Michael is different. 
Is it just me, or is Star Trek going the wrong way?
- Thread starter LunaticBurnout
- Start date
How?
...Oooohhh!!!!
...Oooohhh!!!!
Lol, it wasn't Nu-Trek that "normalized hatred and extremism". Unless you care to explain how Discovery or Picard cultivated bigotry and prejudice in the fanbase.
But no, I'll tell you where a huge part of this belly-aching and negativity comes from.
In the modern day, there is a massive geek grievance industry that pollutes Youtube, social media and other places on the internet. What happened was a bunch of manipulative grifters realized that nerds are very easily manipulated and get angry at the most trivial, meaningless things - and most importantly, these nerds are willing to throw money at any swindler that might pander to them. There are geeks to fleece, and cash to be made! And so you have countless thousands of hours of Youtube videos complaining about POC and LGBT people in sci-fi, and popular culture being infected by SJWs...when the reality is, a legion of lonely, vulnerable nerds need to be kept in a state of constant, powerless fury, so that their masters can siphon more and more advertising dollars from them.
That's where a huge part of all the negativity and complaining comes from. Frustrated nerds get tricked into getting even angrier, and then they wander elsewhere on the internet to spread their opprobrium. I will say that Trekbbs has done a great job of not succumbing to his, however.
So, no, NuTrek did not normalize hatred and extremism. If you really despise hatred and extremism, then just stay away from those poisonous Youtube videos. You'll find your environment becomes a lot less toxic and enjoyable.
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Yep. Given the choice between things that will make me angry or things that will make me happy, I go for happy.
Segments of the Trek fanbase have a tendency to hate anything that is new going all the way back to when TNG first aired in 1987. People absolutely hated it to the point they petitioned to get it cancelled. DS9 also received a lot of hate when it came along and for a good while after as did Voyager for pretty much all of it's run.
I hate to break it to you, but Discovery and Picard are not responsible for hatred and extremism being normalised. You can blame the fans themselves for that because they're the ones espousing that hatred and extremism. I'm sorry, but there is a segment of the Star Trek fanbase who are not nice people. There are some who are threatened by an outspoken black women or just women in general and don't like gay male characters finally existing in the franchise. They don't really buy into the actual human condition aspects of Trek and only care about the pew pew, the ships and arguing about made up technobabble or writing Dominion War fanfiction. They are coming out of the woodwork because they are having their views legitimised by a bunch of youtube hucksters who are fanning the flames for profit but don't really give a flying fuck about the fans falling for their bullshit.
I'm now reminded of one of the times in recent years I first became truly disillusioned with Trek fandom, just after the Children of Mars Short Trek aired, which IMO, was a truly amazing character piece. But a disturbingly large percentage of fandom got hung up on the brief ten second shot near the start of Starfleet ships recycled from Disco, and how because of that they'd lost all hope for Picard to be any good.
Because apparently, recycled ships had never been done in Star Trek prior.
In the early '90s, a disturbing number of fans insisted that it was a bad idea to have a black man or any kind of woman as the captain. Some said it was a problem because every kind of person around the world is comfortable relating to a straight white male lead character, but once you change any of those traits, you're creating a character who will only appeal to people who share those traits, because a straight white male is the generic default human. Some said they couldn't watch the show if they couldn't see themselves visibly reflected in the main character. Some (white male) fans argued that people of colour and women would be offended by Sisko or Janeway because they were clearly just tokens created by the producers to pander to them, and that must be insulting to them. Some argued that it was okay to have characters who weren't straight white men, but it absolutely had to be justified by the needs of the plot. You couldn't just have someone happen to be an Asian woman or whatever because that would be (and here we go again) tokenism or pandering or political correctness gone mad.
And the bigots won! Once. Enterprise went back to putting a black guy and an Asian woman in minor roles and let the white people run the show. Sure, there was a woman, but she was eye candy, wearing a skintight costume when not being slathered with decon gel, so that was okay.
But Berman and UPN are gone now, and we've got people living in the real world making new Star Trek. My boss is a black woman, I've got co-workers from a variety of ethnicities and sexual orientations and identities, an in-law's kid is trans. New Star Trek looks like normal everyday life. Deal with it.
Wow, what a remarkable and unsupported reach. Not a debate winner.
Are the bigots winning with SNW? To be really consistent with the "logic" of your assertion about ENT, the answer would be yes - but then, that would undercut your insistence that modern Trek really is keeping up with the times.
Deal with it.
You seem to have a rather overly exaggerated rosy glasses view of Voyager and DS9. For your premise to have any merit to it at all, then they both would have had to have been huge hallmarks of diversity. They weren't.
For starters, the largest subsection of both shows was still white men. This actually actually gets worse with DS9 when you take into account it's massive oft-celebrated extended cast which consisted almost entirely of white men and three white women, two of whom were crazy lady baddies and the third was only there to be ogled. There was one Asian women, I suppose, but her diminished presence was so minimal she's hardly worth noting. And let's not forget that one of the female leads had padding inserted into her costume to make her breasts appear larger.
Voyager wasn't any better. Its female captain was written as masculine as possible. And any time she was allowed to express her femininity, it was in overly cliched ways that were obviously written by men -- despite a women running the writers' room a good chunk of the show's run. And let's not forger the infamous quote by the show's executive producer claiming "women in positions of power in the military are never babes.'" And then there was that time the brought in the most attractive woman they could find and squeezed her into a costume so tight she had to be administered oxygen on set. (And some how still passed out several times.)
