The thing I love about this, the thing I always find funny whenever this comes up, is that these midwits are just too dumb to make the obvious argument. The argument that is “in their face” and “being shoved down their throats.”
There is a rational, coherent argument to make their point. It’s one I disagree with. It’s one that, in my opinion, can only be made in bad faith with no purpose other than to be a concern troll, but it’s there.
They always bring up Adira, Gray, Jett, Stamets, Culber, and anything else that’s gone up their ass but never any of the actual social commentary because they’re so thick it went over their heads and they didn’t even notice it. You can see it in this thread. They mention the characters and people respond with “but they’re just existing, how does that bother you?” They just bring up the characters again to a response of “yeah, we heard you the first time, what are they doing that bothers you other than existing?” And it just goes in a circle.
There was never an episode of ToS where Uhura talked about how hard it was to be a black woman as a bridge officer, because it wasn’t. That’s the whole point. In the future Star Trek wants us to imagine, a black female officer is completely unremarkable. Whenever they wanted to engage in social commentary about race relations in the 60s they had to invent an allegorical race, time travel, or use some other device to make their point.
The same thing is happening in the newer series. All those characters are just existing. Their sexuality and gender identity is completely unremarkable in the future Star Trek shows us. If those dipshits had two brain cells to rub together they would see the new series are full of allegories about not just tolerance, or even acceptance, but appreciation for beings with non-conforming expressions of self. If any of that did manage to trickle through their thick skulls they probably just twisted it into “yeah, people shouldn’t make fun of me for having a relationship with a waifu pillow.”
If they weren’t so stupid they could easily give a half dozen examples and say “it’s too much,” “I got it the first time,” “focus on something else for a change,” or whatever other bullshit justification they came up with to oppose these themes. It would be a bad faith argument that I would disagree with but at least they could pretend they’re not bigots, instead of their current position which seems to be “I’ve got no problem with these people, I just don’t want to see them.”
TBH, I initially had a strange reaction to Discovery. It seemed to me like it was virtue-signalling and pandering to an audience to increase viewership or profit. Similar to how you sometimes see fake stock-photos of a business where they contains exactly one person from every ethnicity. I think the word I’m thinking of is “tokenism.” I still watched it for a couple seasons, and it was decent. I didn’t really realize at the time how prevalent and dangerous bigotry still was in the U.S… Now I think it’s probably good some shows and movies over-represent minorities.
It seemed to me like it was virtue-signalling and pandering to an audience to increase viewership or profit.
Until people stop seeing minorities as different, then these kind of labels are going to get applied just because they exist. If a cast of non-minorities doesn’t raise an eyebrow, then a cast of minorities shouldn’t either. Base such labels on the way the characters are written, not because they exist. Stopping bigotry requires not caring about sex, gender, or sexual orientation.
I didn’t really realize at the time how prevalent and dangerous bigotry still was in the U.S
Bigotry is a worldwide issue, not just in the US. The problem is often implicit discrimination, where someone is subconsciously influenced by bigotry and isn’t aware they’re doing it. It never gets resolved because people get defensive when it’s pointed out to them. Stopping it requires prioritizing doing the right thing over being right.
The one argument that Star Trek has gone woke I agree with is that the characters are all tripping over themselves to make make Tilly captain despite her obvious incompetence for that position. Contrast that with Barkley who everyone recognized needed self improvement to progress.
Otherwise I totally agree. Star Trek has always been progressive when it comes to race, religion, etc.
Just one example of the extremely poor writing
And, on the flip side, there’s also their total blindness to many examples of old Trek being decidedly unsubtle. They just will not address those, because to do so would completely undermine their point—and they’re not interested in the truth, really. They just want their anger.
I don’t know how someone can be a Star Trek fan and not get it. It’s an attitude diametrically opposed to the core spirit of the franchise. How do these people enjoy a show about exploring strange new worlds, seeking out new life and new civilizations, but they can’t stand the presence of different humans?
Star Trek was literally always woke.
I assume they’re returning to their truck to retrieve some sort of accelerant.
I don’t mind wokeness if the story is good, but to crash a story to champion wokeness is unacceptable to me.
In my opinion STD is just badly written with the focus on timeline breaking technology and a Mary Sue.
