I have no issue with the Bajorans.
They were after all just another alien of the week who got fleshed out a bit more in a later series. They may seem one sided as only super-religious but they were no more ridiculous than every Klingon being all about honor, or every Romulan being a scheming intelligence operative. That was just poor writing, but they are at least equal to the Klingons in terms or what we know about them.
Really their whole religious mediation side is no different to the Vulcans, only without the obsession with logic to it.
I honestly don't think that much of the player base feels either way about them, no more so than all the other myriad of alien planets and species we encounter in the game.
They had a pretty terrible experience under the Cardassian occupation, so it's no wonder some of them felt the need to fight back (even if targeting civilians made those attacks no better than what they were suffering under).
Certain people can try to claim the Cardasian occupation was a blessing for the Bajorans but it's clearly not that way, almost all the canon sources show its a was a brutal occupation with killings, enslavement, labour camps; all the usual "bad dictatorship" cliches.
It's pretty easy to see what your game is if you feel the need to publicly praise the kind of treatment the Bajorans were susceptible to under the occupation. I think the initial purpose of this thread is pretty evident too...but at least it has stimulated some interesting posts about how the stories could have been different in written post 2001.
The sources for all the bad things the Cardassians did in DS9 was the Bajorans though. Not entirely a trustworthy source if you ask me.
They consistently sounded like a bunch of religious fanatics trying to justify violent terrorism after the fact. Bear in mind the Bajoran government was comprised almost entirely of admitted former terrorists so you can't take anything they say at face value.
The sources for all the bad things the Cardassians did in DS9 was the Bajorans though. Not entirely a trustworthy source if you ask me.
They consistently sounded like a bunch of religious fanatics trying to justify violent terrorism after the fact. Bear in mind the Bajoran government was comprised almost entirely of admitted former terrorists so you can't take anything they say at face value.
From British point of view, after the Revolutionary War, the US government was comprised almost entirely of admitted former terrorists.
Right. We've been fed a single perspective of the Bajoran/Cardassians issue almost entirely through the eyes of the Bajorans themselves. If you read interviews with ISIS fighters, you'd get a much rosier picture of their "movement", with colonialism, the west, apostates, etc, all being at fault. Thankfully, we have objective records of their terrorist activities and barbarism from numerous other sources.
Yeah but in fairness all we've got to go on is the canon sources, which give us this perspective of the Bajorans. There's little to go on with the Cardasians or on their view of the occupation.
So most of what people think about the Cardasians is based purely on speculation so we have no way of knowing if it's close to the truth or not, as such it's meaningless compared to the actual canon source material.
I agree with that completely, which is why I say that the Bajoran issue is more a problem with writing and writers of the series than anything else.
Yes, I think it would be really interesting to see what the story-lines would have been like if it was written post 9/11, or even post the Iraq invasion and occupation in the following years. I guess that might have hit a little too close to home for a lot of US viewers to have the bad guys onscreen be acting performing a similar action to their troops on the ground, especially as they were seen by some people globally.
It probably would have scared the network off that particular story-line!
Perhaps in a mirror Earth the DS9 story was quite different...
They're also terrorists, and in 2016 people don't take too kindly to terrorists.
As the saying goes: one person's terrorist is another one's freedom fighter.
While I do agree that most Bajorans (as in "named characters who speak a line") are very annoying - though I do like both Kira and Ro, even though the former is somewhat overdone in places - and that there are some things which I'd consider not good (to use a very euphemistic euphemism), people seem to overlook what they were fighting (freedom fighting or terror fighting - your pick) against. The main Cardassian government was after all a not very subtle allusion to the first half of the last century.
I DO think however, that the Bajorans tend to get a lot of flak along the whole "is DS9 the best or the worst ever" series discussion. The whole heavy handed "social situation" angle can be considered either an aspect of depth in the series or taking away from the main draw of space action.
This is the kind of discussion I've wanted to have about DS9 for a long time.
The Bajorans are depicted as freedom fighters and are on the side of the good guys.
But the series wrapped in summer of 1999.
