#fancy.txt

[fancyhalloran]

it’s such a small motif but the bajoran ear grabbing thing is such an effective way of characterizing the different bajoran religious figures:

when sisko first meets kai opaka, she asks to feel his ear. he’s uncomfortable with it but she’s friendly and he’s putting his best foot forward on behalf of starfleet so he lets her.

the practice returns in the season finale where vedek winn asks to touch his ear as well, but the mannerisms are different. opaka’s friendliness and the fact that she explained the custom first made the question seem genuine; she cared about his consent and he could say no (at least on a personal level though they both knew he wouldn’t for political reasons). winn on the other hand asks as a formality; it’s obvious that she expects the answer to be yes and will be offended if she’s rebuffed.

this is then contrasted with vedek bareil in a kind of classic setup/reminder/payoff kind of thing. when sisko meets him, he notes that bareil doesn’t try to touch his ear and bareil makes a joke about winn doing it. he’s uncomfortable with the practice too and has been trying to get rid of it. so far this is a simple contrast: winn is a traditionalist and bareil is a reformer.

the payoff later in the episode adds depth to this though. winn tries to touch bareil’s ear without asking and he physically prevents her. there are a few different ways to read this: winn feels entitled to do it because he’s also bajoran, or because he’s a colleague; winn is using the tradition to assert dominance over him, knowing it makes him uncomfortable; winn was trying to emulate opaka earlier but doesn’t understand why opaka did things the way she did and by the end of the episode she’s given up. i think all of these are true on some level. regardless of the specifics, winn’s entitlement is highlighted. not only does she cling to tradition, she thinks it overrides other people’s needs and even their bodily autonomy.

[fuckin-nancy]

the scar on john seed's chest originally said SLUT but joseph made him change it to SLOTH

[fancyhalloran]

the thing is too like freaky nikki is also very sympathetic to me in a way that overlaps with a lot of fembot characters. like the existential horror of being created for someone else’s pleasure and then they don’t actually like you and nothing you do for them is good enough but you literally exist entirely for their pleasure

like part of the tragedy of the movie is that both versions of nikki are suffering intensely due to bear’s actions with no* way of changing things.

*well…

[fancyhalloran]

i do feel that there’s a couple scenes that imply nikki has feelings for bear initially, specifically the one where she says no one can tell when she has feelings for a guy and the one where she says that if he has feelings for her now’s the time to say it. that second one is, at the very least, an invitation. obvs we’ll never actually know because of what bear did but i think it makes the violation of it feel worse, at least for me. she clearly trusted him and i think part of the horror is that he never bothered to find out how she felt before trying to erase and rewrite her emotions.

[fancyhalloran]

I think one of my favorite things about Pluribus was actually how much could be predicted. I routinely saw people predict plot points ahead of time (such as in the end the reveal about carol’s eggs meaning the hive doesn’t need her consent), something that was possible because of how committed the show is to its themes and characters. I think it would have been a much weaker show had it been less predictable.

[fancyhalloran]

the hive can’t pick an apple but it can use complete isolation to break someone emotionally so that they stop resisting and beg for it to come back

[fancyhalloran]

sisko telling gul dukat to come by any time he feels homesick is i think one of the funniest moments in any Star Trek show

[fancyhalloran]

i do genuinely think people would not be calling carol unlikable if she was a man. characters with roughly her personality have been a staple of crime fiction (and science fiction when it draws inspiration from crime fiction) for at least a century and, at least when they’re men, people do find them likeable. a dead wife is justification to act out, if the character is a man.