There is nothing wrong with LGBT characters if they fit to the story (not just people with the superpower of being gay).I read the Mary Sue link you provided but I can’t figure out what character you’re suggesting is “portrayed as inexplicably competent across all domains, unrealistically free of weaknesses, extremely attractive, innately virtuous, and generally lacking meaningful character flaws.” (from your link).
I agree about the timeline stuff and also that the LGBT representation was excellently done and not any character’s “superpower” or anything.
(Also the official initialism for Disco is “DSC” (or “DIS” on Memory Alpha) but never “STD”)
I meant especially Michael Burnhams abilities as a human. Her short and unbelievable backstory on vulcan, her super vulcan logic where she outsmarts experts in their fields, her exceptionally fighting skills and so on.
Maybe not all checkpoints could be marked here, but I think she was written in the wrong genre.
Maybe a superhero movie (with a better backstory) would be more appropriate.
Oh ffs can we cut this crap?
Yes, there are legitimate bigoted Star Trek fans. It’s the Internet. You can find an abundance of any extreme niche. I’m honestly willing to bet I could find an abundance of furry star Trek fans fairly easily also, despite furries as a whole being vanishingly rare in real life.
However it’s a lot more common to see legitimate criticism of Star Trek painted as bigotry, often by people who clearly aren’t really that big fans of the series.
You couldn’t criticize Discovery for the first year it came out without being called a bigot, and a lot of the people doing so would clearly have 0 idea about the greater Star Trek universe. I remember reading a multitude of comments calling Burnham the first female Captain or first black captain, saying how female senior officers were quiet and unassuming until Tilly came along, and a bunch of other shit that was objectively wrong.
I feel like most implied accusations of bigotry these days are low faith effort attempts to stifle criticism by newer fans who just can’t handle criticism. It’s exhausting and super toxic.
Finally Lower Decks is a grabbag of woke tropes but was met with widespread and is the most popular NuTrek among hardcore fans. That should tell you something more is going on.
It’s definitely true that some people with legitimate criticisms get misread, but I think it’s inaccurate to say that it’s “a lot more common” to see legitimate criticism construed as bigotry than actual bigotry.
Just look at this thread, there are a bunch of people whining about queer characters being forced in your face just for being a part of the show. The bigoted fans come out in force with talk of “STD” (ugh) all the time, which is what created that expectation in the first place.
I feel like dismissing all the bigotry out there (including in this very thread) as “it’s just the internet” while dwelling on a few dumb comments you read in the past (probably on the Internet?) is disingenuous.
Ffs. Let’s look at this thread.
The top comments are by far just assholes. They dismiss and demean people like high school bullies. They are overly cruel, and blatantly attempt to justify that behavior like pretending their targets are just deplorable who deserve to be treated like this.
I find it disingenuous that you focus on the comments downvoted to hell and completely handwave away this obviously shitty behavior.
My instance has downvotes disabled, so if those comments are downvoted to hell I wouldn’t know. As a result they show as reasonably highly upvoted on my end. Even if those opinions are controversial, the number of upvotes they get (plus the fact that there’s several such comments, even here) show that there’s lots of people who share the opinion. We just happen to be in a community that tends to be biased towards Discovery, so those opinions are in a minority here. Go to other communities, and suddenly people will be complaining about “woke Trek” left and right and getting majority support.
People came at you because you responded to a meme about bigots complaining about wokeness, which even you seem to concede exist, to make a complaint about how legitimate criticism gets construed as bigotry—which the meme in the post is not an example of. It comes across a little like a self report. It’s like if you make a post saying “Nazism is bad” and some conservative randomly responds “this is hate speech against conservatives”. You were talking about Nazis, not conservatives, but their response comes across as them admitting they’re a Nazi.
That said, people came at you really aggro. It’s easy to get caught up in labeling people as bigots and then get carried away in the dunking. I don’t want to handwave away that fact.
Thanks for that last part.
The reason I immediately jumped to the bullying is because I feel like I’ve seen this story a million times. Someone loudly proclaims some extremely popular moral opinions. In the process, they then proceeded to insult whatever morally defunct out group.
At first it seems great. After all, bigots/Nazis are horrible people that need to be put in their place.
