add : Lord of the Rings, huge one right there
I thought about including it, but I'm not sure most people would consider the 1978 Bakshi film to be that authoritative.
Star Trek is always going to be a little political because it's basically a liberal fantasy. A world were racism and bigotry is gone, People no longer use money. Problems are often solved through diplomacy. But it was also a show about a military with it's chain of command and usually had at least one strong male leader character at the top. Whether that be Kirk,Picard,Sisko etc. Discovery's strong male character at the top ended up being the villain and the way Starfleet is depicted seems less military like.
You then add things like the Klingons being stand-ins for MAGA, one character being killed for mansplaining and Stacey Abrams as Earth President then it is very clear what politics the shows creators of the show have. The fact that is was Trek's most diverse cast ever was also just like added proof of their politics. That the show had bad writing though is what makes it the ultimate target for online criticism.
Republican content creators love liberal themed shows that aren't very good because it allows them to really promote the 'Go Woke, Go Broke" messaging and they can make the claim that the shows politics are why the show sucks. They have a harder time selling this message for shows that might be political but are also well written. Sometimes they try going after those shows but they know their bread and butter are the crappy shows and well lots of crappy shows are being made today so they got plenty of material to work with. Their only problem is a problem I have mentioned before which is over saturation. They have complained about wokeness so much and for so long that it has become yet the next thing that has become tedious and boring in our society.
I'm going to try hard not to get into a TNZ territory, but I think it needs to be said that a lot of people don't understand the difference between politics and culture any longer. Frankly, this is the case on both sides, but this was presented most starkly after the last U.S. election, where despite winning everything, a lot of conservatives were still upset, because what really animated them weren't political questions - tax rates, spending priorities, foreign policy - etc. What animated them instead was a loss of cultural hegemony. What they really wanted was
no Bad Bunny at the Super Bowl.
Klingon's as MAGA?
imo That's just wrong and inappropriate since I always got the sense that Klingons were based on the ancient Samurai, with talk of honor and duty and the willingness to self sacrifice etc...portraying them in that manner (MAGA) is inaccurate if that is what is happening...
DIS Season 1 absolutely tried for a MAGA-ish framing for the Klingons. T'Kuvma's speech was essentially religious/cultural grievance, arguing that the tolerance of the Federation was a corrupting influence on the purity of Klingon values. It kind of got lost in the shuffle as the season went on, however - as was the case with most of the theming. It didn't help that T'Kuvma was dead by the end of the second episode, and Kol was dead by the end of the season. By the time they got back from the MU, L'Rell was essentially the last Klingon character, and had to work as a stand in from the brig for the entire effin race.
Lorca's "Make the Empire Glorious Again" line was also pretty on-the nose. Though again, from the second season onward, overt politics pretty much dropped from the show.
Wanting gay characters and trans characters to be represented is more than just being trendy. I mean I guess it is trendy to some degree since people are now more open to that kind of representation but it's also the morally right thing to do as well. Not that I think lots of Republicans would agree with that moral interpretation but at the same time I also don't think just having gay or trans characters would turn away conservative fans anymore than any of the other liberal ideas we have seen in Trek.
Trek was decades behind the time when it came to including gay characters (something that was becoming normalized by the end of Berman Trek already). It had to be done.
The question of nonbinary/trans characters is at least theoretically more complicated, because it's something which is a really historically contingent set of identities built up over the present. In a world where people can get SRS in an hour, would something like gender really matter any longer? That said, we're making these shows as a reflection of the present, not a documentary, so I'm fine with it.
I'll make a note here that it seems like Trek is moving away from queer characters. Look at SNW. There was a tiny bit of queer-ish content in the first season (Chapel mentioning she dated a woman in the past, casting a trans character in a guest role, arguably whatever happened between Una and Ortegas in
The Elysian Kingdom) but since the show has been obsessed with pairing off pretty much everyone in straight relationships.
I dunno about SFA, but I wouldn't be surprised if all the characters are canonically straight (or at least, non-queer - maybe SAM is ace, because she's a holo).
With Discovery though I don't think they saw anything in that show that represents them in any fashion. Maybe Lorca but he was made the bad guy. I mean other than that I am not sure what the show had to offer anyone who might be conservative that would interest them. Thus it was deemed as being to political. Granted the show also lost liberal fans as well but that was more about the shows quality than the liberalism
I feel like the tone of early Discovery was still very masculine, and even edgelord-ish. You had Starfleet planting mines in dead bodies (a war crime in the present day). Starfleet installing L'Rell as a dictator with a WMD. Section 31 in the background doing shady shit. Characters dying for shock value. Etc.
After Michelle Paradise took over, it shifted from Edgelord Trek to Hallmark Channel Trek. Characters - sometimes even the ship! - sit around and discuss their feelings. This can even happen in the middle of life and death crises. No one is ever a bad listener, and everyone validates one another's feelings. With only a few rare exceptions (like when Book's planet blew up), character deaths stop happening, especially for main characters. It was sort of as if the show became afraid we might get triggered if something too bad happened. So the overall "vibes" did shift to something I do think a lot of conservatives would have a hard time dealing with.