I constantly think about how the stories might have been affected, and the characterizations could have changed if it had kept going past 9/11, when the country itself changed its outlook on the freedom fighting tactics the Bajorans used. While the Cardassians were painted as the villains in a broad stroke, we do see often that Bajoran freedom fighters did terrible acts of terrorism to the Cardassians. And there were quite a few sympathetic Cardassians in the ongoing story.
As a country, the U.S. has had a massive paradigm shift in how it treats the tactics that the Bajorans used. And looking back on their traits, they are religious zealots who incorporate acts of terrorism in their overall push for freedom.
I'm constantly intrigued by the idea of revisiting the Bajoran/Cardassian relationship this many years later with a very different perspective on things. I don't know. But yeah, what I'm getting at is while the stories did paint the Bajorans as freedom fighters quite often, there was depth and an edge to that. And while the stories did paint the Cardassians as tyrannical conquerors, there was even depth and sympathy for some of that, especially in the final season arc as you got to know more of the Cardassians when they became the conquered.
You're right the series had depth. But I think in a re-examination of it, it has even more potential depth than ever before. Because I agree, one person's freedom fighter is another person's terrorist. And there has been a pretty big shift in American views on that whole concept in the years since DS9 aired.
So. Much. Potential.
To be fair, that potential would only really be there if the two acts (9/11 and Bajoran rebellion) were comparable or if they're seen as comparable. They're not. There's a clear difference between actors involved, motives and goals.
First off, the links between Bin Laden/Al Qaida and the US go back to a point in time way before 2001 and have much to do with American foreign policy of supporting the wrong guys (take a look at Syria for a more recent example) in general, and specifically regarding the Soviet Union and Afghanistan. Further, there are clear indications that they were helped by other foreign governments like Saudi Arabia. Edit: which leads me to conclude that 9/11 had nothing to do with fighting for freedom, but rather with proxy wars, conflicts between governments and, in a way, it was even facilitated by earlier foreign policy. Completely different from the Bajoran conflict in this respect.
Motives and goals then: difficult to say without looking inside the heads of those who carried out the attacks, but for Bajor the fight for freedom was an important aspect. There seems to have been no such thing around 9/11, the sole purpose seems to have been to either strike fear or just to take as many innocent lifes as possible because of religious/ideological motives. Either way, it instantly takes away the good reasons and goals Bajorans had in mind, which was freedom from occupation. Also, keep in mind that Bajorans were fighting the perceived enemy on their own soil; which is completely different from hijacking an airplane and hitting a civilian target on the soil of your perceived enemy.
Completely different tactics, different motives, entirely different actions in fact. I don't see how true fighting for freedom (of which the Palestinian-Israeli conflict may be a much better real life example to give just one) would be a less righteous cause just because some crazy idiots flew an airplane inside multiple targets (one of them, the Pentagon, being a military target btw), targets that were mostly filled with people who likely had never set foot on the ground in either Afganistan or Pakistan.
Coming back to Bajor: I'm not aware that innocent Cardassians were targeted by the Bajoran resistance, not systematically at least. If there is evidence of that from Memory Alpha or within episodes, then I might agree that not all Bajoran tactics were acceptible and that some Bajorans may have been as wrong/bad as the Cardassians.
__
The second thing then (not specifically aimed at you Snoggymack), the religiousness: as already explained, these weren't the main motives and it's just one reason why the comparison with 9/11 fails imo. Well explained by @starkaos . I do want to ask: since when does being religious make someone bad or since when does it justify military occupation? Hating someone, even extremely religious people who don't affect your own life in any way, for being religious and justifying military occupation says a lot more about the hateful person than about the religious one.
And no, I'm not religious in any way. But I would almost wonder how many accounts Richard Dawkins has on this Forum whenever religion is brought up in threads about Bajor lol.
Right. We've been fed a single perspective of the Bajoran/Cardassians issue almost entirely through the eyes of the Bajorans themselves. If you read interviews with ISIS fighters, you'd get a much rosier picture of their "movement", with colonialism, the west, apostates, etc, all being at fault. Thankfully, we have objective records of their terrorist activities and barbarism from numerous other sources.