Its Asian character was so humdrum that he's now the butt of a lot of jokes. And he was to be written off the show until he showed up in a teen magazine for being good looking. And it cast a white man with a Latinish background as an overly-stereotyped, nondescript Indigenous person.
And that's completely ignoring the utter lack of (but often promised) LGBTQ representation. Sure, that was that time it showed two women kissing -- that was overly fetishized in advertisements and that there is an increasingly popular reading of the episode that feels its conceit is actually quite cynical and dark.
Fans like to champion the 'golden age' of Star Trek as some progressive beacon when it wasn't - very far from it, actually. And Enterprise wasn't any better or worse.
I really don't think that's what he is saying. I'm trying to parse the connection but I'm having a tough time reading his post and seeing Berman era being treated as "golden age" in any way, when his comment at the end was that new Star Trek shows look more like real life than in the past.
@Steve Roby I apologize if I misunderstood you at all. But I am thoroughly confused at this point.
Boy, if you're confused, imagine how I feel. My premise was that there were toxic fans complaining about Sisko and Janeway back in the day, and Enterprise reduced the level of diversity, but now with new Trek we have a more real world level of diversity in Star Trek.
I politely disagree with Janeway being written "as masculine as possible," or rather, with the underlying narrow defintion of feminity and masculinity. I do agree with much of the rest of what @CorporalClegg says (although like fireproof, I didn't read @Steve Roby 's post as rose-tinted). Much to my dismay, as a huge DS9 fan. I do give them credit for writing the most well-rounded woman in Trek, so there was some progress... but not as much as would have been possible, even in the Nineties. Particularly in terms of numbers of female vs male characters. I'm not even getting into the GLBQT* thing...
So yeah, in terms of diversitiy and representation, Modern Trek certinaly got that right, finally, or is on a very good way. Btw., I, too, thought they were taking a step back with Enterprise, and that was a major turn-off for me. As explained above, it's about a lot more than having a white male cis lead. And I am optimistic about SNW in that regard.
And Trek is certainly not to blame for creating a toxic part of the fandom. Viewers with these opinions always existed, they just now feel more cofortable expousing them... in this fandom and many others (SW, Dr. Who, etc.)
So yeah, in terms of diversitiy and representation, Modern Trek certinaly got that right, finally, or is on a very good way. Btw., I, too, thought they were taking a step back with Enterprise, and that was a major turn-off for me. As explained above, it's about a lot more than having a white male cis lead. And I am optimistic about SNW in that regard.
And Trek is certainly not to blame for creating a toxic part of the fandom. Viewers with these opinions always existed, they just now feel more cofortable expousing them... in this fandom and many others (SW, Dr. Who, etc.)
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Yeah, the toxicity these days is crazy. I'm not a big Star Wars fan but the fuss over the recent movies was ridiculous. As for Doctor Who, I'd already seen Jodie Whittaker in Attack the Block and Broadchurch and was excited when she was named the new Doctor, and I've been enjoying her run on the show so far. But I suppose that's because I'm old. I'm from the strange, forgotten time when being a fan meant you liked something.
Didn't you have to walk uphill both ways in the driving snow just to watch it on a bunny rabbit box?
If every current Star Trek series other than SNW was suddenly cancelled, maybe you'd have a point. Enterprise was the only Star Trek on the air in its time. SNW won't be.
The toxicity has always been there. The only thing the last few years of progress has done was force it out of hiding. It's like the old cartoon closet stuffed full of shit. It's out of sight, out of mind until someone comes along and opens the door. But instead of properly cleaning up their mess, they decided to roll with it down in the muck with the biggest loudest pigs they could find, only encouraging them to be louder.
But make no mistake, fans who are racist, homophobic shit-stains on society now, were racist, homophobic shit-stains on society in 1995. And had Trek actually lived up to its progressive ideal instead of clinging to the inoffensive and milquetoast bourgeois safe space it did, they would have come out of the woodwork then too. So we could have had Tony and Wilson being totes adorbs then. And we could have enjoyed it and moved on with our lives while they crashed the AOL servers.
But make no mistake, fans who are racist, homophobic shit-stains on society now, were racist, homophobic shit-stains on society in 1995. And had Trek actually lived up to its progressive ideal instead of clinging to the inoffensive and milquetoast bourgeois safe space it did, they would have come out of the woodwork then too. So we could have had Tony and Wilson being totes adorbs then. And we could have enjoyed it and moved on with our lives while they crashed the AOL servers.
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I was around when ENT was on the air. The "This sucks and ruins Gene's vision and canon" people were around then and treated ENT like many treat Kurtzman Trek. As an interloper ruining continuity simply by existing. Only difference is that from 2001-05 there were far fewer people online to complain and social media had barely been born into the world.
It may not be helping the division when any one critical of the shows get their thoughts constantly dismissed by these kind of...almost mantras at this point.
Because there is no discussion. Liking these shows us as bad as not liking them.
There are plenty of legitimate criticisms of DISCO and PIC, but when you provide a four-year deluge of "Burnham is a narcissist who thinks the universe revolves around her!" and "Picard has corrupted the Federation into a dystopia!"... well, sorry, the nerds shouldn't be surprised when we no longer have patience for them. Talk about mantras...
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