ds9 characters as onion/reductress articles

i love you nyota uhura i love you christine chapel i love you deanna troi i love you beverly crusher i love you tasha yar i love you lwaxana troi i love you kate pulaski i love you ro laren i love you keiko o’brien i love you jadzia dax i love you kira nerys i love you leeta i love you moogie i love you ezri dax i love you kathryn janeway i love you b’elanna torres i love you seven of nine i love you t’pol i love you hoshi sato

people who act like ezri is a bad character because she’s a poor replacement for jadzia make me so mad because she’s not supposed to be a replacement for jadzia!! that’s the entire point of her as a character is about her trying to live up to that and failing!! she’s thrown in way out of her depth completely unprepared for the massive burden of expectation suddenly placed on her and that’s what makes her compelling!! if the writers wanted to give us a replacement for jadzia they could’ve given us another recently joined trill from the commission but instead they wanted to explore the impact of joining on someone who’s not prepared for it at all, how is that not fascinating

in the same episode where ezri is both functioning exactly as she's obligated to (and more than) and still saying things like "my skills aren't really my own," she also does this and it's honestly so nice to have this spoken so a) sisko can respond to the accusation of ruthless or brutality with the very simple yet inarguable claim on survival (he's right even when it's awful, which the show definitely gives space for the character, the specific burdens sisko has to bear) and b) so we can see that being joined for ezri is not just about feeling inadequate or feeling like she doesn't know her own mind but also running up against the ways her past-selves wouldn't protest something that she would.

this conviction feels like something she alone thinks (can't imagine any of the dax past lives that we the audience know would both think and say this), and while it's not going to sway anyone away from trying to survive, she still speaks it. the sort of pattern of ezri, as the character sees it, not quite measuring up to her past selves (she is even physically very small) de-materializes with what seems like little effort from her when some conviction of ezri's is challenged. and, joined, she must understand war and understand the needs sisko speaks to, probably as easily as she understood working on the sci-fi tech earlier with no training under her belt as ezri. but still. the writing tends to give her a big-picture perspective thru ezri's particular strengths--even a big-picture perspective on her own self--which feels like an addition to "dax." like she in particular is just one step-away from direct survivalism, and is now, in the midst of the action, thinking about what it all implies. the strength of self-reflective abilities that she had to essentially teach herself after being pushed off a cliff most people train to jump.

the reason Jadzia isn’t in season 7 is so fucking stupid but “replacing” her with Ezri ended up being shockingly well done and it’s actually so insane. showing the reality of a Trill getting joined mostly against their will is such an interesting storyline

im going to bed but first i dont think sol and albin ever dated at launchpad but they did have a teenage thing where sol was in love w albin but has never had a friend before so thinks its normal and standard to think ur friend is the greatest wizard in the whole world and so cool and his glasses are really cute and i give him massages every day and also i get jealous when he makes new friends. albin also has a crush on sol but even as the chosen one remains rizzless and sol is obviously so hot and out of his league and also hes pretty sure the headmaster has been replaced by a evil lich so thats more pressing right now. and nothing ever actually happened and eventually they move on but theyve also never ever talked about it so its just a thing that hangs out in the background of their 20-ish year long friendship.

How successful would Ezri Dax…

As usual, couldn't faithfully remake one of my existing OCs in Skyrim so I just threw some good details together and now she's a whole new OC

Some Ezris in a school uniform. She has a skirt it just blends in.

Pose

not a knock on artists who try their hands at Trill redesigns but it's so funny to me how most people inevitably draw Ezri with duller colors and lacking some characteristic that their Jadzia design has... by funny I mean I strongly disagree with this reading of canon but I recognize I'm in the minority

yall r about to send me to Star Trek hell but I fuck with Kira x Odo

Round Two

Ezri and dukat from Drawings I will never finish :p

One weirdly specific hill that I, a genderqueer Trill enthusiast, will die on is reading Ezri as a (binary) woman. I mean, in principle I am behind reading all Trek and especially all Trill characters as queer and trans, and I get the way Ezri’s dialogue resonates with a lot of nonbinary people.* But I also think it resonates with kind of gender positionality I see a lot in life but not so much in lit: someone who’s aware of other gender options** and who’s grappled with other gender options but who decides that, for now, the place they started is the place they belong. Maybe not always, maybe not forever, but for now, it works.

And this is bound up with my other Ezri-related Weirdly Specific Fatal Hill, which is that Ezri is actually more secure about her identity within the host/symbiont system than the average joined Trill. When she tells Sisko to drop the “old man” language and complains about pronouns, I read that as her drawing a line between herself and Dax’s past: she’s determined to build her relationship with Sisko on her own terms, not as an extension of Curzon and Jadzia. And for the most part, she does! Season 7 might not always let her carve her own path but Sisko, at least--the person who knows Dax best--seems to quickly recognize and respect the importance of Ezri to Ezri Dax. And we see glimmers of that independence in other relationships, too. Calling out Worf’s illusions about the Empire, dusting off Joran for a job and then popping him neatly back into her subconscious, taking time off to deal with Tigan family drama--all of that suggests an iron core of no-bullshit that anchors her sweet, anxious demeanor. And if she struggles a lot with her past lives onscreen, well, that just points to how determined she is to retain that core self. Despite the accident that created her, she doesn’t fundamentally question her right to be a Dax. And I reckon that’s why she and Dax, despite their mutual surprise at finding themselves together, both decided to keep their partnership going.

Anyway, she’s also incredibly lesbian. I will die on that hill, too.

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*Plus, like, do what you want interpretation is generative etc.

**because they are literally shouting in her head all the time