Well, we do know about the Bajoran/Cardassian conflict that one of them was ruling uninvited over the others. All details aside, backwards or not; mass killings or torture or terrorists targeting civilians or not. This is at best a colonial or "enlightened Europeans vs aboriginal people who need governance" issue. Which in my opinion is not very good for being a best.
I do get some of the sympathy for Cardassians from the fact that they were indeed better written. Elim Garak was one of the most interesting characters of the franchise - they overdid him in the end, but it still holds. Gul Dukat was universally hated, but not the way he was written, he was a well written baddie. Kai Winn was annoying, then annoying, and finally annoying. And you can argue that there were quite a few strawmen in the whole storyline. But still these strawmen have a point. Or would you like foreign occupation for your country, even with all basic necessities cared for, maybe even better than when you were self-ruled, but not being allowed to practive your religion, celebrate your holidays, or have any say in political and similar at all?
This also makes for a nice contrast with the discussion which pops up here and there about how stupid, albeit canonical, it is (or isn't, depending on your stance), that the Klingons will be part of the federation in the 31st century. Both discussions also rely on the question of how much a planet of hats each race will be, and how static that hat is.
As for the pre/post 9/11 question, that is surely interesting. And probably the angle would have been tuned down out of fear of opening fresh wounds. But I doubt that there would be too much restraint. After all, some of the things the US did after the 9/11 attacks were highly discussed as well. The ongoing battles for Aleppo and Mossul are being covered very differently, despite having many superficial similarities, just depending on which side is attacking and which is defending. And that is an issue, though you oughta tread carefully, lest you become what you are fighting (as somebody already said in this thread). But the differentiation between good guys and bad guys, already strong in many in real life, even easier in a movie set with fictional people, would in my opinion still have made it possible to run these storylines past 9/11.
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Right. We've been fed a single perspective of the Bajoran/Cardassians issue almost entirely through the eyes of the Bajorans themselves. If you read interviews with ISIS fighters, you'd get a much rosier picture of their "movement", with colonialism, the west, apostates, etc, all being at fault. Thankfully, we have objective records of their terrorist activities and barbarism from numerous other sources.
Yeah but in fairness all we've got to go on is the canon sources, which give us this perspective of the Bajorans. There's little to go on with the Cardasians or on their view of the occupation.
So most of what people think about the Cardasians is based purely on speculation so we have no way of knowing if it's close to the truth or not, as such it's meaningless compared to the actual canon source material.
Well.... The Federation did verify quite a lot of it. So we're not actually taking the Bajorans' word for it.
One thing we DO know is that most Cardassians had no idea what their government was doing. Prior to Dukat's death, the Cardassian government basically treated the populace as sheeple who were told what to think by the government, and nothing more. Even the people working in the camps didn't know all of what was going on in the camp they were working at.
I'd say my biggest issue with the Bajorans, especially as they exist today, is they aren't willing to give Cardassia a shred of credit to their current freedoms.
Even if you buy in completely to the Bajorans version of events during the Cardassian occupation, it can't be denied that Cardassia brought the Bajorans people out of what might be called a social dark age.
They had a caste system in place, which determined your job from your birth, you had no choice in the matter, but Cardassia abolished this system, and the government which kept it in place, bringing an equality of sorts to Bajor.
Knowing this, it's entirely likely that the resistance movement was in large part funded by remnants of the old government who were angry that the system that kept them in power for so long was now gone. They used the shared religion of Bajor to whip the more common folk into a frenzy, and now you have innocent families, Cardassian and Bajoran alike, being killed by these rebels, the Cardassian government responds harshly, they know already that you can't negotiate with terrorists. And the former Bajoran aristocracy who goaded the attack feign disgust with the Cardassian "over reaction", encouraging further attacks from newly recruited resistance fighters.
Eventually, the resistance goes on so long that most of the original fighters are gone, and knowledge of the aristocracies role gone with them. This grants the Priests and other leaders a small degree of deniability while they watch their people kill themselves against the very "enemy" who freed them from their shackles in the first place.
In "The Darkness and the Light" Kira really showed herself to be a terrorist, right after Silaran tells her about the way she killed Gul Pirak's entire family:
KIRA: "I don't care whether you held a phaser in your hand or you ironed shirts for a living. You were all guilty and you were all legitimate targets!"
