We're all queer here

How often is he left to his own thoughts while she's resting or sleeping? How much sleep does he manage to get, with the all-too-recent memory burned into his brain of his other Blighted patients screaming in agony as they die around him?

And I've never really thought too hard about the last shot on Teplna before, but it really got to me this time, with Julian standing out-of-sight watching from a ruin, while everyone celebrates the baby Trevean's holding. The way he's actively avoiding the praise or gratitude he could easily have received by going along with Trevean...

How often is he left to his own thoughts while she's resting or sleeping? How much sleep does he manage to get, with the all-too-recent memory burned into his brain of his other Blighted patients screaming in agony as they die around him?

And I've never really thought too hard about the last shot on Teplna before, but it really got to me this time, with Julian standing out-of-sight watching from a ruin, while everyone celebrates the baby Trevean's holding. The way he's actively avoiding the praise or gratitude he could easily have received by going along with Trevean...

Explode, you say?

Actually, I am of the strong opinion that most main character deaths should come mid-season anyway, so that we get to see the impact it has in the other characters and really feel the hole that their absence leaves. End-of-season deaths always seem to be followed by some sort of time skip in which most of the morning happens off-screen and I despise it.

I tend to agree that ten episodes of morning and then Ezri showing up to get Ben from Sisko's Restaurant would've had a great emotional impact. Worf choosing duty and honor over his wife would've been very in character, but it definitely would've given all of them much more to play. Worf could've saved the symbiont but lost Jadzia in the episode, setting the scene up for Dax to come back as Ezri in Image in the Sand. They only would have needed another tragic event to trigger Ben leaving DS9 and going back to Earth.

They didn't even really use Jadzia to her full potential throughout the series anyway, but she was especially underutilized after Change of Heart. She didn't have huge dramatic turns that would've been affected by her absence, and in some cases they would've been made more resonant because of it. The Sound of Her Voice would've been heart wrenching knowing they were talking to a dead woman during her wake, then they would feel the absence of their fallen friend even more, her absence would be felt without even having to evoke her name. Plus Jadzia only had TWO LINES in that episode, explaining the wake:

Worf could've played his grief while any of the other characters could've explained what an Irish wake was, probably O'Brien.

She had 3 lines in Inquisition. She had ONE line in Profit and Lace. She fixes Quark's replicator in Valiant for a total of 5 lines. She has a little heart-to-heart with Kira in His Way, plus a little interaction with some other characters. All in all, she doesn't have much going on.

In The Pale Moonlight could've been more resonant since what spurred Ben Sisko to action in the first place was the loss of friends and colleagues because of the war, and Jadzia only serves as a bookend in this episode talking about death and loss anyway. Her biggest episode post Change of Heart is probably The Reckoning, serving as a conduit for technobabble and a sounding board for Sisko. She's in Time's Orphan a fair amount for technobabble as well, but that episode serves mostly to set up her wanting a child during Tears of the Prophets. (IMO a cheap tactic to make her death more tragic because she wanted a child, but I digress.) Even in Tears of the Prophets she isn't very present in the episode, since there are bigger plot points being played out on the Defiant and with Dukat. She gets a couple moments with the characters closest to her then a few measly goodbyes and that's it.

Redraw of Kirk’s very-graceful frontflip from The Arena!

But what’s striking about it as well is that Julian Bashir has not only also been a political prisoner, but has undergone a very comparable trauma in the form of having Romulan memory probes used on him in “Inter Arma Enim Silent Leges.” I think one could argue that that episode also does not attend to the trauma of that experience as fully as it could (instead only noting that the devices weren’t effective on him), but it does at least get emotional follow-through in “Extreme Measures” when he takes a cold and vindictive pleasure in turning the same instrument against Sloan, and it becomes pretty unambiguous that He Didn’t Enjoy That, Actually. There is no such gravitas placed on Ezri’s experience (even though Ezri has been established as struggling with violent impulses since the joining, something torture trauma would only exacerbate).

"Spider-Man New York Stories: The Fashion Consultant" ✨️ A funny and lighthearted Spider-Man and The Nanny crossover story, by yours truly✨️

A story for the 90's people! In case you don't know, The Nanny was a 90s TV show, starring Fran Drescher, which took place in New York! So... of course I had to write this.

I started this story almost a year ago 😭✨️ I need to be faster when making comics HAHAHAAHHS