Pretty sure the downvoters didn't finish reading that...
They sure didn't and only frothed as soon they saw WoKe.
woke is the new sheeple
...in that anytime anyone uses it to support their argument you immediately know they're a grade-a fuckewit.
I’m saving that. Not sure if and how I could use it as I (at least try…) avoid fanning flames, but…
To be fair, woke is a really annoying right now, essentially a conservative dog whistle for "I want to be racist but don't want to be called racist", so I don't blame a lot of people for not finishing. If I read everything that started off with woke I'd have a much higher blood pressure.
Don't get me started on ds9. A black captain? A trans lesbian officer? A gay interspecies couple? The federation using fear from war as an excuse to become a police state? Can't believe they made my colorful space communism show woke.
A gay interspecies couple?
Rick Berman:
I can't be the only one who remembers Trekkies legitimately bitching about Tuvok because "Vulcans aren't black."
Like... really? You've been there and checked this out for yourself? Or is it that most (and not even all) of the handful of Vulcans you saw so far were white?
Tuvok is the best depiction of a Vulcan in all of Star Trek too and I will die on this hill (Spock is half human, so I am not counting him). Tuvok seemed to me like he found humans (and Neelix) to be illogical, difficult to understand, and somewhat annoying; but nonetheless he couldn't help but like them as well, though he wouldn't admit that to them (tangential hot take: Vulcans claim to suppress their emotions, but they still make decisions based on emotion and rationalise them as being based on logic after the fact)
Tuvok is black!?!?! I thought he was a Vulcan! I suppose the next thing you are going to tell me is that Odo isn't a Shapeshifter?
So Bald IS a hairstyle!
BALD?? I have hair! Why else would I visit the best barber in Starfleet?!
I assume because the writers thought it was hilarious
Because if he didn't, he would wind up looking like Hector Salamanca
You hated Discovery because it was too woke.
I hated Discovery because it wasn’t woke enough.
We are not the same.
I hated it because half of the characters annoyed me and the other half didn’t have enough screen time
I just couldn't get into Discovery or Picard because they felt... weird? Not that it wasn't like Star Trek in the stories or that it was "woke," but it just didn't have the same vibe as what I grew up with. Lower Decks has the vibe, but not the tone or anything else. I need to check out Strange New Worlds. It looks like it might be what I'm really missing.
Both Picard and Discovery were season long plots without episodic filler episodes to shake things up which made it painfully obvious that their overarching plotlines were terrible. Add some poorly done melodramatic scenes about how the leads are the most important people ever without showing why (and in a lot of cases showing the opposite) and we have two series that were just a slog to watch up to the point that I stopped.
Both sounded good on paper. Both had great casts. Both seemed to suffer from terrible writing and direction.
The final season of PIC was fun, and the second one had some good moments, mostly with Q. But that first season was still being written as they were filming and the second season had part of its budget appropriated for the third season and it shows in both.
I just watched Season 2 of Picard and all I could think the whole time was "TNG crew would have wrapped this up in 1 or 2 episodes..."
Yup, in order to make Discovery and Picard work, the writers had to give everyone the idiot ball.
Trek is at its best when it's competence porn.
As a note, to be in star fleet requires 4 years at the start fleet academy. You need to be somewhat good at your job and somewhat disciplined to even be considered for a slot on a ship.
Yes, watch Strange New Worlds! It really does get at the vibe and tone of TNG and the other 90s Trek shows. It's a breath of fresh air
I find many of these shows and movies that are accused of being woke is because they create protagonists without flaws, out of fear of making non traditional characters look bad I guess? But protagonists without flaws are boring.
I'm trying to think what Burnham's fatal flaw is, or her deadly sin. It's mostly stuff that has happened to her and she has to overcome but that's not the same thing. Interesting protagonist have flaws like hubris, vice, hypocrisy, greed, something that makes them more real. You look at characters like Rey from star wars and again, flawless except for her past, which again is something that happened to her not something she is.
That's why people didn't like when Han Solo didn't shoot first. Yes Han Solo is overall a good guy, but he's also ruthless and a gangster when we meet him. If he's already a flawless good guy at the start,that just sucks. Anakin as well, good but arrogant and controlling
I think i agree with the general premise that flawed characters are more interesting, and i also feel (with no data to back up that feeling, so bear with me) that these 'woke' characters sometimes fall into a pitfall where they're just so boringly written that it does feel like the writers are either afraid of being perceived as 'punching down' or (edit: finishing this thought) want to misguidedly write a perfect character for the sake of superficial representation of some group.
