Comment on Is Star Trek Discovery that bad?
TeamAssimilation@infosec.pub 5 days agoWhen I said Adira is a nonbinary girl, I meant she is female of sex and nonbinary of chosen gender.
it was a big deal when they announced her, but the treatment was milquetoast and timid. Same with the few non-cis characters, they were tokens, the show didn’t have the courage to depict a future where a diverse gender philosophy is widely accepted. They yellowed out of it and presented as if it was still our time. I don’t dislike the show for being woke, I dislike it for being shallow woke.
Same with the rest of it, it was 90% SFX and 10% writing. With long series like TNG you can afford the luxury of experimenting and fumbling the ball some weeks, it Discovery and Picard and massive productions that only have 12 episodes a year. They had to make every one of those count.
melmi@lemmy.blahaj.zone 5 days ago
I just don’t understand this “Vulcan powers” criticism. She was a prodigy, sure, and pretty good at doing anything she wants, but that’s a broader issue. I don’t recall any point where she showed any Vulcan abilities that would be implausible for a human to learn from being raised in that culture. Even if you could argue it contributes to her being good at too many things, that has nothing to do with Vulcans specifically.
And I find it very ironic that you’re complaining about the portrayal of trans characters not being progressive enough while misgendering Adira. Adira is non binary. They are not a girl, and they explicitly make it clear in the show they use they/them pronouns. Girl refers to gender, not sex, and furthermore sex isn’t relevant to 99% of conversations so you don’t need to disambiguate by finding a replacement word.
Frankly, I think Adira and Gray’s transness was handled quite well. I’m not sure what makes them tokens to you. Adira has more lines than most of the bridge crew, and the little queer family unit of Stamets/Culber/Adira gets quite a bit of development and screen time. Gray gets his time in the spotlight too, and gets a bit of character development of his own.
Both Gray and Adira are immediately accepted and never questioned by anyone on the crew. That’s a far cry from presenting it as if it were still our time. No one trips up on either of their pronouns once. You yourself refer to Adira with she/her in your comment.
The main difference between Adira and Gray is that Gray already came out and transitioned off-screen, while Adira comes out on-screen. I think their transition is well done and realistic; even in the Trek future people will have to come out to some extent because people clearly default to binary pronouns. They aren’t mind readers, and they haven’t replaced all pronouns with they/them, so it’s only natural that one would have to explicitly tell people their pronouns.
Stamets immediately accepts Adira, with zero questions about nonbinary identity or pronouns, and then seemingly informs the rest of the crew off-screen. I don’t know what you think coming out nowadays is like, but that’s not the reaction most of the time. Adira comes off as kind of nervous in the scene, but they’re talking to someone they barely know at this point who arrived from hundreds of years ago. Plus they’re just a nervous person in general. I think it works well.
And Gray doesn’t have to come out at all, he’s accepted as male from day one. His transness only ever comes up as vague references to transitioning. Seems pretty accepted to me!
TeamAssimilation@infosec.pub 5 days ago
I fully accept I have difficulty with using these pronouns. English is not my first language, and in my daily life I know zero nonbinary people, literally zero, so I don’t get to practice. I’ve only seen trans people on TV, or in discussions on the Internet, so I don’t get to practice those either.
I know a handful of people that are gay or lesbian, but they’re not into choosing special gender pronouns. So my only practice before this discussion was another online discussion more than a year ago.
melmi@lemmy.blahaj.zone 4 days ago
I suppose I’m confused what your issue with the trans characters is then. I thought at first you wished there were more, but now you’re saying you don’t understand why it comes up so often?
I understand the difficulty getting used to new pronouns. It’s great that you’re doing your best to understand despite not having much experience with it. I was just trying to point out that the portrayal in Trek is already showing a world that accepts trans and nonbinary people far more naturally than IRL, even if there could be more representation of actual queer folks.