Ya gotta be cruel to be kind...

[qcontinuum]

OOC: Crossposted from theatrical_muse today.

Prompt 232: Is there a situation where it's appropriate to be unkind?

How about all of them?



My perspective on this is probably somewhat different from most beings. As a member of the Q Continuum, the greatest dangers I face on a regular basis aren't death, pain, hunger or loss; I am at greatest risk of being bored out of my mind or swallowed by the overmind I live within. I don't, generally, have to wonder if people love me or care about me. They can't help it, any more than I can help caring about them even though there are times I really wish I could hate them all. I don't need to feel like I belong; I already belong a lot more than I wish I did.

If the Q are too open with each other, too connected, too gentle, too selfless, too *kind* as you put it... we can be destroyed. Melt into the Continuum overmind, merge into one another and create a new entity. I had a friend who tried to die that way for billions of years, and it was my job to be cruel to her so she wouldn't try to merge with me and wouldn't be able to merge with anyone else... well, at least until she snapped and tried to kill me.

We also run the danger, when we deal with mortals, that they will end up worshipping us. Which I find rather repulsive, personally, but which is also actively dangerous to the mortals in question... because we're *not* totally obsessed with their well-being, and if they spend their time praying to us instead of actually solving their own problems, then we're either stuck fixing things for them for the rest of time, or we'll get bored and abandon them and *then* they'll be screwed. It is much, much better to be mean to mortals when you have godlike power... at least until they can prove to you that no, they're not going to throw themselves at your feet and start worshipping just because you give them a nice present.

So I am, generally, very much in favor of being unkind to people when they need it, and sometimes just when *I* need it... hey, an entity's gotta find some fun *somewhere*.



Muse: Q
Fandom: Star Trek TNG

Comments

[(Anonymous)]

Q. I'd ask you to forgive the rather gross intrusion on your personal journal but somehow I don't think you're the forgiving sort.

So.

Before you delete this (or blast it into a thousand pieces, whichever takes your fancy first) I have a question, a simple, boring, human question.

Considering your rather impressive omnipotence, close-to-godliness etc, why is it that you've allowed yourself to become a)bored and b)saddled with a child that alternates, in your words, between pissing you off and making you proud?

I extend my deepest apologies for the intrusion. If I knew of any other way of contacting you, I would have taken it.

[qcontinuum.livejournal.com]

Allow myself to be bored? I suppose you think mortals allow themselves to die. There are things that are inevitably built into the nature of beings and the universe. I'd be offended if I didn't realize the profound depth of ignorance such a question must come from.

The universe is finite. I am five billion years old, which is a significant fraction of the universe's lifespan. With the power available to me, I have done and seen virtually everything there is to do and see. My fundamental nature is to seek novelty, to explore and learn, and as such I was created with a low threshold for repetition; I crave new experiences, and there aren't any left to have. Or very few, at any rate. How could I help but be bored?

As for allowing myself to be saddled with a child... the short version is, I was bored. See above. New experiences? Since the formation of the Q Continuum, no Q had ever had a child within the Continuum, who was allowed to be a Q and access Q power while still immature. Those of us that weren't involved in creating the Continuum in the first place were created as adolescents -- no experience or maturity, but physically we were essentially adults. We've taken adult mortals and granted them Q power, making them into adolescents of our species, and we've bred children who were born in mortal form who grew to adolescence within that species before their connection to the Continuum and their access to Q power kicked in, but my son is the first Q to be born inside the Continuum as an infant.

There's a longer story behind it, of course. I didn't get the notion that having a child might help alleviate my boredom -- I'm hardly the warm, fuzzy, paternal type, and seeing other Q executed for being so besotten with a child that they ignored their obligations to the Continuum didn't help -- until we started fighting a civil war over change and freedom vs. stagnation and death.

See, one of our number killed himself because he was bored, and his entire thesis was that we as a species needed to embrace death or we'd stagnate. Immortals don't like hearing they should die. A significant number of my stodgier brethren believed that it was the freedom to even *think* "hey, I'm bored, maybe I should kick off" that threatened to destroy us, and they wanted to exert even more control over the Continuum as a whole, fearing mass suicides leading to disruption of the Continuum, and perhaps the loss of all our power and immortality. Others, myself included, saw Q's death as a wake-up call saying that we Q needed *more* personal freedom or we would all wish we were dead. And then someone invented a weapon that could let us quickly and easily kill each other, so we started shooting each other over the conflict.

