Am I a monster for rooting for the Cardassians in DS9? Be honest tg. Be very honest

How far are you into the series OP?

Yeah, its in general a pretty awful civilization.

This. Cardassia goes through so many changes over the course of the show.

Secret police, genocide, fascism...

Now that you've got me thinking, I remember a bit with Garak and Bashir that illustrates it. They each read a crime novel from the other's culture. In Cardassian mysteries, everyone is accused and everyone is guilty (otherwise they wouldn't have been accused), so the mystery is in connecting which criminal did which crime.

They get a little sympathy because their alliance with the Dominion fucks them royally, but yeah they're pretty bad dudes.

Every faction is DS9 is made of terrible monsters whom the universe would be better off without. So yes, you're a monster for rooting for the Cardassians, since they're a DS9 faction.

is that supposed to be a vagina?

No, you're not. You have probably without realizing it grasped the thing about Cardassians- they're one of the most human races in the setting. Federation Humans are post-scarcity alien weirdos. Cardassians are fellow assholes.

No. Like almost every faction in DS9, there's a certain amount of sympathy in their portrayal. It certainly doesn't help that the Maquis and the Bajorans are almost more contemptible at times.

I have never seen so much unadulterated rage anywhere as on /tv/. I'm an edition war veteran. Something is desperately wrong.

Alright but why does that make you root for them? "WOOOO GO 18TH CENTURY SPACE FRANCE!" is kind of a weird reaction.

I don't necessarily think that makes them good guys. I could say a serial killer kills fewer people than say, car crashes, but that doesn't justify their actions.

You could if, by killing those people, the serial killer reduced car crashes by the millions. When the Spoonheads occupied Bajor they took it from a planetary backwater to an advanced industrial society.

No, Dukat did nothing wrong.

We see too little of the Cardassians to really say much about them. They're represented by a small handful of individuals, and most of their story happens offscreen. What of it that's shown happens on the comm-screen. We don't know what the Cardassian homeworld is like, other than that it had a period of great poverty, followed by an iron-fisted regime that did a lot to alleviate said poverty.

That lack of details provides a lot of room for interpretation, and combined with the fact that many of the Cardassian character we see have amazing personalities and screen-presence, it's easy to rationalize their situation.

On the other hand, we get to see first-hand a lot of the bad stuff that the Bajorans and Federation did in the area. Whole episodes have been devoted to it, from right up close. Most stuff that Cardassians did is in the past, and we never see it.

Or, put another way, the dark side of Bajor is shown, but the dark side of Cardassia is mostly just told.

Please, implying he's anywhere close to the best Cardassian.

The Maquis were terrorist assholes, sure they were also fighting assholes but that doesn't change what they were.

Really they were closer to Space Soviets only they kept way better records.

Those aren't the leaders of the Obsidian Order.

In defense of Cardassians, Bajoran are shit.

I actually never really liked Enabrian Tain all that much. He always just seemed to be an extension of Garak and Garak stories. Important, in a way, but he never quite fully actualized, he's more of a plot device in episodes he's in.

>not rooting for space East Germany

pls

True but Garak was the best character in DS9.

Yes, you filthy cardie lover.

Until he went space crazy, at least

I heard the writers got irritated that people liked Dukat so much that's why Dukat went totally nuts at the end of the series

Its a shame there isn't a not Cardassian race in Starfinder.

Yes he did. He didn't kill off the Bajorans completely.

He isn't the best Cardassian either. Get on my level, plebs.

REMOVE BAJORANS

The Nazi's never gave people trials, fake trials where the verdict was given well before was an old Soviet tactic. Just read Darkness at Noon and ask yourself if Rubashov would understand the glorious fifth light.

I see you've been partaking in too much Bajoran propaganda, there were never any exterminations of Bajorans at all.
But there should have been.

OP, it depends on which Cardassians you are rooting for and when. Rooting for Dukat is always acceptable, except for the previously mentioned space craziness. Damar killing Ziyal in front of him kinda fucked Dukat up.

