this post was submitted on 01 Nov 2023
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Risa
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Come on'n get your jamaharon on! There are no real rules—just don't break the weather control network.
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Or just having a black woman on the bridge as a senior officer next to the captain
Or a Russian as a helmsman
Or a Japanese asian man next them
Or a freaking Scotsman yelling nonsense from the boiler room
And then in the 1980s they made a series where the main theme was that the status quo was perfect and should never be questioned, and they didn't allow a gay character to exist in the entire franchise until 2017. Star Trek's been coasting on the progressiveness of the 1960s series for a long time, and it should be no surprise that a substantial portion of its modern audience has different politics.
Uh, they live in a post-scarcity society that has no money. People in the Federation ostensibly exist to better themselves, not accumulate wealth. They routinely shit on our current time period as backwards and primitive.
Also, they have several alien races with masculine women, feminine men, and asexual / agender people. Riker, being enlightened, sleeps with all of them.
I'm not sure how you got "the status quo is perfect" from that.
Don't forget Data allowing his child to choose their own gender. That is still an issue today.
I think dude had a little bit of a point, older trek was progressive, then it was still progressive but it was much more subtle, lately its gotten less subtle again.
People who WATCH trek noticed it in the low key years, people who casually have it on sometimes missed it, so now they are like "WTF!?!" Because it wasnt quite as obvious in TNG.
TOS was utterly blatant, TNG not so much. What I'll agree to is that DSC was way too sappy, it failed to be scifi on so many levels.
I haven't yet finished DSC yet but I highly disagree with that last bit. Every single Star Trek has been "Star Trek but..." They all do it very differently and that's what makes each one so incredibly interesting to watch as a group instead of just 1 long series. From what I've seen of DSC it's basically just "Star Trek but... It focuses on the characters" similarly to DS9 in that way.
A lot of great SciFi stories are just characters talking but it's in space.... That's most Asimov stories actually... so DSC is definitely sci-fi and very much so sci-fi.
I have no issue with character focus, it's that if I wanted to watch a romantic drama I wouldn't switch on trek. Some sprinkling, fine, but it has been front and centre, carried more by music than actual story or character development. You could plot the "ok we want to hit these emotional cues" spreadsheet that they wrote the story around, haphazardly.
SNW also has quite a romantic arc, heck, even a love triangle. I don't mind it there, it's actually done well and serves Spock's character development.
I will always defend Star Trek as progressive, but it has always been only as progressive as TV would allow at the time. 1980s TV executives would never have allowed a positive gay character on Star Trek in the 80s and 90s. Ellen didn't even come out of the closet until 1997. I would have loved, at the very least, the androgynous alien Riker falls in love with to have been played by a man, and Frakes wanted that, but it was nixed. Because it was the 80s and TV executives were from the 60s. It would never have happened.
And new Star Trek has done a lot to be LGBT+-supportive, which is great.
Ah found the Clueless Trekkie!
TOS was progressive for the 60s
TNG was progressive for the 80s
Oh yea not until 2017, when the first new show aired since 2005's STE went off the air. I'm sure it had nothing to do with the fact there weren't any new shows for 12 years.