SILARAN: "And that's what makes you a murderer. Indiscriminate killing... no sense of morality... no thought given to the consequences of your action. That's what makes us different."
(...)
"I am bringing the guilty to justice. And unlike you, I take care to protect the innocent. I could have killed every monk in that cavern or everyone on the runabout, or half the population of Deep Space Nine, but I didn't. Only the guilty have died. And that is why, although your actions have condemned you, the life of your child will be spared."
Silarin was right: Kira had crossed a line with her indiscriminate killing. The show totally brushed over it (just painting Silarin as a mad man, which he kinda was, but he wasn't wrong).
Well, another way to look at the Bajoran stance is to compare it to the real world policy of "trespassers will be shot"(yes this is morally questionable IRL, but it's the law in many places). The Bajorans wanted the Cardassians to go back to Cardassia. Thus the simple fact that they were in Bajoran territory was criminal.
Kira didn't say what she felt they were guilty of, just that they were guilty of something.
Bajorans are hateable because they wanted strife on DS9 and having your ally not want you there and fighting you on every turn makes for drama. But it does not paint a pretty picture for those allies.
When they did have a reasonable bajoran we could like for one reason or another. Names escape me but both men were resistance fighters and military men. One was sent to hold DS9 and was hunting Sisko and company. But he came off as wily and had no real malice to him. His subordinate however lacked discipline and followed party lines so hard he ended up dishonouring his superior so we never saw him again. Same time frame. Bajoran they all looked up to as a great leader and fighter. He got those accolades by accident and was a third rate fighter at best. But when the time came he stood up and lead because his people needed him to. So he got gunned down by hardline bajorans.
Any bajoran we saw with more depth than one dimension was brushed aside within an episode or two so the only one you kept on screen was Kira Nyrese. (Probably spelled that wrong.) And to make her 'interesting' after her firebranding ways began to cool. Added dark parts to her past that she never really answered for. And her and the bajoran way in the beginning was not good. They wanted to hunt people for being cardassian in the first degree. Not genuine guilt.
Cardassians to make us like the bajorans more, were generally given dark brush strokes. And the standouts among them were even more interesting. Thus things would swing back to sympathy.
Originally Posted by pwlaughingtrendy
Network engineers are not ship designers.
Nor should they be. Their ships would look weird.
Ironically, only the Cardassians were later shown to have some depth, and that there was 'more to them than meets the eye.' Bajorans, however, with the exception of our liaison, Kira, all remained rather superficially predictable, Vedeks included. They tried with Neela, who I really liked, but immediately removed her from the series, at the first opportunity.
N.B. Ro Laren was nice too, but she wasn't in DS9, of course.
At the end of the day, you have to look at it from a neutral point of view to see who the bad guys really are. The Bajorans welcomed the Cardassian Union, the Union brought industry to Bajor, and abolished the Bajoran caste system, to the detriment of the almost despotic leadership of Bajor.
There were heroes and villains on both sides of the occupation, the difference being Bajor seems to revere its criminals rather than those who preached peace.
Cardassia punished its criminals, rewarding those who showed bravery in combat or those who were efficient in their duties.
Cardassia punished its criminals, rewarding those who showed bravery in combat or those who were efficient in their duties.
Just after a little discussion about Duet, which resolves around the fact a Cardassian war criminal was given medals and a state funeral with full Cardassian military honors... Bravo, such audacity.
DS9 lost me in the 4th season. It got too religious and spiritual and the Bajorians were loud mouth "I'M RIGHT AND YOU'RE WRONG" bleep holes. They justified violence in the name of their religion and Star Fleet backed them up because of a mutual enemy. (sounds a lot like real life if you ask me.) That's why i fell in love with Voyager so quickly. It was back to science and skepticism and quick thinking by gritty officers. Bajorians just bring back sour memories with DS9 I guess.
I just don't find them very compelling. Reman, Romulan, Ferasan, Caitian, Gorn, Andorians, Trills, Joined Trill, and Klingons are all far more interesting.
Just finally made a Vulcan for AoY, ought to make a Tellarite, and still haven't taken advantage of unlocked Joined Trill.
