Yeah but "The Neutral Zone" retconned "Angel One" so that doesn't matter either.
Spoilers ST PIC Stargazer Comic
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That's my point -- that it was treated inconsistently over time by different writers. Although "Angel One"'s mention of Romulan activity was vague enough that it's not as significant or unambiguous a precedent as "The Neutral Zone." For all we know, the reports could've turned out to be a false alarm somehow.
I dunno, the idea that the Romulans subjugated and tortured one of their own racial subcaste into mutant psychics, perhaps even having put all of their psychics into slavery and that's why they lost the ability, is a pretty notable element of empires as well. It also shows just how nasty and brutal the Romulan Empire can be in the sense that they have such a awful racial hierarchy and gives greater context to what happened to them when they fled from Vulcan.
Mind you, I also like the idea of a wide variety of Vulcanoids just like humans have.
We have Vulcans, Romulans, "Who Watches the Watchers", and Sargon's people -- though people tend to forget that one.
Maybe, but oppressiveness is an aspect of empires that Star Trek has shown routinely. Also, some empires are more oppressive and cruel than others, but the one thing they all have in common, literally by definition, is that one state rules over multiple others and employs their resources and labor. I'm not talking in terms of moral judgments, but simply in terms of political science and the textbook definition of an empire as distinct from other political entities. And that fundamental defining feature of an empire is something Trek hardly ever shows in its alien "empires," with the exception of the one that wasn't even called an empire, namely the Dominion. (And the Son'a, but that was only in one movie.) So it was refreshing to see it established as an aspect of the Romulan Empire.
Beyond that, I'm sick of the laziness of Trek and other sci-fi in treating biological identity, political identity, and cultural identity as synonymous. It's a form of racial essentialism that would be obscenely bigoted if human populations were portrayed that way. In real life, cultures intermix. People immigrate. People convert and assimilate. Portraying a given culture as all one species, or a given species as all one culture, is stupid and shallow. So any attempt to portray a political power in Trek as multispecies rather than monospecies is a step in the right direction.
Besides, the Romulans probably descended from a single movement that left Vulcan 2000 years before and migrated to Romulus. It stands to reason that they would have been culturally and perhaps racially monolithic. If they were intolerant of telepaths or some other ethnic subgroup, why bring them on the migration in the first place? But if that monolithic group arrived at what they hoped would be a new homeworld just for them, and they found that one of the twin planets already had its own indigenous species, then it makes perfect sense that they'd subjugate them.
True. I suspect the name is part of the reason.
Remaus being the unfortunate brother of Romulus. Sort of if you had two planet populations named Caineans and Abellians, you might think they were related.
But that is a silly OOC reason.
Remaus being the unfortunate brother of Romulus. Sort of if you had two planet populations named Caineans and Abellians, you might think they were related.
But that is a silly OOC reason.
It's always been obvious that Paul Schneider intended "Romulus and Remus" to be the names that human astronomers gave to the twin planets their enemies in the war came from, the same way humans have named so many other heavenly bodies after Greek or Roman mythological figures. (Which is why it was so unutterably stupid for ENT: "Minefield" to establish that "Romulan" was the Romulans' own name for themselves). After all, the two powers had so little contact that humans didn't even know what the enemy looked like, so why would they know their indigenous name? Or at least, why would they use it, any more than Americans refer to, say, China as Zhonghua?
So the names are outsiders' terms for the planets, which would have no bearing on the relationship between their populations -- especially given that the Romulans are colonists rather than natives, something that humanity didn't know when they assigned them that name (again, going by the original intent).
Bah, I just assumed Romulans settled Rome on Earth.
Kirsten Beyer was involved with writing the comic, so there's some direct influence from the PIC writing staff. Matalas apparently had no notion of its existance, so he wasn't consulted. But I don't know how much that actually matters when Paramount has to sign off on these anyway, so if the writers of the comic need answers regarding XYZ, they should have a contact regardless.
So far as more 25th century world-building goes, I'm guessing IDW doesn't think there's enough of an audience for it on their end, or Paramount is keeping a tight rein on the tie-ins to the "present" Trek era. I'd like to see more tie-ins just going into the world-building too, though, though I'm more interested in far-future DISCO-era stuff like the Vulcan/Romulan reunification.
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Good point about Beyer. It does feel that the Disco comics dole out a little more treats when it comes to world building, though still not enough for my tastes. I think it's a cool idea to have Disco comics fleshing out the 32nd century, but I wonder if there is even less of an audience for that than there would be for 25th century comics that could conceivably feature TNG, VOY, and DS9 characters.
The problem with the tie-ins doing any kind of worldbuilding is that the show is at liberty to overrule whatever they do anyway. Which we've seen happen plenty of times already with the Disco tie-ins, even when there's coordination. Granted, Desperate Hours fell victim to changing showrunners, but that wasn't the case with IDW's Mirror Universe miniseries that followed up the S1 Disco MU arc, which later got contradicted by Terra Firma.
