nooooooooo

[kindkit]

I just watched DS9 3x14, "Heart of Stone."

Why, show, why? Why did you have to take a fascinatingly alien character and write a clichéd "unrequited love" plot for him? And why did you have to ruin a nice canon female-male friendship?

It's not that the story itself was so bad. Clichéd, as I said, but I can sort of see how Odo's loneliness might lead him to become deeply attached to the first person to treat him like, well, a person. I was moved by Odo's sorrow. And since Kira is awesome, him loving her makes more sense than if she were some nobody written in specifically to be a love interest.

Nevertheless, giving Odo a romantic motivation is a failure of creativity. A failure of nerve, perhaps; it feels like the show doesn't dare to make Odo as radically different as he really, given his physiology, ought to be. Changelings don't eat or drink, don't have anything like a similar anatomy to humanoids, so why would they have sexual reproduction?

It's possible to interpret Odo's feelings as acculturation. His entire life has been spent among people who value romantic love, so I guess I can see how he might have learned to feel it even though it's not "natural" to him. If I were writing fic, I think that's the route I'd take. But it's not what the episode itself does, even though the episode ends up centering on the key issue of Odo's connection to the "solids" and his choosing them over his own species. The problem is, the episode portrays romantic love as natural/inevitable/universal--witness the fact that the Changeling immediately suspected it as the reason for Odo's choice, and wasn't at all surprised or confused. It's also significant that the Changeling is shown as female when in humanoid form (female always? why should Odo's species have distinctions of sex or gender?) and that she and Odo had that metaphorically-sexual-merging thing in "The Search." The implication is that Odo chooses Kira over her; that both species have essentially the same relationship structure. It makes no sense at all.

This is especially disappointing considering that the writer clearly knew there were other possibilities, given the conversation between Bashir and Sisko about the male crewmember who was "budding" and for whom Bashir was throwing a baby shower.

Plus, frankly, Odo has enough angst that's innate to his situation without laying unrequited love on him as well.

*sigh*

Comments

[senmut]

I was a very strong Odo/Nerys shipper...in a different way. I wanted an expression of 'courtly love', I think. What now comes around in Asexual Fandom as non-sexual romantic feelings? Not acted upon, and each possibly moving on to something with other partners, but the full our romantic+sexual was not what I was looking for.

[kindkit]

the full our romantic+sexual was not what I was looking for

And there's certainly room for interpretation as to what Odo actually feels and whether there's a sexual aspect to it at all. Not that the episode was making any kind of thoughtful distinction, but it didn't close off the possibility of an asexual Odo. Which is something, I guess.

[senmut]

+nods+ It's just very, very hard to find that interpretation in fanfic. I can read the other way, but it's not what I most want.

[kindkit]

Fanfic tends, alas, to go for the uncomplicatedly shippy. I've been cautiously reading a few Garak/Bashir stories (cautiously because I'm avoiding spoilers, so I'm relying on a friend's recommendations of what I can safely read now) and even though I like that pairing and I'm happy to see it written as sexual, the stories I've read still flatten out their relationship so that it's nothing like what I see onscreen. Instead of doubt and mistrust and reluctant affection (and lies!), the stories portray Perfect True Love, which, um . . . no.

[senmut]

I echo that 'no' in so many ways.

[starlady]

Yeah, pretty much. In some ways DS9 remains the most radical Trek show in terms of gender & sexuality--apparently there's an mpreg episode of Enterprise, but I've read entire academic papers condemning its representation of same, and really I try to pretend ENT never existed anyway--the crewman Bashir mentions is mentioned throughout the show, and iirc shows up in a couple of the Pocket books, and there's the lesbian kiss later on in the show, but that's more or less it.

I think you're right to frame Odo's emotions in terms of acculturation, though I don't think Odo so much chooses Kira over the female Founder so much as he chooses Kira over the possibility of knowing more about himself as one of his people through the female changeling; it's the known over the unfamiliar. Odo grew up among the solids, and thinks (of himself) as one of them, which is how I tend to frame the female changeling's reaction of unsurprise. But YMMV, of course.

I really need a DS9 icon.

