Are We Being Gaslighted in Regards to Canon?

[Hey Missy]

Everyone's favorite character is obviously Rygel.

 

[Agony_Boothb]

For as long as I can remember the definition of Star Trek Canon was "whatever is seen on screen." I remember this particularly well becasue of my debates regarding Enterprise. This definition never included creator intent, unless that intent showed up on screen. For example there are a lot of ideas writers, directors, etc. had for their stories and characters, or even ideas in scripts, that never appear on screen. So even though it was their intention it was not considered canon.

However, it seems like ever since Discovery came out people have been insisting that we accept creator intention as canon rather than what is seen on screen. Yet, there never was any sort of announcement of this change. It just all of a sudden was that way.

Just to make sure I wasn't going insane I googled it and indeed found referenced to Star Trek canon being "what is seen on screen," going back to 2006.

So why do we have people rejecting the long standing definition of canon in favor of the "creator intent is canon" definition, all the while acting as if it has always been this way? Has anyone else felt like the rules all of a sudden changed when people started insisting that creator intent was canon?

NOTE: The purpose of this thread is not to debate Discovery, instead it is to discuss when, where, why and how the definition of canon has changed and our reaction to that change.

I'm just going to say I think using a term like Gaslighting to express what you think is happening in fandom is really inappropriate and belittling to what gaslighting actually is.

As someone who has witnessed gaslighting first hand thanks to my parents marriage, what you are describing is anything but gaslighting.

 

[Damian]

But if you're doing a morality play about racism or overpopulation or censorship, or a character drama about survivor's guilt or lost loves or growing old, then making the aliens too weird is just going to get in the way of the story--and the acting.

Maybe it's just me, but I find that sometimes making characters nonhumanoid makes them more sympathetic and easier to relate to in some ways. Sometimes the characters that move me the most in a story are robots or AIs or animatronic creatures or the like.

I think in some ways your both right. I think some of it is still budgeting and resources, however, how much of it affects the story. Going back to Planet of the Apes and the whole language thing--having a language barrier was not something that was part of the story (other than Taylor couldn't speak at first). The movie makers just wanted us to think that everyone spoke English for simplicity's sake. I think some of that could be the case for exotic looking aliens depending on what they wanted to focus on. If an episode had nothing to do with appearance, then it's probably not worth the resources you would need to put into it to make it happen.

I do give Star Trek overall credit for not just ignoring the whole 'why do so many aliens appear humanoid?' question. They occasionally posed questions about that and tried to propose some possible answers. And occasionally the unusual alien crops up, which has occurred more and more over the years. And I do think some of that has to do with improvements in CGI technology. Enterprise was probably the first Star Trek show that really started to experiment with that more and Discovery carried that on as well to some extent in season 1.

But I guess I'm sort of like Greg, if it's a great episode I don't really care as much about the alienness of a character. I mean I can go either way, I agree with David Gerrold that "The Devil in the Dark" was a great episode and the alienness of the Horta was significant to the story in that case. "Galaxy's Child" was another good example (well except the Brahm's angle--but just focusing on the alien part of the story). But in Greg's example of "Duet" that's not really important to the story (well, plus it features two aliens already portrayed to a significant degree up to that point so you could hardly make them pod people from the...um never mind). I have no problem with more recent Star Trek shows like Enterprise and Discovery encountering unusual life forms--in fact that's great. But because of my continuity fetish I'd prefer not to significantly redesign already existing life forms like Romulans, Klingons, Andorians, etc. I'd rather they just, you know, seek out new life . I guess I'm going off on a tangent and back to continuity. A mix of familiar looking and new exotic life forms would be fine for me, suffice it to say.

 

[Damian]

And to add to that sometimes when doing an allegory type story about racism their appearance as humanoids may help get that across. "Duet" again comes to mind for that with Kira's wanting revenge for the sins of the Cardassians, and the Bajoran that eventually murdered the Cardassian. Now we may sympathize with Kira, her people were brutalized by Cardassians....but not all Cardassians. Something she learned, I think for the first time probably, in that episode.

Or even something like "Let That Be Your Last Battlefield"--I mean I know it's got it's detractors-and it's a bit obvious. But I still loved Kirk's reaction when Bele was trying to explain why he hated Lokai's people so much. "I'm black on the right side (or is it white, I forgot which was which), he's white on the right side...all his people are white on the right side". And Kirk's like 'so', he's not getting it. You're annihilating each other over that. And it really makes racism seem that ridiculous. I mean it's absurd when you think about it.

In that case them being humanoid I think served a higher purpose in their story telling.