So? That "problem" is endemic to any and all science fiction, because reality itself will eventually overrule it all through new discoveries or the calendar catching up. Real history has already overruled the Eugenics Wars, the DY-class sleeper ships, the crewed Earth-Saturn probe, the Millennium Gate, etc. In a couple of years, it'll overrule the Bell Riots. In 41 years, it'll overrule First Contact.
The job of science fiction is not to predict the "right answers." That's an impossible goal and an absurd one to aspire to. The job of science fiction is to speculate -- to explore what might be or might have been, to imagine interesting possibilities. Those possibilities can still be just as interesting after reality has contradicted them. They don't cease to have value when that happens, because their value was never contingent on that in the first place.
Well, I'm just waiting for Strange New Worlds to override Discovery: Aftermath, for better or for worse. I'm a little surprised Picard: Stargazer included Remans given the showrunners' implied distaste for them.
They're kind of a big part of Romulan write-up in canon even if it's only because of being the only revealed alien race that the Romulans have subjugated like @Christopher said.
I also really like what ST:O did with the Remans. They're depicted as unrepentant vampire-like monsters/orcs in NEMESIS but I liked that they're shown to be also possessed of heroic freedom fighters in ST:O.
Watching them trying to rebuild their own race with perhaps even less sympathy/help from the Federation would be an interesting story.
I can just imagine one of them going, "The Romulans have attacked the Federation constantly, are even the reason it was formed, and turned out to have blown up their own relief fleet. Yes, Shinzon attacked the Federation but our sins are far less than the Romulans have ever been. Yet the Vulcans open up their homeworld to the Romulans and no one offers us anything. We were abandoned twice over."
Didn't stop Michael Chabon from disproportionately ignoring them.
I think you and Christopher both make fair points when it comes to overruling canon and whether that should matter or not. But when it comes to the DISCO Mirror comics, I don't think Terra Firma contradicts that story because what Emperor Georgiou experienced, courtesy of the Guardian of Forever, was a separate Mirror Universe reality than from DISCO's first season. Conceivably, the DISCO Mirror comic story can still take place in the Mirror Universe Terran Empire established in DISCO's first season.
I think the TNG Mirror Universe are harder to square with Trek canon, especially when it comes to traipses into DS9 territory.
I mean, the Discovery MU comics were basically an inherent contradiction, since we had Mirror Owo as part of Georgiou’s personal guard and killed during Lorca’s attempted coup on the show, and then featured in the comic, set after the episode. Plus seeming to treat Airiam as wholly alien, rather than a human with extensive cybernetics. Terra Firma basically just compounded the already inherent contradictions.
Honestly, that just strikes me as something that’s basically inherent to the show and comic having been in production basically simultaneously - maybe Owo being on the Charon came late in the game, Airiam’s origins may not have been pinned down in season one (particularly given the recast in season two, when she actually GOT backstory)... Both show and comic were in flux on the same subjects, it’s not surprising they diverged.
Honestly, that just strikes me as something that’s basically inherent to the show and comic having been in production basically simultaneously - maybe Owo being on the Charon came late in the game, Airiam’s origins may not have been pinned down in season one (particularly given the recast in season two, when she actually GOT backstory)... Both show and comic were in flux on the same subjects, it’s not surprising they diverged.
Chabon was only showrunner for Season 1, and I don't think Terry Matalas has given his opinion on Remans. Either way, Terry also didn't even know this comic was being made, so he wouldn't have had input on it.
Except the contradictions had more to do with the background of the setting. Example, the comic series presents Airiam as a cybernetic alien serving as a junior officer on the Shenzhou. Terra Firma shows her as human, one who has never been cybernetically augmented, and she's first officer of Disco under Captain Killy.
Yeah, that's basically what happened. During the first season, there were contradicting stories about what Airiam was supposed to be depending on who you talked to. Some said she was a cybernetic alien, others said she was a cybernetically augmented human. It wasn't until her death episode in season 2 where she was finally established to be cybernetically augmented human.
The way I've looked at the alien empires in Star Trek is that the homeworld is state that rules and the other states that provide resources and labor would the colony worlds.
But that's still an after-the-fact fudge of the writers' failure of imagination in portraying single-species empires. If they'd gotten it right in the first place, we wouldn't need to handwave it.
I mean, we have gotten glimpses of imperial rule, notably with Bajor under Cardassian rule. And TNG established Krios as a world under Klingon rule, while TOS showed the Klingons trying to conquer or suborn worlds to their rule. But outside of DS9 with the Dominion, Nemesis was the only Trek production that showed an empire using a subject people as soldiers in its military, which is a standard practice of empires from Ancient Rome to the British Raj.
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