My headcanon is that Hardison has a pretty solid idea what the worst thing Eliot did was because he was curious (remember, this is a guy who canonically cracked the Pentagon servers at twelve and hacked the White House emails because he was bored between S1 and S2,) and poked around the internet and less legal channels to get an idea for what Damien Moreau was up to at that time and worked from there. It doesn’t change anything as far as he is concerned. The only reason he doesn’t say that to Eliot is because he figures Eliot would probably not be thrilled that he was hacking into Eliot’s past behind his back.

but the thing is… he doesn’t need to.

The show gives us the answer. If you watch Eliot carefully, which his boyfriend Alec certainly does, it’s right there.

Eliot is a short-tempered, highly critical guy. He yells a lot and gets frustrated easily and threatens people.

But he is never, ever mean to kids. Never.

In fact, Eliot is conspicuously nice to kids, even when it puts him at a disadvantage to help them. He’s patient and genuine. He goes berserk when kids are in danger. He will do just about anything to make sure that they’re okay. They’re safe.

Alec is the smartest guy Eliot knows. I don’t think he needs to hack anything to put those puzzle pieces together.

Sometimes. The "het" ship is more compelling than the yaoi. I know. It's crazy. But it's true.

Sometimes people will be so scared of the concept of "straight" (read: m/f) relationships that they end up shipping a far less compelling yaoi ship instead because hey at least it's gay.

Or there is the even more confusing phenomenon of trans-ing a character's gender for the sheer purpose of not having to have a "straight" ship. Not even for the sake of exploring the gender of that character but simply because it HAS to be gay or else it is objectively worse in their eyes.

That's not even to mention the amount of times that this strange assumption that all m/f relationships are het (and of course thus "bad" on some scale) that it results in the erasure of canonical bi characters? An example of such is Cheleanor (Chidi and Eleanor from The Good Place) being referred to as a "het ship" or "straight ship" when Eleanor Shellstrop is very much canonically bisexual.

And then there is this sort of shame around thinking that maybe the m/f pairing is good actually? Like it's a net loss to some degree?

And I've been there, I've done these things but. Looking back? It comes from a place of a lot of biphobia.

M/F relationships are not your enemy. A man and a woman being in a relationship is not your enemy. Acting as such just isolates entire swaths of the LGBTQ+ community, not even just those under the bisexual umbrella (though even if it was just mspecs that should still fucking matter!)

Hell!! This weird sort of fear of the concept that someone could be straight was a fucking centerpiece of Ace Discourse!

Of course there are medias where the M/F relationship is rushed or not well established and put there for fuck-all reason except for the fact that it's "expected" but that does not mean that is the absolute standard of M/F relationships within media!! There is a reason that MSR (Mulder Scully Relationship) was what essentially started shipping as we know it in the first place!

M/F ships can be well written! Shock of all shocks! Continuing to act like the problem is that they're a man and a woman and not the writer's misogyny (internalized or otherwise) just serves to harm your own community!!! And also! Really hurt your media comprehension abilities!

Always odd to me that

Critics who bash hurt/comfort fiction for being problematic because of the hurt aspect, don't stop to think maybe people engage with that trope because they really love the comfort aspect.

Yeah, I don’t know, it’s almost like people who have been hurt badly can sometimes imagine a scenario where there’s someone giving a shit and taking care of them and loving them despite their broken places? And sometimes maybe that’s so incomprehensible in their own life that  they use fictional characters to make it more accessible to themselves?

