Lwaxana is loud. She’s flamboyant and vibrant and loud. She speaks with great inflection and an abundance of words. And she does so because she’s enamored with sound.
Betazed is quiet. Words aren’t spoken aloud. Her own father refused to speak (as Deanna said, he believed it was for off-worlders and people who didn’t know any better). Lwaxana grew up in a quiet home, on a quiet planet.
And then… then she traveled.
She threw herself into the noise of the universe and it was glorious. People speak of the sights of the galaxy, but what of its sounds? And she began to use her own voice, and she discovered that she could use vocabulary and inflection to create such wonderously new sounds with her own voice.
Deanna never understood why her mother was so much more talkative aloud, when her loquaciousness was rather average telepathically. She didn’t understand that it wasn’t about the words or the message but the sound.
I am so on board with this. It explains so many things, adds such depth to the character, and gives the relationships she has and develops a different cast all together.
Even just looking at her relationship with Deanna, who seems perpetually frustrated with and embarrassed by what her mother says aloud, where Deanna is having to negotiate this dichotomy of the two people she sees in her mother: the one who insists Deanna speak with her telepathically and is as perfectly formal as any other Betazed, vs. the woman who says whatever comes to mind in the most extravagant way possible seemingly just to get a rise out of those around her.
It’s so beautiful in the simplicity of delivery, leaving it ripe for interpretation, and in the interpretation a deeper understanding.
Plus, I totally get loving words and the different ways we can employ them to express thoughts and feelings. Travelling the world by sound, over the web or in person, is a beautiful way to experiences the way cultures use words to convey and emote. Ah, the different ways people use the same words, changing tone and inflection, changing emphasis from one thought to the next. It’s intoxicating.
And then you start to learn how you can use it, too, and it feels like a super power.
I can only imagine what Lwaxana would have felt, going from a world of silence to a world of sound the way she did.
