Least Relatable Character?
- Thread starter Emnabtond
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No, you're right, particularly as it really has very little to do with the topic... and it is, in a way, a continuation of a discussion from the "USS Cortez" thread. Threads in Trek BBS tend to naturally branch and develop in unexpected ways! Although this is nowhere near the epic "Anwar vs Niners" battle that sprung out of the Cirroc Lofton appreciation thread...
Perrin. I mean, seriously, all the woman does is whine.
Sarek went from a long-term relationship with Amanda to...this?
Oh, and Keiko O'Brien, one in a very long list of TV Wives Who Bitch about Their Husbands' Occupations, Even Though They Knew What the Guy Did for a Living Before They Married Him.
"Oh, honey, you never spend any time with your faaaamilyyyyy!!!!"
Sarek went from a long-term relationship with Amanda to...this?
Oh, and Keiko O'Brien, one in a very long list of TV Wives Who Bitch about Their Husbands' Occupations, Even Though They Knew What the Guy Did for a Living Before They Married Him.
"Oh, honey, you never spend any time with your faaaamilyyyyy!!!!"
Perrin. I mean, seriously, all the woman does is whine.
Sarek went from a long-term relationship with Amanda to...this?
Oh, and Keiko O'Brien, one in a very long list of TV Wives Who Bitch about Their Husbands' Occupations, Even Though They Knew What the Guy Did for a Living Before They Married Him.
"Oh, honey, you never spend any time with your faaaamilyyyyy!!!!"
Well I like Keiko. Seriously, she was a pleasant woman who occasionally argued with her husband, but to listen to DS9 fans you'd think she was some sort of soul-destroying harpy!
Even that Keiko was around all these years, there is very little that we really know about the woman as a woman. She is a good mother, and she had something to do that does not do anything to bother the Federation or the Bajorians. With Keiko on TNG and DS9, her position was to make sure nobody would have thought that Chief O’Brian was gay.
Gawd, she drives me crazy..... I've just reached season three in my Star Trek Marathon watching after so many years of not seeing DS9, and jeez.... just about every episdoe she was in in the first two seasons was nothing but her complaining, giving attitude, cold shoulder this, dirty look that, trash on O'Brian just about any chance she could get..... Oh no.... life's a little hard, no kids want to come to her school...... blame O'Brian, it's all his fault.... as if he didn't already have enough crap to deal with.
No wonder why he was so cranky..... I would have teleported her sorry arse out into space while she was still asleep long ago, ungreatful wank.
Evil Ezri said:
I completely disagree. Keiko and the children were there so that we could sometimes see a family on that dang station. You know - a husband, a wife and their children? The kind of family that a lot of people have? The kind of family that we almost never see in Trek? I really liked that we finally got one.
Pemmer Harge said:
I also never got the Keiko hate. Yes, sometimes she did indeed resent her husband's job. You'd think, based on the reaction of some DS9 fans, that this was, like so totally insane and out of leftfield! Unprecedented in marital history!
The plain fact is that this is, out here in the real world, something that a very large percentage of married people go through sooner or later. Those of you who have never been married really need to be aware of how common this actually is. Yes, that's right - sometimes your spouse will be illogical and unreasonable. And sometimes you will be. Welcome to Reality Land.
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Plus I find it hard to believe that anyone would have bothered to give Chief O'Brien a wife just so someone wouldn't think he was gay - on TNG, where he was just a recurring character. Surely if they were worried about people thinking that this or that character were gay, they'd rather be worried about the main characters - none of which were married.
And did that many people really question O'Brien's sexuality on TNG? I can see that some people want to see 'homoeroticism' in his friendship with Bashir - just as they always see in close same-sex friendships - but he didn't have such a relationship on TNG. I don't think he even had that much screentime on that show, before he got married.
I don't think anybody said that.... it's not like they got married and then he went into Starfleet.... he was on the Enterprise when they got married and full swing into Starfleet at that time.
Everything was all great and wonderful until he was assigned to Deep Space Nine, something which she didn't like from the start and then ragged all over his arse the whole time until she decided to make a school...... and when that didn't go over so well at times, who'd she bitch at again? Poor O'Brian.
I say if you're already in a demanding job before you get married, then whoever you are marrying, is marrying your job as well in a sense, since you're accepting and wish to wed them for everything that they are. To marry someone and then complain about their job after the fact is petty and they have only themselves to blame for putting themselves in such a position, nor should they feel justified in guilt tripping your husband/wife into changing everything you are and do simply because now you're married.
I'm married..... and I made sure I wouldn't marry into such a situation in the first place. My wife lives in Australia and I live in Canada. Currently she's back in Australia because of her father passing away. When we entered this relationship, thus marriage, we both accepted that there will be times that we will have to be apart, families will be on opposite sides of the planet, and we may not always be able to be in two places at once, nor be together everytime, all the time.
