I mean, it ain’t exactly The Honeymooners or Dukes of Hazzard, is it? That’s the standard that we’re measuring “woke” against these days!
Comment on William Shatner And ‘Star Trek: Starfleet Academy’ Actors React To News Of Series Ending
Sl00k@programming.dev 20 hours agoWhat’s crazy is I can’t even pinpoint what they even mean by the wokeness? It’s really not overbearing, nor anymore than SNW or other TV shows. Maybe I’m just in a West Coast echo chamber
grue@lemmy.world 18 hours ago
Zaraki42@lemmy.ca 10 hours ago
If anything, Discovery was way more “woke”.
captain_aggravated@sh.itjust.works 10 hours ago
I’m from North Carolina. No West Coast echo chamber here. Lemme splain.
The first thing we have to do is acknowledge this: Republicans are racist, sexist and homophobic. Their god has told them over and over again that black people are evil, women are inferior and gays deserve to die. The people who disagree with them on that are their enemy, that they are currently fighting and winning a holy war against.
“The Left” are their enemy. Back during the Obama administration, The Left would self-describe with the term “woke.” So The Right started using this as a slur for The Left. Being okay with black people is woke. Being okay with gays is woke. Being okay with trans is a whole new flavor of woke. These same kinds of people tend to also be into environmentalism and such. That is also woke, of their enemy. Hence giant pickup trucks and performative fuel wasting.
“But these people you’re talking about tend to like old Star Trek, and it’s been progressive since the 1960’s!” Yeah they mostly don’t see that. Because in both TOS and TNG, a white man is in charge, even if there are women and blacks on the crew. Old Trek tends to devolve into feats of military badassery or at the very least brinksmanship. Picard had a habit of out-badassing Romulans over the telephone. What about DS9? Didn’t watch it; stars a black man. Don’t like that show. What about Voyager? Watched a few episodes when Jeri Ryan joined the cast, didn’t get into it. Enterprise? Wasn’t on any channels I could get at the time.
Meanwhile, there has been a decline in Star Trek’s maturity level. TNG was a very mature show, and not in the Game of Thrones “They get their tits out” sense of the word. TNG is a show about high functioning grownups. I’ve heard it called “competency porn.” There’s an episode where Data is acting Captain of the ship, with Worf as his acting FO. Worf acts impatient with Data, and Data asks to speak with him in the ready room, and delivers a reprimand. He speaks in a stern but not raised voice. There is no shouting. Worf accepts his reprimand, comes to agree with Data’s way of thinking. Data dismisses him, and then checks in on a personal note, regretting if having to reprimand him has damaged their friendship, and Worf replies that he acknowledges he was out of line and that he’d like to remain friends. They behave like the kind of professional adults that should be in command of a warship.
That started slipping in the later shows, ENT went kind of sophomoric with all the attempts at sex appeal. JJ Abrams made a couple movies, during one Uhura tells Kirk during a critical shuttle flight to wait so that she could have a lover’s spat with Spock. On Discovery, they gossiped and backtalked like high schoolers, and then there’s a gag on Starfleet Academy where a cadet sheepishly admits to having swallowed her combadge. Apparently she put it in her mouth like a teething toddler.
Funny thing about the right wing, a lot of them have served in the military, or if they haven’t, they fetishize it. Old Trek was made by WWII veterans; Roddenberry flew B-17s for the USAAF and Doohan stormed Juno Beach on D-Day. Starfleet is a space navy, one that has gone more and less military over time but it’s still a military setting. Another aspect that makes Trek interesting and palatable to the right. Military service and especially combat makes one a “real man.”
There is no shortage of Hollywood types doing interviews listing off all the various “progressive” messages they intend to shoehorn into their works, Alex Kurtzman is among them. The thing is…they’re not delivering a message. Old Trek delivered messages. New Trek virtue signals. In the same way The Right tunes their trucks to run rich, “rolling coal” to performatively waste fuel, to be seen doing something The Enemy doesn’t like, New Trek (and indeed most of what Hollywood has done over the last decade) have been full of performative faggotry. “The cast is mostly female, trans and brown and practically all of them are gay except for one token white dude whose job it is to be always wrong.” The Left likes it because they think The Right won’t.
I want you to think about this: The Left is depicting themselves in these shows, yeah? By making all the characters brown and gay and retarded? No seriously, the more “Progressive messaging” and “representation” they cram into these shows, the characters get dumber and more childish. They’re depicting themselves as stupid pathetic children. Which makes it very easy for The Right to demonize them as dumbass manbabies who never grew up and shouldn’t be in charge of anything important.
Explain to me why they’re doing that.
LurkingLuddite@piefed.social 16 hours ago
The ones who aren’t being dishonest pieces of shit feeding into divisivism are usually complaining about the lack of quality of the writing and/or the overt nature of ‘leftist’ messaging, meaning anything remotely progressive like gay people existing or touchy-feely things coming from guys in a manner where those things are not directly relevant to the plot.
Often times there is some credibility to the complaints of the quality of writing, it’s just the ‘woke’ thing that triggered them to think about why the thing on screen is happening. Instead of noticing that it’s a general ham-fisted nature to the writing (which Trek basically always has in quite a few episodes of all series), they stupidly blame ‘woke’.
That is the power of the brainwashing coming from the dishonest propagandists like Ben Shapiro and their ilk: Legitimate shortcomings become things caused by “the other”, instead of basic variability of quality.
IMO, the bigger problem with Trek is Hollywood dumbasses like Kurtzman like pushing messaging more than writing good stories to challenge the alternate POV, which plays right into the shitty propagandists’ hands.
There are plenty of old episodes that would embarass modern Trek with being progressive since they didn’t make it an overt declaration (tell the audience), but showed why the bigoted view was bad. Whereas new Trek loves to just… declare the progressive view as good, and then go on to Main Character the problem away: Poor writing even when you agree with the message.
Sure, there are also quite a few hamfisted episodes of old Trek, but I’d much rather take 24 episode seasons smattered with ham than 10 episodes with an overarching story that loves to simply declare itself superior. It’s so much easier to ignore the poorly written episodes in old Trek when there is so much to take in, especially when there are some gems to find.
IMO, the overproduction is also hurting a lot of newer IPs even beyond being a huge cost. It’s so much easier to gloss over a 6/10 in writing which is inevitable no matter the message, when the visuals and the rest aren’t a 10/10 in every scene. I think it’s one reason why Lower Decks gets so much love. It’s “just a cartoon”, so when the writing nails a mature topic, it feels like a proper treat.
echodot@feddit.uk 6 hours ago
The reason people like lower deck so much is because it was obviously written by an actual Star Trek fan rather than someone trying to write generic science fiction and then slap a Star Trek aesthetic on top. Which was what discovery was like in the early days.
LurkingLuddite@piefed.social 2 hours ago
Fully agreed there! They also do mature topics better than many humor focused cartoons. At least more regularly.
Grail@multiverse.soulism.net 10 hours ago
I disagree that cartoons set lower expectations. I expected a lot from Lower Decks and that expectation was well satisfied. One thing LDS does benefit from is the 22 minute runtime. 45 minute episodes are too long.
LurkingLuddite@piefed.social 2 hours ago
Cartoons don’t set lower expectations. They naturally come with a different set of expectations that happens to have more leeway with writing. Especially in comedies vs overproduced “serious” shows.