However, over time, the definition of bigot/Nazi widens to the point where it essentially becomes meaningless, while the vitriol towards whatever group becomes more and more unhinged.
I remember on reddit there was a sub called justneckbeard things. It started by roasting toxic neck beards. However by the end they’d just be posting pictures of obese nerds, making wild and completely unfounded moral assumptions, and then using those assumptions as a justification to bully people.
I honestly don’t think most of the people complaining about bigots are here to protect tolerance. I think they’re just toxic people who enjoy being cruel.
Who said you can’t critique Disco?
This is about a very specific, very silly objection, levelled by people who have found themselves indoctrinated into a mode of thinking that alienates them from the people around them, because of a manufactured fear preying upon alienation many of us experience in our modern world.
I’ve had plenty of objections to aspects of Disco, especially during season two, but scattered throughout the series, and no one has ever called me a bigot for my hot takes. If you’re presenting your critiques in such a way that people are assuming you’re bigoted, perhaps you should reevaluate how you’re constructing your criticism.
Oh God and the gaslighting.
Valid Criticisms:
Max drama deviates from star trek standard format
non episodic / arcs within arcs make it hard to jump in and follow
Everyone talks too fast (lampooned on SNW | LD crossover even!) Deus Ex (Time Travel | AI | Etc.)
MultiLithium gets really explody if you cry hard enough.
Not Valid:
Everything is too (Gender | Sexual Preference | Skin Color) for ST (these people have a vacation fuck planet, and regularly bone holocharacters, get over it we all know if Kirk had a holodeck he would have died in that thing).
Mushroom warp is stupid (fuck you I loved mushroom warp).
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You just reminded me of a bingo card Reddit Risa had during Disco S1:
ha! That’s excellent. I was not in a position time-wise to watch DSC S1 when it actually aired, so I missed all these shenanigans. In retrospect it’s probably the best trek to binge (which I did) since many episodes feel more like parts of a movie instead of being self contained. I’m a fan of all trek, even Enterprise. :D
Do people genuinely not like ENT?
From my perspective, I didnt start to appreciate it until the final season and then I wasnt even that bummed because I knew I wouldnt have to hear budget rod Stewart sing over an old Timey map with crew member power point transitions
Ooooo I can do this too!
STD had shit writing, unbelievable performances, and stands as a monument of what not to do making Trek. They did inclusion pretty well however, which I think opened the door to future, positive choices in the franchise.
SNW did all these things correctly. (I’m 100% not biased because I’m crushin on Captain Angel)
Picard S2 is legitimately the worst thing ever made in Star Trek. It physically hurt to try to finish it, and remains to this day the only Trek I skipped episodes of.
LD is just perfect. No notes.
I’m not really sure what the point you’re trying to communicate here was?
Does that mean it’s okay to douse me in accelerant too?
look, I’m not here to kink shame you
You assholes hop into IPs that were longstanding homes of nerds and then act like high school bullies.
Honestly I doubt you give two shits about social justice. You just use it as a justification to be a cruel asshole to people.
Calling people assholes and gatekeeping is clown behaviour. Take a week off.
In all honesty, most people that hate current trek don’t hate it because it’s too woke, they hate it because it’s just generic trash. Classic trek didn’t care much about big space battles, loads of pew pew and great action shots. Classic trek cared about great stories. The ships were places where people actually worked and lived together.
Current trek (anything after enterprise) has horrible story lines, horrible dialogue, is mostly about dump action pew pew and CGI, ignores 50 years of history, is all about fuck this, fuck that and fucking fuck you and honestly: it isn’t woke: it’s only virtue signalling.
Classic trek was woke by making great stories about real issues in society. New trek is just a sad shadow of what it used to be.
I was never bothered by new trek being too woke because it isn’t.
To quote a really shitty show: sheer fucking hubris.
Strange New Worlds and Lower Decks have been pretty good at scratching the classic itch I think. But yeah I do agree that picard and discovery suffer from a problem that a lot of Marvel and DC comics these days suffer from. They dont slow down and spend every arc going from a threat THAT WILL CHANGE EVERYTHING to another threat that WILL CHANGE EVERYTHING. So many universe ending events.
