listen. jadzia dax is a highly competent starfleet officer and master of like 273 martial arts techniques and fighting styles but she is. bad at violence. i mean she can do it but she obviously doesn’t process it well at all, that’s why she likes klingons, they give sense and meaning to what she otherwise finds senseless and meaningless. she is a lover, not a fighter. she does not want to go into battle, she wants to science and joke around and have sex with alien women. leave her in peace
you know I never thought about this? but… yeah.
it’s so fascinating to me??? because from that first klingon quest episode where she was nervously asking kira about what it’s like to kill someone, I keep getting this vibe that yeah, curzon was probably a Brawler who was down to solve problems with his fists (like sisko sometimes does), but jadzia….not so much
and there are other examples but the one that just hit home the most for me was when she was serving on some klingon ship with worf in early s6, and she was playing up all of her klingon knowledge and etc, and then when there’s a fistfight in the mess hall, between two klingons, on a klingon battle cruiser, where she’s just taken pains to establish herself in the pecking order and the 100% expected thing to do would be to wade into the fray, she…. takes two steps back and stuns one of the combatants with her phaser
like that is such a pacifist Starfleet move. and I think it speaks to a tension that exists in her between the violence of her circumstances and her past hosts, and the instincts of shy, harmless bookworm jadzia who just wants to study weird space shit and not hurt anyone
She’s under so much stress all the time I think? Because she isn’t Curzon, it’s so painfully obvious, but she fears she should be him (and I wonder if this is a tension Trill pairs outgrow with time - if she would have become truly Jadzia and not primarily Dax if she’d been allowed to live a full and happy life with children and husband) but she can’t be him, she just wants to - as you said - study weird space shit and not hurt anyone, she wants to be a sarcastic but sweet bookish girl and flirt with Kira and maybe score Worf one day but that isn’t important and yet here she is in war and battle and blood, and there is no reason to it.
But the Klingons? They give it reason. (And she knows Klingons, she knows them well.)
I mean I’m not saying anything you didn’t say but
Jadzia bby
no exactly!! like. I can so clearly see her using klingons and klingon culture as a *coping* mechanism – one she knows, thanks to curzon, but where he was probably drawn to it because he felt like he could understand it, jadzia turns to it precisely because she *doesn’t* understand, but here is a System and she is a scientist, she is good at Systems. and like therefore the fact that she gets more and more deeply into klingon shenanigans (and more and more into worf) as the series goes on and everything descends into horrible war and chaos strikes me as….not a coincidence. because no one is better at ‘living a meaningful existence in wartime’ than klingons, and that is something jadzia might not be able to do on her own. “Jadzia bby”: the eternal cry of my heart