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I’ve drawn a few creepy twisty Odos before, but I really wanted to explore what it might’ve been like in the show aand I wanted to draw more Odo being twisty. So this little comic sprung out of that!
This was a fun exercise and I learned a lot while putting it together. Like how much I love drawing Quark.
reading ds9 comic “fools gold” and have collected all the times the artists drew odo in the background. now for your viewing pleasure: tiny odo
mall cop who sleeps in a bucket.. perfect small edit: deadass didnt know the dress was for a wedding. i saw a photo of odo in a big long flowy gown abdn blacked out
"There's a scene where Rene's face is peeling off and kind of wasting away. And I don't think I've ever had more fun in terms of the intensity of the scene where [Odo and Garak] are huddled together. And, in fact, I kept telling them to put their faces closer and closer together. So the intimacy of it was incredible. It was almost like a love story in a nonsexual way." - Director David Livingston re: the interrogation scene from the Star Trek DS9 episode The Die is Cast.
This episode was just on Pluto TV. And I thought it an appropriate time to fully capture the director's exact words about the scene above.
mall cop who sleeps in a bucket.. perfect small edit: deadass didnt know the dress was for a wedding. i saw a photo of odo in a big long flowy gown abdn blacked out
These clips are from the first six minutes of S2E12, 'The Alternate'. And I had to talk about the journey that Odo takes us on with his body language and mannerisms here.
Armchair body language analysis under the cut. Grab a snack; I am a person who is full of words.
In the beginning, Odo is rigid as usual, but he starts to change as soon as he walks into that bar. In that first moment of him looming over Quark, it's like he's eagerly anticipating the verbal spar he's about to engage in.
You quickly see him become more and more relaxed as he talks to Quark. He becomes increasingly animated, to the point of being downright playful. His tone rises and falls with his sarcasm, reaching almost cartoonish levels on occasion. There's a warmth to him even when he's expressing annoyance with Quark.
Eye contact with Quark is constant and intense. He's distinctly leaning towards Quark the whole time. He says more than he needs to, because he's having fun screwing with Quark, and it's overall just an adorable scene.
And then Dr. Mora shows up, rudely interrupting their psychosexual makeout sesh.
The change is instant. Odo's posture becomes incredibly tense and avoidant, leaning back slightly. The sassy head-swaggles are gone, replaced with frantic attempts to find anything to look at other than Dr. Mora. He seems to desperately hang on to every opportunity he has to look at Quark instead. (There's a joke somewhere here on tumblr about how Quark is Odo's 'emotional support criminal' - in this scene, he literally is!)
Odo speaks in strained, terse tones and stares downward in a heartbreakingly submissive manner as Mora treats him like a specimen instead of a person.
Odo physically drags Mora away, not wanting him to interact with Quark any more than necessary. He further reinforces this by telling Mora he doesn't want to know Quark.
I'm guessing he just doesn't want to explain the Thing he has going on with Quark. That would be difficult enough to explain even to the people who know Odo - he sure as hell doesn't want to try to explain it to the abuser who's just going to criticize and analyze it.
Then there's that beautiful little 'fuck you' affectation on the way he pulls that chair out for Mora... and then we have an absolutely withering murderglare in the shuttle.
I think this scene is amazing because it gives us a Quodo segment that is so long and playful that it borders on fanservice, then immediately follows it up with an encounter so uncomfortable that it makes us angry on Odo's behalf.
This shows us the stark difference between how Odo behaves around the person he's only pretending to hate... and how he behaves around the person he actually hates.
How much more relaxed would Odo have become if his playtime with Quark hadn't been interrupted? Dr. Mora cockblocked all of us when he showed up, and I will never forgive him for that.
Kay I can't get over "Improbable Cause"/"The Die is Cast" because Garak stabs Odo in the back without a moment's hesitation the second he gets the invite to return to the Obsidian Order/Tain/Cardassia/Whatever, and then he tortures Odo nearly to death looking for info on the Dominion and all he gets out of Odo is that Odo really wants to go home to his people and join the Great Link despite Everything, but when Odo gets the chance to go home, despite how much he wants to, he sticks to his morals and refuses.
So Odo gets stabbed in the back, and tortured into revealing a shameful secret. He should kick Garak out on his ass and never speak to him again, but he doesn't.
So whereas Garak took the chance to go home without hesitation, Odo refused his own chance to go home with equal conviction, so Odo could sit on his moral high horse and judge Garak for giving into temptation, but he doesn't.
Odo might not forgive Garak for what he did, but he understands why he did it enough to stick around and be his friend despite it all. Like, the guy really says "hey you did a really shitty thing to me but I understand, let's get breakfast sometime."
Something about that just hits, you know?
Because I have a disease where I want to add a baby to every television show I think Odo's changeling baby should have stuck around, but to save money they stay a little jar of goo for a long time. Like Odo's talking about how they turned into a dodecahedron yesterday but every time we see them Odo's carrying a jar of goo and is like "Say hello to the Major, sweetheart. They're all tuckered out 🥺." This has been "Deep Space Nine Slapstick Pitches."
its Morn Spinning Monday
happy Morn Spinning Monday to all those who celebrate
odo art for today
and heres just the lineart because i love nice crisp weighted lines.
rene had such a great way with body language which he leaned on during his performance as odo- i assume because his face was covered by a creepy skin-mask the whole time, limiting his facial expressions. very fun to see how he portrays this really gruff grumpy dude in his posture. he’s always skulking around with his head low and his nose high.
so i’ve finally got a good grasp on how to draw odo with stylistic flair. drawing goo is both meditatively fun and horribly tedious, 7/10.
i like his eyes. look at em. what a freak.
“haha odo is so beige and bland and boring despite being a literal shapeshifter” like ok yes I laugh at those jokes too and find them funny I literally have no issue with them but sometimes I also wanna talk about how that’s kind of the whole point of his character.
like odo’s abilities and way of being is so unlike any other known species in the alpha quadrant that it’s shown to be disturbing and off-putting to a lot of people — or at the very least that’s what he was led to believe. like we see this in the alternate where mora tries to convince him he’ll either be locked up in a prison or put in a zoo to gawk at if he’s perceived to have committed any sort of crime or transgression.
so despite being able to literally become anything he can think of, he chooses his default presentation to be as standard, bland and uninteresting as he possibly can. male, always in a beige uniform, very standard hair cut.
odo is so plain because he was made to be afraid of being literally anything else
AU where odo suddenly decides to just start shapeshifting a pixar mom ass every day