then I defy you, stars

"oh ryland. only you would cry over a bunch of rocks."

To a significant degree, I think the writers had a nasty habit of writing interesting plot points about Jadzia and then just kinda dropping them (I wish we could have gotten a more direct exploration on her thoughts of her home planet's society), but this ends up characterizing her very uniquely. Because although I do make that criticism, it creates a fascinating pattern of when she decides to be a rule-breaker and when she's willing to make great personal sacrifice for the bigger picture.

Jadzia spent her pre-joining life working herself to exhaustion just for a fleeting chance at getting a symbiont, to the point where she (by her own admission) had very little else to say about her as a person before then. She dedicated her life to playing the game of the Symbiosis Commission and accepted what it would impose onto her (including, it would seem, its gravest injustices). Her pattern of accepting the circumstances detailed in the episodes mentioned above seems to grow from her learned reverence for her society's rules, which I think can be seen in "Tacking Into the Wind" (S7, E22). Ezri's view of the Klingon government and society are far less romantic than Jadzia's, and she's completely willing to criticize Worf's complacency in its failures than Jadzia ever would have been. By extension, I hardly think Ezri would have been willing to make the same self-sacrifices for Trill society that Jadzia did. This is not to suggest that Ezri isn't anxious to stand up for herself in that manner (she self-evidently is), but it does suggest that this part of Jadzia Dax's character seems to largely come from Jadzia rather than Dax.

Jadzia's relationship to Dax and its history also play into this: she perpetually lives under the shadow of her past hosts, Curzon chief among them, and beneath the confident, collected veneer, she's shown to seriously grapple with imposter syndrome and feelings of inadequacy (interesting then how she haunts Ezri after the latter's unexpected joining). Her grim acceptance of the abuse she faces at the hands of Trill society and Symbiosis Commission comes from the part of her that desperately needs to receive validation of those things (for which Curzon serves as a frequent stand-in). (By contrast, Ezri is far, far less interested in validating her role as host and mostly just bemoans what her joining has done to/taken from her.)

What all this amounts to for Jadzia's character is that, despite the fact that she was originally intended by the writers to be a mentor wise beyond her years, she ends up repressing a lot of her own feelings and selfhood, unwilling to assert that against the looming shadows towering over her. Her confidence and lust for life, though by no means ingenuine, often serve as a shield against self-introspection that might make her precarious respect for her society come crashing down (this post by @respocked is largely what inspired me to write this in the first place). Despite this, she does take genuine joy in her life, her friends, and herself. She is extremely genuine in her actions and in what she chooses to be, and certainly no one can accuse her of being unsure in her convictions. She's fun, she's her own person, and she's a truly irreplaceable presence in everyone's life.

because helen wants to be a storyteller, helen is meant to be a storyteller. helen wants to encode men’s lives in tapestry and eulogy. that’s how we see her when she’s left on her own: striving for domesticity and simplicity, not fame. she is, in homer, the ideal woman, not just beautiful but devoted to her family, modest and hardworking, and so very aware of the responsibility of carrying the memories of those who die.

lmao ja dat was dus ook mijn eerste gedachte

which meant i went and read about snail brains.

here's the bad news, at least by human standards:

snails do not have anything like a centralized brain. their nervous system is made up of small clusters of neurons (ganglia) that mostly handle very local tasks. they don't have a cortex, they don't build big integrated models of the world, and they almost certainly don't experience things like appreciation, anticipation, or savoring.

pudding is not looking at the sky and thinking it's beautiful.

snail eyes are basically light sensors - they can tell bright from dark, but not form images. snail "taste" is done through chemoreceptors on their tentacles and around their mouth. those receptors don't produce flavor the way ours do; they just detect chemical compounds and sort them into "approach," "ignore," or "avoid."

so there's no evidence that snails enjoy food, or wind, or views, the way mammals do.

and that does sound kind of sad. but then i thought that maybe we are asking the wrong question.

snails do have valence. they detect aversive things (like salt or dryness) and withdraw from them. they detect non-aversive or beneficial conditions (like moisture) and stay extended. when pudding is stretched out like this, it means his nervous system is basically saying "this is safe; nothing is wrong."

if we define pleasure not as our human experience of dopamine and reward chemicals but instead as "the absence of aversion" - a state where the organism is open to its environment instead of defending itself - then this does count as something positive, even if it's extremely nothing like human enjoyment.

pudding isn't appreciating the wind. but his body is registering humidity, safety, and the ability to keep functioning, and that matters to him in the only way his nervous system can make things matter. he does not think "this is great, this is awesome, i love the weather", because he doesn't think in the way we do at all, but the neurological action in his ganglion tell his body that he is safe, that the moisture is an acceptable level, that it's not too dry or windy, and that there's nothing imminently threatening.

i think a lot of the sadness comes from assuming that a good life has to look like ours: full of enjoyment, meaning, and aesthetic experience. but a snail isn't missing those things. its world just isn't built to include them.

snails don't have a sense of flavor. they don't even have tastebuds. this seems like a gimme, right? but again that might be asking the wrong question about what "taste" is. biologically speaking, it's chemoreception. we taste sweet because it indicates high value, high calorie sugar molecules. we taste salty for salt, umami for proteins. so in what way does pudding's chemoreceptors differ from ours instrumentally? we can say "by our human perspective, pudding can't experience "preference" or "savoring" or "anticipation of delicious food"", but from pudding's perspective we have radically overengineered ourselves for the task at hand. pudding can tell what's salty, what's high value, what has the chemicals he needs. the functional outcome is that he can discriminate food souces based on their composition. is that not taste?