enough of your middle aged man blorbos whos your specialest middle aged woman. if anyone tags a woman under the age of 40 on this post ill kill you in real life
the nutrek shows written in the era where gay people are allowed now but picking up old characters makes the whole thing feel kind of bizzare sometimes. bc like. seven is with a woman in picard now, apparently.
but if you go to watch voyager, the gender roles the crew portrays are super antiquated. i’d say how they do dating and love was not attempting to be progressive even for the 90s. so we have b'elanna and tom’s newspaper boomer comic strip marriage. we have seven getting pressured to go on a date with a man to a holodeck restaurant in a dress. and then, within these character’s lifetimes apparently you can just be gay.
and it’s so funny to me to come up with watsonian explanations to this. i like to think that the voyager crew is Just Like This.
back in the alpha quadrant people were gay and trans the whole time but the voyagers just like. all got really stressed out and started inventing gender roles again. to people outside of voyager they are as alien to them as people who got removed from their homeland for 20 years and started speaking in a different dialect.
by the time voyager gets home all the women are wearing milkmaid dresses. everybody is baffled by this but they don’t want to say anything. somewhere along the way they assigned someone to leave glass bottles of milk outside people’s quarters. a white picket fence has been put up in engineering. it was like a frog being boiled and now even the bajorans and the bolians have 2.5 of a kid and golden retrievers. the golden retrievers are holographic. during the debrief at starfleet hqs they get aggresive when you imply this isn’t standard.
one day the exvoyager crewmen are at a party and a sociologist is there and comes up to them and is like hello this is my thesis on the Voyager Phenomenon which i will be presenting soon. it’s about how majority-human societes in times of stress tend to assume odd behaviours like diving themselves into arbitrary groups and exhibiting certain behaviours- and the crewmen just go What? No We Don’t. and everyone is like Yeah You Do.
The term ‘ship’ is too vague. I don’t think they should date i think they should be fucking regularly. I don’t think they should date i think they should yearn for eachother endlessly but never have it be requited. I don’t think they should date i think they should kiss one night and never talk about it again. I don’t think they should date i think they should hate eachother so much that it turns into bottled up lust. I don’t think they should date i think one of them should have a one-sided crush on the other. I don’t think they should date i think they should have a situationship that ruins their lives. I don’t think they should date i think they should stab eachother
JANEWAY: You’re using their space as a dumping ground for your antimatter waste. Why? EMCK: My civilization produces over six billion isotons of industrial by-product every day. This region is a perfect disposal site. CHAKOTAY: How convenient, for you. A spatial vortex to the middle of nowhere, far away from your own system. Out of sight, out of mind. Problem is, somebody lives here.
“Night,” Voyager
It is an interesting move to problematize the concept of “void” and “emptiness” and “wasteland” in what is the most extreme version of material nothingness. It’s often been a political way to describe land that can then be more easily set up to claim, for colonizing efforts. Labeled “unused” land, “untilled” and “untended”, implying through layers of cultural significance both that resources cannot be extracted and/or that no one is there to properly extract the resources–the land is not appropriately made land and thus the people on it not categorized as people, in the sense that they cannot be contracted and protected in the common “civilized society.” (This is not a complete summation of settler colonialism, just an aspect of it.) What a space is, how it can be valued as something rather than empty or “waste”, can be derived from how cultural truisms of resource harvesting define one’s judgement of that space. To make the assertion that “somebody lives here”, just “one species,” is an assertion still that space is valued by the life that cultivates it but not an assertion on what cultivation is or what its phenomenological limits are.
It is also an optimistic idea that, in the depth of evident nothingness, there can be people, especially given that empty space is the majority of what one sees outside Earth’s boundaries. Treating darkness as a place of fecundity in narrative is productive imagining–suggests the possibility of a pastorale of the void, which Harry would inevitably vocalize on his clarinet, or even already did in episode:
TUVOK: Anything to report? KIM: Not even a stray electron. But I did finish writing my concerto. I call it ‘Echoes of the Void.’ Got a minute? TUVOK: Too many, in fact.
“Night,” Voyager
What is absence and what is presence is as nuanced as any other category, in “Night,” and creative will, with Harry’s composition and the overuse of the holodeck, along with the actuality of people in the “void” disrupt more traditional representational logics of darkness.
Tuvok: Yes, she is four years into a severe and constant guilt-ridden depression. She will most likely try to throw herself on the next grenade that presents itself.
Chakotay: Four years? And you couldn’t have brought this up at any other point before now?
Tuvok: She is functioning. And anyway, I will just die with her if it comes to it.
Chakotay: …Why??
B'Elanna, suddenly appearing at his elbow: Are you taking volunteers to die and/or suffer for freedom and justice?
Janeway, half in shadow, chewing on a cigar: “Oh, I still do believe in God, old man. I believe in God and Mercy and all that. But the dead are happier dead. They don’t miss much here, poor devils.”
Chakotay: Stop quoting The Third Man and turn on your vitamin-D lamp.
thinking about that post about how chakotay is a really horribly written indigenous character but an amazingly written male character and truly i think that’s a thing with so many voyager characters where they have some great writing in x dimension but awful writing in y dimension. seven is very much treated as eye candy, often in a born sexy yesterday type of way, but personality-wise she’s objectively annoying and off-putting (not saying this as a knock on her at all, she’s one of my favourites and her aggravating personality is a part of that). harry is allowed to be seen as desirable by women and push for big risks in a way that’s quite refreshing for an asian character, but he’s also not allowed any real recognition for his achievements. b’elanna’s struggles with internalized racism are treated with empathy and care (at least some of the time) but she still ends up with a guy who thinks racial microaggressions are hilarious. the epic highs and lows of star trek voyager are so so so real
the magic of holding multiple contradictory readings of a character is that you end up with situations where you’re like “ok this character is gay and there are multiple lines of evidence for them being gay and their interest in the opposite gender being a product of either not realizing or trying to suppress that fact except ☝️ in this one very specific scenario then they are 100% bi”
i just think that tom paris is not really into women except as a way of proving to his dad that he’s not just a sad little gay boy (he is). unless that woman is captain kathryn janeway in which case he wants to be naked and collared at her feet
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the people have spoken. whatever psychic field janeway generates that causes people to become sexually fixated on her regardless of their individual preferences must be studied
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