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What were normal Voyager crewmen (outside the senior staff) thinking about Kes, Neelix and Seven?

BohandiAnsoid

Captain
Captain
Because Voyager focuses mostly on the main characters and their interactions, we don't really know anything about how people outside them thought about Kes, Neelix and Seven of Nine. And I think this is an interesting thing. Kes and Neelix are both from new species. Kes is quite unusual and also genuinely friendly to everyone. Neelix tries to do his best, but can be too eager to help. And Seven… she is a former Borg, when the Borg is an existing threat, might have hurt families or friends of some members of the crew. Not to mention, her personality may be… annoying to some. The cold, efficient Borg mindset.

What do you think about this?
 
For Neelix and Kes, I think they'd be welcoming and curious with eventual turned stomachs from leeola root mixtures. For Seven, they'd be apprehensive and a little scared for a while with eventual learning that Borg are great.
 
For anyone in Starfleet, meeting new species or befriending formerly-hostile ones is basically the most exciting thing in the world to them, so they'd probably all be hyped.

Maquis maybe less so, but even they were born and raised in the utopian, egalitarian, 24th century Federation, so presumably have at least a vaguely positive outlook toward things like species diversity.
 
Neelix was the local who knew about the area of space they were in, so I'd say it's reasonable that they were pleased to have someone who might at least help them avoid some of the worst of the local hazards that they could (like, say, for example, pointing them away from something like the Krowtonan Guard, who took out half of the Equinox's crew - it's easy enough to picture him saying 'oh, I'd avoid this area, there's nothing of use to you here, you should go in THIS direction' without even mentioning the Guard proper).

Kes, at least to begin with, was a tagalong with Neelix, but as she became the Doctor's medical assistant, we saw that the crew appreciated her gentler approach to him plenty of the time. Plus, given her personality, I'd say she was someone the crew in general was fond of, because she just had this gentle and eager to learn air about her that I would think would put them at ease.

Now Seven is where things get trickier, because I think there SHOULD have been a lot more attention given to the crew struggling with a Borg among them. We had B'Elanna's hostility, particularly in The Gift and Day of Honor (plus an additional bit in the novelization), but it wasn't ever really given the focus it should have, I feel. Sure, we had Janeway making it clear that she saw Seven as a victim they had rescued from an abusive home, for want of a better metaphor, but Seven also represented this existential threat to them, surely it called for some additional pushback. But, that would also have depended on Voyager, as a show, developing the crew outside of the main credits cast and being able to have a lower decks perspective.

Given Voyager's unique circumstances, where not just was the ship lost in an area of space 70000 light years removed from their own frame of reference, but they were also a melding of Starfleet and Maquis crew, a mix of people who choose to explore the unknown and people who were just looking to defend their homes from the Cardassians, I think they were generally pretty accepting of people outside of the typical "chain of command" having a position of prominence in the ship's hierarchy. After all, there was a decent chunk of the crew who came from outside of the typical chain of command. Not like it was a new thing on Voyager.
 
Now Seven is where things get trickier, because I think there SHOULD have been a lot more attention given to the crew struggling with a Borg among them. We had B'Elanna's hostility, particularly in The Gift and Day of Honor (plus an additional bit in the novelization), but it wasn't ever really given the focus it should have, I feel. Sure, we had Janeway making it clear that she saw Seven as a victim they had rescued from an abusive home, for want of a better metaphor, but Seven also represented this existential threat to them, surely it called for some additional pushback. But, that would also have depended on Voyager, as a show, developing the crew outside of the main credits cast and being able to have a lower decks perspective.
That was Voyager: nine main characters and a bunch of faceless uniformed non-entities. Even Harry was pretty borderline in that regard.
 
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