I was saying the last day to a friend that what people don’t realise about Garak is that yes, he’s extremely provocative and he lives to offend and provoke people, to pick out vulnerable threads in their characters and pluck and play with them like he’s pulling them out of their clothes, and yes, he says things that are specifically about Cardassian superiority and culture, especially when he’s provoking Bajorans

this is partly because he’s The Worst™, partly because he genuinely feels he deserves everyone’s hatred, partly because he’s happy to be trusted but too much of a nationalist to be trusted if that means people forgetting he’s Cardassian, and partly because he thinks it’s funny

but consistently, when people describe their culture and defend it to him as proudly as Garak describes and defends his own, he is PLEASED. Garak will tell you until his face turns purple that he hates Klingons, Ferengi, Bajorans, Romulans, Vulcans, etc, but whenever Kira describes Bajor’s religion or Klingons go toe to toe with him whilst talking about Kahless or when Quark defends Ferengi culture, Garak is PLEASED

because to Garak, from his moderately insane perspective, if he tells you Cardassian culture is superior and all you do is call him a spoonhead and walk away, you’ve just proven him right

but if you SHOW your culture, if you defend it piece by piece, it doesn’t matter if you spit in his face while you do so - he’ll be glad, because if you care enough about it to defend it like that, it must be good for something, and it must be worth defending.

if you don’t bother to defend it, or if you jump to personal insults, that’s fine, but you’re ceding to Cardassian superiority in the first place, and he thinks that’s a shame.

Garak as a Cardassian despises individualism and it’s probably what he hates most about the Federation and Starfleet - like, Quark and Garak have their root beer conversation where they both scornfully discuss the Federation’s cosmopolitan multiculturism and basically point out that the Federation is just as much a colonial force as Cardassia or the Klingins etc, and one of the ways you can consistently befriend Garak is by telling him things he doesn’t know and defend them not from a place of logic or sentiment, but LOYALTY to a higher cause, and to a collective

he doesn’t tell julian he needs to learn to murder his friends just bc he thinks julian killing people is sexy, although it is - it’s also because he wants julian to learn that he can have his friends as an individual, or he can have his ideals as a servant and representative of the causes he claims to support, but he can’t be both an individual AND truly loyal to a collective. he has to choose one, ideally the latter.

even if that cause is Starfleet, he’ll grudgingly respect it

my favourite thing about garak is also how he consistently comes off as liking and trusting and respecting women far more than he does men, especially bc like

so garak is the pettiest bitch alive, but the bit in civil defence when he tells dukat to back the fuck off kira has NOTHING to do with dukat himself

garak hates dukat. he killed his father, he thinks dukat represents everything flawed and wrong and corrupted in the Cardassian military and government, he thinks Dukat is an embarrassment, hedonistic, selfish, and all these other flaws

and yet in that moment, he doesn’t embarrass Dukat in the way that would hurt him most, by implying it and making Dukat figure out what he’s saying. he doesn’t say it to another character and let it cut him. he doesn’t even tell KIRA, and let her refuse Dukat

garak, in short, doesn’t do anything about that interaction in a Cardassian way. he doesn’t belabour the point, he doesn’t draw it out

he sees that dukat is making advances on kira, and that not being Cardassian - and also bc Kira thinks that even Dukat wouldn’t stoop that low - she isn’t noticing the cues, and he’s furious

he’s furious that dukat is disrespecting the major like that. the major that garak genuinely quite likes, no matter that kira will never trust him and always hate him - garak has never been and will never be offended when kira threatens him or insults him, even about ziyal later on, because kira is a bajoran and she makes a bajoran something worth BEING. she knows her history, she knows her culture, poetry, religion - she educates both gently and aggressively, she tells federation people to fuck off when they’re ignorant, and she is PROUD of who she is. Garak calls her by her title a LOT more than he does some people, for one, and apart from the threats which we all know he enjoys from everyone, he almost never says a bad word about her when she comes up in conversation which I think is so funny

and when he sees what dukat is doing, he’s disgusted. yes, he’s disgusted bc dukat is disgusting and bc garak likes kira, he’s disgusted that dukat is treating kira like one of the bajoran women he could pluck out of a line up and casually take for his comfort, but more than that, he’s disgusted that dukat is taking advantage of kira’s trust and ignorance.

but what he’s disgusted by most isn’t dukat himself, but that he’s a Cardassian doing this in front of Garak who sees what he’s doing, in a room of stupid aliens who don’t know any better, and he thinks Garak will LET him? that he’ll APPROVE? like fuck he will!

garak speaks very bluntly in that interaction. it’s probably the bluntest and simplest we see him get outside of begging tain to acknowledge him as a son.

what’s telling about it is how dukat reacts - how he says, wounded and scandalised, “Garak!”

how it’s JULIAN that has to seriously tell garak to back off

because even Dukat didn’t expect garak would do that. because its not very cardassian of him. a Cardassian doesn’t just bluntly reveal the intentions of another like that when he has nothing to gain from it - it isn’t done! it’s impolite, it’s improper! Kira is just an alien woman, after all, and Garak has just embarrassed Dukat in front of all these aliens not because he’s being selfish and self indulgent and that’s bad from a Cardassian POV, but because Garak is seeing Dukat disrespect this alien officer in a way that he dislikes, and so he puts a pin in it

as though kira is a Cardassian. as though she’s worthy of that defence as an OFFICER, not as a Bajoran or a woman.

and he doesn’t rub it in. he doesn’t gloat over dukat. he doesn’t go on and on about Dukat’s affection for Bajoran women or women that don’t want anything to do with him, even through he easily could, even though he enjoys hurting Dukat, even though flustering him would be a benefit in their conversation

because all of that would upset KIRA. it wouldn’t be worth hurting Dukat for, and in fact, I think Garak would have done exactly the same thing if it was any other Cardassian officer, which is WHY it’s so significant bc like.

Garak is so petty, as I said.

it’s telling when he puts his pettiness aside to prioritise something else.