Kirsten Beyer invitation in VOY forum
- Thread starter lurok
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It is well said. But..and there is a but...
I too have had to face a lot of death and loss in my life. When I was 5 years old I lost my Grandmother to cancer and then dealt with my Grandfather shooting himself in the head six weeks later because he couldn't deal with the loss. I loved them both. Since then I've lost my other two grandparents who were as close to me as my mother and father were. In the last ten years one of my best friends was murdered, another died of a blood clot to the brain and this last year I've lost an Aunt and Uncle who were like second parents to me. I work as a case worker in a homeless shelter and have had clients that have died on numerous occasions, many of them people I considered friends. Most of the people I've seen die didn't die peacefully. They died tragically and I'v e dealt with it only because I have a higher power that helps me cope.
I understand the desire not to want to write stories that magically bring people back to life. But I am suggesting that while you may not be up to the task someone like Kirsten could. In the world we live in today we live with war, hunger, homelessness, addictions and suffering. The last thing I want is an over abundance of those things in the books that I read and the stuff I watch on television.
The Star Trek world in the novels the last few years have been in a lot of ways a reflection of the times. Look at it: The Federation has lost billions to the Borg. Andor has succeeded. Ben Sisko left his wife and daughter. Kathryn Janeway was killed, Commander Vaughn is in a comma. we may have lost Scotty, the crews of Enterprise NX01 are scattered along with the crews of DS9. It's depressing.
Going back to the Trip analogy, it was said that there were enough plot holes to bring him back. Well, in Before Dishonor there's just as many plot holes.
Janeway sets off to investigate a Borg vessel in a lightly armed science vessel.
A Borg cube that becomes a live on it's own when there's never been any evidence it could do it before.
Lady Q being involved at all.
Absorbing people and planets.
The mutiny of the Enterprise crew.
Janeways death, had it been written accordingly could have meant a great deal to her fans but it wasn't. It was stupid. The stupidest death written on screen and off. It was shallow and depressing and while I too detest resest buttons (for example while Jadzia and Data were a couple of my favorite characters I would not want them magically resurrected) Janeways death is up there along with Trip Tuckers death in TATV. And while the holodeck crap may explain that he really didn't die, Riker and Troi said he did die that way making it canon. Whether we like it or not.
Christopher I love your work and more times than not I agree with your opinions on this board. But I have a question. Why do you think that Janeway should stay dead but Trip Tucker shouldn't? It is the same thing. When the decision to write the Enterprise books with Trip alive and well were written, have you ever told anyone that he should have stayed dead and that it should be permanent?
Janeway was the first female lead in a Star Trek series. Janeway (and Mulgrew) made Voyager possible for seven years. The character has inspired women and yes even men to believe that they can do anything if they work hard and set their minds to it. A lot of people have testified to Kate Mulgrew just what her character has meant to them. But yet a supporting character who was only on the air for four years who's main contribution to Star Trek is catfish and pecan pie gets a rebirth and life and one of the Captains get absorbed, trashed, and dies in book written by a man who didn't like her, that's almost criminal and makes me resent Clark and David in the same way people resented Braga and Berman.
It's my opinion that as far as I'm concerned a death like Janeways shouldn't be permanent.
But yet when I see the hypocrisy of this situation I can see why the Bring Back Janeway people get ticked off. I've had meaningless death be a part of my life since I was a child. I don't need to read it in Star Trek. Star Trek used to bring hope to people.
What does it bring now in the novel continuity?
What the hell kind of question is that?
It brings hope now!
That's what I got out of Destiny & Full Circle (etc), anyway. There are things you can't ever beat, and forces arrayed against you that sometimes are exactly as bad as they look. And THEN, it's still worth having hope, that even if you can't fix it, the things you believe in will. What time is hope more important than that?
Hope is easy if you're the superpower and you can stand on your high horse and lecture everyone about how they all need to get along and stop being superstitious just like you. Or if you're on the most perilous journey imaginable, but somehow never manage to feel any consequences of it.
Hope matters when the Captain dies. When the Federation fails. When you have to earn your beliefs. Trek has, for most of its lifespan, not had to do that; it's been a fun utopia, but it hasn't felt like something worth fighting for. A dream, not a hope. The "darker" things like Destiny and Full Circle made Trek *matter* to me, genuinely helped me get through some of the hardest parts of my life so far.
Don't trivialize that with this "what does Janeway's death" bring crap. It brings realism, proof that Trek still works even when things don't happen the way everyone wants. It brings power to a fantasy, substance to a dream. It makes this a story worth telling.
It brings hope now!
