have I mentioned in any sort of detail yet how creeped the fuck out I am by the way the Founder(’)s(’) treatment of Odo is just like…. textbook abusive? because it is MASSIVELY DISTURBING to watch, okay.
like. punishing him (for what is almost certainly a hypocritical crime), and then doing the “we forgive you. do you forgive us?” routine. CONSTANT constant “we love you and you’re a part of us and we want you back” talk. isolating him from anybody else because they’re not good enough and can’t give him what he needs and don’t understand him the way the other Founders do? fucking with his sense of time such that he neglects any other responsibilities. simultaneously belittling his reasons for not going back with them, and then acting like they absolutely deeply understand that single reason that they’ve half-made up. questioning and wearing down his stated boundaries about linking.
honestly the most freaky part was when Odo was defending his choice to link with the other Founder to Kira by talking about how he wouldn’t be letting any information slip about the new resistance, because linking isn’t a sharing of information, just like, existence or something. when the Founders had literally used the Link to engage in espionage a season ago by manipulating and planting information while Odo was joined to them. like. YIKES on bikes, massive gaslighting ahoy.
and you know what, in light of all this it kind of makes me… suspect that the purpose of launching marmalade children off into space all on their own isn’t just to gather knowledge to enrich the Link and the changelings’ understanding of the world, but also to create “sleeper agents”, enmeshed in non-Dominion cultures, who will be easily ripe for manipulation by the core population of Founders into betraying their adopted societies and advancing Dominion takeovers of new worlds. because the Founders know that changelings are feared and mistreated by solids. Odo himself certainly hasn’t been run out of town or anything; he has a pretty good position for himself - and even so, his primary caretaker as a child was Dr. Mora, who also was and continues to be abusive and manipulative to him. so his that case is at all typical in terms of who picks up and “raises” these baby changelings, what the Founders have done is basically created a population that comes to them already fucked up by their personal history, and easily vulnerable to re-victimization.
I was talking with @weaver0fwords about why it is that Odo never acknowledges Quark’s more good deeds, like the food/supply smuggling he did for Bajorans during Terok Nor, or why Odo, someone who is concerned more with justice than law, strongly disapproves when (for example) Quark arms the Maquis and similar groups. It’s very likely (given Odo’s close monitoring of Quark) that Odo knew about Quark’s smuggling during the occupation and yet he never mentions or acknowledges it at any point in the show, and when you do have Odo finding out about Quark’s illegal activities that seem to be for a good cause, he’s usually annoyed/disapproving in a way that indicates that he still very much has a low opinion of Quark. This got me thinking about how I think Quark’s morality has been very influential on Odo and that Odo and Quark have a kind of symbiotic relationship when it comes to moral action. There’s less evidence of it in canon, but I also think Kira had a similar influence on Odo’s morality. Both Quark and Kira through their contrast with Odo’s values help define for Odo what he is willing and not willing to do.
This is one of my favorite topics so I decided to expound a bit more on what I think Odo’s morality is as depicted in the show, and how I think Quark and Kira shaped that morality.
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do you think after children of time, when the dust settled, odo kept going back to the other odo’s memories of what happened?
do you think he replayed the memory of nerys holding his hands, of her kissing him, over and over in his mind, thinking of this memory that feels like it should be his own but belonged to someone else?
“haha odo is so beige and bland and boring despite being a literal shapeshifter” like ok yes I laugh at those jokes too and find them funny I literally have no issue with them but sometimes I also wanna talk about how that’s kind of the whole point of his character.
like odo’s abilities and way of being is so unlike any other known species in the alpha quadrant that it’s shown to be disturbing and off-putting to a lot of people — or at the very least that’s what he was led to believe. like we see this in the alternate where mora tries to convince him he’ll either be locked up in a prison or put in a zoo to gawk at if he’s perceived to have committed any sort of crime or transgression.
so despite being able to literally become anything he can think of, he chooses his default presentation to be as standard, bland and uninteresting as he possibly can. male, always in a beige uniform, very standard hair cut.
odo is so plain because he was made to be afraid of being literally anything else
fuck everyone and everything lwaxana troi is my favorite woman ever. she’s annoying. she’s hilarious. she’s full of herself. she’s genuinely caring and kind. she wears wigs because she can’t stand to be ordinary. she’s the daughter of the fifth house, holder of the sacred chalice of riix and heir to the holy rings of betazed. she’s unfathomably horny. she’s a milf. i’m deeply in love with her. odo out of my fucking way
Not to be dramatic, but JB is all that is keeping me sane rn, so I'm glad I was able to draw him and that after hours spent erasing parts of his face and redrawing them carefully, I actually like it a lot :)
Ok I might've overdone it with the anime princess treatment, but!!!! (I have no defense)((There's bunch of other stuff, but I need to stop nitpicking and go catch those zzz's))
i honestly barely ever think about the mirror universe EXCEPT to mull over my disappointment that we only got to see a little bit of mirror odo.
i also feel like had there been fewer budget constraints he could have been a little more monstrous, much more inhuman in appearance? but maybe that’s me and my unquenchable thirst for BODY HORROR.