#anyway. sorry for writing this wholeass novel in the tags lol. actually wait no I'm not

[sixthweyoun]

What kind of people are they most likely to clash with?

oh this is a GOOD fucking question thank you anon

People who underestimate his intelligence, or who ignore the fact that he very much is a person capable of making decisions for himself. His conditioning still deeply impacts his life, and will probably continue to impact his life for a long time, but that doesn't make him less of a person, it doesn't mean he can never grow beyond its parameters, and it doesn't mean his value as a person is proportional to how much he grows beyond it. He has some very strong opinions about the way that the Federation sees itself as so morally superior to the Dominion but often objectifies him in similar (though less overt) ways.

If someone infantilizes him ("oh your mind is too fragile/damaged ever be able to make independent decisions or form opinions that deviate from what you were taught") or demonizes him ("I don't trust you because I don't know what the Founders programmed into you and you could be dangerous") then he's going to not want much to do with them. He knows how he works, he knows his limitations and skills and he's starting to get to the point where he can look at a lot of what the Founders did to his people and be like "yeah, that's wrong and unethical." But growth and recovery are not things he owes to anyone else, and no one gets to tell him to speed up the process for their personal comfort.

#answered ask #it's not a 1:1 parallel because very few things in fiction are #but if it's not obvious i am drawing a parallel here to the way that ableism is used to gatekeep people from making decisions autonomously #because neurodiversity theory/critical disability theory is my passion and i enjoy applying it to sf/f settings #thesis statement: vorta conditioning is a neurodivergence #it can be distressing or beneficial but it is foremost a different way of experiencing and processing the world #it's like autism where there's so few cases where it isn't co-mingled with trauma that trauma just is part of the profile/experience #follow up thesis statement: weyoun 6 as a 'defective' vorta is neurodivergent by vorta standards #the question a lot of people ask when it comes to vorta is 'what are they like in the complete absence of their conditioning?' #and I think that's an impractical question to ask and a boring one #the better question to ask is 'what are they like when they're no longer afraid?' #anyway. sorry for writing this wholeass novel in the tags lol. actually wait no I'm not #you follow this blog you deal with my weird tangents about how the dominion works