![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
Entry tags:
nooooooooo
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*
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*
no subject
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.
no subject
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.
no subject
She could be bisexual? But I'm sure the writers didn't think of it that way.
no subject
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.