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Star Trek fans have held the national stereotype of being way too rabid about things for decades but they’re probably the nicest fan base in all of science fiction and the one least likely to have a large faction of them absolutely lose it over a torpedo being fired by a woman or dumb shit like that
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anyone that tries to say star trek has “gone woke” or some stupid shit like that clearly isn’t a fan of it and just trying to rile up stuff. I mean come on… how can someone say that and have watched the shows LOL
Yeah, its not like Star Trek suddenly went woke, its been woke. First ever TV kiss between mixed races was between Kirk and Uhura. Scandalous.
That’s actually a common misconception. Not to downplay the significance of what Shatner and Nichols pulled off to get around the various censors (ruining alternate takes and such), but many TV shows did it before Star Trek.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/First_interracial_kiss_on_television
I think it was the first one that was both broadcast nationally in a primetime slot and where the actors were easily identifiable as having different ethnicities on a tiny TV screen. Would explain the misconception.
Late 30s here- it blows my mind that we don’t have to look very far into that past for the Shatner/Nichols smooch to be remarkable.
It’s uplifting to me. This present world can be ugly, but it’s comforting to think that the kiss is almost mundane when compared to the present.
A win is a win!
And they’re not even that woke. Afaik they still ocasionally eat animals in the 24th century. (Unless they’re Vulcan.) Watch The Orville if you want some proper progressive shit 😆
They have food replicators. The only thing not vegan about replicated meat is that they’d probably use your poop as bulk material to synthesize stuff
Watch The Orville if you want some proper progressive shit 😆
You mean like “agree to date me or else I’ll date the younger clone of you?”
Not to mention the first black woman officer and the first black/white kiss.
the first black/white kiss.
…in a drama series. This was the first:
That’s Lynn Fontanne kissing Sammy Davis, Jr. at the 1965 Emmys.
As far as the first interracial kiss, that does have a star trek connection- Desi kissing Lu in 1951.
On top of that, Shatner himsellf kissed France Nuyen on the Ed Sullivan show in 1958.
https://fakehistoryhunter.net/2019/09/11/not-the-first-interracial-kiss-on-tv/
Right now it’s the modern entitled version of woke. Not the philosophical exploratory woke.
Modern Trek tells you off for thinking differently while old Trek set an example to aspire to.
And that’s only in the few limited moments NuTrek a actually bothers spending time on making an opinion, as most of it is cheaply written shlock to squeeze as much as possible out of underpaid VFX artists.
Releasing Let That Be Your Last Battlefield at the height of the civil rights movement wasn’t some hypothetical philosophizing. That was pointed condemnation. Same with The Outcast’s attack on conversion therapy, or In The Hands of the Prophets’ take on religious dogmatism.
Star Trek has always been happy to condemn bad ideas. If you think it’s just started telling people off now then you haven’t been paying attention.
It was 100% philosophy, and leading by example, exactly as I said. It spent the entire episode showing the hypocrisy of the two characters and showed the crew of The Enterprise to be better than their millenia old squabble.
It wasn’t 30 seconds of emotional finger pointing in between cheap action sci-fi.
I’ve been paying perfect attention to Star Trek. But it seems like loads of people have simply forgotten how Star Trek got their point across.
Kinda hard to be a bigot when your favorite show is about a egalitarian socialist utopia
And yet it still happens. There are right-wing bigots who watch Star Trek for the pew pew space battles and ignore the rest, sad as that may be.
They are not Trek fans, they are violence fans. They are not welcome.
I love Star Trek for the vision, the tech, the people and of course to hate Wesley. This is my utopia.
The funny thing is, unlike with most sci-fi, Starfleet usually only starts shooting as a last resort. They don’t even notice that.
OK I love to laugh at Wesley, don’t get me wrong, but why the hate? I am a dirty casual it’s true. But next Gen is the one I know best, he wasn’t that bad was he?
Ah… I see some of them must’ve made it to the writing room on NuTrek… Because it’s pretty much nothing more than a VFX showcase these days.
I miss the time when an entire episode was essentially the crew figuring out a moral dillema, or just some really weird space bullshit.
I have a theory:
Star Trek fans were some of the earlier cosplayers. Trekkies were wearing Starfleet uniforms and Vulcan ears to conventions decades before the word “cosplay” was a thing. My father has a book called the Starfleet Technical Manual published in the 70’s that is basically an official guide for fans to build screen accurate costumes and props from, including sewing patterns for the various tunics and wrist-length dresses and a page of color swatches, plus dimensional drawings of tricorders, phasers and communicators.
And the public at large in the 1970s wasn’t ready for that yet.
People were cosplaying Junge Werther in the 1800s, it’s just a thing people do.
I have that book! It’s super cool. It’s themed as a document made by the military about information on the Federation that leaked into the past.
There’s also diagrams of space stations and ships, and small things, like how to properly decorate sleeves and badges for rank and division.
Same man created the brilliant Star Trek Blueprints, the first detailed deck plans for the Enterprise. He did all this after his daughter took him to a Trek convention and he saw how passionate the fans were and what a need there was for material like this. It’s a great story.
I used to have the original black cover version. Long lost, sadly. I have it as an ebook though. The one Star Trek book from my youth I had to buy once when I saw it used was this one, which used to be canon until TNG threw almost all of it away. But Rick Sternbach illustrated it and the ideas are pretty fun.
https://memory-alpha.fandom.com/wiki/Star_Trek_Spaceflight_Chronology
I think my favorite part is when an Earth expedition to Alpha Centauri meets Zefram Cochrane (TOS says he is from Alpha Centauri and there’s a lot of headcanon to explain it) and learns to communicate to him through mathematics. At the beginning, Cochrane draws a circle with a symbol next to it, the Earth mathematician realizes that it means pi and they move on from there.
Looks like someone scanned in every page if you’re interested: https://www.cygnus-x1.net/links/lcars/spaceflight-chronology.php
Edit:
As much as I love First Contact, in terms of world building, I like that so much more.
Oh man those technical drawings are MY SHIT. I got all the Star Wars ones. I’ll definitely see if I can track this down
There’s a certain kind of kid that grew up just eating shit like this up.
Hands up those old enough to remember the shitfest that erupted over Janeway (and/or Sisko)
I threw up the horns. It was nuts as a middle school girl, when Voyager first started airing, and everyone was so angry about Janeway and when I’d ask why they would turn red and shake their head, or change the topic.
It’s true. It’s not been a totally smooth ride. It’s taken work to educate fellow fans, and making the intolerant unwelcome.
Like there was early “controversy” about Geordie getting to be on the bridge. Which seemed kind of logical, but if you scratched below the surface you’d see how selective that critique was. That it was just racism and ableism
I remember a comment saying that Tuvok was so anal his skin is brown on Usenet in 1995. Some things never change.
I kinda lost it when Janeway fired more photon torpedos than the ship had upon entering the Delta quadrant. Where did she get the extra torpedoes?! She’s a witch!
Head cannon is that 1/3 of voyager is taken up by a massive shuttle manufactory. It’s never discussed but it must be there…Otherwise, none of this shit makes any sense.😬
The lower decks should have done a joke about the three ensigns on Voyager who did nothing except build shuttles the entire seven years.
They could do it in the shuttle bay, they wouldn’t need much more space than a finished shuttle takes up. We know they have shipboard replimats for larger things, I figure replicating and building standard shuttle models on long voyages has standardized procedures and steps like Lego instructions. You only need to replicate one piece at a time saving on space. Gotta replace your shuttles somehow on those 5 years missions and the nearest Starbase is months away.
I was always sad they never explored that sort of thing in an episode, didn’t have to be as big as the Delta Flyer but still!