But that never happened?
I felt they went out of their collective way to keep the Prime universe intact from a storytelling point-of-view and yet be able to go off and chart their own course.
Do you think they'll keep making Abramsverse movies after #3?
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But that never happened?
I felt they went out of their collective way to keep the Prime universe intact from a storytelling point-of-view and yet be able to go off and chart their own course.
There's nothing reasonable about trying to declare one fictional story to be "our universe" and the other not. When people treat this as important it's a demonstration that they've lost touch with what fiction is.
I actually do appreciate that aspect of it. While the rumors are that Bad Robot wanted to preempt all TOS marketing for themselves and their new stuff, they weren't so arrogant as to destroy Prime. The Prime universe still exists. So I want story in Prime. The Abramsverse has little meaning to me and that affects how much I really care about it; i.e., not much. I've been consistent about that.
But that never happened?
I felt they went out of their collective way to keep the Prime universe intact from a storytelling point-of-view and yet be able to go off and chart their own course.
Reasoning: Prime is where we are. The alternate reality is where we are not, and is therefor not relevant (to me). The only person from Prime who can possibly experience the alternate reality is Spock. If Prime is still intact, we will just continue through our own timeline without ever meeting anyone or bearing any consequence from the alternate reality.I'm still not sure I follow the reasoning why the Prime has more significance than the alternate reality?
SF, by definition, occurs in a "What if?" world, roots in our world or in a fantasy world. Due fantasy worlds like Star Wars or Lord of the Rings have less impact due to their setting? Does the fact that TOS represents an alternate history in of itself (Eugeneics Wars in the 90s, namely) negate that impact after the fact? Would Abrams Trek be more impactful if it had been a clean reboot, with no Spock Prime?
No snarkiness here. These are legitimate questions.
SW/LOTR: These were never represented as optimistic futures for our civilization. Although I care about SW, I don't care about it like I do Star Trek and its vision of our future. It's from a long time ago in a galaxy far, far away. And LOTR just has no basis in our reality. They are not us. So yes, they have less impact, though not in the sense of an any less enjoyable ride through a fictional story. The movies themselves are fine, more or less, depending on criticisms of storytelling and movie-making, but are not really inspirational to how I want to live my life the way Star Trek has been for so many.
Eugenics Wars: I ignore Eugenics Wars in the 90s as something the writers just didn't predict well enough. I give it a real-world pass, whereas it is impossible to do that with alternate reality. The Eugenics wars was just a failure of prediction and to put them far enough out. But in 300 years when we still don't have warp drive, people are still hungry, still at war, and still committing crimes against each other, I'll tend to seriously reconsider the whole thing.
It would have more significance if it were a clean reboot in our own universe. But the arrogance of such a move would break Trek history so fundamentally as to ask why bother? Just create something new for people to love.
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Since we're not actually in either place, it makes no difference at all.
In the real world, Sherlock Holmes is a fictional character.
In Conan Doyle's stories, Sherlock Holmes is a real human being.
In the series Sherlock, it's reasonable to assume that there is no fictional character named "Sherlock Holmes" written about by Conan Doyle.
Does that make Conan Doyle's stories part of "our universe" and Moffat's series less real than the world of the old stories?
Real answer: no, it does not. In reality Holmes does not exist.
Fascinating (and I mean that sincerely).
Personally, I find LOTR more inspiring because of the moral roots, while SW is more interesting due to his archetypical nature, as well as the characters. Actually, both have archetypes that I find fascinating as characters and their development. I think their moral challenges can find parallels in our world.
Trek, similarly, I find enjoyable from a character standpoint and the technology is fun, not as a predictor of technological or societal change. So, for that point, I will respectfully disagree.
Thank you for the explanation, though
Personally, I find LOTR more inspiring because of the moral roots, while SW is more interesting due to his archetypical nature, as well as the characters. Actually, both have archetypes that I find fascinating as characters and their development. I think their moral challenges can find parallels in our world.
Trek, similarly, I find enjoyable from a character standpoint and the technology is fun, not as a predictor of technological or societal change. So, for that point, I will respectfully disagree.
Thank you for the explanation, though
I'm still not sure I follow the reasoning why the Prime has more significance than the alternate reality?
