#in the meantime. fuck. i just mean. FUCK.

[trillscienceofficer]

I would like to clarify that when I say that Seven's situation on Voyager is fucked up (like in this post I wrote yesterday) I don't mean that Janeway should've listened to her demands and let her go in “The Gift”, or that Janeway and the Doctor had no right to start removing her implants (leaving them would've killed her after all). What I mean is that the fucked-upness is in the whole situation that made Seven's reclamation from the Borg possible but also put her in an environment (the USS Voyager) where survival is guaranteed by the close collaboration of everyone on board, which also means concessions of personal freedom and privacy. Other crewmembers entered this pact voluntarily (we can discuss some other time what choice did the Maquis actually have other than join the crew), but Seven unequivocally did not. Yet it's the only way she could've been reclaimed because we know, and the show drives this point home multiple times, that she was so young when she was assimilated that Seven of Nine, Tertiary Adjunct of Unimatrix Zero One alone would always choose the Borg. She knew of no other alternative.

I don't think letting Seven go back to the Borg in “The Gift” would've been an actually ethical choice, even if it's true that that was what she wanted. She was undoubtedly a prisoner, but I think that we forget (well, I do sometimes at least) that Seven, outside of any metaphor, can be very dangerous. She is strong and quick, she has Borg weaponry and technology at her disposal, she is relentless when pursuing her goal, and even as a drone she knows how Voyager works inside and out. Janeway took the gamble of disconnecting her from the Collective in “Scorpion, part 2” because they were expecting her to try and assimilate Voyager on her own, which she promptly tried to do as soon as the Species 8472 was no longer the main threat. So imho the ethical question posed by “The Gift” is, what do you do when an extremely dangerous individual asks you to be freed so she can rejoin the genocidal alien army of brainwashed zombies that terrorizes the galaxy? They will likely pursue you afterwards, but even if by some lucky chance they don't, you'll still have given back both a weapon and cannon fodder to the genocidal alien army. In addition to that, there's the concrete possibility that your prisoner might one day start living a different life once the brainwashing loses its hold on her.

So no, I really don't think that Janeway made a bad or even questionable choice in “The Gift”, even if it's painful to see Seven struggle against it. The complication has only just started at that point, imho. The fucked-upness comes from her having to “become an individual” in a highly-regulated and closely-surveilled community, one she could've never chosen on her own. On one hand this allows Seven to develop skills she completely lacked in a somewhat safe environment, but on the other hand it limits quite severely what she can or can't do. And while at first she rails against those limitations (she spends the entirety of season 4 doing just that), with time she starts understanding the value of living on Voyager. She manages to resist the Borg Queen's threats in “Dark Frontier” because she has learned compassion in the meantime, eventually choosing voluntarily to return to Voyager. It's a turning point that definitely does a lot to compensate for her lack of agency in “The Gift”. She thinks of Voyager as her new collective, which is equally a testament of how far she's come as much as it is a worrying admission that her new group identity is not that far off the Borg, in her mind.

By season 7 Seven is outright grateful for everything Janeway has done for her, but it still doesn't make her arc learning to ‘fit in’ any less of an exercise in shaping herself into the mold she was given as her only possible future. Is it better than being a murderous, mind-controlled zombie? Yes, it absolutely still is. Seven's independent thoughts and actions now matter, even when they clash with the rules, which is just not comparable with being a Borg drone in any way. Yet it's easy to see why her role on Voyager is also stifling, and that again she can't choose differently because she knows of no other alternative, and none are available to her anyway.

The fucked-upness also comes from extra-diegetical, production reasons, of course. The stupid ideas about what a woman is and what Seven should do to really be one (does she even want to be one?), the fact that a medical practitioner could control so closely how she presents and what she eats, the lack of actual clothes in order to make her a sexy babe for the 90s Trek target audience (“males aged 16-40”), the lack of locks on Cargo Bay 2 where she regenerates, and many other aspects that I'm sure I'm forgetting now... Ignorant, ‘default’ assumptions on how things ‘are’ that the show simply refuses to acknowledge. I know they only seem so obvious now because more than twenty years have passed since Star Trek: Voyager was on the air and the culture (in the US) has changed so much since then. This, I agree, is the kind of fucked up that I could easily do without and Seven's story would be better for it.

So in conclusion, when I say that Seven's situation is fucked up it's not so much because I think Kathryn Janeway should have chosen differently when it came to her; it's more that Seven's arc on Voyager is very complicated, for the most part, by design. Even if I think Janeway could've handled some things in a different way, in most cases it makes sense for her character to have taken those decisions regarding Seven, and I don't always think it would've made for a better story if she hadn't. Obviously I wish the production-level assumptions weren't there, and I think part of what Star Trek: Picard did right in its first season was flipping a lot of those assumptions on their head in just a handful of episodes where Seven appears.

Personally I find it valuable to keep in mind that Seven's storyline on Voyager can be complicated and fucked up without necessarily wanting to make it ‘better’. It still is interesting and effective because it's far from perfect, because everyone tried the best they could given the very difficult circumstances, because we've never seen the whole crew, much less the Captain, outside of survival mode. Yet Seven is also a survivor of almost unimaginable violence and coercion and it makes sense, I think, that her presence regularly poses ethical challenges to what other characters and even the audience might consider ‘right choices’ or ‘right behavior’. Survivors in real life, I think, often challenge our societies (none of them perfect, and where many also live in survival mode) in precisely the same way.