That's what I got out of Destiny & Full Circle (etc), anyway. There are things you can't ever beat, and forces arrayed against you that sometimes are exactly as bad as they look. And THEN, it's still worth having hope, that even if you can't fix it, the things you believe in will. What time is hope more important than that?
Hope is easy if you're the superpower and you can stand on your high horse and lecture everyone about how they all need to get along and stop being superstitious just like you. Or if you're on the most perilous journey imaginable, but somehow never manage to feel any consequences of it.
Hope matters when the Captain dies. When the Federation fails. When you have to earn your beliefs. Trek has, for most of its lifespan, not had to do that; it's been a fun utopia, but it hasn't felt like something worth fighting for. A dream, not a hope. The "darker" things like Destiny and Full Circle made Trek *matter* to me, genuinely helped me get through some of the hardest parts of my life so far.
Don't trivialize that with this "what does Janeway's death" bring crap. It brings realism, proof that Trek still works even when things don't happen the way everyone wants. It brings power to a fantasy, substance to a dream. It makes this a story worth telling.
The hell it does. What's trivial is the way that Peter David wrote her death in the first place. Hope only matters in fiction when it's written that way. If there was proof that Trek still works and brings hope then so many people wouldn't feel the way they do about stories such as Janeways death and Sisko's sudden desertion of his family. That's not giving power to a fantasy or substance to a dream. It's killing dreams more than it is fueling them.
It's giving power to crappy writing and story telling.
I mean, sure, fair enough, it's all in the eye of the beholder anyway, right?
I'm just saying, I was a casual fan for a long time and the recent tendency of the authors to make these things matter - to me - has made me an obsessive and deep fan of the Literature. I read almost 200 books in two years, on the strength of ballsy storytelling like Destiny, Full Circle, etc, wanting to connect all the dots so I could make them matter as much as possible. (A lot of those books were bad, I wouldn't do it again, but that's beside the point.)
For every one of you that thinks this death trivializes something important is someone like me that thinks it conversely adds import to something that was trivial. (I mean, really, did anyone on Voyager ever face anything hard, like, ever? What a total waste of dramatic potential that show was.)
You can express your totally valid opinion all you want, but mine's just as valid, so don't act like these creative choices "added nothing". They added nothing to you, but for me, and Christopher, and tons of other people, they added a lot.
I'm just saying, I was a casual fan for a long time and the recent tendency of the authors to make these things matter - to me - has made me an obsessive and deep fan of the Literature. I read almost 200 books in two years, on the strength of ballsy storytelling like Destiny, Full Circle, etc, wanting to connect all the dots so I could make them matter as much as possible. (A lot of those books were bad, I wouldn't do it again, but that's beside the point.)
For every one of you that thinks this death trivializes something important is someone like me that thinks it conversely adds import to something that was trivial. (I mean, really, did anyone on Voyager ever face anything hard, like, ever? What a total waste of dramatic potential that show was.)
You can express your totally valid opinion all you want, but mine's just as valid, so don't act like these creative choices "added nothing". They added nothing to you, but for me, and Christopher, and tons of other people, they added a lot.
Okay everyone's had their added drama and realness by billions of people dying and Janeway offed.
Let's have a heart warming RETURN of Janeway and the drama of her finding her way in a more damaged Federation.
Let's have a heart warming RETURN of Janeway and the drama of her finding her way in a more damaged Federation.
Only a slight pause.
If anyone could come up with a way to do it that was actually interesting and emotionally challenging rather than just being cheap and lazy wish-fulfillment, Kirsten could.
But that's missing the point, I think. Star Trek is about hope. If everything's always hunky-dory and happy, there's no need for hope. Often the most compellingly hopeful, optimistic, uplifting stories are those that take place in the wake of great loss. Because they show that even after a loss, we can heal and recover; we can take comfort from the memory of those we've lost; we can find new purpose or new love and be happy again once we're able to let go.
Kathryn Janeway doesn't die in every Voyager novel. Her death is in the past. The Voyager books now are about how her shipboard family heals and moves forward and keeps her alive in their memories and actions. That's very optimistic. It's not about gloom and despair at all. I grant that there have been a number of Trek novels lately taking things in a darker direction, but I think Unworthy and Children of the Storm are two of the most upbeat and hopeful Trek novels to come along in the past several years.
By the same token, I've tried to make my own post-Destiny fiction optimistic, to tell stories of healing and hope in the wake of tragedy -- both in Over a Torrent Sea and the upcoming The Struggle Within. Your premise that every story informed by tragic events must be depressing is not true. Happiness isn't something you can only find in the complete absence of bad things. It's something you build for yourself in spite of the bad things that are inevitably part of life, to give you strength to transcend them.
