my unpopular DS9 opinion of the day is that the Dominion solid races aren’t actually given the level of attention and sensitivity by the writing itself that we all give them. I feel like what we got was largely up to things like Avery Brooks’s directorial work in 3x06 The Abandoned, and Jeffrey Combs pleading with Ira Steven Behr to be able to have one Weyoun who questioned the order of things and even partially defected to the side of good. 

one thing my poor partner has heard me talk about ad-fucking-nauseam is how we got a clear answer for what happens to the Founders. We know that they surrender and end the Dominion War, but we’re never told the terms of that surrender. We know that Odo goes back to the Great Link to cure the morphogenic virus. And we’re supposed to infer that once the Founders are cured, next on the agenda is, you know, freeing all of their slaves, right? It seems reasonable to assume that. Except for the fact that all the deuterocanonical media that addresses the postwar Dominion says they’ve made absolutely glacial progress on that if they’ve made any at all. I’m not here to argue about how good the litverse or Star Trek Online story arcs for the Dominion are, I just. I feel like it’s very telling that the series’s narrative went to such lengths to show that the Founders will have a future and Odo will have a large part in it, but didn’t even think to address what the future held for the Jem’Hadar or the Vorta. 

It’s fantastic that the Dominion fandom has taken these two whole, entire races of people who are not allowed to be people and given them the sympathy and dignity that the narrative only barely thought to give them. But I would like it if we could acknowledge a bit more that the narrative was, overall, very lacking in this area and could have used a lot of improvement.