Spoilers 1st openly gay character.
- Thread starter steam235
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I'd hope we have left that stereotype behind, myself. Science Fiction isn't just about spaceships and anomalies and lasers. It's about people in a fantastical world. And romance is a big part of people's lives.
In the future romance is dead, all humans are cloned.....
So gay people who never mention, imply or are depicted as gay? This is called erasure.
Maybe I worded that poorly. I don't tune in to watch romance in TV shows. That has no interest for me. Trek usually does romance pretty bad. So I prefer to see as little of romance as possible in the TV shows I watch.
So I don't want to watch trek about a gay couple, a hetero couple or a any other couple. I prefer all of that to be as far in the background as possible.
No, I don't mean that. I was referring to a PR blitz beforehand to announce it, instead of letting it come out in the story itself.
I apologize for making it seem another way.
I could be wrong, but I would presume that in the Trekverse 23rd/24th century there are plenty of same sex relationships, but the self-identification as being "gay" is probably a quaint historical footnote. This would help explain why we didn't actually see gay characters in the past - it's just that the same-sex relationships of some of the characters were never written about, not that all of them were categorically "straight."
Well yeah, it is a bit embarrassing for the producers to be super proud of this, as all it really does is to call attention to the fact that it took this bloody long. I mean of course better later than never, but at this point it's not much of an achievement.
If Trek wanted gayness to be a big deal, they should have done it during the 90's.
Or even the noughties. IIRC, the original plan was for Malcolm Reed to be gay, but the producers wimped out.
Now it's 2017 and Star Trek has an ongoing gay character in a world where pretty much every show has LGBT representation. Wow. Amazing. Bravo.
Or even the noughties. IIRC, the original plan was for Malcolm Reed to be gay, but the producers wimped out.
Now it's 2017 and Star Trek has an ongoing gay character in a world where pretty much every show has LGBT representation. Wow. Amazing. Bravo.
Yeah, Berman being a homophobe really held the franchise back.
I know that even before Reed, there was to be seen a same sex couple on TNG, right around the last couple seasons, but the idea was scrapped as well.
Has it been confirmed it was Berman? There have been many cases when some people making the shows have said that they wanted to do this and that thing related to this topic, but some big boss nixed it. So that was Berman?
Yes, there's romance in the future but to truly be the part of the sci-fi story we watch (one of the plot) it must be romance with a sci-fi twist. We're watching science fiction. It's not supposed to be like a current romantic drama or comedy about boy meets girl or even boy meets boy (which is not controversial or ground breaking anymore). In general, I don't expect my sci-fi entertainment to be turned into a regular soap opera. There can be romance, family drama, personal drama, etc but there's almost always a sci-fi twist to it, so we tackle the subjects of romance or anything related to our lives (humanity, war, hopes, fear, society, etc) from a particular angle. Some kind of "what if" angle.
It doesn't have to be I'm gay or I'm straight and my romantic endeavors or situation are mentioned in every 5 episodes just so people remember. If it's not part of the story, it's not part of the story. We don't have to follow the romantic situation of every characters or even any at all.
Yup, they're just now getting around to a gay character when everyone else is on to casting trans and nonbinary ones. In about the 2030's Trek might be where the rest of TV is now. Maybe.
You can look at what Memory Alpha has on Berman if you're curious. Several people have accused him of being a homophobe, and no one has ever defended him. At minimum he cared so little about gay rights that he wasn't willing to stuck up for the writers when they wanted to make even passing reference to same-sex relationships.
At the points in time when the ideas were brought up, Trek was at an all-time high. Berman was pretty much the final say in what went on screen, as far as I knew.
The funny thing to me is how some critics have complained that he's "stereotyped gay guy" and an "insult to homosexual characters."
Which I find funny because until I saw that criticism I had forgotten he was a gay character. If they introduce a relationship with another man, I trust the writers will treat it like any other relationship.
Which I find funny because until I saw that criticism I had forgotten he was a gay character. If they introduce a relationship with another man, I trust the writers will treat it like any other relationship.
As they should. To me, how they had Sulu in Beyond was well-done. There was some publicity about it, but it felt more like a product of a plot detail being released to the public as opposed to making a huge point about it.
Seeing him leave the ship and go over to see his daughter and partner, making it part of the overall story and not pausing to have neon signs on him is what should be done.
It's life. Everyday life. Singling people out seems to defeat the purpose, to me.
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