Discovery / SNW to TOS is like 1000 times whatever differences there might be between TOS and the TOS movies or Berman 24th century shows or ENT.
No, it isn't. People
always, always say that the newest work's discrepancies are insurmountably greater than the previous one's, but that's an illusion. It's just that we've had more time to reconcile the old contradictions in our heads, to concoct rationalizations for them or just forget about them and focus more on the consistent overall narrative we've chosen to build for ourselves. The new inconsistencies
feel more radical because we haven't had time to rationalize them to ourselves yet.
You're not saying anything that I haven't heard fans say over and over again. They said it about Kelvin. They said it about
Enterprise. They said it about TNG. They said it about the movies. Every single time, it was the most drastic change and the worst betrayal ever and could nevah, evah be accepted as True Trek. Then, a decade later, they're including it among the True Trek that the
next new thing has irreconcilably contradicted and betrayed.
And so what if the differences are greater?
It's just stories. It's not an "alternate universe," it's just a reinterpretation of the imaginary universe. At this point, I'm fine with assuming that TOS was just a rough interpretation, an imperfect dramatization as Roddenberry thought of it when he made TMP and TNG, and that the new version is the more "accurate" portrayal of the 23rd century. After all, a lot about TOS sucks in retrospect. It was sexist as hell, it made limited, token efforts at racial inclusion, and a lot of its technology and futurism haven't aged well. So I'm fine with assuming that the stories of TOS generally happened, but without the dated details of the 1960s presentation of them.
Just think of it like Marvel Comics. The basic events of the comics published in the 1960s are still accepted as having happened in the universe's canonical past, but the period details have been updated as the timeline moves forward, so that, say, Reed Richards is a veteran of an imaginary, undated war in the recent past rather than WWII, and Peter Parker's high school classmates had smartphones when he was bitten by the spider. What matters to the canon is not the surface details, but the core events and characters. The rest is just interpretation.
Granted, there are some cases where I'd rather go the other way and assume it's the modern shows that are taking inaccurate liberties, like their tendency to make interstellar journeys far shorter than they used to be, or SNW's totally wrongheaded take on the Gorn. But that's fine. They're
both fictional. They're both artistic interpretations of the same underlying reality. They both take certain liberties with it for dramatic or stylistic effect. Sometimes the differences are greater than others, but the differences are in the
depiction of the subject, not in the subject itself. Have the same model pose for, say, Andrew Wyeth and Pablo Picasso, and the resulting paintings will look drastically different. But it's still the same model.