Damar, once he learned to stop sucking Dominion cock and find his own balls, is actually quite heroic and noble. Definitely worthy of admiration.

So much of DS9 is always from the Federation and/or Bajorian "good" way of thinking, that when we are presented with the Cardassian POV on events and motivations, it is more often than not intended to be "evil". But when viewed from a more neutral lens, the Cardassians and the occupation of Bajor and their treatment of the Bajorans (and the Maquis for that matter) is entirely justified.

Also, honorable mention goes to Garak, as he more than any other character stayed true to his principles regarding what actions were best for Cardassia throughout the entire series.

Backed.

Fucking fantastic character and actor.

>OP, it depends on which Cardassians you are rooting for and when.
This.
There are some truly despicable Cardassians in the series and rooting for them is kinda monstrous.
Of course, that includes Dukat, who was evil throughout, despite those in the thread supporting him.
But Dukat was easy to root for too, because he was truly great.
So it depends on the individual.
You can root for Fritz without supporting genocide.

If you were just rooting for the civilization in general, I'd say that might be fine, depending on why.

As the image below this post might suggest, I too, agree.

The Maquis were deulsional. They were all obsessed with "muh soil" and "muh homeland" but they didn't have a game plan that didn't involve dragging the Federation back into a war or leveling Cardassian planets with strategic weapons which, let's face it, they never had the balls to do.

They got screwed by the treaty, everybody knows that, but the point of compromise on a political scale is that SOMEBODY has to get the shaft and they just couldn't handle it.

In the end, they got what they wanted and the Federation was drawn back into war with Cardassia...and the Maquis got South Korea'd in the first round and ceased to exist.

C'mon, Klingons and Romulans have their own Bajors in their history, and we're okay with them. The fact is the Federation (read: the VULCAN Federation) is just a loose collection of civilizations that were TOO SMALL DO TO ANYTHING COOL and never became empires, instead coalescing into a wierdo Vulcan hegemony fronted by the monkey puppets they pulled off an irradiated wasteland.

If you want to be a big dog, you gotta bite. The Vulcans bit, back in the day, and their little pets even nuked their own planet because they were too scared of their own genome.

Cardassia plays the game of Empires. They taste fruits the Vulcans can only dream of, save those that had the strength to become Romulans.

Sounds more like a mix of Stalin-era soviet union with a dash of European colonialism.

On a related note. Does anyone think Bajorans would be incredibly insufferable to deal with in real life?

What would have happened if Garrak managed to override the weapon controls when they were over the actual Founder homeworld? Could the Defiant have raised their little hive ocean? What knock on effects would that have on the rest of the Dominion?

They almost certainly all would have died of course.

Bajorans are directly responsible for basically everything terrible in DS9, of course they'd be fucking insufferable to deal with. Fuck Bajor.

Reminder, Dukat, in his first month of managing the Bajoran Occupation, he reduced labour camp quotas by 50%, abolished child labour, improved medical care, and increased food rations. In fact, the death rate had dropped by 20 whole percent.

I think having a single statue isn't asking too much.

Everyone's life would have been easier if Garak just acted like Garak. He could've preemptively ended the dominion threat like three times before the events of 'in the pale moonlight'.

I think the federation rubbed off on him more than he realized.

What three times?

I might be getting the timeline off it's been years since I've seen the show but off the top of my head blowing up the founders while odo was on trial, killing Dukat during the fight with the klingons, using Ziyal as leverage against dukat, etc.

>The Nazi's never gave people trials
Buuuuuuullshiiiiiiiiit. The Germans followed law and procedure to the point of detriment.

They're basically Jews but without the scheming infiltration. So fuck yes they'd be insufferable.

They are sorta justified, all their voodoo bullshit mysticism actually keeps getting proven right.

Which I find incredibly annoying.

I do like how they handle breakups.

Dukats daughter was hot

Roddenberry is turning over in his grave.

Which is good. Communists should get no rest, even in death.

Probably, but going on worldbuilding Cardassians specifically find their kind of personality dysfunction hot as hell.

