Risa

Just imagine what they could come up with in the future. A female captain? A black station commander? No way, Star Trek has gone down the gutter. I'm not watching TNG. They can stick their wokeness where the sun don't shine.

Go back even further! The cage almost canceled the entire show because a woman was merely implied to be captaining the ship for a quick while 😰😰

My favorite TOS episode was the one where they showed the clear superiority of the aliens with the white/black faces over the aliens with the black/white faces. The genocide part went a bit far, but in the end those black/white face guys had it coming.

They rarely are. They're usually just someone who watched Star Trek and thought it looked cool. When it comes to the actual ideas and equality and giving people chances? Nah. The amount of "Trekkies" I've met who are aggressively for the death penalty for people who they politically disagree with or who are disgustingly racist? Phenomenally high.

They had a black woman in a respected, professional position with an officer's rank. The same with an Asian man.

They tackled race relations (in an admittedly very silly way) when no one else would touch it.

They had one of the first onscreen kisses between a white person and a black person.

Starfleet was created as a military force, but dedicated to peaceful exploration and science at the height of the Vietnam war.

Can you even imagine what today's Republicans would say about it back then? There would be a boycott of the network the first time Uhura was onscreen and it wouldn't have finished the season because there were only three networks.

Well, as someone who's gay, I'd say that the representation from Stamets and Culber didn't feel forced or unnatural. If Stamets were straight and Culber were a woman then nothing would change. If Adira wasn't non-binary then nothing would change. If Grey wasn't trans then nothing would change. Stamets was on screen for like two episodes before you ever find out that he's gay. Culber on for one. Adira doesn't mention that they're non-binary until halfway through Season 3 and the reaction is literally just "Okay" and they move on. Grey only has two throwaway lines mentioning a previous transition. Their characters are all well established without their sexuality or identity having any impact on the show. It would all be the same characters but straight. The show goes out of its way to demonstrate that being gay, trans or non-binary has literally nothing to do with the content of your character.

I am getting slightly tired though of seeing people who aren't part of the community saying that the representation of us 'feels forced'. Our mere existence isn't forced. Moreover, are you really the one who gets to judge this? After people trying to kill us for decades, and then using us for marketing purposes, now y'all wanna judge whether our existence is "forced"?

Can't LGBT+ be included unless its meaningful? I dont like that "pandering" argument. It is too easy to misuse, too subjective.

I want them included in bad shows as much as in good shows. I want a random background person to be gay just as much as an important character. Best case would be if we didnt even raise an eyebrow on seeing a LGBT+ character and rather critizise their acting or plot instead of blaming "pandering". I dont hear anyone call forcing a unecessary romantic straight subplot into a plot for "pandering".

The stories suck and neither fanservice nor wokeness save new trek from being worse than the trek from our youth.

I don't want this serialized shit.

I've seen 4 generations of the show, all were episodic. All of a sudden, everything is serialized. Fuck that. Give me self-contained, 43-45 minute stories I can watch in any order and not be like "wait, wtf is going on?"

DS9 and Voyager (and the new season of Lower Decks is doing it too with the mysterious ship plot) have been able to have both an overarching story line while still being episodic. Why can't Picard or Discovery do that?

Yeah I’m pretty sure that is what is turning me off the current shows. I don’t mind the representation, since that’s a core element of Trek and has been since the first show.

Just that the shows, especially discovery, felt very lecturing and on the nose. I don’t want literal current day talking points in space. I want to see a future where those issues have been overcome and it is normal and no big deal.

Though I may be biased because I hated the stamets character, or rather the whole engineering department.

Neurotic gay scientist who is always preoccupied with his emotions and personal life but is also as an afterthought the smartest guy in the galaxy, featuring snarky butch lesbian wonder engineer who is preoccupied with being obnoxious kinda gets old after some episodes.

I think it's starting to turn around.

Discovery - I stopped watching after season 2 cause I thought it was so bad

Picard - season 1-2 terrible. Season 3 pretty good

Lower Decks - all good

Strange New worlds - only watched S1, not my favorite but will definitely watch S2

Prodigy - never saw it so IDK

I think Discovery and Picard really ruined the reputation of modern Star Trek. Overall I think it's at worst it's average.

You can always join us and watch more Star Trek!

But people complain about the newer iterations of Trek being 'woke' for introducing all flavor of LGBTQIA+ characters, tackling hot button issues, and just generally showing love and equality for all. Yet they seem to be completely blind to the fact that the original series started all of this by being 'woke' at the time. Having a black woman on the bridge who was treated as an equal, a Japanese man treated as an equal. Even a Russian with Chekov. People forget that at the time this was a little bit insane to show on TV. Now it's like "Oh well, yeah, of course! They were just being awesome!" No. They were being the 60s equivalent of woke. That only continued in The Next Generation by introducing more people of color, people with disabilities of all sorts, and more intense subject matter. Got even more intense (and darker) in DS9. Voyager is guilty of the same thing. Enterprise as well but it's the younger sibling people talk less about so it doesn't get as much praise in that department. Probably because of alien nazis but blame Voyager for starting that with the Hirogen.

Anyway.

Point being that Star Trek has been woke since the start but people wanna ignore that and just whine about people different than them because they're either cowards who are afraid change, who are hateful bigots who don't want others to have happiness, or who are fools that believe the world revolves around them.

That or they're just plain fucking stupid.

I started with The Orville (I know, it's not Star Trek), then Lower Decks, TNG, and now DS9. If you want woke, The Orville is very woke and I really enjoyed it, they brought up trans rights and gay rights issues. Following that, TNG isn't really woke I don't think, there's still some traditional patriarchy issues in there iirc but it's still a pretty moderate show.