One of the things in the fandom that frustrates me about people trying to ignore that Kira had some legitimately illiberal beliefs (like her support of the d'jarras caste system, initially preferring the conservative fundamentalist Winn for Kai over a moderate like Bareil) is that I think the fact that Bajoran politics and religion include some genuinely yikes stuff is what makes the way early DS9 handles its postcolonial story so good. It's really easy to make the colonized culture (Bajor) all good and the colonizer culture (Cardassia) all bad -- but it does neither of those things, there are negative things about traditional Bajoran society and culture, and positive things about Cardassian society and culture. Not only does that kind of grappling with "what do we keep, what can we leave behind" make for a much more honest portrayal of a formerly-colonized nation rebuilding after independence, but it also challenges the audience to have more genuine support for anti-colonialism. Because in most real-world cases, the original culture wasn't perfect -- no culture is -- but still, colonialism is bad, the things colonizers do are human rights abuses, and every people deserves the right to self-determination anyway. This is a thing that comes up in a lot of genuine postcolonial literature (especially in terms of women's rights and patriarchy -- Season of Migration to the North and high school literature class favorite Things Fall Apart come to mind as books that are anti-colonialist but still often show the colonized culture [Sudan and Nigeria respectively] in an unfavorable light in that way) and it's cool to see an American TV show from the 1990s grappling with these ideas in a sci-fi context. I complain a lot about DS9's politics especially re: race and pluralism but I think this aspect of it is pretty good, one of the things that most drew me into the show initially, and not remarked-upon enough. And despite being a 30-year-old show it's a particularly salient message I think for a lot of modern fandom social justice culture, where people too often conflate being oppressed with being virtuous -- when in fact, whether someone is a good person or believes in good things is irrelevant as to whether they deserve human rights of the kind that Bajorans were denied during the Cardassian occupation. And you should have to seriously consider ideologies that differ from your own in order to truly reject them, which DS9 does more than any other Trek show with its non-Federation alien characters in general.
ALTfuuuuuuuuck
