So, obviously, you didn't actually click the link and read any of her blog post. Instead you mischaracterized and categorically dismissed her just because you disagreed with something in my pullquote.
(FWIW, the central thrust of the piece is about "Kirk drift"... the way the presentation of him in the Abrams films, as rash, impulsive, and a womanizer, is based far more on a pop-culture caricature of Kirk than on anything about how he was originally depicted. She leverages detailed examples on behalf of that argument, and she's pretty much inarguably right about it.)
I didn't log on for a day and come back to find five pages of discussion about my signature!
All disputes about
Discovery and the Abrams movies aside (and I've made clear where I stand on that), lawman's right: that's not the main point of the article.
Discovery didn't even exist when it was written.
I think it's a really excellent piece, and I routinely recommend it to people who aren't even Trekkies. I'm a right-winger who normally closes an article the instant I see the word "kyriarchy" (heck, guys, I backed
Santorum in 2008, just to give you an idea of how far I am from Horakova ideologically)... but Horakova points out something that is really, really
strange: the fact that our cultural memory of James T. Kirk isn't simply
unrelated to the actual James T. Kirk depicted on screen, but is actually
opposed to the actual Kirk in almost every way, and even people who obsessively watch the show are frequently unable to see the real Kirk instead of the distorted cultural memory of him they've received from Zapp Brannigan. This is a startling realization, and, once you notice it, you start to see it other places in pop culture. (It's like seeing past the TARDIS perception filter, though; it's not easy.) We routinely deny facts about characters that are literally
right before our eyes in favor of a cultural opinion about those characters that is completely incompatible with those facts.
Once she's demonstrated this bizarre phenomenon, she tries to develop some explanation for it. And the Marxist lens through which she sees the world definitely influences that, and often not for the better. Yet I haven't come up with any
better explanations, and even if I threw her whole explanation for it out the window, the whole article is still worth it simply for calling our attention to the fact of "Kirk Drift," which certainly demands
some explanation.
It took me months of leaving the tab open before I actually read the piece all the way through, because the author's ideology was so obviously very far away from mine, but I'm very glad I finally did, and you should read it even if you don't share her beliefs about the Abrams movies (which are very much not the main object of the piece).
Also, although it is only a footnote, her comment on the gamification of continuity -- not just in
Star Trek but in a huge range of "franchises" today -- absolutely hits the nail on the head of a problem that's been bothering me for years, but which I could never quite articulate. (I love continuity! But the most important part of continuity is verisimilitude, and the great majority of "references" in, say, modern superhero movies not only fail to advance verisimilitude, but actually undermine it.)
Thanks for pulling me (and this wonderful article) into the conversation, Lawman!