i mostly just pretend that the curzon-loving-jadzia thing didn't happen because acknowledging it honestly makes me so frustrated and uncomfortable and it reveals too much of the biases underlying the writing of one of the more interesting star trek characters (to me) in any series. but, setting aside my reactive feelings about this reveal, i can read a narrative purpose and theme in this that i don't think was deliberate but is still interesting.
by the time she finds out that the reason she was rejected and then accepted into joining with a symbiont was due to curzon's feelings for her--attraction and then guilt, she'd already: a) held up curzon's promise, at the risk of her own lifelong imprisonment, to protect curzon's former lover, b) held up another of curzon's promises to kill a guy in battle (despite being told she shouldn't have to by kira of all unlikely people), c) had her symbiont taken away from her outside of her choice and then joined with the person who took it at gunpoint, and d) learned that the symbiosis commission lied to her to cover themselves about the fact that her symbiont had once been joined to a murderer, a person she then had to accept within herself or die about. and then she learns that the most recent host of her symbiont had feelings for her, who she was pre-joined. on top of all this, sisko has been calling her "old man" since he met her because sisko remembers curzon. and it's a joke--she's a young woman, it's ironic--but that's still the nickname he gave her. this man, curzon, who she has to carry with her for the rest of her life. who was a burden (which she accepted with a certain kind of nobility) before she found out about his feelings and his subsequent unjust actions because of those feelings.
she learns and experiences all this and then she meets lenara. and lenara breaks her heart and chooses trill society and custom. and lenara says to her, explaining why she's not going to choose to be adventurous or brave and go against the norms, "we don't all have a curzon inside of us". which is sort of crazy for her to say given that it was torias's memories that inspired jadzia's initial connection to lenara, not curzon's. (and like torias was established in the show as being a daredevil pilot who took big risks. so why mention curzon at all?)
and then after jadzia meets worf, she accidentally gets all the main crew trapped on a planet in "children of time" where she meets both her great-grandson and future host of her symbiont and it's his actions that have ensured she crash there and have to commit to reproducing with worf so he and the rest of the colony can exist.
so, counting, that's curzon, varad, joran, torias, and yedrin--all male hosts of jadzia's symbiont and all who in some way hurt her. and in each instance the conclusion to her agential action in each story was simply accepting it.
the curzon of it all is the most frustrating part. people have joked that jadzia is like a klingon "weeaboo" and it's true, there's so many instances where she performs klingon culture--sincere or not, there's still a level of performance. and that interest and that memory of past relationships with other klingons comes from curzon. and it's one of the reasons i was a little annoyed that sisko scolded her like a child and insisting she's a prideful young woman when she doesn't want to go through a ritual she had promised to do to marry worf. he calls her “old man” constantly, the value of her curzon memories has been celebrated again and again, the value and source of her personal choices have been attributed to curzon, her life as a joined person came solely down to curzon’s control, curzon is the previous host mentioned most who is implied (deliberately or not in the show) to have the most influence over who she is—and she’s called a little girl over a moment of maybe unearned pride and told she is not curzon.
all of this would read better to me if: a) we got way more substance about who jadzia was as a person before being joined and b) if dax’s other previous hosts, like, perhaps, some of the women, were given equal consideration and implied screen-presence. but as it is, as it’s written, deliberately or not, jadzia’s story is one of accepting the things that come at you and the people that hurt you, especially if you have to carry them in the most intimate way. this frames a lot of her actions in later seasons as one of a person who has to keep learning this lesson and then frames her death, with all its other accidentally concordant details like quark and julian lamenting they’d never gotten with her or the random introduction of her wanting a baby with worf.
obviously i think the intent when writing jadzia dax was not to write someone who swallows her opinions and convictions and pride. i think the intent was to write someone both youthful and old, fun and intelligent, committed to the ideals of exploration but also committed to her brothers-in-arms, so to speak, and in all that they succeeded. she’s a really fascinating character and is performed and written still with a richness of person that i think a lot of fans don’t give the character credit for. but the resulting character also has all these instances of learning a similar lesson over and over: accepting people who have wronged her and also that an enormous portion of her value comes down to curzon--the memories that she didn’t make but she still has to honor and own.
this is also why i sort of wish they'd had a plot where, like, jadzia is injured, she insists they remove the symbiont to send it back to trill to be joined to another, they do but it pisses julian off and he and his augmented-brain team figure out how to keep jadzia alive after the symbiont has been taken away, and like it’s a dire and permanent solution and it’s disabling maybe in some way, but it works and she’s alive, and then lenara hears about what’s happened when she realizes the dax symbiont is being joined to someone else and she races to jadzia’s side because now it’s just a gray area of the law, being together, and jadzia is like “i’m just jadzia now” and lenara is like “cool, can you help me build an artificial wormhole again? one that lasts?” because like, jadzia has several science degrees. one of exactly two things about her pre-joining self that is fully textual. and lenara returing specifically to be with jadzia would have implied an enormous amount of non-curzon-derived worth. and that’s how jadzia dax is written off the show, instead.
none of this to say we're given nothing about jadzia pre-joining:
she has a mother she writes a letter to every time she's "going into battle" therefore pre-joining she had some sort of loving relationship with her mom
she has a sister who once gave her a pair some glasses she didn't like. lots of different things could be extrapolated from this but my initial read is that she and her sister often tease each other
she excelled in school and achieved a very high-level of education in several subjects--one of which was "exoarchaeology" which is why she's tasked with translating some ancient carvings on an ancient bajoran stone at some point which is particularly fun to me personally
she was decided and determined to be joined ("ever since i was a little girl" and the fact that after being rejected she applied again--that's a unique type of self-championing and fortitude)
all of this is really wonderful stuff of character and makes her feel very much like a person which makes the setting and weird sci-fi alien conceit she's depicting more interesting with her presence. and also why it would've been delightfully painful to see her try to confront having to live on without a symbiont.