[kindkit]

he chooses Kira over the possibility of knowing more about himself as one of his people through the female changeling

That's how I'd prefer to interpret the scene, certainly. I just don't give the writer credit for being that sophisticated. My sense is that the "Odo loves Kira" thing is not very well thought out (it's very tacked on despite a bit of clumsy preparation in "Fascination") and derives from unexamined assumptions rather than any attempt to talk seriously about identity or physiology-versus-culture.

In re: gender and sexuality, I just watched "Destiny" and I was sure the two female Cardassian scientists were a couple, right up until one of them hit on O'Brien. Damn it.

[starlady]

I may be reading it in light of later developments.

I was sure the two female Cardassian scientists were a couple, right up until one of them hit on O'Brien.

She could be bisexual? But I'm sure the writers didn't think of it that way.

[kindkit]

She could be bisexual?

Of course she could be. But I'd been reading her and the other scientist as a couple. Cardassian sexual norms could be very different from human ones, but I find it hard to read her as being in a serious relationship with the other woman if she's going around offering to have children with men she hardly knows.

[doyle]

why should Odo's species have distinctions of sex or gender?

Yeahhh... that tends to happen a lot in Trek. ("Oh, you want to try dating? Well, as an android with no emotions it's hard to see where gender would come into this... but since you look male, let's get to finding you a nice girl!")

[kindkit]

Well, as TOS helpfully informed us, male and female are Universal Truths.

[lilacsigil]

Yeah, DS9 (like most of the Star Treks) can do very well by leaving characters alone, and very poorly when it decides to have a Very Important Story about them. This was one of the reasons that, after reading the novels first, I found actually watching the TV show a bit disappointing - the novels had so much more variety and depth and alienness which TV rarely has the courage to do (and by TV I don't just mean the writer or production staff - I mean everyone involved from them to the executives.)

[kindkit]

That seems to happen whenever tie-in novel writers have a bit of freedom. The Doctor Who novels produced during the show's hiatus--when writers were allowed to do almost whatever they wanted with what was then seen as a defunct property--can be incredibly daring and creative. But since the new series started, Who novels have ceased to be any good.

[st_aurafina]

Odo/Kira is really not my thing at all, either. I would totally have preferred the solid friendship they were building until this episode.

Actually, I'm starting to realise how much of this series I've actually bleeped out of my memory, because I don't even remember watching this episode. There are some good ones, I promise.

[kindkit]

Oh, there are a lot of episodes I like, and some I love. In a way, that makes it more frustrating when the show doesn't live up to its potential.

[ten]

I interpreted that completely differently. I never saw the merging as remotely sexual, but rather as an expression of a certain way of 'hivemind'. Not unlike the Borg, the Changelings only feel right if they exist together. Odo has been cut off of that natural state of being, and the female Changeling shows him a taste of it.
And of course he wants it again, because being unable to merge with anyone else, he feels lonely. A single, instead of the multitude he should be. And that same feeling of being alone, mixed with observing the lifestyle of the solids around him also creates his romantic involvement with Kira. He wants someone he can trust, aka a true friend, to help him feel less singular, and that love thing is the closest the solids have to that.
That's how it always seemed to me.

(I also like to imagine that she presents very purposefully as female because she has observed that the solids trust females more. Of course, in reality the creators just wanted to show a female of that race, but hey... why not make up for their thoughtlessness with my own imagination.)

[kindkit]

But what we see onscreen is a physical joining. And there was an earlier episode (I can't remember which one) where someone (Quark?) makes a sexual joke about Odo "mingling"/merging with another shapeshifter if he ever found one. To me it reads as sexual even though obviously it's not the same thing as humanoid sex. And I think (because I am cynical) that the show had the other Changeling present as female precisely because of that; if the other Changling had presented male it might have looked OMG GAY.

I think it's significant that we didn't see Odo merge into the pool with all the others, but just with that one female-shaped Changeling. The choice emphasizes the appearance of (hetero)sexuality and de-emphasizes the hivemind/multiplicity aspect of the Changelings.

I agree that your interpretation makes more sense in terms of what we're told about Changeling physiology and culture. But what happens onscreen is different. It makes less sense because it forces Odo into a paradigm that doesn't fit him or his species. The fact that it makes less sense is why I think it's ideological--the writers/producers/whoever were couldn't get beyond the notion of individual sexuality and romantic love.