Mushrooms are safe and are the only guaranteed safe method of traveling to other universes and back, also in real life. He’s especially responsible by having a trip sitter with him.
I just want strong leads-period. I enjoy a wide variety of characters, and look up to many different ones, not just people of my same race, creed, gender or whatnot. I do. 34 years old here. Still inspired by fictional and nonfictional characters alike, and look up to Aragorn.
I agree. Unfortunately, I think that there are probably better fictional role models, at least in mass media, than there are real-life role models.
See this is something I've long had an issue with in entertainment. That because a show is watched by men, it has to have tough masculine leads to be liked by that audience. Or the inverse, that if a show has a female lead, men won't watch. Which as we know is complete bull. They'll watch, they'll just complain, like commenters here.
Virtually everyone who has ever had a role model, inasumch as it is very rare that we ever really know the person we look up to. "Don't meet your hero" and all that.
I think the point is that as adults, most people don't pick and choose their entertainment (or enjoy their entertainment) based on whether it has a strong role model of their race, gender and sexuality. I think we all like having characters we can superficially identify with to some degree, but at least for me, I more identify with character traits than appearance. It's why characters like Barclay and Stamets spoke to me, as someone who grew up as a socially awkward, anxiety-ridden science and tech geek (which I imagine a lot of Trek fans did).
Oh I agree. Another reason why I like Tilly. Tilly and Barclay are the "us" characters for at least many of us, our way of being somewhere in the crew and being useful.
Tilly is the hyperactive, anxiety-ridden side of me. Stamets is the obnoxious jerk side of me. I do recall, as a pre-teen, watching Hollow Pursuits and being wide-eyed that there was finally someone who understood me, when Barclay talks to Geordi in Ten Forward about what it's like to be socially awkward. He wasn't a role model, I didn't look up to him, but I identified with him, and remember thinking something along the lines of "oh my god, so I'm not alone, people know what it's like."
I mean, I remember when I was younger meeting musicians that I liked and finding out they were idiots. They were never my heroes though, and I didn't really aspire to be like them. I dunno, I suppose I just don't really compare myself to other people - at all - very much. When friends of mine tell me they're depressed because other people their age are doing better at X, it always just strikes me as strange, because I never use someone else as a yardstick.
I grew up on TNG, and never saw myself in any of the characters, though there were ones that ostensibly matched my age or gender or race. I loved and respected Picard, but it wasn't until Jake Sisko (then Janeway and Seven) that I felt I had anything like a role model.* As I've gotten older, I tend to find something in many (if not all) the characters from all the shows to be role model worthy, though in some cases you really dig through the character for that. Burnham and Tom Paris are similar in a lot of ways, except I'd never think of Paris as a role model and I might think of Burnham as one if I squint. They are both preternaturally good at everything, but Burnham had to prove herself a lot more, so her straightfaced "do the right thing even if it might be wrong" attitude works better as a role model than Tom's "everything is easy for me, even prison".** * Not faulting the shows, just describing my experience with them. I don't need to have a role model in every show. Sometimes you just click with some characters in a different way. ** I like Burnham. She's enjoyable as a character to me. Her arc was dramatically inert, but that's just further proof that the "this time it's personal" mentality of writers is a shallow pond of diminishing returns (for all but the very best writers). She'd be great in a story that wasn't about her character (which were the best - albeit tiny - pieces of S1).
But there is a big difference between identifying with a character, and a role model. Did you really aspire to be Jake Sisko?
Quite simply, yes. I didn't identify with him, I aspired to his positive qualities. I'm not saying that he was an amazing role model as I look back now. But flaws and all, yes, at the time, someone who pursued a career away from the expectations of a parent while still maintaining a healthy relationship with that parent (broad strokes here! just saying what I saw in him in the 90s). Plus, he was kind of a dick in that way only kids can be, but he showed potential for growth, and then actually grew (until the writers no longer knew what to do with him).
they gave Jake one of the best most fantastic compact arcs in The Visitor. He lived and sacrificed his entire life for a chance at a reboot for his father. I don't want the new Picard show to be a cavalcade of former-characters, but I would really like to see something from Jake Sisko, the famous writer.
Why can't male fans identify with strong female characters, or strong robot characters, or strong assexual grasshopper characters? Speaking as a male fan, I've never understood this weird idea that male fans need a male hero to keep their interest. Even as a kid, I read Pippi Longstocking and Tom Sawyer, I watched Cinderella and Pinocchio, I thought John Steed and Emma Peel were seriously cool, I watched Batman and Wonder Woman, I read Conan and Red Sonja . . . . If women can watch and enjoy hundreds of years of movies and TV shows about cool male heroes, I think men should be able to watch Discovery or Doctor Who or whatever without fretting about where the dudes are.
This is the single best episode of Trek ever produced. Anyone with a father, or who never had a father, or who had a child can relate to the powerful themes from this episode.
Funny you mention grasshoppers because favorite book series as a small child was "A Cricket in Times Square."
Oh Lordy, Ms Emma Peel... I spent some of my first formative sexual years (teens) trying to find someone like her. Actually succeeded once, but circumstances forced the two of us apart. (read: my 22 year old stubborn stupidity)
Damn, we must have read all the same books as kids... How about "Stuart Little", "A Phantom Tollbooth" and all the Unabridged versions of "Doctor Dolittle"?
The "Identify With" and the "Aspires To Be (Like)" aren't quite the same thing, though of course you should be able to have either or both or any combination. Not that I'm disagreeing with you at all, just want to highlight two separate things at play in this thread (and in Trek, and in fiction, and in life, etc). FWIW, Data was always a character I identified with, but never a role model. Janeway was a strong role model, but I never (or rarely) identified with her except in a generalized "audience member invested in the story/characters/show" kind of way. Tilly has the potential to be both. Really, a lot of DSC characters have that potential, we just haven't seen enough of them yet. And it's totally fine if they aren't IDs or RMs for everyone or anyone, so long as they are interesting enough to interact with interesting stories. But yeah, if anyone can't Identify With or Aspire to Be (Like) someone because their gender, race, species, or anything else isn't like their own... uh... ??? Star Trek can be a lot of things. We can disagree whether DSC does those things well. But you can't really fundamentally connect with Star Trek if you think people can only connect with people who are just like them.