#This is a Neelix hate blog

[daxromana]

the thing about voy is that the secret good voy would’ve been so good. and yet. we are afflicted with tom paris.

#m.txt #st blogging #i also hate neelix but if one of them has to go it’s paris #his concept isn’t bad but his writing is so boring

[quarks-pussy]

At this point I literally search up "Neelix" on any trek blog I wanna follow before I do so because some of y'all just love to hate a lil sillyguy and I cannot have that on my dash. Also, you will die by my sword

#if they seem sus i search up wes as well but at least on that front most people on here seem to have grown a brain since the 90s #personal #original posts fresh from quark's pussy

[a-student-out-of-time]

So I’ve been reading LINUJ’s blog lately, and it makes me believe that Nikei is in a similar boat to Miu. What do I mean by that? (Aside from both dying in Chapter 4, but that’s neither here nor there) What I mean is both characters were designed in a way to make players hate and despise them for their actions but unfortunately their sympathetic qualities were too much on display so people wound up liking the characters instead of hating them. (1/2)

//Yeah, it is pretty interesting. You can see that with Monaca too, who was meant to be a character everyone hated, but has a pretty sizable fanbase, and even I think she’s a better villain than Junko

//Generally, it’s kinda funny how deliberately setting out to deliberately evoke an audience reaction with a specific character can have the opposite effect. You make a character you think everyone will hate, but they end up having a pretty big fanbase; you make a character you think everyone will like, you might end up with a scrappy 

//If I can let the Star Trek fan in me speak for a moment, two that come to mind for the latter are The Outrageous Ocana and Neelix. The former was an attempt as a “devilish rogue”-type character, but was so badly received that he never appeared outside of one episode. The latter was meant to be Voyager’s breakout character in a similar sort of role, but he instead became an odious dimwitted comic relief nearly on part with Jar Jar Binks

//Making a character the audience is meant to hate also may run the risk of trying to go so far over the top that you make a villain who’s despicable in every way. The healthy balance to aim for is a love-to-hate type of villain who you like seeing, but who you also want to get the shit kicked out of them

//Really, it’s kind of a fool’s errand to gauge how audiences will react to a character; you can only cold read a hypothetical audience so far, much in the same way that lampshading tropes will instead highlight what may seem like your insecurity as an author. Instead, just write characters how you think they work best and the reaction will stem from them naturally

#mod talks #a student out of time

[delta-queerdrant]

an ethics of dying mad about it (Jetrel, s1 e15)

Welcome back to this queer Star Trek blog that is also secretly a humanist theology blog! Today it is not my fault, because we are talking about Jetrel.

A truth I brought to this episode: I do not believe in forgiveness. More correctly, I think there are like twelve different phenomena that we label forgiveness and the whole thing is a linguistic confusion. Let us indulge in a taxonomy!

Five ways to forgiveness:

Someone does something shitty. It's not a big deal and you let it go. Relationship is preserved.

Someone does something shitty. They make amends and you let it go. Relationship is preserved.

Someone does something shitty. They make little/no credible effort to make amends, but you let it go. Relationship is preserved.

Someone does something shitty. They make little/no credible effort to make amends. You end the relationship (or enact other consequences), and you forgive them.

Someone does something shitty. They make amends. You end the relationship (or enact other consequences), and you forgive them.

So what is forgiveness? Like a bad Supreme Court justice, let us inquire into its etymology. The word seems to have a legal origin, in fact - literally giving up the right to collect a debt or enact a punishment.

There's so much to unpack here! Is forgiveness transactional? Is it still "forgiveness" if the offender made full amends, i.e., has paid their debt to the best of their abilities? If the wronged party asks for accountability and consequences, what's left to forgive?

Jetrel is such a compelling episode that it's almost beyond summary. Ethan Phillips is at his absolute best, his performance and the script imbuing Neelix's character with welcome complexity. The episode unfolds organically, telling the story of a war crime with familiar contours that serves as the jumping off point for a narrative about trauma, guilt, and repentance.

I really liked these two men's parallel stories. Neelix's anger is paired with shame at being a deserter; he's vulnerable and struggles to put his experiences into words. Jetrel wants to right the wrong he's caused but still finds ways to avoid taking responsibility, speaking of his duty to science and drawing a false equivalence between his losses and Neelix's. He's absolutely credible as a powerful scientist whose ethics are warped by his positionality; no apology he can offer will satisfy.

Reading over the script, I'm surprised to find that the word "forgive" appears only once in the context of Neelix and Jetrel's relationship. Kes doesn't suggest that Neelix forgive Jetrel, but that he deal with his anger.

"But was it really Jetrel you're angry with? Is he the one you blame for what happened?" she asks. When Neelix says he can't stop hating him, she concludes, "Maybe you have to stop hating yourself first."

