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.
POV: You’re on a fetch quest for Kira and you give her a jumja stick instead of the 85645 self sealing stem bolts she asked for, forgetting that she doesn’t like them.
the worfzia pregnancy plotline is horrendous primarily bc it was tacked on just before jadzia’s death in an attempt to make it sadder, equating the worth of a woman’s life to her potential to have children, but like even if they hadn’t killed her off right after it would still have sucked bc it’s so obviously written as the obvious next step after heterosexual marriage and not like, a life-changing decision for two people to make. first of all, worf has already had a child and it went horrendously, his relationship with alexander is rocky and he feels immense guilt about not being there for him in his formative years, and you’re telling me him and jadzia had a brief chat about having kids and he was cool with it? once again no one seems to have a looser grasp of worf’s storyline than the people who allegedly wrote it. the disparity between his limited experience of parenting and jadzia’s several lifetimes worth is also interesting but of course that doesn’t come up either. secondly, jadzia’s family have almost never been mentioned before, i’ve seen people theorize that the joining process caused a rift between them as it wouldve been hard to cope with her becoming an almost completely different person - would jadzia’s relationship to her own parents not have been pertinent to bring up as she decides to become a parent herself? how does she feel about becoming a mother in this lifetime, now that there’s a war on, when presumably all the previous times have been under much stabler circumstances? would anyone bring that up as a concern, what kind of world that child might be born into? how would she react to that? thirdly, julian says that back before she and worf got married he and jadzia discussed this and he told her a trill-klingon pregnancy would be almost impossible, yet she seems determined to make it happen anyway - this is the most in-character part of the whole episode for her imo, because it’s very like jadzia to disregard the odds and fight for what she wants, but also, she’s literally the science officer, and while biology isn’t her number one field it would’ve at least been interesting for her to bring up her own research on the subject to counter julian’s warning.
there’s just so much missing from that episode, it feels like a plotline ripped out of some generic soap and pasted onto the characters we know and love, flattening all the things that make them who they are into the vague shape of a random straight couple
Something I love about DS9’s framing of Jake Sisko is how he’s consistently positioned as someone worthy of protection, whose survival and flourishing and emotional well-being are of tantamount importance, and whose innocence and vulnerability are precious.
It’s present from all directions in The Visitor. Everybody protectively closes ranks around Jake upon Ben’s disappearance, with those little moments of Dax and Kira and Bashir giving him physical affection and reassurance and Quark going out of his way to be nice to him. Jake’s older self’s protective impulses towards his younger self, as well as his desire to save his father, are the basis for the timeline reset. And then after the spacetime continuum gets wrenched back in line purely to save Jake from the emotional trauma of losing his father, the episode ends with Ben, who’s borne witness to everything and is the only one who remembers it all, continuing that work of shielding Jake from that knowledge.
And then Nor the Battle to the Strong carries on the thread of protectiveness towards Jake, in that case as part of the episode’s deconstruction of military heroism. As he’s marinating in shame over bailing on the mission to retrieve the generator, Bashir apologizes to him and says he was wrong to put Jake in harm’s way in the first place. And then at the end, he wakes up after sealing the cave entranceway and both Bashir and his father are tenderly looking after him, with similar imagery to The Visitor in terms of him being symbolically cradled by the other cast members’ concern for him. He never needs to toughen up or grow out of that need to be rescued - in fact, his fear and panic and feelings of being out of his depth prove to be immensely valuable, as his last conversation with his father emphasizes, because he’s able to bear witness to the experience of the soldiers through his writing.
That comes through in a really interesting way in Valiant as well, with Jake’s emphatic concern for his own survival in the midst of all the culty militaristic weirdness of the Valiant crew:
Nog: You don’t understand, because you’ve never put on one of these uniforms. You don’t know anything about sacrifice, or honor, or duty, or any other things that make up a soldier’s life. I’m part of something larger than myself. All you care about is you.
Jake: That’s right. All I care about is Jake Sisko and whether or not he’s going to be killed by a bunch of delusional fanatics looking for martyrdom.
And I love that exchange not only because it’s a rare articulation of how I would actually feel in a situation like that in a franchise full of characters who are all prepared to sacrifice themselves in the line of duty, but also because in the context of the episode, Jake’s position is actually the heroic one! It’s his sense of self-preservation, and the fact that he hasn’t romanticized the notion of heroic sacrifice, that enables him to see through the dogmatic ideology of the Valiant cadets and recognize how dangerously out of their depth they are. And it’s just a nice articulation of his own worth.
(And of course the Defiant rescues them at the end, because Jake’s grown up now, but he hasn’t outgrown needing his father to save him. And that’s never a shameful thing, but a really beautiful thing, and necessary to the fabric of the show.)