These are things her and I accepted when we entered the relationship. While some people would consider such a relationship too straining and perhaps stressful, we do not. When things do get challenging, we talk about it..... we don't finger point at one another, blaming one another or forcing one or the other to do what the other wants out of some guilt trip and if I felt that was going to be the case, I wouldn't have gone through the marriage.
If you say a very large % of married relationships are like as you described, then that would explain why there are so many divorces these days.
^ I suspect that you're overthinking it, Praxius. In every marriage (in, I'd guess, every long-term relationship, whether the couple is married or not), the couple has some dumb things that they fight/argue/consistently disagree about. This isn't the dumb thing that my husband and I fight, etc., about, and it's not the dumb thing that you and your wife fight, etc., about, but this is the dumb thing that Keiko and Miles fight about.
Yes, she knew he was in Starfleet when they got married, but she didn't know he'd end up on a backwater space station, did she? No, she did not. So there she is, trying to raise a kid and eventually two kids there. Give the poor woman a break.
I would say that Keiko is not a lot different from a lot of military spouses out there, who are proud of the service person that they're married to and dedicated to the service that they married into. But...
But raising a family on a base far from home can be a difficult life, and some people handle it better than others. And setting your own career on hold to help your spouse's career isn't easy, either. So Keiko didn't always handle these things that well. Why is this so hard to understand? I thought one of the things people like about DS9 is its realism.
Yes, she knew he was in Starfleet when they got married, but she didn't know he'd end up on a backwater space station, did she? No, she did not. So there she is, trying to raise a kid and eventually two kids there. Give the poor woman a break.
I would say that Keiko is not a lot different from a lot of military spouses out there, who are proud of the service person that they're married to and dedicated to the service that they married into. But...
But raising a family on a base far from home can be a difficult life, and some people handle it better than others. And setting your own career on hold to help your spouse's career isn't easy, either. So Keiko didn't always handle these things that well. Why is this so hard to understand? I thought one of the things people like about DS9 is its realism.
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Cpt Cullison
Ensign
My Trek Least Relatable Character is Captian Janway and how the hell did she become admiral before Picard some please explain.
My usual victims would be either Wesley or Neelix. But recently I saw Riddles and developed a miniscule of respect for Neelix. Wesley, though the character in the beginning was just an irritant at least to me became something (Traveler). I guess that can't count as 'relatable'. I'm going to go with Harry Kim.
And the nice guy in Hellraiser.No, the one playing Garak was Scorpio.Mmmmmm.....Zombie Chic Goths.
Was the fellow playing Dukat the ame guy who was Scorpio in Dirty Harry?
You know, I hate crossovers, but they should've made a throwaway line somewhere in all that about "the trouble with Cenobites."
You know what kind of sucks for Keiko in comparison to the "serviceman's wife" (or servicewoman's husband, or the other permutations we'll no doubt eventually see)? When he was on the Enterprise, he was effectively permanently deployed--and she always seemed kinda-sorta expected to go with him. DS9 was kind of a step up, since it's sort of on the beaten track and is expected to be threatened with explosive death less often, but then the Klingons and the Dominion shows up.
Nobody expects Mr. or Mrs. Apple Pie go live in Iraq with her kids, but there does seem to be this social pressure that Keiko and Molly and Yoshi have to go live on Station Dominion Magnet.
Maybe Iraq isn't really equivalent to the E-D in terms of amenities, but living in Iraq might actually be safer than living on a starship when you don't have your name in the opening credits.
I might be reading to much into it, but that's kind of the impression I got. "Starships are now open to families, so now you don't have any excuses... not you Wesley, or you, Keiko, or you, pregnant woman from Voyager!"
I was annoyed with his character in Hellraiser for being so clueless and wimpy. Although he did have that great scene when he played the bad guy in the skin of the good guy (how does that work? Nevermind, I like Clive Barker so I don't ask those questionsAnd the nice guy in Hellraiser.No, the one playing Garak was Scorpio.Mmmmmm.....Zombie Chic Goths.
Was the fellow playing Dukat the ame guy who was Scorpio in Dirty Harry?
You know, I hate crossovers, but they should've made a throwaway line somewhere in all that about "the trouble with Cenobites."
) and got to be all creepy and sleezy and incestuous.Hellraiser was actually the first thing I saw him in, so when I saw him as Garak and checked the name and bio of the actor, I thought "What, that's Larry from Hellraiser?
I like him much better this way!"Hm, we're getting sidetracked again...
1)Still ignoring unanswerable points, like the importance of Ro and Duet in establishing the premise, 2)still disproving things I didn't say and 3)having no point other than blind hostility.
