july-19th-club:

i love whenever julian winds up in a runabout with someone and immediately turns from ‘a likeable, slightly over-talkative man with some strange social habits but a lot of good points as well’ into ‘thee most obnoxious person you ever met in your entire life’ just bc hes stuck in a car ride. but especially i enjoy the face journeys of whoever he’s with as he shares every single thing he’s thinking as he thinks it, makes weird noises, asks a bajillion questions, fidgets, paces, snacks, swivels around in his little chair, and if they say ‘let’s just be quiet for a second’ he says “of course! totally :) great idea. you know, i once met a monk who had taken a vow of silence; here is every single fact i know about religious, selective, and involuntary mutism isnt that interesting?”

:

Quite a lot of Worf’s plots are about him failing to accept he’s not a traditional or average Klingon.

• Trying to impose a marriage on his baby mama because of Klingon tradition, despite him growing up on Earth and she’s half human.
• Being weird when his parents visit. “Everything had to be Klingon” when he was growing up.
• Insisting on a traditional ceremony with Jadzia, even when it threatens to stop the marriage altogether.
• Wanting his son to be a proper Klingon even though his son has never known any proper Klingons.
• “Yeah, of course I will kill my brother if tradition demands it.”
• Getting meditation-drunk in his Enteprise quarters to bring on a vision - I doubt any other Klingon would try that shit during a duty shift on a Klingon vessel.
• Dragging colleagues off on a dangerous mission to get a woman into Klingon heaven even though she isn’t Klingon.
• Being one of the few Klingons who apparently gives a shit about honour in Klingon politics whilst everyone else is like “eh, what can you do?”
• The fact he longs for some traditional Klingon nipple torture on his birthday.

From the other Klingons we’ve seen, I think many of those raised in the Empire would have side-eyed Worf’s commitment to this whole bit.

On some level Worf has to know that Klingon culture isn’t really in the blood, it’s about upbringing, and by imposing all this Traditional Klingon stuff on himself it’s like he’s reassuring the validity of his own identity, trying to convince himself it doesn’t matter that he was raised by humans or trained in Starfleet or that he sleeps on a soft bed and drinks prune juice.

But his version of Klingon culture is all about honour and duty and none of the fun stuff - there’s very little of the partying or the more raucous Klingon stuff in there. Presumably this is because he associates his Klingon side with the family he lost, so being a Klingon is quite a sombre idea for him. So it’s quite sad because his arc is like a reverse Data arc - whilst Data becomes more validated during his arc, Worf just keeps trying harder and harder to prove an identity that nobody can take away from him anyway, and he’s not even getting the good stuff.

Unless you count this. Depends on your preferences I guess.