What if instead of calling it fetishization of abuse, we called it self-soothing, imagining, healing? Just a thought

the aesthetic romanticism of this episode. the deep love for discovery. the decolonization allegory which is not so much a 1-to-1 allegory, so to speak, because sisko proving that ancient bajorans had not only the technology but the sheer Wonder and Curiosity to venture into space is a metaphor for speaking against any number of white supremacist "histories" deriving from imperialistic paradigms since the age of colonization---

to provide the counter-colonization narrative with a space-ship that sails on the impulse of photons (a very real and possible engineering for space-flight--like NASA is building ships like that) is wonderful. this story about the ancient people who thought to travel to space and push their spacecraft through space off the force of light, and then sisko proving to everyone not only its possibility but its historical fact, was sweet and interesting and full of feeling.

it's all as if to say: to engage whole-heartedly with an episteme of decolonization is to engage whole-heartedly with an episteme of curiosity and discovery and love for What Is.

"Explorers" is one of my favorite DS9 episodes, for the reasons op describes. OP, i hope you don't mind if i add on some more of the things i adore about this ep!

First off, I just love when Sisko's artistic passion is showcased.

Really quick though, I do want to highlight how this episode cultivates Benjamin's and Jake's father-son relationship, which is itself one of the best elements of DS9.

Moving on: i think it's fitting that this episode is the debut of Sisko's goatee — a key symbol of Sisko's representation of "unrepentant Black manhood."

As he embarks on his quest to prove the ancient Bajorans could have sailed across space and all the way to Cardassia, Sisko wears civilian clothes inspired by his African ancestry (if anyone has info about the specific African culture/s this outfit's patterns draw from, please let me know!). This is an earlier example of Brooks getting the show to let him incorporate African imagery into Sisko's clothes (and quarters).

[Gonna put the rest of this under a readmore cuz it's so long oops]

simply cannot ever resist what i call the little mermaid or the tin man or the pinnochio plot, the one about a character who is either inhuman or human but outside in some way, constantly searching for whatever it is that they consider to be the quintessential proof of humanity, preoccupied by it so deeply that they fail to realize the proof is in the act and fact of the search itself

(via @notaficwriter)

the fixation upon Gomez Addams as a hypothetical "rich to be eaten/guillotined" as opposed to discussions of radicalizing the Addams family into redistributing willingly (which is arguably in character for most adaptations if not all) shows how deep seated the idea of necessary punishment is within modern leftist ideals. In spite of the strength of Gomez's sense of justice, honor, and equality - traits everyone including the jokesters at large unanimously adore him for - the prevailing attitude is one of antagonism and absolutism. Forbes said the Addams family are Rich, so we would need to Kill Them.

Tumblr has simultaneously painted the Addams as a family that would take in anyone, house students and newcomers, generously give their time and money and assets away; and at the same time, claims the resources that allow them to do these things we laud them for make them inherently evil and in need of destruction.

It Says A Lot about how people don't understand that the phrase "eat the rich" is not a call for class genocide, its a warning about what desperate working dogs do when starved and beaten ad infinitum. This is all hypothetical discussion. Gomez Addams, and indeed any "good rich" people, does not actually exist.

But I do find the way we discuss him and his hypothetical wealth very interesting. I'd sooner put Scrooge McDuck against the wall, because he can't be changed. But the Addams family? They're inherently counterculture by existing as a fun house reflection of nuclear family values. Pick you battles kids, cmon.

This is a brilliant way to frame many of the online misunderstandings surrounding class/wealth issues and social change, but mostly I'm just reblogging for the phrase "I'd sooner put Scrooge McDuck against the wall."

speaking as a Jew, i’m extra-super dubious of all that stuff that talks about cartoon witches being an antisemitic stereotype. I can get where the thing with the nose is coming from, but the claims about the hats are based on flimsy claims that require a lot of mental reaching. The hats that Jews were forced to wear were not a universal thing, and I’ve yet to see any evidence that they were part of the cultural consciousness by the time the image of the pointy-hatted witch became common.

The biggest points against the hat hypothesis:

You know what kind of hat does closely fit?

The hat in this painting (“Portrait of Mrs Salesbury with her Grandchildren Edward and Elizabeth Bagot” by J.M. Wright; circa 1675) was “a type worn by affluent women throughout Britain at this date”. Look at that hat. Any modern viewer looking at this painting might think it was supposed to be a character created by J.K. Rowling.

