According to ‘Terok Nor: Night of Wolves’, while Odo’s first words were repeating Dr. Mora’s sentences (“My name is Mora”), the first sentence he came up with on his own (like, independently constructed) was “Men don’t make good scientists”, which he picked up from Dr. Mora’s Cardassian supervisor, Dr. Yopal.
what strikes me about “Far Beyond the Stars” is how they cast Odo as the one who upholds oppression through complacency. because Odo’s been shown to be very beholden to the status quo - he prides himself on his neutrality, sees himself as only being subject to justice and truth. That was the thrust of “Things Past” - he doesn’t feel guilt over collaborating with the Cardassians, but over the fact that he failed at properly exacting justice under the premises of their rule. He tries to be benevolent from within the system, but doesn’t consider the fact that the system itself might be flawed (though he arguably starts to reconsider this at the beginning of S6). So his AU role here made a lot of sense for him, tbh.