Let me just lay it out, all my cards on the table. You need to understand where I'm coming from with all this.
The facts are as follows.
JJ Abrams and Roberto Orci, empowered with the authoritative voice of the power of canon assigned to them by a corporation that wanted nothing more than to maximize profits for all concerned, have set in stone the contents of a narrative.
Now, my heroes are good people. They have explored, adventured, enjoyed triumph and suffered adversity, and in a number of cases, committed great personal sacrifice in the interest of the greater good.
They willingly rush into danger, they not only accept but embrace all diversity, they give without asking anything in return. They answer distress calls even from their enemies, because it's the right thing to do, and they know it can get them killed but they do it anyway because
that is what they are about.
The premise of Star Trek is that if people in the universe choose to be good, and more and more of them join together over time to each do their own thing without hurting each other, then the universe will eventually be good.
These people influenced my development, and they helped me survive some very dangerous, tough, and adversarial periods in my life as a young queer person. In a very real sense, they are a significant part of
who I am as a person.
You can condescendingly tell me it's all fiction, Christopher, and imply that contradictions, corruptions, and misrepresentations of established concepts are therefore unimportant or meaningless in the context of the "real world." But the fact is that all of these things are "real" to me, in a very special way that I care deeply about.
I think they probably are to a
lot of people, or Star Trek simply
would not have become what it is.
The Prime timeline is important because everyone and everything I've ever cared about in
Star Trek exists in that timeline. Especially the parts that influenced me in the darkest times of my life, when I was young.
The
real parts of
Star Trek had such a profound impact on my life that it is as if I lived through it all myself. It doesn't matter that it's fiction, because it's speculative fiction about how things can be, about how things should be. I really needed it when I was little, and I feel as though I need for it to continue now.
You speak about your writing gigs as being "hired to do a job." You talk about restrictions, and licenses, and cashing cheques.
And you keep doing it. Somehow, you work within those limitations and restrictions, you keep putting out great stories. You've produced some amazing works that hold deep meaning for me.
You
clearly know
Star Trek inside and out, and you love to tie things together and make everything work.
That's why it hurts me when you say things like that you don't care at all how the doors seem to know when to open, for example.
I respect you, but I don't like a lot of the words you've said to me in this thread. You don't need to remind me that
Star Trek is made-up, I'm a grown adult and I understand the fictional context of the world in which we're basing our discussion, and the secondary context of the real-world licensing issues that stand poised to complicate our continued experience of the shared prose narrative.
Maybe you all had great friends, a supportive social structure, a family that loved you, and were able to find schools and jobs that accepted you without a huge amount of effort and fighting and pain and suffering. I didn't. All I had, alone at the end of each day, was
Star Trek.
People on the Enterprise-D don't abuse and mock Data for being different. They don't ostracize him and force him to live in isolation, team up against him, and collectively punish him for something he can't control. Instead, they learn about
and are amazed by his differences. They embrace, praise, and appreciate his unique capabilities and cooperatively create a role for him where he can thrive and contribute to his community. They accept his differences and welcome him as a friend, they forgive him his social failings, and they go out of their way to help him understand what he wants to learn about how the rest of them work.
It's a world
where a man can wear a skirt while on duty, whatever his personal motivation might be, and none of his peers tear him apart and ruin his life for it. Instead they just respect him equally, because presumably he does his fucking job correctly, and that's the end of it because he's just entitled to and equally deserving of their common decency, and everyone just respects that.
I didn't dream about living in
Star Trek because they have replicators and transporters and holodecks. I dreamed about living there because I thought, if I did, they might give me a meaningful job to do, and a safe place to live, and they certainly wouldn't bully me to the point of attempting suicide.
These people are who I want all people to be. I was promised a future where, eventually, everyone would understand these things about what it supposedly means to be human.
I can see myself existing there because it's where
I would choose to be if I had a choice. It's a hell of a lot better than this shit world we live in, unless you happen to be a rich cis white man.
Now, in exchange for a combined profit of approximately $518.1 million dollars (which is more money than I will ever see), all of everything I have cared about most has just been erased from existence.
All of those people I looked up to and relied on, their homes, families, memories, actions, feelings, choices, consequences, the totality of their being, is gone.
Every problem they've ever solved, every life they've ever saved, is ultimately meaningless because according to the
well defined and repeatedly demonstrated laws of their universe, it has been over-written. They cease to exist in 2387, and do not continue.
Even
Enterprise is sullied, spoiled by Abrams's doings. Archer and the crew of the NX-01 were decent, and did the right and moral thing. But none of it matters because despite their goodness, their future can be rendered to shit by the violent, vengeful, greedy selfishness of one man with a black hole and some guns and an unscientific glob of garishly coloured magic that makes planets turn inside out. Or, a greedy selfish man with a legal contract and a keyboard, depending on the particular perspective you choose to take.