Bajorans, Ferengi, Humans, are just not interesting to me, but of those 3, I would probably play a Bajoran before Human or Ferengi.
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I do want to ask: since when does being religious make someone bad or since when does it justify military occupation? Hating someone, even extremely religious people who don't affect your own life in any way, for being religious and justifying military occupation says a lot more about the hateful person than about the religious one.
And no, I'm not religious in any way. But I would almost wonder how many accounts Richard Dawkins has on this Forum whenever religion is brought up in threads about Bajor lol.
I would say that Religion like other ideologies is used as an excuse to disguise the actual motive of military occupation or some other heinous act. Going to war to build a new castle is certainly not going to inspire the peasantry to fight, but fighting because of religion or some other ideology certainly will.
The only way that being religious would make someone bad is if the religion is inherently evil like practicing human sacrifice or other heinous acts.
I'm no fan of the spoon heads, but didn't the Bajorans welcome the Cardassians to Bajor?
They did in 2328
"The meaning of victory is not to merely defeat your enemy but to destroy him, to completely eradicate him from living memory, to leave no remnant of his endeavours, to crush utterly his achievement and remove from all record his every trace of existence. From that defeat no enemy can ever recover. That is the meaning of victory."
-Lord Commander Solar Macharius
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They were after all just another alien of the week who got fleshed out a bit more in a later series. They may seem one sided as only super-religious but they were no more ridiculous than every Klingon being all about honor, or every Romulan being a scheming intelligence operative. That was just poor writing, but they are at least equal to the Klingons in terms or what we know about them.
Really their whole religious mediation side is no different to the Vulcans, only without the obsession with logic to it.
I honestly don't think that much of the player base feels either way about them, no more so than all the other myriad of alien planets and species we encounter in the game.
They had a pretty terrible experience under the Cardassian occupation, so it's no wonder some of them felt the need to fight back (even if targeting civilians made those attacks no better than what they were suffering under).
Certain people can try to claim the Cardasian occupation was a blessing for the Bajorans but it's clearly not that way, almost all the canon sources show its a was a brutal occupation with killings, enslavement, labour camps; all the usual "bad dictatorship" cliches.
It's pretty easy to see what your game is if you feel the need to publicly praise the kind of treatment the Bajorans were susceptible to under the occupation. I think the initial purpose of this thread is pretty evident too...but at least it has stimulated some interesting posts about how the stories could have been different in written post 2001.
They consistently sounded like a bunch of religious fanatics trying to justify violent terrorism after the fact. Bear in mind the Bajoran government was comprised almost entirely of admitted former terrorists so you can't take anything they say at face value.
From British point of view, after the Revolutionary War, the US government was comprised almost entirely of admitted former terrorists.
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Yeah but in fairness all we've got to go on is the canon sources, which give us this perspective of the Bajorans. There's little to go on with the Cardasians or on their view of the occupation.
So most of what people think about the Cardasians is based purely on speculation so we have no way of knowing if it's close to the truth or not, as such it's meaningless compared to the actual canon source material.
Yes, I think it would be really interesting to see what the story-lines would have been like if it was written post 9/11, or even post the Iraq invasion and occupation in the following years. I guess that might have hit a little too close to home for a lot of US viewers to have the bad guys onscreen be acting performing a similar action to their troops on the ground, especially as they were seen by some people globally.
It probably would have scared the network off that particular story-line!
Perhaps in a mirror Earth the DS9 story was quite different...
To be fair, that potential would only really be there if the two acts (9/11 and Bajoran rebellion) were comparable or if they're seen as comparable. They're not. There's a clear difference between actors involved, motives and goals.
First off, the links between Bin Laden/Al Qaida and the US go back to a point in time way before 2001 and have much to do with American foreign policy of supporting the wrong guys (take a look at Syria for a more recent example) in general, and specifically regarding the Soviet Union and Afghanistan. Further, there are clear indications that they were helped by other foreign governments like Saudi Arabia. Edit: which leads me to conclude that 9/11 had nothing to do with fighting for freedom, but rather with proxy wars, conflicts between governments and, in a way, it was even facilitated by earlier foreign policy. Completely different from the Bajoran conflict in this respect.
