Star Trek: 10 Things You Didn't Know About The Orions
5. A Pirate's De-Coding
Not all pirates are Orions; not all Orions are pirates. The Mistress of the Winter Constellations had to spend a lot of time trying to divest herself of the clichés in order to be the now lieutenant junior grade D'Vana Tendi — the first Orion Starfleet officer (that we know of in the Prime timeline).
According to Mike McMahan in an interview with TrekMovie in 2020, Tendi began as a discussion with production company Secret Hideout. They were looking for a character in the pilot to have their first day aboard the Cerritos to get a "baseline of somebody else's view of the ship". The earnest Orion was to be "all silver lining".
Tendi was also somewhat of a self-insert on McMahan's part, as he went on to note to TrekMovie:
What's fun about Tendi is that if I got to serve on a Starfleet ship, I'd be Tendi too! There's literally nothing on the ship that she doesn't get excited about.
Of course, when it doesn't end in tears, it ends in solar sailships and the hilariously to-the-point Pirate Queen. The Tendi family business was once the fifth largest house of the Orion Syndicate, after all.