If good, decent people making the right choices in the 22nd century is pointless because it leads to a broken time-wrecked bullshit future in the 23rd century and beyond, then what purpose is there, what possible good does it serve to try to be decent in the here and now, as a "real" person in the 21st century?
Why should I continue to expend the effort to keep being a good and decent person, in the persistent face of adversity and near-constant affront? If the future is hopeless and out of my control, why do I spend my time and energy helping strangers, and treating each new acquaintance optimistically as a potential friend, rather than acting selfishly and expending myself in defensiveness and paranoia at the ultimate expense of others?
I do what I do because, deep down,
I am a Starfleet officer. A very particular set of people, in very specific situations, taught me what that means, and that's how I learned the difference between right and wrong.
JJ Abrams erases hope in exchange for ticket sales. Paramount and Bad Robot have sold out
Star Trek.
I wasn't on the
Narada with Nero. I wasn't on the
Jellyfish with Spock. JJ Abrams's reality isn't real to me, because
I do not exist there. I don't see how I would fit in with that world, nor do I wish to.
Nobody there behaves with any decency. Everything is guns and fighting and danger and violence and death, with a sort of a post-9/11-esque atmosphere of terror and fearmongering, and a totally fucked up militarization of Starfleet. Heteronormative bullshit, and an overwhelming sense of
unrealism.
These movies don't make me feel good, or hopeful, or happy or comforted. They make me feel dead inside.
And nothing makes any fucking sense. Uhura is fucking Spock for
no adequately explained nor even barely discernible reason. Hand communicators establish real-time phone calls from light-years distant.
Because why not. Khan's genetically-engineered blood brings dead people back to life. Trans-warp beaming: no special hardware required, just some creative math we never thought of before, and we can type it into the console in about ten seconds flat.
This is a bunch of ticket-selling bullshit and all of you know it. You either genuinely don't care, or pretend not to care. But it's
fucked and I refuse to accept it.
Regardless of all the "geeky" technical details and the "obsessive" adherence to established canon, to invoke both of the derogatory judgemental statements that have been levelled against me in this thread so far, I put it to you now that the
spirit of
Star Trek is dead in these newer films.
Where is the exploration? Where is the discovery of self, and the external universe?
Where is the grandly majestic, hopeful soundtrack and the burst of bright white light cast when the ship goes into warp? Everything is
just fucking wrong.
This is where 'canon' has left us.
Nero and his crew are dead, the
Jellyfish and
Narada are destroyed, and it's doubtful Spock Prime will be making an appearance in the next Abrams movie. (Leonard Nimoy, may he rest in peace).
Nobody who lives from an objective observer's standpoint inside the universe defined as "Star Trek" who wasn't on one of those two ships will ever know, meet, or be affected by the actions of, the people who made me who I am. It is as though
I have been erased from the timeline. Any interest I have in it most
certainly has.
"Star Trek(TM)" is no longer "the future." All of it has been taken away from me, in favour of a truly repugnant reality full of reprehensible choices, terrible outcomes, indismissable sexism (as it's not filmed in the sixties), unlikable people, and lens flares. It's a broken future and I want no part of it.
The books are all that I've had since the end of
Enterprise; A series whose theoretical continuity with what came around it was already potentially adulterated by the interference of the Temporal Cold War storyline, and whose saving grace was, ironically, the news of its own cancellation triggering a changing of the guard in the creative staff. The comics are and will remain irrelevant, having always been ridiculous and contradictory in their content, their stories also critically limited by their medium in both scope and length.
These days, for
real Star Trek, the novels are all that matter.
And that's all about to get fucked up by all this nonsense and legal wrangling over
who owns what parts of my imagination.
The terrible punchline of all this, really, is that what's going on with "Star Trek(TM)" flies in the face of what
Star Trek was originally meant to represent.
All of this bullshit exists so that
men can make more money, and so that JJ Abrams can keep making more movies where people beam across light-years, Kirk gets catgirl threesomes, Carol Marcus needs to be naked in public to order to get into a shuttle or whatever the fuck that was about, and where the distance between stars and planets simply isn't a thing, because reasons. "Cold Fusion" is a device that turns volcanoes into ice... Also, racist depictions of indigenous aliens, and the
Enterprise works as a submarine under water because
why the fuck would it not, amirite guyz?
Basically, as a result of this nonsense since 2009, I am suffering a spiritual crisis. The new Pope is saying a bunch of shit that I just really can't agree with, and I'm consequently worried that I might not get into heaven after all.
I have nothing else to say at this time.