It’s a match in design, gender, region, and most importantly, time period: by the time that pointed witch hats started to appear in artwork in England and English colonies, this style of hat would have been associated in the cultural consciousness with elderly women, especially those who were clinging to decades-old fashions.

The easy, simple answer to where the witch hat came from: it’s exactly what a woman with all the stereotypical qualities of a witch would have worn in the first place, in the time and place the trope originated. 

Old-fashioned but not by several centuries, severe and somber, and popular with a class of women that people would have spread nasty rumors about in the first place (so many accusations of witchcraft were directed specifically at women who were independently well-off, whether out of simple envy or else scheming).

Seemed like about time to bring this back up.

Another very obvious and often explicitly stated basis for the CLOTHING of the cartoon witch is Puritan costume from the 18th century… seeing as Puritans were famous for their witch trials. The green skin, curly hair, big nose, warts etc are all definitely at least racialized things. Though big nose and warts are associated with age the combined picture is pretty much just a racial caricature.

The green skin is a product of old makeup practices. To make something look extra-pale on black & white film, you didn’t use white, because the monochrome film was blue-sensitive:

This is why so many classic movie monsters were rendered as green—because public appearances and the rare color image of he actors in full makeup would be a blueish-green. Filming for black & white even affected the props and scenery. This is what the Addams Family’s house really looked like:

There was actually one specific movie that started the “witches have green skin” idea, and their witch was in Technicolor:

Witches didn’t have green skin prior to The Wizard of Oz. A makeup choice made to show off the Technicolor and make her look evil and otherworldly, plus possibly to play off the fact that her opposite, the Wonderful Wizard, lives in a green city (and yeah, maybe the folks working on the film were already used to the idea of baddies having green skin).

Speaking as someone with an interest in historical conspiracy theories and social panics, our idea of a witch is a hodgepodge of different European cultural baggage that’s cohered into it’s own thing so far removed from the original that it’s almost innocuous.

Like any folklore archetype assigned to a villainous role, the witch has been used as a stand in for plenty of different kinds of hate, but that doesn’t make the witch itself a hateful symbol. As always we need to interrogate what the author MEANS by the use of the archetype

I understand why fans are upset by the whitewashing of Romani characters like Lilia, but at the same time I would rather they avoid the horrible Roma stereotypes that you see in film and television. I'd rather have a Sicilian strega than yet another caricature of a Roma fortune teller.

But I really do wish at some point the MCU would make a better choices about their adaptations of the comics' Romani characters. They deserve the same level of respect and research and cultural sensitivity that we saw in the Black Panther films and Ms Marvel. There really is no excuse. I will always wonder what the discussions were like when they were writing WandaVision because that would have been the opportunity to actually explore the Maximoff family. I want to know what battles were fought, and why we ultimately lost out.

It pisses me off that we are still paying for Joss Whedon's shitty choices from 10 years ago.

i genuinely don’t get cishet monsterfuckers. for context, in the wake of shape of water i participated in this loving-the-monstrous type discussion event slash publishing party wherein i debuted a short story about a woman who “befriends” a cave monster—but that isnt the point. the point is i had to hear straight women talk for hours about how the appeal of monsters is some kind of weird “taming the beast” fantasy—loving a monster until it loves you back, sounding like every bad beauty and the beast take ever.

And there’s my queer ass being like literally none of you get it. this isn’t about power, this is about love and alienation and acceptance. you dumbasses, I’m the monster. this isn’t a metaphor for your shitty boyfriend, this is a metaphor for my own alienation from a society that tells me a the way i am and the way I love are grotesque. this is a fantasy of love free of judgement, separate from societal standards that I’ll never live up to anyway. that ghoul doesn’t care if I’m fat, they think it’s hot that I eat well. that immortal fae creature doesn’t care if the gender on my birth certificate matches the one I use now, they barely have a concept of gender in the first place. that tentacle monster doesn’t care if I shave, they don’t have eyes

monsterfucking is queer culture, everyone else go home

Oh. I’m guessing those were all yt women, too. Del Toro isn’t Queer, afaik, but he -is- Mexican in the us. It wasn’t really that long ago that interracial relationships were just as forbidden and taboo as Queer ones and there’s still obviously race tensions going on. The other in Shape of the Water is just as much, and likely written as, being a different race and the feeling of alienation of having a different place of origin. It happens to resonate with everyone who’s ever been considered a monster by society, and there’s not just one way this has happened.

