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Damar: Full of Win

Completely agree. Interesting about the foil to Dukat, worked very well as they were both quite different personalities. Damar the brute force of Cardassia biding his time as his superiors fall victim to their own machination. In the end Damar is seen as the stable one.
 
Hehe. I love the bit where he taunts Weyoun, too. Heck just about any scene between Damar and Weyoun is gold.
 
Interesting read. I wonder how he would have played Damar differently if he had know Damar had a wife and kid.
 
I think being a career soldier Damar married for family connections and bred because this was expected by Cardassian society. Not that he didn't care for them, but clearly his heart was in his work. The family name and line could maintain itself just fine back home without him, he had plenty of other women to keep him occupied if that is what he wanted. I think a lot of marriages were one of power and pragmatism.

Most of this I think I got from the Terok Nor series which fleshes out Cardassians as well as some DS9 relaunch.
 
And yet that contradicts a lot of what we see in episodes like Chain of Command or Cardassians, where it's said that family is considered one of the most important elements in Cardassian society.
 
That family thing could have been planned better. Either make Damar caring about his family and returning home after work, instead of playing with whores, or make him a playboy without a family. Maybe they wanted him a playboy and then suddenly someone came with the idea to give him a wife and a son to have them slaughtered by the Dominion so that Damar tasted what his awesome Cardassia had done to Bajorans. Cool, if not so poorly (un)planned.

Unfortunately, with the exception of Ko'tan Padar and twisted Gul Madred, who seemed to care for their kids, the writers didn't bother with showing any more Cardassians confirming their claimed care for their families. Dukat forgot about his 7 kids very quickly and Damar didn't seem to care about his kid until the kid was dead.
 
I think the interesting thing about Damar in hindsight was that he was likely the most blunt and honest (full blooded) Cardassian in the history of the show. While Garak and Tain always had layers upon layers to their words, Dukat with his numerous self-delusions/self serving statements, and even good men like Marittza resorting to deception to accomplish his goal, Damar seemed to speak what he was thinking 99% of the time.

Even in his interactions with Weyoun (up until Changing Face of Evil) are so contrasting with the ones that Dukat had, as where you clearly see those two trying to play each other, he and Weyoun just ended up bickering because Damar refused to engage in any of the negotiation double speak typical of Cardassians and Vorta.
 
I didn't see any problem with Damar being performed as if he had no family. That was probably normal for Cardassian males, particularly in the military. As long as they had lots of living children to succeed them, they weren't a day to day concern. Similarly, we knew Dukat had many children, yet that fact didn't influence his behavior, except in the case of Ziyal, where the influence is what sent him on a downward spiral of destruction. Seeing that certainly would have validated Damar's attitude.
 
Yes that is what I was getting at Temis. Having family was more about bloodlines, or rather bloodlines was very important whether you were going to be a family man in the way we understand that to mean or not.
 
I could write an essay on all the reasons I love Damar, but I'll just say he's my favorite character on DS9 and seriously competes for my favorite in all of Trek.
 
^Wow, really? He started out as nothing special but he grew so much as the series went on it's impossible for me to imagine someone thinking of him as "background noise"...but hey, if that's how you feel, that's how you feel.

As for his relationship with and feeling for his family, it's not exactly unprecedented in human societies for men to have wives and children they care for but whose feelings don't seem to prevent them from seeking amusement elsewhere. Why couldn't that be the case here?
 
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Damar really wasn't there from the beginning? I had to look it up, he didn't appear until season 4 but I feel like I've known him forever :rommie: How is it that DS9 can have such well developed secondary characters and Voyager could barely do the same with their primaries? (cough- Harry Kim-cough)
 
Unfortunately, with the exception of Ko'tan Padar and twisted Gul Madred, who seemed to care for their kids, the writers didn't bother with showing any more Cardassians confirming their claimed care for their families.

What about Tekeny Ghemor? :)




As far as Damar being one of the most blunt, honest Cardassians in the show, I'd agree. Tekeny Ghemor was a very honest man too, though definitely not blunt.
 
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