 

[Christopher]

I think in some ways your both right. I think some of it is still budgeting and resources, however, how much of it affects the story. Going back to Planet of the Apes and the whole language thing--having a language barrier was not something that was part of the story (other than Taylor couldn't speak at first). The movie makers just wanted us to think that everyone spoke English for simplicity's sake. I think some of that could be the case for exotic looking aliens depending on what they wanted to focus on. If an episode had nothing to do with appearance, then it's probably not worth the resources you would need to put into it to make it happen.

But I'm approaching it from the other direction. After all, the analogy is to lead characters like Kira, not just guest aliens in a series with an already human/oid cast. My point is that if you've committed up front to doing a series or movie in which the aliens are nonhumanoid, that does not preclude you from doing stories about those nonhumanoid characters that are just as poignant as they would be with human-looking characters.

What comes to my mind is the more recent iteration of Planet of the Apes starring Andy Serkis. I think that trilogy did a remarkable thing -- the first film focused mostly on humans with a few CGI ape characters, the second was about an equal mix of both, and the third centered overwhelmingly on apes with only a few human characters. And yet we cared just as deeply about the ape characters in the third film as about the humans in the first, if not more so (because, let's face it, the human characters in the first film were kinda dull). The third film proved that you don't need human faces to identify with a character story (although, granted, the difference between humans and other great apes is evolutionarily and anatomically slight compared to our difference from other species on Earth, let alone aliens).

I do give Star Trek overall credit for not just ignoring the whole 'why do so many aliens appear humanoid?' question. They occasionally posed questions about that and tried to propose some possible answers. And occasionally the unusual alien crops up, which has occurred more and more over the years. And I do think some of that has to do with improvements in CGI technology. Enterprise was probably the first Star Trek show that really started to experiment with that more and Discovery carried that on as well to some extent in season 1.

The thing is, TOS loved its monsters. Exotic creatures were all over it -- the salt vampire, the Gorn, the Horta, the neural parasites, Sylvia & Korob's true forms, the Mugato, the tribbles, the Melkot, the Tholians, the Excalbians, not to mention all the cloud creatures and energy beings. There was enough for a whole children's book called The Monsters of Star Trek (which I once had an autographed copy of). And then there were all the background crew aliens glimpsed in TMP. But Berman-era Trek was disappointingly humanoid-centric by contrast, with nowhere near the wild imagination in alien design, even though the technology at the time would've easily allowed for far more sophisticated creature effects than we ever got in TOS (recall that the live-action Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles movies, and the Dinosaurs sitcom using the same Henson Studios animatronic technology, came out in the early '90s during TNG's run). But Roddenberry and Berman after him chose to keep the aliens humanoid, to emphasize prosthetics over animatronics, and so we just got an endless succession of bumpy rubber foreheads.

You mention CGI, but the hype around computer graphics obscures the fact that practical animatronics has advanced considerably over the decades as well. (I think it was the prequel to The Thing from a few years ago where they made all sorts of lovingly detailed, realistic animatronic creature effects, and then the studio forced them to replace them all with more fashionable CGI effects that looked far worse.) Most of the alien work in Discovery appears to be prosthetic and animatronic effects. Even Linus the Saurian is a prosthetic creature effect, although his eyeblinks are apparently CGI.

And to add to that sometimes when doing an allegory type story about racism their appearance as humanoids may help get that across.

Oh, just the opposite, I think. The thing is, if you're trying to get people to reexamine their prejudices, the problem with using human actors is that your target audience will apply their prejudices to those actors' appearance, even if it's unconscious. The advantage of using nonhumanoid characters like anthropomorphic animals is that it makes an end run around those preconceptions and biases, giving audiences something neutral to convey the message so that it's more likely to get past their defenses and let them see the moral point of the story. That's probably why Aesop's Fables conveyed universal themes about human behavior through foxes and lions and frogs and crows and ants rather than actual humans. A nobleman woudn't be able to relate to a story about a lesson learned by a peasant or a slave, but you can get the point across to all of them equally if it's a talking mouse or swan that learns the lesson.

Or even something like "Let That Be Your Last Battlefield"--I mean I know it's got it's detractors-and it's a bit obvious. But I still loved Kirk's reaction when Bele was trying to explain why he hated Lokai's people so much. "I'm black on the right side (or is it white, I forgot which was which), he's white on the right side...all his people are white on the right side". And Kirk's like 'so', he's not getting it. You're annihilating each other over that. And it really makes racism seem that ridiculous. I mean it's absurd when you think about it.

In that case them being humanoid I think served a higher purpose in their story telling.

I think that would've worked just as well if they were nonhumanoid, since it would give us even more distance and make it even easier to see how arbitrary the difference was. It certainly would've looked less silly. After all, some cats do have a bifurcated facial coloration like that, so if the Cherons had been felinoid with bicolor fur patterns, it would've looked more plausible and less clumsy.

