Each host is responsible for giving the symbiont new life experiences, and since the two were a (heterosexual) married couple before, Jadzia is allowed only one kiss before Lenara is unceremoniously shipped off. Their relationship is taboo not because of gender, but because they are both Trill who play host to a slug-like symbiont. Nowhere in sci-fi is this more apparent than with the one-episode relationship between Deep Space 9’s Jadzia Dax and her lover from another lifetime, Lenara Kahn.
#Mass effect 2 samara series
The Kiss is used purely for shock value, and its “long-term implications are usually negligible.” The series regular involved will remain straight, and the guest character will rarely stay on the show for long. This type of brief, never-repeated queer fling is used so egregiously as a method of boosting a show’s ratings-pandering to the Jayne in all of us, presumably-that it has become known as the Sweeps Week Lesbian Kiss and boasts a well-stocked accompanying TVTropes page. Sex worker Inara explicitly states that she rarely takes on female clients, and the two women’s encounter is immediately eroticized by Jayne, the show’s poster child for toxic masculinity. Inara from Firefly is also allowed a brief experience with a woman, but one that barely goes beyond being used as saucy, space-aged set dressing. Ivanova is then paired off with a new, male character and spends the rest of the series in safe, heterosexual territory. Babylon 5’s Commander Ivanova does confess feelings for the telepath Talia Winters after the two share heated looks and late-night conversations, but only once Talia is safely out of the picture. But that queerness, relegated exclusively to women (another feature shared by Mass Effect 2), rarely influences the plot in any meaningful way. In worlds where space flight and extraterrestrial life are the norm, queer desire can act as an added layer of the alien, the other, communicating to the audience that they are, without a doubt, not in Kansas anymore.
BioWare’s decision to only include straight romance options, widely thought to be a reaction to the blowback the company suffered when they made Liara, another Asari character, available to both a male and female Shepard in the first game, is especially galling given the prevalence of this half-hearted queerness in shows like Babylon 5, Firefly, and Star Trek: Deep Space 9.
0 kommentar(er)
