Bruna. 28. Bisexual. Brazil. I've got a film degree.
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Really kind of a hot take but if you think Kai Winn is legitimately worse than Dukat you’ve got some issues.
Like what’s worse, being a corrupt religious leader or committing actually r*pe and genocide frequently AND being an even MORE corrupt religious leader because you started a fucking death cult 🤔
I definitely agree with this, but also I’m an aspiring author and from a writers perspective I prefer the character of Dukat. He has a lot of backstory and is such a complicated character with a great arc, but then there’s Kai Winn over here just being annoying and evil and for what? Like whyyy?
I can’t tell if you’re being sarcastic or if you genuinely forgot Winn Adami’s whole backstory of surviving the atrocities of the Cardassian occupation as well as her entire character arc starting with her indignation at the fact that a Starfleet officer, a human of all things, was chosen as the Emissary instead of her, who had dedicated her whole life to serving the Prophets, who she understandably felt betrayed by, so she resorted to turning to the Pah-Wraiths (the Satanic representation we didn’t know we needed in Trek) and also slightly almost mended her relationship with Kira which Dukat certainly never did (she even admitted her flaws and seemed to understand the weight of the things she had done), and then getting tricked into sleeping with Gul Dukat (can you fucking imagine), throwing him out into the streets blind and helpless when she found out the truth, also she fucking KILLED him albeit temporarily.
That’s a lot of things. Dukat’s entire character was just why don’t the people I oppressed like me I was such a nice guy :’(
man I wish people appreciated more what Louise Fletcher did on DS9 because like… yeah Dukat it’s a great villain and truly despicable but Louise Fletcher was absolutely amazing as Kai Winn and how hateful she was, but she still played her with so much depth
You’re right and you should say it. Louise Fletcher deserves all of the awards.
And can I add that it’s a crime that we don’t talk more about this scene?
Kai Winn was put in the Cardassian equivalent of a concentration camp. She was beaten, abused, possibly raped, and most likely worked half to death. None of that excuses her later actions, but you can bet I wouldn’t have survived everything that she did without an obsession with power. If i were in her shoes, I would also want to have so much power that I would never, ever be put in the position of “victim” ever again.
Yes, so much! It always bothers me when people say that she is just pure evil but are willing to see the grey areas of Dukat’s character, because it’s obvious to me she wasn’t always just evil. One of the scenes that hit me on this rewatch also was this one:
this is preceded by the bullshit story Dukat under the Bajoran disguise is feeding her, but the dialogue is pretty interesting for me:
Dukat: When the Resistance destroyed the Cardassian outpost in Relliketh, Gul Dukat ordered a hundred Bajorans rounded up. His intention was to send us to the capital for public execution. Winn: A hundred from Relliketh. When did that occur? Dukat: Just before the great famine. By sheer luck, my transport was rerouted to a labour camp. I learned years later that the dispatcher had misread the orders.
Like far from me from defend her actions, lol. Winn is absolutely terrible at what she did with Bareil, both in cheating her victory over him and later on letting him die, and she was power hungry and ruthless and it ultimately led to her downfall, but she wasn’t just an evil caricature. She had so much depth and honestly, kudos for Louise Fletcher for being able to play her so wonderfully when Kai Winn was in actually just a handful of episodes.
man I wish people appreciated more what Louise Fletcher did on DS9 because like… yeah Dukat it’s a great villain and truly despicable but Louise Fletcher was absolutely amazing as Kai Winn and how hateful she was, but she still played her with so much depth
I wrote about this in another post and I don’t think I can say it better now so I’ll just paste that in:
I love this scene because it says so much.
Firstly, about Kai Winn as a character. She isn’t a one dimensional villain. She isn’t blindly following her faith and that is her only motivation. She has struggled with it and have been punished for it. It would have been so much easier for her to chose another path. To renounce her faith or to simply stop teaching it. But she fought for it.
Secondly, about Bajor as a society. Why is their faith so important to them? Because so many people like Kai Winn had only their faith during the occupation. They held on to their faith. Surely partly because the Cardassians hated it. It was always a form of resistance in itself to keep believing, keep praying, keep gathering in secrecy.
Thirdly, it says a lot about Ds9 as a show. This is exactly why I love Ds9. They weren’t satisfied with Winn as a simple antagonist, there to show up now and then and make trouble for Sisko with some religious opposition. Instead they made her complex. They chose to let us understand her. They do this with a lot of their characters and they do it so well.
How the scene plays out comes as a surprise when viewing the episode for the first time. Of course they are going to exchange some banter and then go separate ways? Of course we the viewers will be left satisfied with knowing who the enemy and the heroes are? No, says Ds9.
Instead Winn here challenges Kira’s, and in turn the viewer’s, maybe quite simplistic narrative. Her disdain for Winn is understandable, but Winn reminds her and the viewers that reality is always more complicated.
I still think it’s incredibly fucked up that he raped her by deception, and the show doesn’t ever really address this…? she never would have slept with him if she knew who it really was (hence the slap) and therefore she was raped. that’s super fucked up and the writers don’t really explore it at all.
[Dukat gets a lot of credit for being one of Trek’s most effective and well-acted villains, but I think Winn deserves just as much credit for being a vastly different yet equally deep antagonist. Every condescending word that slithered out of her mouth made my skin crawl, and her utter lack of charisma even in-universe was obviously deliberate. Yet she was still believable as a person and served as an excellent contrast to Dukat’s slimy “charms”. ]
[I keep seeing Kai Winn being compared to Dolores Umbridge from Harry Potter, but honestly, Kai Winn is a much better villain than Umbridge. Where Umbridge has pretty much one note - a “falsely sweet” kind of nastiness - Kai Winn is incredibly complex and human. The DS9 writers did an amazing job of giving her very real, human motivations behind even the worst things that she does - motivation beyond just “being nasty.” That’s part of what makes her such a great villain. ]