The whole “love someone until they’re not a monster” is extra, super gross in that context because people don’t feel BIPOC are actually capable of human emotions who need to be taught to be human by some benevolent yt person who’s fetishised their body.

reblog this version pls

It’s important to remember that disabled people are also included in this other, both by society and textually in Shape of Water.  Elisa, the lead, is mute, and deals with a lot of shit because of it, particularly from the cishet white man villain.  Her disability is also what allows her to connect to the monster, as she’s able to teach him ASL signs he can communicate with.  They’re able to connect because they’re both different.  To this day, disabled people face a lot of barriers to relationships, like potentially losing disability benefits if they get married in the US. 

Del Toro has a lot of works that boil down to “Different is good and the people trying to fight for the status quo are the true evil here” (shoutout to Pan’s Labyrinth where, in a world full of monsters, the primary antagonist is a white fascist general and abuser).

CATWS 10th Anniversary | March 31st » Favorite quote: "I never said 'pilot'" for @catws-anniversary

I wanna take a moment to appreciate Sam. He's the smoothest mf out there, rizzed Captain America, Black Widow and the former Winter Soldier.

He's the best big bro and uncle, a great counsellor and he gives so much to the world after everything he's lost.

I wanna take a moment bc we don't talk about Sam's PTSD enough. How he's been graceful watching his friend getting his dead best friend back but knowing that he'll never get the same chance. How he got back into the same field he saw Riley die in, because he believes in doing the right thing.

How he's just a regular man in a crop top equivalent of the iron man armor and has to do a continuous plank mid air whenever he flies- and is still cool after it. How he can carry a whole supersoldier with his muscle strength (and complains a lot) (but still does it).

He loves orange juice, has a wine collection, and has a great sense of humor. He makes big breakfasts and has equally big tits. He also goes on morning runs, which is kinda how he ended up being the worlds first flying captain america.

I wanna take a moment to also acknowledge that Sam was the first to have an opinion against the accords. We keep talking about Steve standing against it, but this is one thing that Steve did, that Sam did faster.

Is Sex What Makes Us Human? Shamhat and Enkidu Weigh In

Some extended thoughts on The Epic of Gilgamesh.

When I was a little kid, I had a big book of world mythology.  Abbreviated versions of several episodes from the Epic of Gilgamesh were included, such as the taming of Enkidu, and the battle against Humbaba.  And I remember how they described Shamhat teaching Enkidu to be human: she bathed him, and fed him bread, and taught him to speak, and taught him "the myriad words for love."  I thought that was so lovely and poetic, when I was 12.

In the original epic, Shamhat teaches Enkidu to be human by having sex with him a lot.

when i said everyone on b5 has an “i thought i was just having a career but it seems i am fated to be historically important 😐” realization where they have to stare into the middle distance for a few days to come to terms with it, it’s actually everyone except delenn. she sees fate coming and she’s an eager volunteer.

i find her brief flickers of fear and doubt incredibly compelling (like when her grey council friend gives her the triluminary and her face journey is ‘oh damn so we’re really doing this’—

“i can’t [take it].” “if you’re right, you will have more need of it than we will.”