That said, for this show in particular (i have watched TNG/DS9/Voyager but not Discovery), is it a valid criticism for this captain that couldn't be applied to the older series? Picard's flaws are heavily understated - sure, he was a violent little shit off screen when he was younger, and he can be a little more of a hardass than called for occasionally, but I always felt he was pretty consistently portrayed as the voice of reason, and his flaws were only relevant in a couple episodes. I think I would say that's also true of Sisko and Janeway, though Sisko has a lot more nuance to his pragmatism that is really interesting as DS9 continues.
You're not wrong. Picards biggest flaw that people point towards is either not being great with kids or just emotionally stunted. Janeway has so few flaws overall that the only one you'll hear follow her around is "Genocidal" because of Tuvix. Most of her other flaws are episodic like with hunting the Equinox.
Edit: Even then, her flaw in hunting the Equinox is that she cares too much about Starfleet to let them abandon their morals. She's so aggressively pro-Starfleet/United Federation of Planets that when tasked with not getting home for 200 years (it was 70 years at max warp without ever stopping) she put Starfleet morals first and stuck her crew in the Delta Quadrant. Multiple times. So her flaw is shes too Starfleet.
What's the "gay agenda" reference for TNG?
idk Riker turned me gay
When I was a kid watching TNG with my parents, my father would sometimes say things like “Man, that guy is too handsome” when Riker was on screen.
Grats your dad is gay/bi
I also don't think the TNG cast is particularly overly-emotional.
Plus TNG didn't retcon Klingon appearance, it had been that way for like 10 years already by that point, from the TOS films.
First one that comes to mind is "The Outcast". Not really gay, but for anyone who is triggered by anything different they would consider it "woke".
There's also:
The Host which has Crusher dealing with falling in love with a Trill who moves hosts. It can be seen in some very specific ways as a trans allegory and just challenging heteronormative assumptions about love and attraction.
The show really pushes a lot of 'Found Family' stuff which ends up being super popular in most LGBTQ+ media because we're disowned by other people. (Data accepted and accepting himself as part of the crew, Worf and Alexander aren't too awesome but Deanna steps up a bit there. You've got Wesley who's kind of adopted by most of the upper ranks after a while.
TNG is purely "Infinite Diversity in Infinite Combinations" which people see as gay agenda because they wanna collapse anything pro-diversity as just being LGBTQ+ because they have fragile pathetic minds.
Q is aggressively queer coded. The hyper dramatic and flamboyant personality, the penchant for being a theatrical whore, openly flirting with Picard (and Riker) in such a way that you genuinely aren't sure if he's joking or not, he rejects every type of rigid norm from humanity, Voyager and a few other things even hinted in such a way that due to his ability to change form he's above gendered norms too and sort of gender fluid. Not to mention being the campiest motherfucker this side of the Alpha quadrant. "It matters to me. YOU matter to me. Even Gods have favorites, Jean-Luc. You've always been one of mine." There's also his deep fucking loneliness, something that a metric fuckload of people in the community suffer from. Part of a whole but ostracized and on the outside? Yea.
My only major critiques for Discovery are that they walked back a Calvin-verse reboot after fan backlash (my interpretation), and that the theatrics usually don't mesh well with the action-oriented flow of the rest of the episodes around it.
The reboot thing was, to me, overly clear with the changes in aesthetics and technology. Especially the Klingons. And I get it: it's hard to dazzle audiences through vibrant creative direction, with decades of canon on your back. All that older stuff has compromises from old effects tech and budget baked in, so breaking from it is incredibly tempting. But the fans will not let you do this: just ask the Dr. Who production people. So we get some really oddball stuff happening in the first few seasons.
To the latter point, we get moments like: "The ship is going to explode in one minute, so let's argue for at least ten before we deal with that." This kind of thing happens a lot in Discovery and a binge-watch would have you thinking that the ship's counselor is either dead or contemplating transporter suicide. The dissent between characters feels valid most of the time, but other times is just jarringly out of character or contrary to self-preservation as to break suspension of disbelief. But there's usually angry, loud, arguing dissent. Which is a shame since these same episodes is hitting the mark on every other metric, IMO.
retconned Klingons to look super weird
TBF the Klingons were retconned in TMP
From now on, every Star Trek show should change the appearance of the Kinglons and the Trill. And also add a new color of Andorians.
was there even one gay character in TNG?
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