I have no idea what this word salad of a reply is supposed to be arguing.
You seriously gonna try to tell me that this
is not a major redesign from this?
You gonna claim that the Trill going from this
in TNG to this
in DS9 is not a major, major redesign on par with the DIS Klingon redesign?
How is it not a major redesign to go from this in TOS
to this in TNG
to this in ENT?
How is it not a huge change to go from three digits in TOS
to five digits in ENT?
(Funny how the TOS Tellarite's eyes look totally disconnected from his face...!)
Hell, ENT totally redesigned the Coridanites from one episode to another. The Chancellor of Coridan in "Shadows of P'Jem"
has a completely different apparent biology from the Coridanite ambassador in "Demons!"
And hey! The skeletal structure of the Gorn from ENT
is oriented completely differently from the skeletal structure of the Gorn from TOS!
Did the entire Gorn species develop Gorn scoliosis somewhere along the line?
All of of these redesigns are as major as the Klingon redesign in DIS. But only one of them has fans claiming it's a continuity violation or means the later production can't be in the Prime Timeline. Pure hypocrisy.
Viruses do not re-design entire skeletons. It's pure fantasy nonsense, on par with killing someone by pointing a wand at them and shouting "Avada Kadavra" in
Harry Potter.
Every Trek fan does that, because if they didn't, they'd have to reconcile the dozens upon dozens of major continuity contradictions Trek has accumulated in its 50-odd year history. What, we're supposed to pretend "The Alternate Factor"'s depiction of anti-matter is in any consistent with the rest of the franchise?
Nothing in "Divergence" provides an explanation for why Klingons went from Fu Manchu/Yellow Peril stereotypes to a single boney ridge along the center of their foreheads. The topic is never addressed.
You mean this guy,
this guy,
and this gal?
Yes, I remember them.
Yes, they are offensive! Especially Marab, who is a virtual re-creation of the racist stereotype that was the Klingon makeup design of TOS. All three of them look like a disturbing combination of brownface and yellowface. It's totally offensive, it has the (I'm sure unintended) impact of supporting white supremacy, and it was a fundamentally
bad idea to even go there.
That is a textbook ethnocentric response.
Skin tone
isn't irrelevant in a white supremacist society like the United States. You don't get to dress white actors up as a combo of racist stereotypes of Asians, Arabs, and African Americans, and then pretend that that's a totally innocent thing no one else should object to. You really need to read up on the history of racial coding and Blackface/Brownface/Yellowface if you think otherwise.
* * *
You know what the kicker is?
I don't subjectively like the Klingon makeup design on DIS! I wish they hadn't extended the backs of the heads, I think they should have had hair in S1, and I think the difficulty the new lower facial prosthetics gives the actors in enunciating properly outweighs the importance of having a makeup that does not only cover the top half of the head in this era of HD television.
But I damn well respect that 1) it's no bigger a continuity problem to redesign the Klingons today than in the past, and 2) the producers, by giving Klingons a variety of skin tones not present in real-life humans, worked very hard to separate their Klingons from the racial coding that had previously (unconsciously during the TNG era -- the TOS Klingons were consciously designed to evoke Fu Manchu and were described in the script as "Orientals," so, yes, the TOS Klingons were an intentionally racist creation) affected the Klingon designs.
