sonictoaster replied to your post “Star Trek: DS9 Notes - S5, Vol. 3”
THEY’RE EACH OTHER’S FAVORITE TROPE
sherlocks-freebitch replied to your post “Star Trek: DS9 Notes - S5, Vol. 3”
SUCH an awesome two parter. And yeah, a hell of a lot to unpack in that death scene.
And unpack it I now WILL! I made it through those episodes alive so now I get to go back, ahaha, that’s how that works, apparently.
And this is gonna be related to Julian & Garak being each other’s favorite trope, because all of it is. Because: the way they express intimacy with each other is nearly always through performance. Oh it goes so deep, and we will follow it.
1. Pretense
I’ve had “the thing about pretense” jingling in my Loose thoughts doc for a while, so first let’s finally do that. The Thing is, Garak and Bashir are pretty unique on Deep Space 9 in how much they appreciate and even respect a good pretense. And we’re talking maybe all the definitions here, the social masking and the imaginary inventions and the affectations, too.
They’re both showy sorts of people on their own, prone to really delivering the full length of their sentences and playfully feigning things. So its no wonder then that as soon as they met they were dancing around “my dear Doctor” and “my dear Mr. Garak”-ing each other, having a grand old time and confusing the hell out of most everyone around them. Because they’re both the type, it turns out, who doesn’t need to trust a person to enjoy them — an outlook entirely foreign to someone like Kira Nerys, or Benjamin Sisko to a good extent. Or Miles O'Brien, which is probably part of why his relationship with Julian didn’t take off until later, after Miles began to realize that this fancy idiot Enacting Friendliness with suspicious cards like Garak, wasn’t himself an untrustworthy person.
But Julian and Garak immediately recognized that they had a shared language of Pretense, and so were able to just step directly into playing some coy elaborate mashup game of Two Truth Or Dares And A Lie. The game was the relationship – and as it would turn out, it would also be the trust.