The Bjorans also had slaves as part of their caste system.

A caste system that the Cardassians abolished.

Except that they like...didn't, and mostly spent their time killing thousands of Bajorans for not obeying their arbitrary laws.

Except that they did.

We are given the numbers in the show. 15 million dead Bjorans. The occupation lasted 50 years.

That's 300,000 a year.

According to the World Health Organization there were 1.25 million road accident fatalities in 2013.

We kill over 4 times more people with cars by accident than the Cardassians killed in a """brutal""" military occupation.

I mean....I'm not sure that's really a fair comparison since car accidents are accidents and killing people for disobeying you is not an accident, sort of by definition.

They totally did. It's a plot point and something the cardassians defended themselves with in non-shit episodes.

That's rather like saying the Rwandan genocide was "okay" because their excuse was "keeping order".
Not to say the Bajorans were perfect or anything like that, but the Cardassians basically drove up right up, parked themselves on Bajor without asking permission, set up laws, and started killing people who disobeyed them.

It's the rough equivalent if I went into your house when you weren't taking care of it, brought a gun with me, and then shot you and your family members if they didn't start taking care of it except I also added other rules that had nothing to do with taking care of the house, and my original reason for being there actually had nothing to do with ensuring your house was clean and everything to do with your house just sort of being there and me having a gun and you not having one so I decide I get to be in charge.

Everyone who ever commits mass-murder to protect order has a perfectly rational excuse as to why their mass-murder was justified, so color me not impressed or surprised you know?
If humanity can collectively decide that killing huge numbers of civilians and no combatants is okay "as long as you have a good excuse" then I'll buy it, but until then you just sound like an edgy kid who hasn't really ever had to have anything remotely truly unpleasant forced upon them in their lives if you think that's a fair trade.

Mind you, we have over twice the population of Bajor. They killed 1 in every 200 people of Bajor's population.

No, because it's just fiction and who you root for in fiction doesn't actually affect real life.
If you find them sympathetic, then it's because they are basically shown to just be people (albeit with weird social norms) and are largely sort of screwed by their shitty government.
Now, if you want to go try implementing their government in real life, you're still not a monster but you are kind of delusional.

They also had slavery work camps. How many Bajorans spent their entire lives as slaves without it being technically killed by Cardassians?

Plus the slave labor was kind of the entire point of the occupation; they didn't give a shit about "uplifting" Bajorans which is why they basically had "comfort women" and slave labor.
They just wanted the natural resources. They also destroyed a lot of Bajor'a infrastructure to make them more reliant on the occupiers.

I don't know. Is it comparable to the slave social class that the Bjorans had before the occupation?

The Italian Fascist government under Benito Mussolini killed only 30 people, half of them legitimate criminals who did legitimate criminal things that under Italian law at the time mandated execution. That doesn't change that they were a Fascist government oppressing the civil liberties of the average Italian.

With regards to the Cardassians, they were a hostile power invading a sovereign planet for the purposes of empire, stealing resources and killing the people who opposed them. It doesn't matter if it was "only" 300,000 per year. It doesn't even matter if it was only 3 per year. They were still abrogating the sovereign right of the Bajoran people to govern themselves, and extracting Bajoran resources that by any and all rights belonged to the Bajorans.

The thing is, permanent peace between the Klingons and the Federation, or the Romulans and the Federation, is impossible for exactly what you just pointed out. The difference is that the Klingons are larger.

The Federation isn't "cool" with how the Klingon Empire treats its non-Klingon subjects (or even most of its Klingon subjects). It just accepts the reality that any attempt to forcibly change that would mean war, which the Federation doesn't want to get into since it's not certain it can win against the Klingons and the Federation isn't warlike anyway.

The Federation also has a general attitude that, if left to their own devices, every species will trend towards democracy and equal representation over time. Whether or not this is true is irrelevant, it's what it THINKS is true, and so it allows the Klingons and the Cardassians and so on to exist as they do with the assumption of "they'll come around eventually". The Federation only gets personally involved when major crimes against sapients occur, or when fighting defensive wars to protect its extant claims.

