Rewatching DS9, Major Kira and the Bajoran resistance, especially the episodes that deal with unclean hands, like “The Darkness and the Light” really hit different when watching today, vs my innocent childhood.
I don’t really have a point, just DS9 has aged like fine wine with new flavors with each season passing.
I think it’s easy to feel a lot more for the narns because of all the stuff they go through during the series, as opposed to just in the backstory. I think the fact that the narns as a whole and our main narn character in particular start the show as people obsessed with hate and revenge is also very important, both because it shows the impact that the centauri have had on them, and because it makes their arc and character development so much more dramatic.
It’s been a long time since I went through DS9, but when I think of the bajorans, I think of their own internal political squabbling more than the occupation. Sure, we hear about it and on a few occasions even see what it was like on the station at the time, but there is nothing in there as powerful as the stuff we got in B5, like say, G’kar’s father on the tree.
Hell, Sisco was thinking about retiring to a little house on Bajor. Ain’t nobody thinking that way about the narn homeworld.