given chakotay’s rather. um. unorthodox approach to playing therapist they really missed out on an opportunity for him to manufacture a christmas carol type of situation in response to janeway’s depressive spirals. like it’s not so bad in the delta quadrant, check out these simulations on what we would all be up to if we weren’t here. here’s me and b’elanna getting mowed down by cardassian forces! here’s harry rotting away in a founder prison after being replaced by a changeling! here’s tuvok throwing himself in the path of a phaser blast meant for you! here’s seven, still a mindless borg drone! don’t you feel so much better about your choices now?
I have also been thinking of that happening but as like, Q doing a Tapestry but for Janeway.
*Q snaps his fingers and they appear in an alleyway*
Q: And this is where Tom Paris would be if you hadn’t brought him along on your ill fated expedition and had nasty salamander sex with him.
*Janeway looks at Tom laying in the gutter*
Janeway: Yeah, that’s about what I expected.
Paris: Hey, I don’t live in this gutter! I’m just on my last transporter credit of the month. I want to go back into Sandrines when it opens tomorrow so I didn’t beam home.
Janeway: Can I see myself getting overwhelmed and disembowelled by a Klingon boarding party again?
Q: Once was startling, twice was exciting- I’m beginning to think you have a self destructive streak.
voyager writers so galaxy brain for making harry the guy with the most pinpoint ruthless drive to get back to the alpha quadrant then having not one but three episodes where he gets home and is like UM. never mind. now that’s a compelling bit of character writing right there
i wish more people were capable of understanding that a character’s race actually does impact things you can say about them and that’s a normal thing to take into consideration to avoid perpetuating racist stereotypes. and that if you jump on here headcanoning a black character as psychopathic and engaging in criminal behaviour when they have never canonically done so then maybe you ought to look inwardly instead of doubling down and insisting you basically forgot that the only black character of said family was black. now you look racist and stupid
Beyond a cessation and writing overhaul over how televised Star Trek properties write the narrative reality’s alien cultures as narrow expressions of specific characteristics of human culture and imply that a fair amount of this expression is due to biology, one thing that a character like B'Elanna would benefit from is a story in which a lot of the behaviors Klingons are accused of exhibiting are also explicitly described as morally neutral. Pointing out that B'Elanna is rarely ever depicted in action as being more hostile than any other character is important. But it is also important to comment on the frameworks of morality as well that suggest things like loudness and assertiveness and aggression are ontologically “bad.”
Suppose the point of speculative fiction were to expose naturalized cultural structures–B'Elanna as a character would benefit from being told she is not violent or aggressive (because she isn’t, textually, on a personal level–she was a participant in a violent resistance but this isn’t essentialized as a part of her biological expression or used to characterize Chakotay, for instance, as ‘naturally’ aggressive)–B'Elanna, if she ever is violent and aggressive, might also benefit from being told, and being framed by the writing through, “so what, this is an enormous universe of millions of lifeforms and cultures, millions of ways of being, millions of value systems, so what. all judgments should have to be justified and explained.” B'Elanna’s dislike of Klingon culture reads too often as self-hatred rather than a sincerely reasoned ethical objection: “too robust for me”, she said of the language. Robustness, should it even be a measurable and observable quality of a language (it is not), is morally neutral. What experience is she connecting this description to? Where is this judgment originating? Star Trek aliens are not the most sophisticated speculative creations, for various storytelling reasons (some better than others), but on occasion they can prompt interesting questions and force a confrontation with naturalized moralities. B'Elanna, less tortured by past rejections and isolating incidents, or less obsessed with what these past experiences suggest about her person, could say both things: “I am not hostile.” and “The behaviors you describe as hostility are not innately bad.”
And, while we’re imagining ideal outcomes, a new series of Star Trek is produced and it fully complicates Klingon culture by making it reflect the complexity and multitude of human culture so that the biological influence over culture is shown as profoundly nebulous and impossible to parse.
every time dukat shows up on this show he’s invented a new job for himself. first it was cardassian commander, then he dabbled as a space pirate for a bit, then he tried dominion lapdog. now he’s club president of a cult. by this time next week i expect he’ll be dropshipping 3D printed trinkets on etsy
