this post was submitted on 02 Jul 2026
610 points (97.4% liked)
TenForward: Where Every Vulcan Knows Your Name
7176 readers
719 users here now
/c/TenForward: Your home-away-from-home for all things Star Trek!
Re-route power to the shields, emit a tachyon pulse through the deflector, and post all the nonsense you want. Within reason of course.
~ 1. No bigotry. This is a Star Trek community. Remember that diversity and coexistence are Star Trek values. Any post/comments that are racist, anti-LGBT, or generally "othering" of a group will result in removal/ban.
~ 2. Keep it civil. Disagreements will happen both on lore and preferences. That's okay! Just don't let it make you forget that the person you are talking to is also a person.
~ 3. Use spoiler tags.
Use spoiler tags in comments, and NSFW checkbox for posts.
This applies to any episodes that have dropped within 3 months prior of your posting. After that it's free game.
~ 4. Keep it Trek related. This one is kind of a gimme but keep as on topic as possible.
~ 5. Keep posts to a limit. We all love Star Trek stuff but 3-4 posts in an hour is plenty enough.
~ 6. Try to not repost. Mistakes happen, we get it! But try to not repost anything from within the past 1-2 months.
~ 7. No General AI Art. Posts of simple AI art do not 'inspire jamaharon'
~ 8. No Political Upheaval. Political commentary is allowed, but please keep discussions civil. Read here for our community's expectations.
Fun will now commence.
Sister Communities:
Want your community to be added to the sidebar? Just ask one of our mods!
Creator Resources:
Looking for a Star Trek screencap? (TrekCore)
Looking for the right Star Trek typeface/font for your meme? (Thank you @kellyaster for putting this together!)
founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
I think it's very easy to claim 'woke' with modern star trek, but I think the issue is that politics used to be more tightly wound into the plot in that they used to express leftist viewpoints in a natural way that served the plot. The episodes were well thought out and were rich with allegory and metaphors.
Now the political views have remained largely the same from before, but the writing has suffered to an extent that things feel forced and no longer serve the plot in a natural way. It's less thought provoking, and more "here's the moral of the story". Which for better or worse only really underscores Star Trek's leftist views.
Bullshit. Modern star trek is fine I guess, but like, wasn't the captain in 'discovery' ever so slightly faschy? There's the ship that runs on doing mushrooms and an openly gay character. That's like it. It's not even the wokest star trek, what with the other one having the trans wormgirl and the sheriff who turns into a cloud for fun and the space-palestinian security officer and all the explicit antifascism while the semi-defecting fascist spy flirts with Dr. twink under the watchful eye of black space-jesus(n'awlins edition).
Compare it to actual woke fiction from the decade previous, three mediums:
Sense8(TV): the main character is just a trans woman, everything is a metaphor for 'drugs are great, fuck the state', and everything is queer. There's a 'detransition is murder' arc. There's a hive-mind-body-swapping orgy. Several, I think. Magical prison support is a major theme. Also prison breaks. Cops in your affinity group fucks everything up.
Pillars of eternity(video game): the druid is straight up an indigenous bisexual furry. If you're too racist, he will seduce your wife, turn into a wolf, seduce your dog, and then steal your cart with all your beer on it on his way out. the paladin is transmasc-not-trans misotheist secret agent of kinda-revolutionary-kinda-dugallist france. he wizard is literally two spirit and a gay uptight British schoolboy/ancient appalachian party girl. The Americans worship the goddess of fire and conflict above all others and literally did the high fantasy Manhattan project to murder the god of forgiveness rebirth and being nice to each other when he popped into a dirt farmer and declared communism-jihad in canadappalachia. Everything is so Hegelian it hurts. There's a joke ancap paladin subclass. The main plot is about the brutal violence of manifest destiny and its echoes through history, a stillbirth epidemic, and Americans all being howling fascists led by a shadow government of CIA telepaths. Doctor/scientists actually trying to solve the problem, who might even have a shot, are regularly lynched basically for being nerds.
I won't even start on recent books, partially because I don't look at publication dates for those, and partially because nobody else has ever read one. But let's just say the nearest non-star-trek-branded equivalent to 'star trek' in literature (not a consideration in other media, went for 'within a decade) is the 'culture' series, which is falGsc(explicitly anarchist) where literally everyone is trans and drugs are a thing you get from your drug glands that grow in during puberty. Authority always turns out badly.
Discovery was generally written badly, so yeah, the message also suffered from that. If there even was one.
And that's kind of what I'm getting at, the writing for Discovery was lacking in a way that everything felt forced and rushed. The plot, pacing, the character relationships, etc. Why would we expect the politics to feel subtle when nothing else in that show was subtle?
You never watched TNG right ? It was literally either a philosophical lesson or a critic of society by episode ...
Maybe take a little of that energy you spend watching Trek closely and put it towards reading comments more carefully?
That's a very valid comment 😂
Yes, that was literally my point. I'm uncertain where the disagreement is?
TNG was rich with thought provoking philosophy, you would be left to ponder the morality of the episode long after the fact. Sometimes things were intentionally ambiguous, sometimes not. But the episodes always invited viewers to come to conclusions.
The writing style has shifted from that approach, with modern Trek the answers require significantly less digging, sometimes it feels like the lesson is being underscored. The morality is the same only how it is presented has shifted.
So what I'm saying is the politics is the same as it ever was, what has changed was the writing style.
I'm not even going to place a value judgement on that shift, some might prefer the face value appeal of modern Trek. Personally I prefer the writing style that was used on TNG, you may like a modern series better, either way it's all good.
You're acting like Star Trek used to be more subtle when it had episodes like "Let That Be Your Last Battlefield".
Valid point, TOS wasn't always subtle. In my defense I was referring to the TNG, DS9, VOY, (and sometimes) ENT era. Whose writing often felt significantly more polished and less rushed than TOS.
So if you are trying to say modern Trek is written in a style closer to TOS, then yes I 100% concede to that point.
I would not say TNG was particularly more subtle. A gendered alien from a genderless race being put through conversion therapy is about as subtle as Let That Be Your Last Battlefield was. A planet of literal Native Americans in space being forcibly moved by Picard, who finds out he is the actual descendent of a 17th century coloniser, is somehow even less subtle. The Measure of a Man would have worked without explicitly bringing up slavery, but they made sure that it was brought up, and that it was a black woman who did it. Star Trek has pretty much always shouted its message for the people in the back row.
I think the problem is that in some of the newer trek, the political references are crude and sometimes tacked on when they are not even relevant.
Reread your post and I "may" have misunderstood you at first 😁