Motives and goals then: difficult to say without looking inside the heads of those who carried out the attacks, but for Bajor the fight for freedom was an important aspect. There seems to have been no such thing around 9/11, the sole purpose seems to have been to either strike fear or just to take as many innocent lifes as possible because of religious/ideological motives. Either way, it instantly takes away the good reasons and goals Bajorans had in mind, which was freedom from occupation. Also, keep in mind that Bajorans were fighting the perceived enemy on their own soil; which is completely different from hijacking an airplane and hitting a civilian target on the soil of your perceived enemy.
Completely different tactics, different motives, entirely different actions in fact. I don't see how true fighting for freedom (of which the Palestinian-Israeli conflict may be a much better real life example to give just one) would be a less righteous cause just because some crazy idiots flew an airplane inside multiple targets (one of them, the Pentagon, being a military target btw), targets that were mostly filled with people who likely had never set foot on the ground in either Afganistan or Pakistan.
Coming back to Bajor: I'm not aware that innocent Cardassians were targeted by the Bajoran resistance, not systematically at least. If there is evidence of that from Memory Alpha or within episodes, then I might agree that not all Bajoran tactics were acceptible and that some Bajorans may have been as wrong/bad as the Cardassians.
__
The second thing then (not specifically aimed at you Snoggymack), the religiousness: as already explained, these weren't the main motives and it's just one reason why the comparison with 9/11 fails imo. Well explained by @starkaos . I do want to ask: since when does being religious make someone bad or since when does it justify military occupation? Hating someone, even extremely religious people who don't affect your own life in any way, for being religious and justifying military occupation says a lot more about the hateful person than about the religious one.
And no, I'm not religious in any way. But I would almost wonder how many accounts Richard Dawkins has on this Forum whenever religion is brought up in threads about Bajor lol.
Well, we do know about the Bajoran/Cardassian conflict that one of them was ruling uninvited over the others. All details aside, backwards or not; mass killings or torture or terrorists targeting civilians or not. This is at best a colonial or "enlightened Europeans vs aboriginal people who need governance" issue. Which in my opinion is not very good for being a best.
I do get some of the sympathy for Cardassians from the fact that they were indeed better written. Elim Garak was one of the most interesting characters of the franchise - they overdid him in the end, but it still holds. Gul Dukat was universally hated, but not the way he was written, he was a well written baddie. Kai Winn was annoying, then annoying, and finally annoying. And you can argue that there were quite a few strawmen in the whole storyline. But still these strawmen have a point. Or would you like foreign occupation for your country, even with all basic necessities cared for, maybe even better than when you were self-ruled, but not being allowed to practive your religion, celebrate your holidays, or have any say in political and similar at all?
This also makes for a nice contrast with the discussion which pops up here and there about how stupid, albeit canonical, it is (or isn't, depending on your stance), that the Klingons will be part of the federation in the 31st century. Both discussions also rely on the question of how much a planet of hats each race will be, and how static that hat is.
As for the pre/post 9/11 question, that is surely interesting. And probably the angle would have been tuned down out of fear of opening fresh wounds. But I doubt that there would be too much restraint. After all, some of the things the US did after the 9/11 attacks were highly discussed as well. The ongoing battles for Aleppo and Mossul are being covered very differently, despite having many superficial similarities, just depending on which side is attacking and which is defending. And that is an issue, though you oughta tread carefully, lest you become what you are fighting (as somebody already said in this thread). But the differentiation between good guys and bad guys, already strong in many in real life, even easier in a movie set with fictional people, would in my opinion still have made it possible to run these storylines past 9/11.
One thing we DO know is that most Cardassians had no idea what their government was doing. Prior to Dukat's death, the Cardassian government basically treated the populace as sheeple who were told what to think by the government, and nothing more. Even the people working in the camps didn't know all of what was going on in the camp they were working at.
My character Tsin'xing
Even if you buy in completely to the Bajorans version of events during the Cardassian occupation, it can't be denied that Cardassia brought the Bajorans people out of what might be called a social dark age.
