jcatgirl asked: hi, i don’t know what being graycatted means, but i am v interested in hearing why the creation of kira nerys and the casting of nana vistor is important.
Oh, my sweet summer child. You don’t know what you’re getting into with me, but you’re about to learn. Okay. I feel like I’m constantly drafting the ultimate Key to All Mythologies Ode to Kira, and never managing to do it proper justice. But I’ll try to respond to this. Here we go. (FYI: graycatting, defined.)
First of all, I write this with deep affection and respect for Ro Laren. Because Ro Laren is important for a lot of reasons. Her arc is one of coming to terms with trauma. She is a ferocious, rule-breaking woman whose rule-breaking we are meant not only to empathize with but, ultimately, to esteem. (I’m trying to avoid spoilers here for my brand-new Trekster friend, but y’all know what I’m talking about.) But Ro Laren is also representative of an archetype of Tough Girls on television, especially in genre shows: so powerfully repressed that she can’t access her own emotions or forge adequate relationships. (That said, two important things that TNG does better than most: one, the person who helps Ro to resolve some of this is GUINAN, not some pushy dude-romantic-interest; and two, ‘Pre-emptive Strike’ is so intelligently the story of her learning this about herself and finding a path appropriate to herself.)
Now. It seems clear to me that the pilot of DS9 was written with Forbes’ (very brilliant) portrayal of Ro in mind. If you’re familiar with Ro, when you first meet Kira, gesticulating and shouting in Sisko’s office, Nana Visitor can come off as an incompetent ham. What the hell is this woman doing, I thought, the first time I saw ‘Emissary.’ Where’s Ro Laren? I miss Ro Laren. This lady’s overselling it, throwing a fit instead of seething at a low burn like she’s supposed to.
Because the pilot was written for Ro Laren, but Nana Visitor was already playing Kira Nerys. I have no way of knowing what went on in the minds of DS9’s writers and directors, or between them and Nana, in those early days. But I would be willing to bet cold hard latinum that they saw her explode into a role that had been written for repression and bitterness, and crafted the character to follow accordingly.
And that gift of Nana’s for a controlled performance of wild, complicated, sometimes self-contradicting emotion is what makes Kira Nerys as important as she is.
And Kira Nerys is important because she breaks the mold in which Ro Laren is stuck. Kira Nerys is a Tough Girl who shoots first and asks questions later, who’s all instinct, all impulse, and who is also entirely, availably emotional. And that part of her, the part of her that’s all feeling, is seen by the other characters and by the frame of the show as her strength. ‘Her presence,’ as Terry Farrell put it, ‘is her strength.’ You just do not see that on TV, that combination of toughness with feeling. (The sole other example I can think of is late-series Gabrielle of Xena: Warrior Princess.)
She also gets to have powerful, healthy relationships. Lots of them. Friends and mentors and lovers and co-workers and mentees, with whom she lives and learns. The key example, I think, is the evolution of her relationship with Sisko over the course of the first season. Sisko sees just how volatile she is, just how impulsive, and he trusts and respects her for it. Even when he knows she’s wrong – and she often is, those early days – he lets her play it out, whatever it is, lets her learn on her own terms, and never forces her hand. (Again, trying to avoid even minor spoilers, but see my ‘soph rewatches ds9’ tag for some recent installments in my incoherent thoughts on this.)
She is a survivor of trauma, not a captive to it. This is the most important thing about Kira, and the rarest thing in women on television. No matter how much she loses – and she loses so much, over and over – she continues to grow, to be in feeling and in relationship in ways that allow her to grow, to survive in the fullest sense of the term.
And I think it’s all down to that explosiveness of Nana Visitor’s in the pilot. She took the frame she’d been given, and she broke it open into something new and revolutionary. I have never really been one to fangirl actors, but Nana Visitor is the one I truly want to meet in real life, if only to say: ‘Thank you. You made it possible for me to stop apologizing for being intense and emotional.’ I think she made that possible for a lot of women. I can’t begin to measure the value of that.
Photos from my Trek pilgrimage to Vulcan, Alberta today! Not only is the town full of amazing, geeky touches, but the Trekcetera Museum has some great artifacts, including Janeway’s coffee mugs and one of Seven of Nine’s uniforms, complete with redonkulous corset - as well as some of Bashir’s hyposprays that were, in reality, just pepper mills with stickers.
A follower asked for more of my photos of Kate Mulgrew and Jeri Ryan at the Star Trek Voyager reunion panel at Star Trek Las Vegas! Of course I’m happy to oblige, and threw in some that also include Roxann Dawson.
New Women at Warp! Interviews with Chase Masterson (Leeta) and Nana Visitor (Kira) from Star Trek: Deep Space Nine at Star Trek Las Vegas 2015. We talk about their DS9 characters – how they developed and challenged gender roles, as well as favourite scenes, community work and current projects, including Nana’s dream to have a play with Rene Auberjonois as a talking cat!
When we left off at the end of Part 1, Lexxa Singh and her crew of renegades had just been captured by the problematically racialized and confusingly motivated baddie Borrada.
Now, we see them in captivity, surrounded by effectively grotesque skeletons of Borrada’s previous dead.
I’ve been anticipating the release of Star Trek: Renegades for about two years now. I remember that when the crowdfunding campaign started, Ria at thevalkyriedirective did a mini-campaign to encourage them to craft strong female characters with functional costumes, and she got a fairly positive response from the creators.
But in 2014 we started to see more photos from set and became a bit more wary on the costume front. And while the main Captain is obviously a tough woman, I thought it was a missed opportunity not to cast an actress of colour as a “direct descendant of Khan Noonien Singh” - akin to the whitewashing of Khan in STID.
So all of that said, I’ve been pretty much reserving judgment overall until I see it, which is going to happen tonight, and I am going to live blog it for you all. If you want to watch along, head on over to YouTube.
In addition to the whitewashing issues and unnecessary rape mention, Renegades was ruined for me at the STLV screening when someone asked if writing awesome women characters was intentional and the writer said yeah and Koenig interrupted with something about them being hot and the dudes all turned on by it. I’m sure someone remembers exactly what he said. You could see every woman in the audience just sort of sigh while all the men laughed. It was a downer.
I heard what happened was two women thanked Koenig and Russ for writing in tough female characters and Koenig replied something along the lines of, “Well, we have a lot of horny guys watching,” as if the only reason they put so many women in was for the benefit of male viewers sexualizing them. Pretty gross.
Boldly going where no feminist has gone before.