Also all James Bonds are Timothy Dalton, drive a V8 Vantage Volante and wear a Tag Heur, even if they are Daniel Craig wearing an Omega and driving a DB10. If they do any of those latter things it is a canon violation.
I know you're going for humorous effect here, but it's a strange choice of analogy to do it with. The Bond films have never even
pretended to have anything resembling consistent continuity. That ship sailed way back in the '60s.
Visual aesthetics are not Canon.
You say that as if it's carved in stone somewhere. In reality, it seems like a fairly new (and still contentious) concept devised to justify the wishes of producers who wanted to change pre-existing visual aesthetics. I'm pretty sure I never saw any such notion discussed (much less proclaimed!) in Trek fandom prior to the launch of DSC.
When we're talking about a fictional reality whose primary home is on screen (indeed, in terms of strict canonicity, its
only home), it frankly stands to reason that
what we see is meant to be an important and consistent part of that reality. Divorcing the look of things from the story content requires some serious mental contortions.
...the reason visual aesthetics aren't Canon is because there's never been a single unified visual aesthetic in the entire history of the Trek franchise.
Except, of course, there has. Every time we've ever seen the TOS-era
Enterprise NCC-1701, inside or out, it's had a consistent visual aesthetic. Every time we've seen the NCC-1701-A, or -B, or -C, or -D appear, they've all had a consistent visual aesthetic. (Technically the 1701-E has changed a bit from one appearance to the next, but that ship is such a dog's breakfast of extraneous design details that it's hard to tell anyway.) Every time we've seen the 2260s-era uniforms, they've been the same... and likewise for uniforms from other eras. And so on. Trek has, in fact, put a
lot of effort over the years into maintaining a consistent visual aesthetic for every period of its extended fictional future history. Until DSC came along.
If one doesn't try to expand its definition, the term "reboot" in a fictional context means that said fiction has had everything - all the stories, designs, and continuity - previously associated with it thrown out and replaced with new stories, designs, and continuity that may share similarities with what existed before but are also clearly different from it.
If you are taking an existing fictional property that has gone dormant and resuming it by adhering to its already-established narrative history - either in whole or in part - you are not "rebooting" it, even if you insist on using that term to describe what you've done. Period.
Oh my gosh. We actually agree on something. This is worth acknowledging!
There is a meaningful distinction between the terms "reboot," "retcon," "reimagining," and "relaunch," as applied to fiction. They're not all mutually exclusive, but neither are they interchangeable.
Doctor Who from 2005 forward, for instance, was a relaunch and to some extent a reimagining, but it was definitely not a reboot.
