sonneillonv:
Maybe we could have another slumber party in my basement and bond over how dead our parents are.
There is an Imperial Dreadnaught’s Weight (yes I’m mixing my sci-fi, shut up) of unexplained context that makes this comparison completely deceptive. I’ll keep it really short - Garak is a member of the Occupying, Oppressing culture and Kira is a member of the Occupied, Oppressed culture. Also, Garak lost his father as an adult and Kira lost her parents as a child if I remember correctly.
I think you’re missing the fundamental irony of the series. Cardassia started as the Occupying, Oppressing culture, but through Dukat’s arrogance and hunger for love/power (the same arrogance and hunger for love/power that motivated his horrifically violent actions as a dictator during the Bajoran occupation), Cardassia became the Occupied, Oppressed culture once taken over by the Dominion. Yet, even with the pain inflicted quite purposefully by the Dominion occupation, one of the rallying cries of the Cardassian resistance was, “We should be Occupying and Oppressing people, not being Occupied and Oppressed ourselves!”
Nevertheless, Garak’s parents were killed as part of the Dominion occupation. Tain died in a Dominion prison camp during the Dominion’s initial invasion of the alpha quadrant (just days before the occupation of Cardassia began). Mila, who may or may not have been Garak’s biological mother but was certainly a maternal figure, was killed during the most violent days of the occupation when the Dominion was killing Cardassians en masse to show their might and prevent an uprising.
Also, we don’t know how old Kira was when her father died, but given that she was played by Nana Visitor in flashbacks and the amount of hair her father had lost between “Wrongs Darker than Day or Night,” I’d say she was at least 20.
I don’t really wanna get into whether or not losing both parents as an adult gives one the right to refer to oneself as an orphan, mainly because both of my parents are still living. But, even if Kira and Garak have been aged out of orphanhood, they still demonstrate an affinity in and outside of canon for younger people who have likewise lost their parents. In the same way that Kira is canonically shown to be on the side of Bajoran war orphans (i.e., collecting money for the Bajoran War Orphan fund), fanon shows post-series Garak using his newfound influence to benefit Cardassians orphaned during the occupation.