The obvious difference being that we never actually saw Trip die. We saw a 24th-century simulation indirectly portraying his alleged death. Thus, it's a lot less of a stretch. It's not accurate to say "There were plot holes, so we can pretend it didn't happen." That's not the way it works. The reason Trip's death could be retconned is because the specific nature of the plot holes in that case makes it feasible.
No, Trip's alleged death was a lot stupider. At least Janeway heroically gave her life to save Seven of Nine and the Federation, something I can easily believe she would do. Trip allegedly blew himself up to fight off a few petty raiders when there was no reason whatsoever that he needed to do so. There's no character motivation for it, so it was just the writers puppeteering the character to act out a scheduled story beat. That's a stupid death. Whatever you might think of the technicalities of the circumstances around Janeway's death, at least she had a valid character motivation for sacrificing herself (and, as Full Circle revealed, a valid character motivation for putting herself in that situation in the first place), and that automatically makes it less stupid.
That's not true at all. Riker and Troi saying he died is not evidence that he died, because they were not eyewitnesses to the event. It is only evidence that they believe he died. It's hearsay testimony, and that is not proof of anything.
There are countless things that people in real life believe about history that are absolutely false. Like "Columbus proved the Earth was round." Every educated or well-travelled person back then knew the Earth was round, because it's pretty obvious. But people like Washington Irving, writing the histories and legends of Columbus, wanted to paint him as an Enlightenment hero outsmarting the hidebound institutions of Europe, so they vilified the church and royalty by claiming that they were so stupid and ignorant as to believe the Earth was flat, something that any remotely intelligent person would know was untrue. So generations of Americans have grown up accepting a blatant lie, a piece of political propaganda, as a historical fact. I've even seen well-educated scientists express belief in that myth. So it's entirely possible that Riker and Troi could believe something about their history that is simply false, that's actually a lie put into the history books to serve someone's agenda.
That's not really an accurate characterization. For one thing, we don't actually have any primary-source evidence that Trip died at all, so "stay dead" isn't really the right way of putting it. For another, I never actually said he "shouldn't" be treated as dead. Had it been up to me, I would've left him dead. But the decision was made, and for the reasons I've explained, I felt it worked in that particular instance.
And really, the fact that it's been done before is the best possible reason not to do it again. It's not good to be predictable.
No, it isn't, because we never saw the death. Trip's "death" is the same thing as Holmes at Reichenbach Falls, or Blake in the third-season finale of Blake's 7. It's not the same thing as a story where we witness the death "onscreen" in unambiguous detail.
That shouldn't be relevant. It's contradictory to praise the addition of a female lead as a stride for equality and then demand that the character be given special treatment because she's female.
It's ridiculous to paint this as a gender issue. It was a woman, Margaret Clark, who decided to kill Janeway. It was the same woman, Margaret Clark, who decided to resurrect Trip. It wasn't about the sex of the character, the editor, or the writer. It was about what was deemed the best story decision in each distinct case. And they are distinct cases.
I don't see hope in writing about resurrection. That's false hope, because it's a nonsense situation that can't happen in reality. It's taking refuge in a lie, and that's a feeble excuse for hope. Hope in the wake of death lies in friends and family, in acceptance and recovery, in doing what you can to preserve the legacy and memory of a lost one.
Perhaps I was letting my emotions get the best of me as far as no hope in the Trek novel line. The last novels I've read, DTI: Watching The Clock and IFM are books that do have a lot of hope for the Trek universe. On the topic of hope I feel I'm wrong.
But as far as every one of us that thinks this death trivializes something important I believe like you it can add import to something that was trivial. But in the case of Kathryn Janeway and her death it didn't. How many authors here in the Treklit forum have said they enjoyed what was done story wise with Before Dishonor and thought creatively that it was a great addition to the current Trek storyline? How many? Go ahead and answer.... I'll wait. The answer that I can think of us none of them.
I
Well, look up one post above yours; that's at least one.
Before Dishonor wasn't the best execution; it was all the "HOLY SHIT" without any of the grounding. But I think Full Circle gave it the grounding it deserved. It wasn't there originally, but it hangs together now. And, even if I'd hated BD, it would've been worth it for Full Circle.
ETA:
Yes. This. You put it far more eloquently than I
Before Dishonor wasn't the best execution; it was all the "HOLY SHIT" without any of the grounding. But I think Full Circle gave it the grounding it deserved. It wasn't there originally, but it hangs together now. And, even if I'd hated BD, it would've been worth it for Full Circle.
ETA:
Yes. This. You put it far more eloquently than I
But we're not talking about Before Dishonor here. That's another thread. We're talking about what Kirsten Beyer has done with the premise of Janeway's death. And I've said repeatedly that I think she's done a fantastic job finding meaning and value in the story of the end of Janeway's life and how her loved ones cope with it.
