benvenuto a tutti quanti

[id: x/twitter qrt from user styloshka that says "I read a forum post about art once, that it's a product of the dialectic between the effort of the artist and the friction of the medium. You push on the thing and the thing pushes back on you, it has its own voice. The weight of a piano key, the tension of a guitar string." original post from user colleen_daves says "Don't you want to skip over the mindless drudgery that is making art?" I do six stand embroidery and break like 10 needles a day, would I prefer that activity didn't hurt my hands and make me angry? Sure. But that's what makes having the finished piece after so worth it to me."]

to be clear: Kate Mulgrew was not pregnant on the set of Voyager. I meant this purely in the "what if?" sense and the "what if?" in my head is that the showrunners need some on-screen fabrication as to why Janeway looks pregnant, so they invent just the absolute worst possible scenario to impregnate Star Trek's least breedable character. (sorry, A.B.O. people who keep making Janeway an omega in fics, but she's an alpha. I don't make the rules).

anyway this results in a season-long subplot which starts with Janeway finally (and reluctantly) visiting sickbay for her long overdue annual medical, where the Doctor cheerfully announces that she's perfectly healthy and also pregnant. record scratch and a quick zoom on Janeway's face before the title sequence starts.

then follows a god-awful merry-go-round of "that's impossible!!" and "how can this be??" and characters taking bets on who the lucky guy is, and the Doctor making a sly comment about "why would it have to be a man?" which people misinterpret as #bipower or whatever but it's actually shot down so fast it's borderline homophobic. To say nothing of the question of choice vs anti-abortion which is given only the flimsiest of lip-service, because eventually it's revealed that the real culprit all along was Q and silly humans could never dream of being able to actually kill a Q. The pregnancy is for poorly explained and self-proclaimed complicated reasons that make no sense and involve far too many uncomfortable jokes that with hindsight go beyond misogyny and spawn literal decades of debate about whether Q impregnating Janeway without her consent can be described as rape if there was no actual physical interaction between them.

in the episodes that follow, the pregnancy is only ever mentioned in passing jokes or hackneyed one-offs eg/ "the Captain can't drink coffee anymore because it's bad for baby!!" and "an alien species has been rendered sterile and kidnaps the Captain to try to unlock the power of fertility!" etc etc you get the idea, until eventually Janeway gives birth and everyone is wondering how they're going to raise a literal demigod on Voyager when Q suddenly appears and offers up some snappy dialogue before spiriting the baby away.

this arc is largely forgotten in later seasons, though occasionally the writers will scrape the bottom of the barrel for ideas, and Janeway will inexplicably become teary at a random point, waxing lyrical about some perceived chance of motherhood being missed. Everybody either tries to forget about this saga and pretend it doesn't exist, or they double down on Janeway-As-Mother-Figure because god forbid a woman be anything but a mother.