 

[Damian]

But I'm approaching it from the other direction. After all, the analogy is to lead characters like Kira, not just guest aliens in a series with an already human/oid cast. My point is that if you've committed up front to doing a series or movie in which the aliens are nonhumanoid, that does not preclude you from doing stories about those nonhumanoid characters that are just as poignant as they would be with human-looking characters.

What comes to my mind is the more recent iteration of Planet of the Apes starring Andy Serkis. I think that trilogy did a remarkable thing -- the first film focused mostly on humans with a few CGI ape characters, the second was about an equal mix of both, and the third centered overwhelmingly on apes with only a few human characters. And yet we cared just as deeply about the ape characters in the third film as about the humans in the first, if not more so (because, let's face it, the human characters in the first film were kinda dull). The third film proved that you don't need human faces to identify with a character story (although, granted, the difference between humans and other great apes is evolutionarily and anatomically slight compared to our difference from other species on Earth, let alone aliens).




The thing is, TOS loved its monsters. Exotic creatures were all over it -- the salt vampire, the Gorn, the Horta, the neural parasites, Sylvia & Korob's true forms, the Mugato, the tribbles, the Melkot, the Tholians, the Excalbians, not to mention all the cloud creatures and energy beings. There was enough for a whole children's book called The Monsters of Star Trek (which I once had an autographed copy of). And then there were all the background crew aliens glimpsed in TMP. But Berman-era Trek was disappointingly humanoid-centric by contrast, with nowhere near the wild imagination in alien design, even though the technology at the time would've easily allowed for far more sophisticated creature effects than we ever got in TOS (recall that the live-action Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles movies, and the Dinosaurs sitcom using the same Henson Studios animatronic technology, came out in the early '90s during TNG's run). But Roddenberry and Berman after him chose to keep the aliens humanoid, to emphasize prosthetics over animatronics, and so we just got an endless succession of bumpy rubber foreheads.

You mention CGI, but the hype around computer graphics obscures the fact that practical animatronics has advanced considerably over the decades as well. (I think it was the prequel to The Thing from a few years ago where they made all sorts of lovingly detailed, realistic animatronic creature effects, and then the studio forced them to replace them all with more fashionable CGI effects that looked far worse.) Most of the alien work in Discovery appears to be prosthetic and animatronic effects. Even Linus the Saurian is a prosthetic creature effect, although his eyeblinks are apparently CGI.




Oh, just the opposite, I think. The thing is, if you're trying to get people to reexamine their prejudices, the problem with using human actors is that your target audience will apply their prejudices to those actors' appearance, even if it's unconscious. The advantage of using nonhumanoid characters like anthropomorphic animals is that it makes an end run around those preconceptions and biases, giving audiences something neutral to convey the message so that it's more likely to get past their defenses and let them see the moral point of the story. That's probably why Aesop's Fables conveyed universal themes about human behavior through foxes and lions and frogs and crows and ants rather than actual humans. A nobleman woudn't be able to relate to a story about a lesson learned by a peasant or a slave, but you can get the point across to all of them equally if it's a talking mouse or swan that learns the lesson.




I think that would've worked just as well if they were nonhumanoid, since it would give us even more distance and make it even easier to see how arbitrary the difference was. It certainly would've looked less silly. After all, some cats do have a bifurcated facial coloration like that, so if the Cherons had been felinoid with bicolor fur patterns, it would've looked more plausible and less clumsy.

I hate when you say things that make sense.

I guess I didn't really give prior Star Trek episodes that much thought when it came to aliens. If I enjoy the episode I'm watching I'm not as likely to think about the alienness of the characters.

 

[Jedman67]

Wait, i thought Duet was about Dax and her former wife. That was a great episode. I don't recall Duet offhand but anything with Marc Alamo prior to Season 7 is worth watching.

 

[Christopher]

Wait, i thought Duet was about Dax and her former wife.

No, that's "Rejoined."

https://memory-alpha.fandom.com/wiki/Duet_(episode)

 

[Jedman67]

No, that's "Rejoined."

https://memory-alpha.fandom.com/wiki/Duet_(episode)

Ohh thanks, I remember that one now.
OHMYGOD That was a fantastic episode!!!

 

[Greg Cox]

Ohh thanks, I remember that one now.
OHMYGOD That was a fantastic episode!!!

Possibly the first great DS9 ep.

 

[Damian]

Yeah, "Duet" was a great episode. I consider it a turning point for Kira as well. I think it was the first time she realized not all Cardassians are the same...not all of them are like Gul Dukat, or Gul Darheel for that matter.

I actually liked the earlier episode that season "Battle Lines" as well. I think that's the first time we see Kira remorseful about all the Cardassians she killed. While she believed in the cause, she still not happy about her actions.

And, I mean, who doesn't like "Move Along Home"? To be honest, that's another guilty pleasure of mine, like "Spock's Brain". Except for that stupid hop scotch routine (uhm, I mean Allamarein).