Don't get me started on ds9. A black captain? A trans lesbian officer? A gay interspecies couple? The federation using fear from war as an excuse to become a police state? Can't believe they made my colorful space communism show woke.
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I can't be the only one who remembers Trekkies legitimately bitching about Tuvok because "Vulcans aren't black."
Like... really? You've been there and checked this out for yourself? Or is it that most (and not even all) of the handful of Vulcans you saw so far were white?
Tuvok is the best depiction of a Vulcan in all of Star Trek too and I will die on this hill (Spock is half human, so I am not counting him). Tuvok seemed to me like he found humans (and Neelix) to be illogical, difficult to understand, and somewhat annoying; but nonetheless he couldn't help but like them as well, though he wouldn't admit that to them (tangential hot take: Vulcans claim to suppress their emotions, but they still make decisions based on emotion and rationalise them as being based on logic after the fact)
Overall I like Tuvok as a character. My problem with Tuvok is they write him as if Vulcans have no emotion. He even says that.
Vulcans are supposed to have such strong emotions they need to constantly keep them under control and use logic to make decisions because the emotions cause them to make bad decisions.
I think that's a lot more interesting for a character. Nemoy said he played Spock as a guy who was constantly in wonder at things and keeping it under control.
With few exceptions, they're also supposed to also have mastered their emotions very handily. Partly fue to exceptional biology. Not absolutely constantly be on the verge of breaking into tears or a rage, a la Enterprise.
The same people now whine about there being black dwarves in rings of power
You're presuming a lot here. Like that anyone watched Rings of Power.
I hadn't heard that, but it doesn't surprise me. I remember people not too long ago whining about a black Ariel in the live action Disney Little Mermaid movie.
Because real live mermaids that actually exist are white. Everyone knows that.
You know what really grinds my gears about Vulcans? According to Trek lore their blood is green because they evolved using copper atoms to bind oxygen in the blood. But if that were the case they should have hemocyanin, and their blood should be blue.
I know for a certainty, however, that any inhabitable worlds we might find in the future will definitely look like a sound stage populated with Styrofoam boulders
Anyway, hardcore fans are dumb. I should know, I was one
Tuvok is black!?!?! I thought he was a Vulcan! I suppose the next thing you are going to tell me is that Odo isn't a Shapeshifter?
A gay interspecies couple?
Rick Berman:
Hold on, O'Brien and Bashir were the same species!
I've seen DS9 multiple times, but I have no clue what you're talking about on some of these. Please enlighten me.
A trans lesbian officer
Are you talking about Jadzia/Ezri-Dax? If so, neither are trans. The parasite, Dax, in them has no gender but can go to different hosts that have genders.
A gay interspecies couple
Are you talking about Odo and Kira? While Odo doesn't have gender, I wouldn't call it a gay interspecies couple. That's kind of a stretch.
Edited for format
A trans lesbian officer
That is a popular fan interpretation of Jadzia. I can see some similarities, but I don't think the Trill are even as much as an allegory for transsexuality. That interpretation is very reductive and dismissive of the transsexual experience.
A gay interspecies couple
Garak and Bashir were originally written with gay subtext. Producers put a stop to that before anything actually developed between the two characters.
The fact that they successfully branded "Not Being Racist" as being "Woke and cringe" is.. some ol' bullshit
Pretty sure the downvoters didn't finish reading that...
They sure didn't and only frothed as soon they saw WoKe.
woke is the new sheeple
...in that anytime anyone uses it to support their argument you immediately know they're a grade-a fuckewit.
You hated Discovery because it was too woke.
I hated Discovery because it wasn’t woke enough.
We are not the same.
I hated Discovery because it was written like a chorus of monkeys with typewriters and not a single one of them got close to Hamlet.
At least they got the "travel the galaxy on shrooms" part correctly.
Picard: “We work to better ourselves and the rest of humanity”
Tilly: “I went to Elon Musk junior high school”
I'm just going to pretend it's one of his descendants with the same name who actually managed to do some good
I hated it because half of the characters annoyed me and the other half didn’t have enough screen time
I fucking loathe the series for introducing "Frieza" (the half mecha character), and IMMEDIATELY killing her off. Finally a somewhat interesting character, and they get fucking rid of her. Pisses me the fuck off
Yeah, really. There wasn't much enlightened future stuff going on and they pointlessly killed (and then returned, but still) one of the gay guys for shock value(?). It's just so poorly written that neither that nor any of the empowerment messages landed for me.
So Bald IS a hairstyle!
BALD?? I have hair! Why else would I visit the best barber in Starfleet?!
I just couldn't get into Discovery or Picard because they felt... weird? Not that it wasn't like Star Trek in the stories or that it was "woke," but it just didn't have the same vibe as what I grew up with. Lower Decks has the vibe, but not the tone or anything else. I need to check out Strange New Worlds. It looks like it might be what I'm really missing.
Both Picard and Discovery were season long plots without episodic filler episodes to shake things up which made it painfully obvious that their overarching plotlines were terrible. Add some poorly done melodramatic scenes about how the leads are the most important people ever without showing why (and in a lot of cases showing the opposite) and we have two series that were just a slog to watch up to the point that I stopped.
Both sounded good on paper. Both had great casts. Both seemed to suffer from terrible writing and direction.
I just watched Season 2 of Picard and all I could think the whole time was "TNG crew would have wrapped this up in 1 or 2 episodes..."
Yup, in order to make Discovery and Picard work, the writers had to give everyone the idiot ball.
Trek is at its best when it's competence porn.
As a note, to be in star fleet requires 4 years at the start fleet academy. You need to be somewhat good at your job and somewhat disciplined to even be considered for a slot on a ship.
I find many of these shows and movies that are accused of being woke is because they create protagonists without flaws, out of fear of making non traditional characters look bad I guess? But protagonists without flaws are boring.
I'm trying to think what Burnham's fatal flaw is, or her deadly sin. It's mostly stuff that has happened to her and she has to overcome but that's not the same thing. Interesting protagonist have flaws like hubris, vice, hypocrisy, greed, something that makes them more real. You look at characters like Rey from star wars and again, flawless except for her past, which again is something that happened to her not something she is.
That's why people didn't like when Han Solo didn't shoot first. Yes Han Solo is overall a good guy, but he's also ruthless and a gangster when we meet him. If he's already a flawless good guy at the start,that just sucks. Anakin as well, good but arrogant and controlling
Clearly they never understood old-trek
My only major critiques for Discovery are that they walked back a Calvin-verse reboot after fan backlash (my interpretation), and that the theatrics usually don't mesh well with the action-oriented flow of the rest of the episodes around it.
The reboot thing was, to me, overly clear with the changes in aesthetics and technology. Especially the Klingons. And I get it: it's hard to dazzle audiences through vibrant creative direction, with decades of canon on your back. All that older stuff has compromises from old effects tech and budget baked in, so breaking from it is incredibly tempting. But the fans will not let you do this: just ask the Dr. Who production people. So we get some really oddball stuff happening in the first few seasons.
To the latter point, we get moments like: "The ship is going to explode in one minute, so let's argue for at least ten before we deal with that." This kind of thing happens a lot in Discovery and a binge-watch would have you thinking that the ship's counselor is either dead or contemplating transporter suicide. The dissent between characters feels valid most of the time, but other times is just jarringly out of character or contrary to self-preservation as to break suspension of disbelief. But there's usually angry, loud, arguing dissent. Which is a shame since these same episodes are hitting the mark on every other metric, IMO.