I'm looking forward to reading all about how the cope with her return. Chak has fallen apart and will probably pick himself up with the aid of a good woman, wonder what he'll do when Janeway returns?
^You know, what I really find obnoxious is this attitude that the resurrection of a dead character is an entitlement, something it's okay just to sit around and expect. The media have a lot to answer for. They've gone back to that well so many times, made it so much of a cliche, that no character death carries any real weight anymore because audiences just see it as a temporary inconvenience. This is exactly why resurrections in fiction are a bad habit that needs to be broken. I think there should be a moratorium on them, not just in Trek but in comics and everywhere else.
If you can expect that the dead stay dead I can expect resurrection. "Obnoxious" is your judgement. I've read pages and pages about how great it is to read how the characters handled her death, yet I post two sentences about how the characters might handle her return and you use the words obnoxious and entitlement.
This thread is about Beyer's invitation to people to discuss the BBKJ movement. Do you only want to hear from those that don't want her back?
This thread is about Beyer's invitation to people to discuss the BBKJ movement. Do you only want to hear from those that don't want her back?
I don't really care that much about Kathryn Janeway's death or resurrection in particular. She is not the center of the Star Trek universe, she's one of ten regulars in the ensemble of one of five ST television series. She's not that overwhelmingly important to my life. What I'm talking about is the more widespread problem in the media of routine resurrections, conditioning audiences to assume any dead character will quickly come back to life and thus rendering death meaningless as a story device. It's robbed writers of an important tool, and that's not healthy for the industry as a whole. Death in comics and SF has been reduced to nothing more than a marketing gimmick. Worse, it's become a lie, a fraud. Killing off characters and pretending it's a big deal when you fully intend to bring them back to life after a year or two -- that's not playing fair with the audience. It's a shallow, manipulative tactic.
I've been thinking about it more since this threads started, and I have to admit, I could maybe deal with Janeway returning... in my 20 or 30 years storytime. To me the only way that Janeway's return could really be that interesting would be if she had been gone for many years. If she were to return now, or in the near future there wouldn't be that much of an adjustment period, but if it had been decades then it would make things even more complicated, and IMO interesting. I don't know if I really want her death to be undone, but if it is I think this would be the best way to go about it.
ST has often had as a theme: "What might humanity evolve into?"
Janeway's already had one go at evolving ("Threshold", in which she became a giant salamander and procreated with Tom Paris), and Wesley Crusher became a Traveler. Will Decker merged with a Deltan and a living machine, to escape into a new universe.
As a disembodied soul, currently in limbo with Lady Q, I can see Janeway returning - but maybe not in the corporeal form we last saw her. That would be a science fictiony return: "What might humanity evolve into this time?"
Janeway's already had one go at evolving ("Threshold", in which she became a giant salamander and procreated with Tom Paris), and Wesley Crusher became a Traveler. Will Decker merged with a Deltan and a living machine, to escape into a new universe.
As a disembodied soul, currently in limbo with Lady Q, I can see Janeway returning - but maybe not in the corporeal form we last saw her. That would be a science fictiony return: "What might humanity evolve into this time?"
She's not just a character.... She's the Captain. To her crew and the fans that love her.
I have to admire Kirsten's willingness to discuss this issue.
I certainly think that there are authors capable of "returning" Janeway to the story, although I agree with those who stated that the story is great without her.
The Voyager books are the only series in the Relaunch that I am excited about each and every time they come out. The storytelling has been fresh and new, and even the Titan novels cannot touch the feeling of exploration and discovery that the Voyager novels have captured.
The Voyager TV series went off track when it forgot that exploring the new and discovering the undiscovered is what make Star Trek great.
Thanks to Kirsten, we have some of that greatness back.
I certainly think that there are authors capable of "returning" Janeway to the story, although I agree with those who stated that the story is great without her.
The Voyager books are the only series in the Relaunch that I am excited about each and every time they come out. The storytelling has been fresh and new, and even the Titan novels cannot touch the feeling of exploration and discovery that the Voyager novels have captured.
The Voyager TV series went off track when it forgot that exploring the new and discovering the undiscovered is what make Star Trek great.
Thanks to Kirsten, we have some of that greatness back.
Not any more. Now Chakotay's the Captain.
In point of fact, she wasn't even the Captain before she died.
Yes, I know what you actually mean, but I'm not just being snarky, I'm making a point - things change. Sometimes the Captain gets promoted. Or transferred. Or dies. They still mattered, they were still worthwhile, but it doesn't have to be the same as it used to be to be good.
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