>The Federation also has a general attitude that, if left to their own devices, every species will trend towards democracy and equal representation over time.

I sometimes can't get over how ridiculously optimistic the Federation is sometimes.

I think it's not that they expect it, but more that it's not like you can enforce it.

You can't occupy a place to make it a self governing democracy with equal representation.

In their defense, "left to their own devices" actually means "federation suzerainty and incessant institutional contact" while telling folks back home they're leaving species to their own devices.

>hold my beer

>The Federation also has a general attitude that, if left to their own devices, every species will trend towards democracy and equal representation over time. Whether or not this is true is irrelevant, it's what it THINKS is true, and so it allows the Klingons and the Cardassians and so on to exist as they do with the assumption of "they'll come around eventually". The Federation only gets personally involved when major crimes against sapients occur, or when fighting defensive wars to protect its extant claims.

Yeah, people forget that the Prime Directive isn't just 'Don't interfere with primitives'. It's also 'Don't interfere with purely internal matters'. So while they'll offer economic aid in a crisis they won't force any other nation unless they push first.

Uh...

Mind, I have an idea for a post-VOY Star Trek series in which a major plot point over its 3rd season would be (some) Klingons joining the Federation. See, the idea is that the Empire has by this point collapsed into three Empires, each claiming to be the legitimate one. You've got the warlike, traditionalist, conservative Klingons in one (they're based out of Qo'noS and the largest and so "most legitimate"); you've got the underhanded, dishonorable-but-air-of-civility, USSR standins in the second; and you've got the legitimately honorable, Klingaboo, Worf-like Klingons in the third.

And the plot of the season would revolve around the third group applying for Federation membership at the start of the season, and the plot thread for the rest involves trying to placate the war-like Klingons so this can happen; deal with the underhanded treachery of the USSR-like Klingons trying to prevent it; see to reforming the too-throwback parts of the Worf-like Klingons so that Federation membership is possible; and also Section 31 is trying to ruin the entire thing because they're assholes (something something it'll just mean perpetual war with the other two Klingons; something something Klingons can't change; something something. Section 31 is the anti-Trek and should never have been introduced, but now that it has been, it should be finally and fully taken out), so the season deals with the final defeat of Section 31.

I would like to take this additional post to stress how much I hate Section 31 even as an idea, nevermind its execution.

No, but seriously, I HATE Section 31. Hate hate hate hate hate. I will watch Star Trek Into Darkness a million times for no other reason then the knowledge that Section 31 gets blown the fuck up.

, It's also from a logical standpoint a stupid fucking idea; even if it's only to a VERY small number of people you have to make something like that accountable with it's actions known and catalogued.
Making a clandestine group with unlimited hidden funding a broad-ranging and self-determining agenda and then giving them no oversight whatsoever is an incredibly stupid thing to do because you're basically trusting that they won't EVER turn against you because if they did you wouldn't be able to stop it and wouldn't even know about it if they did.

It makes me very proud to say the following sentence:

The only episodes I have ever watched are the Section 31 episodes.

Into espionage stuff and not space opera?

space opera espionage is my thing

When did I get on /tv/?

Part of the big issue with S31 is they run on pure fucking magic. They somehow remain basically perfectly hidden from a society with communication methods far beyond what we have now. Stopping that information flowing shouldn't be really possible.

They are also somehow so good at being secret they can hide from other nation's intelligence forces like the Tal Shiar. The Romulans would LOVE to spread knowledge that the Federation has a group like that within them. They somehow know everything and predict (Nearly) everything perfectly. They never have operatives crack under pressure or go native and get caught.

On the other hand: I would watch the SHIT out of a series that is about a Starfleet Intelligence group waging war against Section 31. Actual spy action rather than 'The magic guys turn up to wave magic wands and cause plot points'.

So, a Gowron/Duras/Worf civil war?

traditional game?...

Learn the difference between Socialism and communism you retard.