Kes's theory of anger is a common folk-theory of blame and forgiveness, and not one I have much time for. There are a lot of reasons we hang onto anger, but I'm not sure I'd characterize self-hatred as one - helplessness, loss of control, is more to the point. Anger can be corrosive, but it's also a proportional reaction to a continued wrong, and accessing it is often key to moving forward.

Obviously, I'm troubled by the end of this episode. Does Neelix's empathy for Jetrel necessitate his forgiveness? Does he even have standing to forgive Jetrel? To me, the question of forgiveness is so much nonsense - the debt can't be collected, and there's nothing to be salvaged between them. In this situation, I'm not sure what forgiveness is, except... vibes?

I was mulling over this question when I happened to listen to a podcast episode featuring the theologian Matt Potts, who has recently published a book about forgiveness. I haven't read the book, but the blurb summarizes his definition of forgiveness: "It is an act of mourning irrevocable wrong, of refusing the false promises of violent redemption, and of living in and with the losses we cannot recover."

Forgiveness as mourning ritual is a concept I can wrap my head around, and something I think the last scene of this episode embodies, even if it doesn't quite have the vocabulary to express it. Forgiveness as mourning ritual acknowledges this: that the bad shit we do lingers, immune to apology or amends. Any debt must be reckoned in a currency none of us has access to. We can't fix things.

And there are, after all, a lot of things that are not forgiveness. Neelix does not allow his anger to wreck his life. He does not throw Jetrel out an airlock. If forgiveness is "not throwing people out airlocks" I can generally get on board, at least much of the time.

I don't think I'll be making reference to this flavor of Christian forgiveness in my daily ethical calculations. It's one thing to acknowledge the profound brokenness of human relationships, another to get on with the business of actually relating to each other. If I was going to embrace forgiveness, the pragmatic Jewish approach gets a little closer to my views.

But on the whole? I think I prefer to die angry. 4.5/5 Wikipedia philosophy articles.

#star trek voyager #star trek #neelix #forgiveness #science fiction theology corner

[cemetrygatess]

I always am like okay I should get back to watching voyager, and then everytime I hate Neelix so much that I quit

#This is a Neelix hate blog

[nunchler]

i really want a rewrite of voyager where all the characters are actually explored cause most of them had the potential to be really interesting but never actually got any focus or development. also neelix dies in the first episode

#this is a neelix hate blog

[croc-odette]

hm i don’t know how to describe the energy of voyager... like i think it’s weakest point is i don’t like all the main characters as much as ds9 or tng, and they don’t all feel like friends as much. and the main plot is a little loosey goosey. but the flavor is so weirdly different than the other star treks that actually feels closer to TOS in a way, but also willing to be a little more fast-paced and disturbing... anyways i’m having more fun than i thought!

#an important update delivered at a podium #star trek blogging #also i was worried i was gonna hate neelix. and actually i like him he's just some weird guy who loves his wife. that's fine with me

[helisol]

people are clowning on some of my tuvix posts and I feel like this needs to be said. thanks to @soggywormcircus​ for putting it into easily digestible meme form.

#neelix hate is banned on this blog <3 #star trek

[cordrazine-official]

by the way this blog is a neelix-hate-free zone. criticism of his character as a whole, the way he's written, his relationships etc is absolutely welcome but anything that basically boils down to "he's Annoying (TM) and i regularly watch tuvok murdering him in 4k so i can point and laugh" will get you blocked.

#he's one of those characters who gets these reactions of seething rage from people and i think it's weird

[meatmensch]

this is a neelix hate blog. fuck that cunt. he’s a pedophile, he’s annoying, he’s always telling people not only to be happy but HOW to be happy. i bet his food sucks ass. (i haven’t watched voyager since i was nine years old. i forget but i don’t forgive)

#star trek #voy #neelix #he's rude to tuvok? he's like bones if bones was absolutely unbearable and the worst person you've ever met in your life #my posts

[benvulio]

you know what's ugly? kes leaving voyager in the fourth season despite having massively important story arcs and character growth but neelix staying all seven

#this is a neelix hate blog tbh #voyager #txt

[quarks-pussy]

During my search for Q x Lore I found someone who, when asked about it, had said they didn't like it and the vibes were off. I went to their blog and it turned out they hate Neelix and don't even ship Daforge!

Some ppl just love to be wrong ig 🤷‍♂️

#this isn't serious or anything ofc and this post is /lh but #HOW can you not even ship daforge?? it's the most wholesome mainstream trek ship!

[beryliium]

Hey! If you're up to playing, I'm curious about 14 for the star trek ask game✨

i didn’t expect anyone to ask - wowie, i’m honored!!! i have a long list actually....

