Comment on The best answer to "when did Star Trek get woke?"

• LovableSidekick@lemmy.world ⁨4⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

  The complaint isn’t about the woke sentiments themselves, it’s about replacing interesting storytelling with lecturing on those themes, and the people in charge of trek right now using the show as their pulpit. IMO it’s phony virtue signaling, but it’s working because the main target audience has largely been ignored in the past, and are very easy to bait and quick to defend anything that looks like an ally and see any critics as evil enemies.

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• SirEDCaLot@lemmy.today ⁨14⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

  But that’s just it. Pushing progressive ideas through ham-fisted storytelling is the wokeness people complain about.
  It is also when these things are blatant. Original Star Trek was progressive not because it showed a black person’s struggle for equality, it was progressive because it showed black people as equal.
  A perfect example is DS9’s lesbian kiss. The short version, Trill are a joined species consisting of a humanoid host with a standard lifespan, combined with a very long-lived symbiote that can live for many host lifetimes. The resulting personality is thus a blend of the host and the symbiote.
  In this specific episode, there is a rule in Trill society that if two Trill are romantically involved, that relationship has to end when either of the symbiotes move to a new host. The explanation is otherwise two symbiotes would just stay together forever through multiple hosts and never grow or learn. Anyway, one of the show’s main characters is a Trill female and in this episode encounters another female carrying the symbiote her symbiote was once married to. So this is a forbidden romance they are both tempted to. It’s explained that the previous relationship one of them was in a male host and the other one a female host. Now they are both in female hosts, and this is not brought up even once. The fact that they are both women is not even mentioned. It is completely and totally ignored.

  THAT is a non-woke progressive presentation of the idea.

  It’s not trying to get the audience to empathize with the black person who can’t sit in front of the bus, it’s just showing the black person sitting in front of the bus and making it not a big deal.

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  • danielquinn@lemmy.ca ⁨12⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

    I agree that this is valid criticism. The Star Trek writers have clearly gotten lazier over the years, opting for hamfisted, blatant, “see? we’re being woke in this scene” rather than allowing you to think for yourself.

    However, the complaint here is laziness and not the nature of the message. I’d even go so far to say that due to the complex storytelling of earlier series, there’s a large continent of the fanbase that didn’t realise their progressive nature, and are objecting to how it’s woke now.

    So basically I think there’s two complaints here: a valid one that you’re making: “lazy writing is terrible and arguably less effective”, and another one coming from, shall we say, those unburdened by an overabundance of schooling that are objecting to progressive ideas that were always there, but they only notice it now with the lazy writing.

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