I could possibly have killed everyone who disagreed with me in order to win, but I didn't want to win that way -- it's one thing to kill mortals, but to kill my own kind is reprehensible even when it's necessary. I needed a dramatic gesture to prove to the rest of the Continuum that change doesn't have to bring death. And of course the change that is most opposite to death is birth. So I decided to have a kid.

As for why *I* am the one saddled with him, it's because Kathryn Janeway positively refused to do the right thing and help out with solving the conflict *she* caused by ruling that our fellow Q had the right to die, despite the fact that her species supposedly has this Prime Directive thing where they're not supposed to interfere with other cultures, but apparently it's not interference if you do it to a *more* advanced species, nooooo. All I wanted was nine months of her time -- a pretty trivial expenditure even for a mortal, but she flat-out refused me. So I had to have my child with a fellow Q, who turned out in the end to be *less* willing to follow through on her responsibilities than me, despite millions of years of accusing me of being hedonistic and totally irresponsible, and she left me with the kid, claiming she had to do it before I did. As if I *would*. I never even *contemplated* running out on my child... well, not for longer than maybe a few hundred years, tops. I mean, even mortals get babysitters occasionally. That's not so bad, right?

Thank you

[(Anonymous)]

Some humans (some Q as well apparently) do allow themselves to die. I don't like to mention suicide but there it is. I know my question came across as ignorant but I was reading somewhere that 'boredom is a state of mind'...possibly the Q have made it a state of being? having to seek desperate measures like suicide (or having children...both are painful) or civil war seems a little exteme...I mean. What happens when all the fun of parent-hood wears off? You're left with a bunch of very not-at-all-happy Q's running around after tiny little beings with omnipotence...(poor you! No wonder you're having such a hard time)...I wonder how many years it will take before another war starts?

But anyway, thank you for answering my questions...despite the depth of ignorance therein. I'll go away and stop bothering you.

(And, by the way, as a female human who has *had* a child I can understand why the Captain turned you down. There are certain parts of female human anatomy that rip you know.)

[qcontinuum.livejournal.com]

Some humans (some Q as well apparently) do allow themselves to die.

Well, yes, but whether or not you allow it, it *will* happen. That's the definition of being mortal, after all. You can perhaps blame a suicidal mortal for dying *right now*, but you can't blame mortals for the fact that they die at all.

What happens when all the fun of parent-hood wears off? You're left with a bunch of very not-at-all-happy Q's running around after tiny little beings with omnipotence...(poor you! No wonder you're having such a hard time)...

I'm trying very hard not to think about that.

Although, since so far I'm the only Q who's chosen both to procreate and to raise the child, we don't have a "bunch" yet. I suspect they're all waiting to see how my son turns out before jumping in.

I wonder how many years it will take before another war starts?

Hopefully, never. War is a sign that something has gone drastically wrong with your ability to communicate with your fellows. We didn't have a war because we were bored, we had a war because we were afraid of our destruction as a species and half of us vigorously disagreed with the other half as to what the prescription for our salvation should be. When someone comes along with a new idea, the way it's *supposed* to work is we take it under consideration, test it, and accept it or not after seeing how it worked... which is what we're doing with having children, more or less. It's not supposed to cause *wars*.

(And, by the way, as a female human who has *had* a child I can understand why the Captain turned you down. There are certain parts of female human anatomy that rip you know.)

Rip? Oh. Oh, dear. That seems like *incredibly* poor design. How is it that any of you ever thought you were created by an *intelligent* being again?

Amanda was of the opinion that if I'd really wanted to procreate with a human, I should have volunteered to take the female role. According to her, if there's a choice in the matter the person who wants the child should take the female role because it's harder work -- also, she claims it would have freed me to pursue Picard, who would probably have said yes for the sake of peace but not if I made him do the work of being pregnant, given that he's used to the limitations of being a human male. I granted her the point tentatively but was unaware that the "work" involved could include grievous bodily harm... even if you can regenerate your body instantly, that sounds rather more painful than I'd ever want to deal with. So I suppose it's just as well I procreated with a fellow Q. At least then no one had to deal with *pregnancy.*