I have actually run into a few Normies who recognize Pike as "that guy Jeffrey Hunter played." And I knew one guy who thought that was Robert April.
Why are Star Trek fans made fun of more than Star Wars fans in popular culture?
- Thread starter Skipper
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Damn — I didn’t think we were still getting cheap shots from the media at this point.I was going to question whether there was still any sort of stigma these days (that Shatner sketch was decades ago at this point), but then I did a crossword puzzle in which a four-letter synonym for "Trekkie" turned out to be . . . "nerd."
Honestly, I can't personally remember ever being given a hard time for liking STAR TREK.
Then again, I've spent pretty much my entire adult life in the science-fiction business. . . .
The only hard time I really got was from other fans.
Most of the time I get blank stares and people move on.
You should have given the puzzle editor a few, ahem, cross words. And you probably should have also said something along the line of. . . but then I did a crossword puzzle in which a four-letter synonym for "Trekkie" turned out to be . . . "nerd."
Thankfully ST and SW fans are not like hooligans of 2 rival football/soccer clubs who fight against each other
When I was a kid in the 90s, I definitely saw more prejudice whenever Trek was brought up in conversations versus Star Wars, at least when it was a "normie" crowd. SW has always been the more mainstream and "accessible," so it makes sense it would be derided by the uninitiated.
What I find interesting these days is that mainstream status of Star Wars has come back to kinda bite it in the ass. Seems like the official social media platforms have had to make posts multiple times to tell the fandom to chill the hell out after the neckbeards have gotten abusive online. I know Trek fandom isn't perfect in the slightest, but I don't recall an incident where Kurtzman/Paramount has had to resort to a press release.
What I find interesting these days is that mainstream status of Star Wars has come back to kinda bite it in the ass. Seems like the official social media platforms have had to make posts multiple times to tell the fandom to chill the hell out after the neckbeards have gotten abusive online. I know Trek fandom isn't perfect in the slightest, but I don't recall an incident where Kurtzman/Paramount has had to resort to a press release.
It is true. I remember that a small segment of ST fans said unpleasant things about Discovery, but I can't think of episodes similar to those where actors were driven to the brink of suicide by the fandom.
Maybe Star Wars fans aren't made fun of because people are afraid of how they might react...?
I did a very unscientific search on Youtube.
a) There are many more SNL skits based on Star Trek than those based on Star Wars, even though in theory this latter IP should be more popular..
b) Those about Star Wars are usually more recent, as if the authors had recently realized that you can joke about this saga too.
a) There are many more SNL skits based on Star Trek than those based on Star Wars, even though in theory this latter IP should be more popular..
b) Those about Star Wars are usually more recent, as if the authors had recently realized that you can joke about this saga too.
In all fairness, there was a long-ago STARLOG editorial in which an unnamed STAR TREK fiction author was basically threatened by an anonymous fan(atic) not to even THINK of stopping writing TREK novels. According to the editorial writer, the TREK author complied fully at that time....''as if his life depended on it.''
We had a discussion about this in another thread about which fandom was more toxic. Are SW fans actually more extremist than ST fans, or simply being numerically more numerous are there also more toxic ones?
The worst Trek fandom got was a few years ago when Memory Alpha decided to play a game of "strictly canonical only" and refused to acknowledge Adira as non-binary because they were never actually stated to be in onscreen dialogue, which even led to Anthony Rapp and Wilson Cruz publicly speaking out against MA. The silver lining there though, is that a majority of Trek fandom seems to have believed MA was in the wrong, and though it took a lot of tapdancing on MA's part (including at one point refusing to refer to anyone by a gender unless it was explicitly, definitively and canonically stated onscreen what gender they were) they eventually relented and acknowledged Adira is non-binary.
Still, as horrible as that whole thing was, it's certainly nowhere near as bad as Star Wars fandom and the way they've treated people like Kelly Marie Tran or Moses Ingram.
Star Wars fandom gets far more abusive far more quickly. Now, that said, Harve Bennett and Nick Meyer did get death threats over killing Spock, so it's not like Star Trek fans are above such abhorrent behavior. But, I have seen the more toxic elements in Star Wars more frequently, with Jake Lloyd, Ahmed Best, and basically so maligning the PT that Lucas gave up and sold the franchise.
I've seen discussions about Hyperdrive that make Matter/Anti-Matter Warp Drives seem half-way plausible.
The way Disney failed to do anything for Kelly Marie Tran still bothers me to this day. And then they compound it by demoting her to a glorified extra in the next movie.
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