#Tbf Eiffel at least seemed to enjoy that thanksgiving dinner

[hephaestuscrew]

Renée Minkowski is extremely into the abstract concept of Crew Bonding in such a way that it impairs her ability to actually bond with the particular crew that she has.

She wants them to have Christmas dinner together and give each other Christmas gifts, but she's not made an effort to learn Eiffel's feelings about December 25th and to think about what he might like to do that day.

She wants them to each say what they are thankful for at Thanksgiving, but when she says she's "thankful to have such a great crew on this mission", it sounds extremely unconvincing, as if she's just saying what she thinks a Commander ought to say at a Thanksgiving dinner on a space station, rather than expressing any genuine sentiments or revealing anything personal about herself.

She wants them all to participate in the talent show "to boost morale... bond as a crew, and... have a great time doing it", but Hilbert and Eiffel's reactions make it clear that talent shows do the opposite of improving crew morale for them.

Christmas celebrations and thanksgiving dinners and talent shows are all things that could potentially have a positive impact on morale and bonding for some hypothetical space crews, but in the way Minkowski approaches them, none of these things are particularly helpful for the morale and bonding of the people who are actually in her crew. Minkowski puts real effort into group bonding activities for her crew, but they are always based on general ideas about crew bonding, rather than on thinking about the individuals around her and what she can do to connect with those people in particular.

#Wolf 359 #w359 #renee minkowski #renée minkowski #I think she was probably even more intense about crew bonding stuff earlier in the mission #By the beginning of S1 she's just going through the motions to some extent #Also telling Eiffel 'that's actually less horrific than what I was expecting' to his thanksgiving contribution #isn't exactly a good way to encourage him to contribute #She tells him not to do smoke rings for the talent show as well #which under Wolf 359 science is sensible #but it's also reflective of a determination to get people to participate in the way that feels right to her #rather than the way that's natural for them #Tbf Eiffel at least seemed to enjoy that thanksgiving dinner #but it doesn't really seem like it brought them closer together #Especially with culturally loaded things like Christmas and Thanksgiving #there should have been a discussion there #but that's the thing #communication #and understanding her crew as individuals #those are things she has to learn #I'm also not saying that successfully bonding with Hilbert would have made any difference to anything #but pre-Christmas-mutiny it was an aim of hers at least on paper #Another thing to note is that Hera is partially excluded from some of these things #She's the only willing participant in the talent show #but Minkowski gives her a part with two lines #Minkowski encourages Hera's contribution of what she's thankful for #but only after Hera's asked if she could say something #Oh also I think that Minkowski's thanksgiving speech sounds like she'd planned those lines out before she even got up to the Hephaestus #She isn't thankful for her crew. Not at that stage. She's saying it through gritted teeth #But she'd planned on having a crew she was thankful for