SF, by definition, occurs in a "What if?" world, roots in our world or in a fantasy world. Due fantasy worlds like Star Wars or Lord of the Rings have less impact due to their setting? Does the fact that TOS represents an alternate history in of itself (Eugeneics Wars in the 90s, namely) negate that impact after the fact? Would Abrams Trek be more impactful if it had been a clean reboot, with no Spock Prime?
No snarkiness here. These are legitimate questions.
Exactly. Life is too short to split hairs over which imaginary future is more "real" than another. And that has nothing to do with our ability to immerse ourselves in a story.
The Prime universe doesn't have more significance; it's simply more familiar to us, the audience, by virtue of having had more stories set in that universe than in any of the others. It's the best-known and most frequently-traveled of all the alternate universes which together comprise Star Trek.I'm still not sure I follow the reasoning why the Prime has more significance than the alternate reality?
SF, by definition, occurs in a "What if?" world, roots in our world or in a fantasy world. Due fantasy worlds like Star Wars or Lord of the Rings have less impact due to their setting? Does the fact that TOS represents an alternate history in of itself (Eugeneics Wars in the 90s, namely) negate that impact after the fact? Would Abrams Trek be more impactful if it had been a clean reboot, with no Spock Prime?
No snarkiness here. These are legitimate questions.
None of those universes are explicitly the same one in which we live, but neither are any of them so drastically different that they couldn't be. All of them arise from a human act of asking "What if... ?" Whatever can be imagined, there's a universe which can contain it.
An imaginary future is not "our" universe.
Doc Brown said it, and it's true. The future hasn't been written yet.
Doc Brown said it, and it's true. The future hasn't been written yet.
I actually do appreciate that aspect of it. While the rumors are that Bad Robot wanted to preempt all TOS marketing for themselves and their new stuff, they weren't so arrogant as to destroy Prime. The Prime universe still exists. So I want story in Prime. The Abramsverse has little meaning to me and that affects how much I really care about it; i.e., not much. I've been consistent about that.
But that never happened?
I felt they went out of their collective way to keep the Prime universe intact from a storytelling point-of-view and yet be able to go off and chart their own course.
Reasoning: Prime is where we are. The alternate reality is where we are not, and is therefor not relevant (to me). The only person from Prime who can possibly experience the alternate reality is Spock. If Prime is still intact, we will just continue through our own timeline without ever meeting anyone or bearing any consequence from the alternate reality.I'm still not sure I follow the reasoning why the Prime has more significance than the alternate reality?
SF, by definition, occurs in a "What if?" world, roots in our world or in a fantasy world. Due fantasy worlds like Star Wars or Lord of the Rings have less impact due to their setting? Does the fact that TOS represents an alternate history in of itself (Eugeneics Wars in the 90s, namely) negate that impact after the fact? Would Abrams Trek be more impactful if it had been a clean reboot, with no Spock Prime?
No snarkiness here. These are legitimate questions.
SW/LOTR: These were never represented as optimistic futures for our civilization. Although I care about SW, I don't care about it like I do Star Trek and its vision of our future. It's from a long time ago in a galaxy far, far away. And LOTR just has no basis in our reality. They are not us. So yes, they have less impact, though not in the sense of an any less enjoyable ride through a fictional story. The movies themselves are fine, more or less, depending on criticisms of storytelling and movie-making, but are not really inspirational to how I want to live my life the way Star Trek has been for so many.
But even if you enjoy Star Trek and find it inspirational, you don't have to literally believe that it could be our future to enjoy it. I mean, I'm pretty sure that we're not actually going to run into real-life Klingons and Gorns and Hortas a few hundred years from now, and that STAR TREK isn't actually predicting that some day a guy named Jim Kirk is going to fight a talking lizard-man on a rock planet. So why does it matter which Jim Kirk we're talking about and how exactly the details of his (not our) future play out?
In other words, fretting about which future history involving Vulcans and tribbles takes place in our actual future seems a bit pointless.
Spoiler alert: neither of them do.
All fiction takes place in an alternate universe/timeline/reality.