—or when she goes to see kosh in chrysalis), but these are not ‘lord will you take this cup from me’ moments. she grabbed this cup herself and ran with it, while the rest of the grey council with the same information was like hey can you maybe put that cup down???? please??

even her other satai bestie is like “respectfully, is this an ego thing?” which is wild because the option she’s turning down is being the leader of her entire culture. she WANTS the prophecy to be about her! sure, kosh may have played a cryptic role in maneuvering her into position and her soul vibrates like a tuning fork whenever she stands too close to sinclair (and sheridan later, of course, with some other vibrations at play there as well 😏), but “chosen one” isn’t something that just happens to delenn. she wants the job!! i can think of very few characters who lie down on the tracks of destiny as intentionally and insistently as she does.

Everyone else, even Londo: Lord will you take this cup from me

Delenn: CHUG CHUG CHUG CHUG

The Vorlons have to have her literally tortured by actual Jack the Ripper just to double check she's not just doing it for her ego/guilt over that near-genocide she started/the gram. Delenn has never been hinged in her life, and she is not going to start now.

Say what you will about Van Helsing 2004; hate it, love it, be indifferent, But the All-Hallow's masquerade ball went sooooo hard and it had zero right to do so! It's a fun, campy, monster mash movie with wonderfully dated ( and expensive) cgi and non-stop action meant to be a popcorn flick one takes out to watch around spooky season. And it has this* chef's kiss* GORGEOUS 6 minute sequence plopped arbitrarily in the second act, which unexpectedly surpasses nearly every other ball in the last 30+ years of film( notable exception being the Cinderella 2015 ball) for literally no reason other than to be dramatic af.

Like feast your eyes on this Gothic masterpiece!!! Who doesn't want to immediately live in this picture?!??

They used those candles with oil in them so that they would have real candles, real string orchestra( I believe), probably around 100 real life extras( something which is tragically absent in modern film), said extras are all in beautiful fully decked-out costumes( which are in luxuriously dark colours, but nearly no fully black, another thing you cannot say for much modern cinema), REAL CIRQUE DU SOLEIL PERFORMERS for all the acrobatics!!!! Hell, instead of filming in a sound stage, where they could control the reverb and the acoustics and the size of the set and the bloody lighting ( they apparently had a heck of a time emulating the firelight for this sequence) and the temperature( it's very cold in stone churches!) better, they filmed in a Baroque church in Prague! As I said, peak dramatic splendour, jfc...

Think about that a second...They filmed a vampire masquerade in a Baroque Catholic Church( St. Nicholas' in Lesser Town, if you were curious) with amazing over-the-top acoustics and marble statues and real, tiled floors and marble pillars and a choir loft which they very much utilized, covered the pipe organ and the altar with a grand brocade curtain so it wouldn't be so obviously a, you know, a church! And there's a gold gilt elevated and canopied pulpit into which they put two vampire kiddies for, again, the sake of being dramatic.

And the costumes! They remind me of the 25th anniversary Phantom of the Opera Masquerade costumes. Same quality, like they're old, well-cared-for costumes pulled out of a warehouse, instead of fast industry churn-outs. With lots of trim and colour and masks and lace and feathers and..just...ugh.. they are all perfect! Just look at all the head pieces on the ladies and the hats on all the gentleman ( save Dracula of course) and the powdered wigs on the musicians. ANNNNDD! The dresses are historically correct!!!!!! It's the 80's bustle era! Nobody does the 80's bustle era in film anymore and it's a bummer. Oh and one other thing! Anna's ( and other women's) hair, at least here in the ball, is also historically accurate because it's all pinned up! None of those fucken modern beachwaves at a ball! Everybody's got updo's!

Gah, I swear, Dracula in his gold cloak really does things to me in this scene!

By the way, the acrobatics are bonkers in here for just background stuff!! Especially the random guys on unicycles and the dude playing the violin whilst standing on a ball...Like....WHAT?

Anyways, all this to say, that this masquerade ball feels sooo real and tangible and because of that it blows every other film out of the water, and no, I will not change my mind!!!!!

Here's a few more gifs, bcuz, why the hell not, this scene is sexy as fuu*ck?