Current trek (anything after enterprise) has horrible story lines, horrible dialogue, is mostly about dump action pew pew and CGI, ignores 50 years of history, is all about fuck this, fuck that and fucking fuck you and honestly: it isn’t woke: it’s only virtue signalling.
To claim that all iterations of modern Trek are a homogenous unit cut from one singular cloth tells me that either you haven’t actually even attempted to watch even half of it, or you’re completely blinded by personal biases. Either way, your opinion would be easy to discard even if it wasn’t a rant only tangentially related to the original post.
Strange New Worlds is more like classic trek, it’s not bad like Discovery.
IDK I think Discovery is weak for like 2 season before it figures itself out and is currently pretty good.
If it wasn’t trek I would have checked out in season 1, but if you’re willing to push through I think it’s worth it.
I’m with you, I did not really like 1-2 much (despite liking the characters, sets, costumes music, etc.) and 3 was an improvement, but season 4 I actually thought was phenomenal and what I want to see more of in Trek, specifically the slower pacing and big weird alien-aliens, and a conflict not solved with pew pews.
I feel similarly with Enterprise, Season 4 of ENT was so good, so I’m excited to see if DSC S5 can keep it up.
Well said. I don’t think new Trek has been too “woke” (whatever that means because no one can define it). The only one that was over the top was that kid who was non-Trill that had a symbiont. For being in the 31st century (or whatever) they focused too much on his they/them nonsense. You’re not suppose to mention it. When you make a thing of it, it doesn’t come across as normal. That’s like TOS making a big deal of a black woman working on the bridge. Sure, in reality it was a big deal at the time, but being set in the 23rd century it should be normal by then.
New Trek sucks for all the reasons you said. God awful writing, poor dialog, and plenty of bad actors. No character development. I can only remember a few characters names from Discovery. The rest I just physically describe: chick with metal on half of face, robot chick, darked haired guy and blonde chick who stood in the back of the bridge sometimes, and chick with African name.
I only continued to watch it for Stamets (after he chilled out), Saru, and Georgiou.
they focused too much on his they/them nonsense.
*their, not his
And it was a scene of, what, 30 seconds where they stated what their pronouns were, then it was never mentioned again? How is that focusing too much on it?
You’re not suppose to mention it.
Unless everyone’s a mind reader, nobody’s going to know what a person’s pronouns are unless they tell them. They did, and that was that.
It was several scenes. Mostly between the doctor and Stamets. More than “30 seconds”.
No other character stated their pronouns, so how am I supposed to know everyone elses? The same way people figured it out since day 1. And here’s an easy way for us to know. Other characters can call him by it, and then we’ll know. Not everything has to be outright stated on camera for the audience to figure it out.
I’m only aware of this scene. What others are there? Stamets misgenders them at 0:09 and they’re done with the scene around 0:48, so you’re right, it was about 40 whole seconds.
I am frequently just… astonished to be honest, how often it’s repeated that it was a “major plot arc” or “multiple scenes” when it was, (as you pointed out) so brief. And it doesn’t ever seem to sway anyone’s opinion when this fact is pointed out!
“They made an entire episode about nonbinary people”
“The one in TNG?”
“No, Discovery”
“There was a single 40 second scene”
“Are you trolling? It was shoved down our throats”
Yeah, there’s a difference between a well written stories that take on social issues and really breaks down the ethics of them in an interesting and entertaining way and a poorly written story that’s trying to do something vaguely similar and completely fails to accomplish anything other than just mentioning that social issues exist.
It’s a weird feeling where I agree with what they’re trying to do but it’s so painful to watch them constantly fail.
A bad thing about the anti-woke thing is it’s hard to criticize things that have good intentions but have bad execution without being lumped in with the assholes. And I feel like poor writing won’t improve when there’s that excuse of “well they’re just hateful anti-woke assholes” to fall back on.
Okay so what’s your take on the core dilemma presented by the villain in Prodigy? Given an apparent choice between isolation and extinction, what do you think the right resolution is? Personally I think the conflict mirrors the real world isolation of Sentinel Island. And with the Sentinelese in mind, it starts feeling culturally insensitive to say isolation has no cultural excuse.
Or do you think the question posed by Prodigy is overly simple?
But, is it not?
They had a black woman as a high ranking officer on the bridge in the 60s.