They had a caste system in place, which determined your job from your birth, you had no choice in the matter, but Cardassia abolished this system, and the government which kept it in place, bringing an equality of sorts to Bajor.
Knowing this, it's entirely likely that the resistance movement was in large part funded by remnants of the old government who were angry that the system that kept them in power for so long was now gone. They used the shared religion of Bajor to whip the more common folk into a frenzy, and now you have innocent families, Cardassian and Bajoran alike, being killed by these rebels, the Cardassian government responds harshly, they know already that you can't negotiate with terrorists. And the former Bajoran aristocracy who goaded the attack feign disgust with the Cardassian "over reaction", encouraging further attacks from newly recruited resistance fighters.
Eventually, the resistance goes on so long that most of the original fighters are gone, and knowledge of the aristocracies role gone with them. This grants the Priests and other leaders a small degree of deniability while they watch their people kill themselves against the very "enemy" who freed them from their shackles in the first place.
KIRA: "I don't care whether you held a phaser in your hand or you ironed shirts for a living. You were all guilty and you were all legitimate targets!"
SILARAN: "And that's what makes you a murderer. Indiscriminate killing... no sense of morality... no thought given to the consequences of your action. That's what makes us different."
(...)
"I am bringing the guilty to justice. And unlike you, I take care to protect the innocent. I could have killed every monk in that cavern or everyone on the runabout, or half the population of Deep Space Nine, but I didn't. Only the guilty have died. And that is why, although your actions have condemned you, the life of your child will be spared."
Silarin was right: Kira had crossed a line with her indiscriminate killing. The show totally brushed over it (just painting Silarin as a mad man, which he kinda was, but he wasn't wrong).
Kira didn't say what she felt they were guilty of, just that they were guilty of something.
My character Tsin'xing
When they did have a reasonable bajoran we could like for one reason or another. Names escape me but both men were resistance fighters and military men. One was sent to hold DS9 and was hunting Sisko and company. But he came off as wily and had no real malice to him. His subordinate however lacked discipline and followed party lines so hard he ended up dishonouring his superior so we never saw him again. Same time frame. Bajoran they all looked up to as a great leader and fighter. He got those accolades by accident and was a third rate fighter at best. But when the time came he stood up and lead because his people needed him to. So he got gunned down by hardline bajorans.
Any bajoran we saw with more depth than one dimension was brushed aside within an episode or two so the only one you kept on screen was Kira Nyrese. (Probably spelled that wrong.) And to make her 'interesting' after her firebranding ways began to cool. Added dark parts to her past that she never really answered for. And her and the bajoran way in the beginning was not good. They wanted to hunt people for being cardassian in the first degree. Not genuine guilt.
Cardassians to make us like the bajorans more, were generally given dark brush strokes. And the standouts among them were even more interesting. Thus things would swing back to sympathy.
Originally Posted by pwlaughingtrendy
Network engineers are not ship designers.
Nor should they be. Their ships would look weird.
Ironically, only the Cardassians were later shown to have some depth, and that there was 'more to them than meets the eye.' Bajorans, however, with the exception of our liaison, Kira, all remained rather superficially predictable, Vedeks included. They tried with Neela, who I really liked, but immediately removed her from the series, at the first opportunity.
N.B. Ro Laren was nice too, but she wasn't in DS9, of course.
There were heroes and villains on both sides of the occupation, the difference being Bajor seems to revere its criminals rather than those who preached peace.
Cardassia punished its criminals, rewarding those who showed bravery in combat or those who were efficient in their duties.
Just finally made a Vulcan for AoY, ought to make a Tellarite, and still haven't taken advantage of unlocked Joined Trill.
Bajorans, Ferengi, Humans, are just not interesting to me, but of those 3, I would probably play a Bajoran before Human or Ferengi.
I would say that Religion like other ideologies is used as an excuse to disguise the actual motive of military occupation or some other heinous act. Going to war to build a new castle is certainly not going to inspire the peasantry to fight, but fighting because of religion or some other ideology certainly will.
The only way that being religious would make someone bad is if the religion is inherently evil like practicing human sacrifice or other heinous acts.
They did in 2328
-Lord Commander Solar Macharius