Uh, just because it perfectly describes the relationship between Ro and Quark (and indeed, I can't exactly picture either of them in any other kind of sexual relationship) doesn't mean it's not a word so absurdly funny (in a non-sequitur, borderline oxymoronic way), and so unexpected, that on first encounter, it would fail to induce one to pass whatever one is trying to swallow through one's nose.
My favs 1. T'Pol/Tucker 2. Ro/Quark - they sold it well in the books I have not finised the relaunch novels so not sure where it ends 3. Archer/Danni Emerson - they make that work as well 4. Picard -Crusher - took them long enough to figure it out 15 years!
I still can't help myself: when this thread surfaces, I immediately start trying to think of ST novels that would qualify as "supermarket porn bodice-rippers." (maybe Spock: Messiah?) (And if that manages to get at least one person to react the way I did to the term "fuck-buddies" being used to describe the Ro-Quark relationship, I have accomplished what I set out to do.)
I didn't see this thread until just now, but that was the first couple I thought of. I liked them together and remember Wildfire being a total gut punch.
As I said before, nothing; it's just so riotously, incongruously, near-oxymoronically, and unexpectedly funny that it ought to make whatever you're drinking shoot out your nose.
I especially didn't like the end of Ro and Quark as Altek Dans was peripheral to it, the blandest person to span tens of thousands of years.
Yeah that was like a love dodecahedron or some nonsense. Quark loves Ro, Ro loves Altek, Altek loves Kira, Kira loves Odo... which naturally loops back around to Odo loves Quark. Another kinda-sorta-never-really-happened romance was Vaughn and Opaka. They flirted a bit in "Fragments and Omens", but the books got chopped off before it could go anywhere, and then by the time we came back, he was dead. .