14. If you could write a episode or book on the series what characters would you pick and what would be the plotline?

uhhh actually, i’m currently writing a tos/strange new worlds sort of thing between kirk and spock, if kirk had to crawl his way to command after the kobayashi test. he becomes a janitor on the enterprise and basically any time they see each other they fight but it’s gets super gay when spock mysteriously leaves - there’s some michael/tilly and baby bones in it too!!

i also wanted to rewrite some voyager parts - chakotay and janeway didn’t have all that chemistry build up for nothin’!!! and maybe some secret rare pair stuff like neelix and tuvok or tom and harry. not sure what i want to go with here as far as plot but i really hated the ending so :/ and i’ve been watching picard and like WHERES MY VOY CREW???

and also!! funny enough - i love the section 31 AU like a whole lot that your art blog ( @sweet-bolillito ) draws!! been meaning to possibly write my own or get your permission to write some things!! michael and jim having a friendship that gets them through all the drama and darkness of section 31, is my absolute jam!! bonding over their distant siblings and trying to figure a way out of s31!!! with of course spock being an upset little vulcan about the whole thing,, gold!!

thank you for asking!!!

#about me #asks

[figureofdismay]

circling back a bit, I always get the feeling that Investigations is essentially a Neelix episode. And it’s frustrating every time because the spent a long time (in episodic VOY terms) setting up this Tom plot, and then, instead of getting to see him going in on the plan with Janeway and Tuvok, and seeing him dealing with his self-ostracization, they give Tom a little bit of running around and the emotional payoff is handed to Neelix. Of all people, Neelix. 

as an elementary school child I found Neelix charming, and I didn’t like Tom because he’d been rude lately. As an adult i can see that the surprise of the ‘reveal’ that Tom was on a secret mission was severely blunted because the setup made Tom ‘unlikable’ and then failed to flesh out the plot and humanize him again. Instead they handed off the attention at the last second to the one character on the show with the least depth, yet who somehow ends up with very nearly the most episode focus time. Even when the plot was built specifically to showcase a different character. Why did they do that? I don’t get it.

#st: voyager #this is a pro Tom Paris blog #just to be clear #but mostly in a way that means i think he was a character with unexplored potential #i don't hate neelix #but I can understand how you could for how much attention he gets ahead of other more nuanced characters #and don't even get me started on the hamfisted 'add nuance to neelix' episodes that just.... confuse the matter #one irl st fan accused that VOY could be called The Doctor And Neelix Show #and #she was not far off tbh

[ignisgalaxia]

Voyager Sketch Month

So I’ve decided to do something really stupid because I apparently don’t hate myself enough already. For the entire month of October, I will be attempting to draw a Voyager-themed picture every day (what is wrong with me?). However, this isn’t just about filling up my blog with my own posts for once (or getting the extra drawing practice). It’s about showcasing my love for Voyager in the best medium I can.

As you’ll see from the list, the first half of the month will be devoted to character portraits (excluding the first two days), while the last half of the month will be about favorites (excluding the last three days which will be just for drawing fun).

~

Day 1 - U.S.S. Voyager

Day 2 - Delta Flyer

Day 3 - Kathryn Janeway

Day 4 - Chakotay

Day 5 - Tuvok

Day 6 - B’Elanna Torres

Day 7 - Tom Paris

Day 8 - Harry Kim

Day 9 - The Doctor

Day 10 - Seven of Nine

Day 11 - Neelix

Day 12 - Kes

Day 13 - Naomi Wildman

Day 14 - Icheb

Day 15 - Borg Children (Mezoti, Azan & Rebi)

Day 16 - Mike Ayala

Day 17 - Borg Queen

Day 18 - Favorite Female Character

Day 19 - Favorite Male Character

Day 20 - Favorite Minor Character

Day 21 - Favorite One-Time Character

Day 22 - Favorite OTP

Day 23 - Favorite BroTP

Day 24 - A Pair I Didn’t Know I Needed

Day 25 - Favorite Villain

Day 26 - Favorite Species

Day 27 - Favorite Episode

Day 28 - An Episode I Wanted to See

Day 29 - Alternate Universe

Day 30 - Chibi Style

Day 31 - TOS Era

~

I made this list as free-reigning as possible so others could do it. However, if I’m the only one who participates, then I might make this a yearly tradition for my blog (dear god why). I highly encourage other artists to try the challenge. Spread this post to all corners of the Voyager fandom! We must show our love for this wonderful little show!

Good luck to me and all other artists! :)

(I’m asking for death at this point)

#my posts #inktober #voyager sketch month #star trek #voyager #voyager crew #drawing challenge #me and my bright ideas #what have i done #this will be the end of me #i guess it could be fun #spread this please

[discosnail]

This is a Neelix hate blog