some people call me the space barbie

[ladysisyphus]

I haven't checked the Voyager Skip It/Watch It guides I did for lizlet in a while, and I found a comment in my Season 5 Guide that I started to answer ... and then it got way out of hand. So, uh, I brought it over here, and I'll make a link over there when I'm done.

These criteria are so odd. The reasons for throwing in forced romances may be subject,

Comments

[quaedam]

I gotta agree with all of this. And I didn't even remember the 'she's mentally maybe 8 or 9 years old' part of that shitshow!

And "when women have sexual awareness and autonomy, they won't dress in heels and a skintight suit on this starship, so if we want a woman in heels and a skintight suit on this starship, we have to create a woman with no sexual awareness or autonomy" is spot on, and probably (from what I recall of Enterprise) also applies to T'Pol from Enterprise, and lots of other female versions of a Spock or Data type character who Does Not Understand Your Human Emotions. Which is really sad, because I enjoy characters like that. But when it's a dude, they never decide that his cluelessness about his shipmates' feelings or urges means that he's definitely gonna wander around the ship nude or in spandex 24-7, because it's just the most efficient and hygienic thing to do and really he does not understand your human concept of shame.

I also recall that the ending of Voyager, where Seven got some kind of chip turned off or on in her head that dialed her human emotions back up, just so they could shoehorn in a last minute romance with Chakotay, was real annoying. Compared real badly to how Data's 'emotion chip' thing was dealt with, too -- I mean, after Data got his emotion chip installed, he was able to turn it on and off at will. But Seven doesn't get to just sample human emotion and then turn it off when she'd prefer not to deal with it.

(ngl I enjoyed a whole lot about Seven as a character; I love all robots and enemies turned friends, but the parts where the show was clearly drooling over making her helpless or vulnerable in ways they never would've done to a male emotionless alien/robot character were so gross and offputting)

[ladysisyphus]

It's really hard to gauge Seven's mental age, because obviously she's incredibly bright and has few of the impulse control problems specific to young people. But she stopped human maturation when she was pretty dang young, and all of her adult thought processes prior to de-coupling are Borg Collective thoughts -- EXCEPT that at the very start of season seven, they pull that weird, oh, right, she was always a Special Borg, she had a creepy boyfriend with all the other Special Borg in their special mental sex garden. But I would lay much money on how nobody even remotely had that in mind until ... well, probably until they sat down to write the season six finale. Besides, I don't know how better 'you grew up and had sexual experiences in a part of your mind you are incapable of accessing' makes things.

I don't want to say 'I wish Seven had been male', because, no, I don't wish she'd been male; she was fantastic in a lot of ways mainstream science fiction doesn't often give women a chance to be. But if dude_Seven had been there instead, we viewers would have been spared so much of the gross that surrounded Seven. And that's a shitty tradeoff!

Star Trek is obviously capable of creating female characters without sexualizing them to the gills, and has done so even on Voyager itself. (T'Pol's presence is pretty unforgivable on a number of levels, not least because of how few other women ever appeared on Enterprise -- at least until I stopped watching.) Even Troi's catsuits were kind of stupid and unprofessional-looking, but she knew she was a pretty lady and often put her pretty lady skills to use on boys she liked (like Worf!). Hell, you can even specifically put a sexy lady in a sexy silver catsuit -- see: Mirror Kira -- and keep her totally in charge of her own body and presentation. But when the high sexiness of a character is inversely proportionate to their own control and design over it, you're on your way to make a RealDoll.

Not to summon Candlejack here, but I think Voyager and Enterprise are victims of the same horror that's lead to GamerGate: the idea that creating a space that men will visit at all necessitates creating a space that only men will visit, because stinky girls ruin everything. (If girls want to show up, that's fine, but they need to behave like 'neutral' consumers; i.e., men.) And just to show men how welcome they are, we're going to put in characters that are very clearly coded as fetish objects -- not just sexy humans, but fetish objects. And then instead of having them categorically reject that fetish object status (which I've seen happen, like in Xenosaga), they get played right into the same nerd romance wish fulfilment plots.

I also don't want to find myself in the place where I'm saying, it's wrong to find Seven sexy! Because it's not! I mean, it's what she's designed to be, so if that's what you think she is, well, that design is working. But the fact that she's given all the sexuality and none of the agency around it creeps me the hell out, and seeing other male characters heroically try to use that sexuality to their own ends makes me want to crawl right out of my skin.

[quaedam]

Yeah. It's different with Counselor Troi, I think -- her specific superpower is supposed to be knowing exactly what's going on with other people's emotions. It's still a bit weird to have one character on the ship who dresses in a nonregulation uniform like that (maybe especially when it's the ship's counselor haha), but idk, maybe it's just... different cultural mores among Betazoids or something. Which is not really the same thing as, idk, the girl from Forbidden Planet dressing in next to nothing because she's been kept unnaturally innocent her whole life.

And I definitely don't wish Seven had been a dude, I guess the comparison to how guys in similar situations in the same series were treated just makes me mad. And/or makes me think how cool it would've been if she'd been allowed to do some of the same things they did.