Except that, first, Ro and Duet and cues for Jewish identity for the Bajorans, such as the tefillin and the very name Prophets preemptively impose the Nazi role for the Cardassians. Worse, the magical powers of subversion and the communal (as in Communism, get it?) Great Link mean trying to merely add a secondary allusion/identification to Nazis just doesn't work. Those are very specific to Communism. Since Communism was supposed to be a powerful, expansionist force bent on conquering the known world, and driven by paranoia, the Dominion's career of conquest just makes it a scifi version.
It is not reasonable to claim other allusions without reason. (I regret the necessity for a tautology to emphasize what should be obvious.) For instance, the conflict between more and less violent factions in the Bajoran resistance is nicely paralleled by conflict between Lehi and the Stern Gang and the Irgun. You can draw some weak parallels with IRA factions. But, Ireland, with adoption of English language and culture and centuries of ties, including massive commercial ties with mass emigration to England and its colonies (which became the US) isn't very parallel to Bajor at all. Drawing a bad analogy doesn't refute a good analogy. Concluding that if you can draw weak analogies, the main, clear analogy is just another viewpoint is absurd.
Whereupon a slew of authorities are quoted. They do not lead anyone to think, That's how it makes sense! There is a singular lack of judgment in accepting arguments that Ensign Ro could be identified with Palestinians (except as a red herring, in pursuit of dramatic irony,) because this ignores 1) the very basic visual identifier of the earring, 2) Palestinians are not part of the US armed services or returning to Palestine from the US to take part in armed resistance, whereas US Jews supply a large proportion of the settler movement, as Ro does in the end, 3) the US government has been since the Sixties the primary support of the Israeli state, while the Federation is not the mainstay of the Cardassian Union, and 4) Judaism, like Ro's religion, is officially respected by the majority religion in the US while Islam is not.
Enough of this poorly reasoned nonsense!
Actually, my post did cross with yours. But, when people insist on misrepresenting my real views, ignore my own views, and solemnly propound outright nonsense, it is perfectly reasonable to assume that personal embarrassment is clouding their judgment. Or are you saying you just want to attack me personally?
You may regard all identification with characters as childish or impute to me the belief that I don't do it myself. But that is merely your problem. However, I believe that ignoring and misrepresenting my arguments is rude.
If first season Kira was truly devout, she could have started explaining Bajoran religion to Sisko, serenely confident that the Prophets had chosen their Emissary well. Or, she could have asked Sisko for guidance or explication, as the available voice of the Prophets. You yourself are well aware that, as Kira is basically a Jew, that she would be in a quandary when confronted with a non-Jewish Messiah. That is why you accept that a supposedly devout person would act the way she does. Accepting the Bajoran=Jew increses understanding of the show. And this example shows why drivel about how Bajorans can't be equated with Jews is just a way of falsifying the series.
You don't seem to know the difference between a cross and a crucifix. So I'm pretty sure I have more to say in a discussion of religion. The idea that the earring isn't strongly reminiscent of tefillin is hard to believe, and far, far more embarrassing that remembering the word "phylactery" instead.
Q, because he's, well, omnipotent! -- RR
stj said:
This was the statement you made, and if I've misrepresented it, I apologize. Re-reading my posts, I admit to some rudeness. Associations between wish-fulfillment and childishness are entirely my own. If you will, let me try to step back from all that.
What I should have said was this. I think you're off the mark in your claim that most people, when they say they "relate" to a character, really mean that the character is an embodiment of wish-fulfillment. Most Star Trek fans I've met don't relate to Spock and Data because they're long-lived non-human beings with super strength. Rather, they relate to the social outsider awkward with the conventions of human relations.
stj said:
The difference between a cross and a crucifix seem superficial to me, as a non-Christian. One is a cross and the other is a cross with Jesus on it. The iconography seems interchangeable (to me), so such a lapse on my part seems hardly worthy of embarassment. But I'm not an expert on Christianity.
On the subject of tefillin, I stand by my stance that there is not a strong resemblance to the Bajoran earing. They're much larger, worn on the head and arm, and not as universal as the Bajoran earing is to their religion. Nearly every Bajoran character has an earing. I'm familiar with tefillin only through media images--despite knowing quite I few people who are Jewish, I've never seen any of them wear or possess a tefillin.
stj said:
Kira was never serenely confident in the Prophet's choice of Sisko in the first season. It takes her a long time to accept Sisko as the Emissary of the Prophets. You seem to be equating Kira's brand of faith with blind, unwavering confidence. If that's what you mean by "devout," then Kira never was devout.
On the second point, she couldn't ask Sisko for religious guidance. Sisko was adamant early on that he had nothing to say on the subject.
stj said:
You've lost me on this point, which I hope you'll clarify. I don't comprehend how Kira's alleged Jewishness supposedly increases or changes my understanding of the series. It seems to me that accepting a messiah that is not of your faith (or species) would be difficult of any religious follower, regardless of their devotion.
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