I've been thinking about Neroon off and on ever since that post I reblogged earlier. I get why he had to die, narratively speaking, and I like that ending for him, but one of the reasons why I wish he'd lived - besides just really liking his grudging development of mutual friendship/respect with Delenn - is that we really know next to nothing about the culture of the two other Minbari castes.
They are effectively three different cultures under one umbrella, and although they do have some things in common (most of them imposed by Valen; thank u for your service Jeff) I think it's reasonable to assume that nearly every cultural thing we see Delenn doing on the show, ranging from the marriage ceremony in season one to all of the various courtship rituals and religious stuff, is religious caste Minbari culture. We really have no idea what the warrior caste does. I think it's safe to say that watching their prospective spouse sleep for three days is not really their kind of thing; they probably have to defeat them in staff combat three days running or something like that. IIRC, it's even canon (extracanonical canon, perhaps) that the language we hear spoken in the series is religious Minbari, and the other two castes have their own languages or at least dialects.
The way that Delenn spends the entire series using the religious Minbari culture as a synecdoche for Minbari culture as a whole is very her and very typical of the Minbari in general - the fact that each caste thinks of themselves as the "true" Minbari seems very them. (And tbf, the humans are doing the same thing, since despite B5's various nods to decent-for-its-period diversity, Babylon 5 in general is an extremely narrow slice of the human cultural experience ...)
But since we really don't know much about the warrior caste, and Delenn presumably doesn't either, it would have been such a delight to see her and Neroon actually dealing with that once in a while. In canon, they only get to the point where they even would have dinner together, socialize voluntarily, play a game, whatever, in those two episodes in season four, at the end of which he dies. But it would have been just so ... idk, cute, and very much in keeping with B5's themes, to watch them both running up against their own cultural chauvinism and lack of understanding of the other's caste culture - but in the same gentle way as late-season Londo and G'Kar, where it's more an opportunity for "oh, we do things this way, do you want to try it?" than a reason for an actual fight. And I would have liked to see a little of that onscreen.
amandla
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titsay
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turnnoffyourmind
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