Icon from a picrew by grgikau. Call me Tir or Julian. 37. He/They. Queer. Twitter: @tirlaeyn. ao3: tirlaeyn. 18+ Only. Star Trek. Sandman. IwtV. OMFD. Definitionless in this Strict Atmosphere.
star trek fans tag your guilty pleasure blorbo from the franchise. this is the kind of character that you fully understand when people dislike them, but you will love them no matter what the writers or the fandom do to them. if there are no more fans of this character then it means you’re dead kind of love.
Thinking about how Damar killed Ziyal and then ended up the hero of the Cardassian people by the end of Ds9. The murder of Ziyal is not shrouded in any ambiguity. She was innocent and he murdered her.
So how can he end up being a hero? How can we reconcile this view of the Damar that commits a brutal, unforgivable act with the Damar that leads a rebellion and saves his people?
That’s a hard question. It certainly comes down to character development. The Damar that shoots Ziyal is shaped by the same values and ideas that created Dukat. Cardassian military man, convinced about Cardassian superiority. But when Damar reaches the height of power under the Dominion, he’s wrecked by guilt and the eventual realisation his people are not the rightful, imperial oppressor, but are being subjugated.
He changes and realize, very reluctantly, that Cardassia has to change to. His turning points are all centered around killing people: Killing Ziyal leads to his induction to leadership, killing Weyoun leads to his role as rebellion leader, killing Rusot leads to him finally accepting the new Cardassian reality. So does Kira “forgive” him? Is the audience to forgive him?
I think Ds9 tells us that people sometimes do horrible things and then we all have to live with it. Garak did horrible things, Kira did horrible things, even Sisko did horrible things. Justice isn’t easy or smooth and certainly not swift. Maybe Ds9 tells us that there’s no dichotomy where we either forgive and forget or we seek absolute justice.
We learn early in episodes like “Duet” that seeing things in black and white, where everyone is either Good or Bad, is not constructive. We learn in “Darkness and the light” that Kira killed civilians working with the occupying forces during her time in the resistance when she had to and also that being consumed by revenge will lead you down a dark path. All those things teaches us that in war, sometimes you don’t have the luxury of absolutes. Kira chose to put her personal feelings about Damar aside and work at his side, not because she forgot Ziyal but because that’s what she had to do.
It’s also interesting to consider Dukat killing Jadzia vs. Damar killing Ziyal and how these horrid acts lead two people on very different paths, but that’s best saved for another post.
Sorry I haven’t answered this before: Christmas holiday meant I wasn’t online so much. I’ve been thinking about this on and off ever since you posted and I still don’t have an answer!
Titles are a big deal for me, and I usually only settle on them partway through writing, as the themes of a book start to really emerge. So I would have to start writing the book to be able to find out what the title is! (If anyone is commissioning, I’d happily write this…)
I usually set placeholder titles in the meantime, and I would probably use Liberator or Underground until something really good came to me.