Alright I need to go to bed now.

YES okay adding more

6) they have essentially no bodily power - in addition to their sight, their abilities are also mostly derived from their mounts, so when they were on basically-dragons, one of them could force an entire military city to its knees just by flying over it; mounted on horses,they were Quite Intimidating in Bree, and eight of them gave Glorfindel a run for his money; on foot they could be defeated by Farmer Maggot's barking dog

7.) They kindly levelled up as the heroes did so it would be fair

8.) Sauron explicitly gains power throughout the series and possibly has more to share with his minions

9) the Shire exerts a dampening effect on all attempts at majesty... genius new theory in which the Ring is nearly harmless, Gandalf known mostly for his fireworks, the Witch-King of Angmar is reduced to interrupting tea parties, etc because the land is just not very magical at all

10) Bilbo wrote the first book and a half and could not resist making chase scenes into slapstick comedy, Frodo wrote the rest and didn't even bother trying to hide his moods

I'm pretty sure the wraiths were laying low because the Shire was constantly watched by the Rangers, of which there were far more than nine, each of whom was a Diet Aragorn also something something tom bombadil, yeah

I like theory 9. It also has implications on why hobbits in general have an odd take on things with no obvious purpose, aka manthoms. It becomes a giant game of hot potato to avoid getting cursed.

All of which could be attributed to the nearness of Tom ‘Anti-materialism’ Bombadil.

At the beginning of The Hobbit when Bilbo recognises Gandalf as "Gandalf who gave the Old Took a pair of diamond cufflinks that only come off when they're ordered" (and are never referenced again despite being a fairly startling item, in a universe where intelligent jewelery is something to be highly suspicious of). In the framework of theory 9, these cufflinks could be immensely powerful items - haunted, precious gems that obey the will of their owner! - who have an ENTIRE series worth of their own lore, which were recovered during the hinted-at adventure of the unrepentant Gandalf and The Remarkable Belladonna Took, and delivered to a place of perfect safekeeping, where they would never cause any problems at all. The Old Took just has magic diamonds what of it? And just like Mad Baggins became a local fairy tale and Frodo never received recognition in his homeland, we will never ever ever know what exactly happened there.

If I might suggest

11) Sauron's connection to the Ringwraiths is like wifi, and the signal in the Shire is like half a bar because it's bloody far and there are mountains in the way, and the rings at Imladris and Lothlórien (and on Gandalf) are like strings of Elven fairy lights that interfere with the wifi signal - so the Ringwraiths' awful wailing screams heard in the journey from the Shire are them unsuccessfully trying dial-up modem

Hnnnnnnng every single one of these takes is so GOOD

Galadriel: you're back early

Gandalf, loading gun: bag end is a Faraday cage

Reblogging to link

I love the idea that the Shire is full of random magical objects that have been reduced to junk by the anti-magic lands, now passed around as useless mathoms.

OR the magical items are just as magical and manipulative, hobbits are Just That Resistant to corruptions.

A visitor to The Mathom-House at Michel Delving being like. sorry. Hello. Are those the lost silmarils. That mithril corselet is worth more than your national GDP. I thought the remaining four dwarf rings were eaten by dragons? Is this not historically curséd dragon treasure that has over long ages absorbed all the malice and greed of the wyrm?

And the hobbit who opens the museum for visitors is like, um, sorry, we don’t actually catalogue most of this stuff apart from noting who left it here, it’s mostly just here to avoid the political difficulties inherent in regifting birthday presents on too short a cycle? Like people get mad if they instantly get back the same present they gave, or if one appears too many years in a row.

The visitor, nodding goes: Is that a fucking palantir

- oh the garden sphere. nobody likes getting that one. It looks like a nice garden sphere but it screams when birds land on it. Do you want it

in middle school during my Intense Greek Mythology Phase, Artemis was, as you can likely guess, my best girl. Iphigenia was my OTHER best girl. Yes at the same time.

