Headscratchers / A Fire of Devotion

• So, the author retcons Samantha Wildman to be pansexual. And she dates (and later marries) a former Borg drone. And at no point throughout the entire 4 part, almost 400,000 word fics does the author think to have Ensign Wildman utter some variation on the line "Gender is irrelevant?"
• A number of comments on both the Fan Fiction.net and Archive Of Our Own versions of this story come from people who think the Seven/Samantha pairing (sometimes referred to as Sam7) makes perfect sense. So how come so far no sign exists that anyone shipped these two prior to Part 1 of A Fire of Devotion being posted on FFN in 2015, more than 14 years after Voyager went of the air?
  • It's not that uncommon for someone to realize that an idea is good and obvious when they hear it, despite not hearing it before.
• In the first chapter based on the two-parter Equinox, we get an indication that B'Elanna was actually afraid of her ex-boyfriend and current Equinox first officer Maxwell Burke. When Burke approaches her in the mess hall she grips Tom tightly enough to hurt him. Why is never explained, and in the same chapter she suddenly seems okay being alone with him on the upper level of engineering. If the author meant to imply that Burke had been a Domestic Abuser, it fails to come across.
  • Admittedly, a Doyalist reason might be that a similar thing happened in the actual episode- they set up a past history between Burke and Torres, but that was forgotten by the second episode.

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