[plush-escapism]

Hell country. Hell country. Hell country. Hell country. Hell country. Hell country. Hell country. Hell country. Hell country. Hell country. Hell country. Hell country. Hell country. Hell country. Hell country. Hell country. Hell country. Hell country.

[coquelicoq]

when you're the only person who keeps living through the time loop, the people around you cease to be people and become mere characters. your treatment of them doesn't matter because they're not real and they won't remember. the only way to give anything meaning is to end the loop; their actions don't affect the loop and therefore are meaningless. you're the only one who has the ability to change the future, so anything you do in service of that goal is justified.

but. kim dojka looks at yoo joonghyuk and says no, actually, these characters are people. whether they remember or not is beside the point because they are real right now. and you don't give your life meaning by achieving some accomplishment that retroactively makes everything that came before worth it - you give your life meaning in the living of it.

[quirkle2]

anybody else rly rly ill about the amount of grief in his eyes in this scene

[original screencap under the cut]

[starbuck]

with respect to myself, this whole “i need to wait till i’m out of school to date,” “i need to wait till i’m more historically, politically, and culturally educated to date” is all bullshit. it’s the top surgery. that’s the holdup. they chop these tits off and i’m ready to go.

[salvatorebennett]

I was listening to this song today and realized how bamon coded it is. It's so them from seasons 6 to 8 (particularly season 7). Someone should make a edit....

[arohuacheng]

i'll admit i am a little cynical about popular interpretation of hua cheng because of the aspects of his character that people tend to focus on. but the animation... i am so happy that they took the time to let him have his soft expressions. his surprise, his vulnerability... the little look on his face at the end of episode four has me losing my mind a little bit. everything i could've asked for in a hua cheng depiction. and the little trailer of him with his golden fan in the next ep... i am so glad he gets to be sharp and violent too :D

[itwoodbeprefect]

flashbacks to dialogue that happened less than a minute ago are annoying and a little insulting for obvious reasons, unless it's in bad buddy episode 5 [2/4] and pat is having entirely serious sepia toned flashbacks to fifty seconds ago while almost shoving a set of drumsticks he hasn't even paid for yet up his nose. then it's brilliant and world changing

[hotsugarbyglassanimals]

it drives me nuts how much suffering we force people to go through to meet some arbitrary idealized standard vs something that'd actually help. they're making my 60 yr old mom with fibro take pain management classes because they're too scared to put her on the prescription pain meds that she was already on before. i just read about someone with adhd talking about how the only med that works really well for them without making them depressed when it wears off or causing anxiety is desoxyn but doctors are too afraid to prescribe it to them because it's technically methamphetamine. the drug war is a complete burden on society

[queer-reader-07]

self control is knowing i want to reread good omens because i want to annotate the fuck out of my physical copy but deciding against it because i have an embarrassing number of unread books on my shelf that need my love too

[sparrowposting]

Expericing the Horrors this morning in SO many different ways.

Like. Having to acknowledge my compulsive people pleasing and the way it fuels my martyr complex, even tho mostly I simply Do Not See It and pretend it's a virtue or doesn't exist. My notions of Duty and Obligation, which are good and my only reason to keep going sometimes, are also morphing into a genuine obsession and fueling said inability to say no or even thinking I'm allowed to say no. Wrestling with the fact that sm of this is an attempt to remain in control of the situation, to keep people placated bc they can't get mad at me then, but also still living with my parents who made me like this in the first place, because that's the best financial decision for me rn. Guilt or anxiety or whatever about the fact that my coping mechanisms/thoughts could be worse but also could definitely be uh..better. ongoing frustration with work and my workplace. [Redacted] happening suddenly at work this morning, which while not impacting me directly, has definitely made all of these emotions Worse.

[yaminerua]

god. Seeing photos of myself these days makes me wanna die.

i need to see a skin specialist to give me something I can use to get this redness under control because it is severely destroying what little self confidence I had left lmfao

[izzy-b-hands]

im ngl i had a lil breakdown before my shower (which i took just before i went to bed to chill and watch the new eps) abt some thought-id-already-worked-all-thru-it irl stuff that resurfaced on me like trauma tends to and i just

it made everything in the show so. I don't know how to say it right. but i feel seen and understood and emotionally overwhelmed in a safe yet weird way, just like i did with a lot of s1 and I am Feeling So Much akdnfkgb (i cannot stress enough that this is a Good Thing and I'm absolutely thrilled and happy with the new eps and like. Going to be fine mentally I just gotta wrangle this like i have the times before.)

[miabrown007]

a minute of silence to my skills to estimate how long a project is ever going to take

[agendratum]

found some translations on twitter for anyone who might still need them and, well, doesn’t wanna risk going on fucking twitter for that

[woundedheartwithin]

Middle of the fucking night, I go to the bathroom and hear my fucking chickens screaming???? Go out to their coop and they’re out in the fully fucking enclosed pen with bloody faces and there are feathers everywhere. They’re okay, thankfully, but Jesus Christ can these fucking predators quit trying to kill my birds?????? I keep them cooped now to keep this from happening and something still tries to eat them like STOP IT. So now they’re in an extra large dog crate in my milk room 😑