I think fanwank [in VOY] was just less overbearingly noticeable for people at the time because nerd culture (or at least a bastardisation of) wasn't mainstream culture, and nowadays it is pretty common for big budget nonsense to be part of an extended universe and self-referential.
Come again? Do you
remember the late 1990s? Nerd/geek culture had definitely gone mainstream by then.
However, this complaint about fan-service totally undermines the other main criticism of Discover, which is the constant whinging about canon violations. You can't really have it both ways (Excepting huge things like the protagonist being Spock's adoptive sister).
I don't follow your reasoning here. It's fair to criticize a show for throwing in gratuitous references to past continuity just to (supposedly) gratify fans. It's also fair to criticize a show for
abusing and undermining its own past continuity. The two things are not related.
...it's kind of ridiculous to be comparing my knee-jerk reaction to one season of 15 episodes of a show that came out when I was 27 years old to 30 seasons of TOS, TAS, TNG, DS9, VOY, and ENT... It's never going to be as exciting for me as it was being 10 years old and renting First Contact from blockbuster.
Ah, okay. You're 27; you
don't remember the '90s.
As the old saying from SF fandom goes, the golden age of (fill-in-the-blank) is whatever came out when you were 12. Anyone except the most hard-hearted nostalgia-proof aesthete is going to have soft spots and sentimental attachments to stuff of that particular vintage, and that's perfectly reasonable.
However, that's not an excuse for the people making the material to
aim it at 12-year-olds. It should be written for discerning audiences. The intelligent 12-year-olds will find it on their own anyway, and that's where new fans come from.
Which is part of the reason they shouldn't really care to much about people nitpicking on the internet. If they want to make money and keep themselves on the air than aiming for our liminal Trek-message-board-user demographic is not the way to do it.
As I've commented before, we fans are not CBS; there's no particular reason we should care whether the owners of the property "make money and keep themselves on the air." What we want is
quality material, not just any old thing they can slap the brand name on.
They keep setting themselves up for failure. They talk about Canon all the time, and so raise expectations from those who truly care about it. But whatever explanation they choose to go with wont actually satisfy.
Truth. The DSC producers have made their own bed here, and now they have to lie in it. If they'd announced from the beginning that the show was a reboot, I wouldn't have any complaints about its continuity. (I'd still have plenty of
other complaints, but that's another discussion.)
...by now, mirror universes are such a well-worn trope (even Smallville had one, with Ultraman Clark Luthor) everyone gets it.
Just an aside, for the sake of accuracy... but that
Smallville story was (loosely) inspired by the original
Justice League of America #29, which introduced the idea of an alternate universe with evil doppelgangers of our heroes, including the Crime Syndicate of America and its leader Ultraman... way back in
1964, well before "Mirror, Mirror" ever aired.
There is a stark difference between "fanwank" and merely "serialization". It is absolutely okay to continue previous plot elements or even characters. It only becomes "fanwank" when the references outweigh the original material. In the case ot TWOK, the whole movie is essentially an original story.
I think this point is really important. There's nothing wrong with making logical use of continuity, including in-universe crossovers and sequels and so forth — indeed, that's what we expect from a shared universe, part of what makes it so nifty. The problem is with
gratuitous insertions of dribs and drabs of continuity, things that are devoid of context and add nothing to the story.
By way of analogy, it's akin to the difference between a genuine conversation involving mutual friends and common interests, and an obnoxious exercise in name-dropping.
Anything that acquiesces to irrelevant nerd debate is fanwank to me, regardless of how successful or entertaining it is. An explanation was not really needed, and we weren't owed one. "We do not discuss it with outsiders" was enough of an explanation.
It baffles me whenever anyone asserts that ENT's Augment storyline "wasn't needed." The appearance of the Klingons was the most obvious longstanding unresolved mystery in the Trek universe. How was making a story out of it a bad thing? The story itself worked just fine, and it settled a question a lot of people had been debating for a long time.
[Spoiler about underwear]
To be fair, what Superman wears on the outside of his tights are
trunks, not underwear. The real problem with the costume you posted is all the gratuitous "Jim Lee lines" on the costume, making it look like some sort of weirdly plated armor — not the red trunks, which help to maintain a nice color balance. (If there's one character in comics who should obviously never need to wear armor, for heaven's sake, it's Superman.)
Pardon my impertinence, but do please explain further why you dislike this wondrous and uncommon declension?
Because as
@XCV330 posted, it's a term with no agreed-upon definition, hence just arbitrarily derogatory... and moreover as
@Groppler Zorn posted, it just sounds icky. (Kinda like "postmodernism" except with prurient connotations.)