The story of Iphigenia always gets to me when it's not presented as a story of Artemis being capricious and having arbitrary rules about where you can and can't hunt, but instead, making a point about war.

Artemis was, among other things--patron of hunting, wild places, the moon, singlehood--the protector of young girls. That's a really important aspect she was worshipped as: she protected girls and young women. But she was the one who demanded Agamemnon sacrifice his daughter in order for his fleet to be able to sail on for Troy.

There's no contradiction, though, when it's framed as, Artemis making Agamemnon face what he’s doing to the women and children of Troy. His children are not in danger. His son will not be thrown off the ramparts, his daughters will not be taken captive as sex slaves and dragged off to foreign lands, his wife will not have to watch her husband and brothers and children killed. Yet this is what he’s sailing off to Troy to inevitably do. That’s what happens in war. He’s going to go kill other people’s daughters; can he stand to do that to his own? As long as the answer is no—he can kill other people’s children, but not his own—he can’t sail off to war.

Which casts Artemis is a fascinating light, compared to the other gods of the Trojan War. The Trojan War is really a squabble of pride and insults within the Olympian family; Eris decided to cause problems on purpose, leaving Aphrodite smug and Hera and Athena snubbed, and all of this was kinda Zeus’s fault in the first place for not being able to keep it in his pants. And out of this fight mortal men were their game pieces and mortal cities their prizes in restoring their pride. And if hundreds of people die and hundred more lives are ruined, well, that’s what happens when gods fight. Mortals pay the price for gods’ whims and the gods move on in time and the mortals don’t and that’s how it is.

And women especially—Zeus wanted Leda, so he took her. Paris wanted Helen, so he took her. There’s a reason “the Trojan women” even since ancient times were the emblems of victims of a war they never wanted, never asked for, and never had a say in choosing, but was brought down on their heads anyway.

Artemis, in the way of gods, is still acting through human proxies. But it seems notable to me to cast her as the one god to look at the destruction the war is about to wreak on people, and challenge Agamemnon: are you ready to kill innocents? Kill children? Destroy families, leave grieving wives and mothers? Are you? Prove it.

It reminds me of that idea about nuclear codes, the concept of implanting the key in the heart of one of the Oval Office staffers who holds the briefcase, so the president would have to stab a man with a knife to get the key to launch the nukes. “That’s horrible!,” it’s said the response was. “If he had to do that, he might never press the button!” And it’s interesting to see Artemis offering Agamemnon the same choice. You want to burn Troy? Kill your own daughter first. Show me you understand what it means that you’re about to do.

It's also the move that guarantees Agamemnon's ultimate defeat and the ruination of his family (which started with Atreus, but Agamemnon definitely didn't learn anything).

I'm never going to be normal about Garak/Bashir.

Imagine being so convinced that you're a monster, respectively, because of unimaginable violence you were groomed into committing and because you're autistic and were given illegal medical treatment against your will so you could pass better. Imagine meeting someone who doesn't just see you but forgives you and refuses to leave you.

Imagine knowing all your life that you can never trust anyone because "sentiment is the worst weakness" or because doing so would destroy your life.

Imagine going your whole life hiding your skills and true self out of necessity, and finding the pleasure of someone who challenges you enough for you to pull down the mask just a little bit.

Garak seeing Bashir as the best of the federation despite being literally barred from service and can never truly be comfortable anywhere because of it, can never have a home. Yet here is this exile, welcoming you where everyone else has treated you like an annoyance.

Bashir engaging with Cardassian culture and, despite their differences, giving garak a place to share the things about Cardassia he loves. A taste of a home he thinks he can never reach. This is arguably the thing that gives Garak a cornerstone to help rebuild Cardassia once he loses Tain who, up until this point, is the cornerstone of his political compass. Garak calling Julian "the kindest voice in my head" and, tho he'd never admit it, he uses that voice to build a better Cardassia.

Imagine being loved in your entirety and finding yourself better because of it.