Conversely, trying to convince me otherwise is the same waste of time. Yet here we all are, discussing our respective pointless points of view about meaningless fictions.
It's New Year's Day and I'm taking the day off. Gotta pass the time somehow!
I suppose I could go see "Into the Woods," but since that's not set in the same universe as the original Grimm's Fairy Tales, maybe I shouldn't bother?
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Who's trying to convince you of anything? We're just making it clear that your insistence that one of these fantasy realms is real or more "us" than the other is rationally insupportable.
I actually do appreciate that aspect of it. While the rumors are that Bad Robot wanted to preempt all TOS marketing for themselves and their new stuff, they weren't so arrogant as to destroy Prime. The Prime universe still exists. So I want story in Prime. The Abramsverse has little meaning to me and that affects how much I really care about it; i.e., not much. I've been consistent about that.But that never happened?
I felt they went out of their collective way to keep the Prime universe intact from a storytelling point-of-view and yet be able to go off and chart their own course.
Reasoning: Prime is where we are. The alternate reality is where we are not, and is therefor not relevant (to me). The only person from Prime who can possibly experience the alternate reality is Spock. If Prime is still intact, we will just continue through our own timeline without ever meeting anyone or bearing any consequence from the alternate reality.I'm still not sure I follow the reasoning why the Prime has more significance than the alternate reality?
SF, by definition, occurs in a "What if?" world, roots in our world or in a fantasy world. Due fantasy worlds like Star Wars or Lord of the Rings have less impact due to their setting? Does the fact that TOS represents an alternate history in of itself (Eugeneics Wars in the 90s, namely) negate that impact after the fact? Would Abrams Trek be more impactful if it had been a clean reboot, with no Spock Prime?
No snarkiness here. These are legitimate questions.
SW/LOTR: These were never represented as optimistic futures for our civilization. Although I care about SW, I don't care about it like I do Star Trek and its vision of our future. It's from a long time ago in a galaxy far, far away. And LOTR just has no basis in our reality. They are not us. So yes, they have less impact, though not in the sense of an any less enjoyable ride through a fictional story. The movies themselves are fine, more or less, depending on criticisms of storytelling and movie-making, but are not really inspirational to how I want to live my life the way Star Trek has been for so many.
But even if you enjoy Star Trek and find it inspirational, you don't have to literally believe that it could be our future to enjoy it. I mean, I'm pretty sure that we're not actually going to run into real-life Klingons and Gorns and Hortas a few hundred years from now, and that STAR TREK isn't actually predicting that some day a guy named Jim Kirk is going to fight a talking lizard-man on a rock planet. So why does it matter which Jim Kirk we're talking about and how exactly the details of his (not our) future play out?
In other words, fretting about which future history involving Vulcans and tribbles takes place in our actual future seems a bit pointless.
Spoiler alert: neither of them do.
I realized that first when I couldn't find the Catacean Institute in a Bay Area phone book. Then it really hit home when we when we got through 1996 OK (I didn't know whether to be relieved or upset).
All fiction takes place inside a snow globe (very arcane or at least obscure reference to St. Elsewhere).
Maybe someone already asked this upstream, but aren't we technically in the beginnings of the Linverse, by the way? Or at least the Lin branch of the Abramsverse?
You mean... this is an alternate alternate reality?
In a way to answer Dennis's point, I understand this attitude, but disagree. The basis of my feelings on this is that TOS and its Prime derivatives ARE in our universe and all others are alternate. That's what alternate means: not ours. To say ALL representations of the story of Star Trek are alternates leaves the show without relevance here. I'd wager the creators and writers never thought otherwise and that when they wrote "Mirror, Mirror" they were thinking that it was set in a universe other than our Prime.
Let's take a different tack: What do you think is the assumption of the majority of all people who know of Star Trek? Our possible future, or someone else's? And do they think of Star Trek as any more or less real or possible than the Marvel universe since they are both fiction?
I've got to agree with M'Sharak that I've never worked on the assumption that Star Trek exists in 'our' universe. There are too many inconsistencies with 'our' reality and their reality for that to be the case. Perhaps *some* version of these characters will exist in 'our' future, but it won't (specifically) be the ones we saw the dramatized adventures of from 1966 through 2002.
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