So I’m re-watching Babylon 5 again and I don’t think we see Delenn and Sheridan kiss until Sheridan proposes. There’s several times where it looks like they are going to kiss but the end up touching foreheads or just getting their faces really close together. I’d noticed it before and had always wondered what the Doylist reason was but today I was thinking about the Watsonian reason.
My initial thought was that neither of them was sure about the other’s customs. Now surely Delenn would be aware that humans kissed. But it’s reasonable to assume that Sheridan would have no idea if Minbari kiss or not. After all, there’s no reason to assume that all sentient bipeds kiss as part of their dating/mating rituals and it’s kind of hard to imagine Minbari going around kissing in public.
So now I thinking about Delenn getting frustrated that Sheridan won’t kiss her. Like she keeps leaning in and he keeps ducking it at the last minute. 😂
Now it’s also possible that they just don’t want to be seen kissing in public as most of these moment were in public, but I’m pretty sure at least a couple of them were in private.
it is hereditary memory on Sheridan’s part
He retains the epigenetic imprint of his ancestor Alan Bradley
who married Lora Baines, co-inventor of the digitizing laser (secretly a vital pillar of the Dumont shipping company, the transmutation of matter into internet data, which was the secret behind their super-fast shipping)
(since the laser was only ever proven safe for digitizing oranges, the company mostly only shipped oranges, which was why Alan and Lora invested so heavily in oranges and even planted their own orange grove that they passed on to their descendants, all the way to Sheridan’s father at least)
but this is tangential to the reason why the men of Sheridan’s family take so long to get to the point of kissing
basically, the mirroring effect between the lives of programmer and program goes both ways, and has generational impact
this includes Alan Bradley’s leisurely path to first base, which was simply a programmer’s life mirroring the Encom system glitch that restricted permissions on kissing, until Flynn and Yori figured out how to debug that right before he defeated the MCP