thinking about the episode where kathryn janeway tells an alien that while other kids were outside making friends, she was indoors doing quadratic equations. (Sacred Ground, fwiw). she does this to imply she was never very adventurous or friendly.
I read that woman’s biography (Mosaic) and her autobiography (The Autobiography of Kathryn Janeway), and listened to her later tell her own crew of various adventures like sneaking out of the house and walking miles in a thunderstorm after losing a tennis match.
woman almost died cave diving because her friends chickened out and she went with a boy instead. got a commendation for sneaking off campus because she saved an old woman’s life in the process. built a replica of da vinci’s flying machine so she could pilot it onto the roof of the dean’s office.
Kathryn Janeway is a scientist in the way Indiana Jones is an archaeologist. undoubtedly qualified, but there’s gonna be a caper about it.
rather than view her statement as an outright lie or a bad characterization by the writers, however, the funnier option is that she thinks of herself as rather introverted, withdrawn, and nerdy. That she is so deep in the trenches of her own mental landscape that she doesn’t realize that other people view her pursuit of science and diplomacy as acts of extreme charismatic recklessness.
which makes it doubly hilarious that jock Kathryn Janeway, who destroys the entire ship at Velocity and routinely heads her own away missions and has single-handedly reclaimed her ship from hostile aliens multiple times, looks at herself and thinks: yeah, I’m very boring.
