this post was submitted on 29 Jan 2024
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Risa
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Star Trek memes and shitposts
Come on'n get your jamaharon on! There are no real rules—just don't break the weather control network.
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Oh ffs can we cut this crap?
Yes, there are legitimate bigoted Star Trek fans. It's the Internet. You can find an abundance of any extreme niche. I'm honestly willing to bet I could find an abundance of furry star Trek fans fairly easily also, despite furries as a whole being vanishingly rare in real life.
However it's a lot more common to see legitimate criticism of Star Trek painted as bigotry, often by people who clearly aren't really that big fans of the series.
You couldn't criticize Discovery for the first year it came out without being called a bigot, and a lot of the people doing so would clearly have 0 idea about the greater Star Trek universe. I remember reading a multitude of comments calling Burnham the first female Captain or first black captain, saying how female senior officers were quiet and unassuming until Tilly came along, and a bunch of other shit that was objectively wrong.
I feel like most implied accusations of bigotry these days are low faith effort attempts to stifle criticism by newer fans who just can't handle criticism. It's exhausting and super toxic.
Finally Lower Decks is a grabbag of woke tropes but was met with widespread and is the most popular NuTrek among hardcore fans. That should tell you something more is going on.
Who said you can’t critique Disco?
This is about a very specific, very silly objection, levelled by people who have found themselves indoctrinated into a mode of thinking that alienates them from the people around them, because of a manufactured fear preying upon alienation many of us experience in our modern world.
I’ve had plenty of objections to aspects of Disco, especially during season two, but scattered throughout the series, and no one has ever called me a bigot for my hot takes. If you’re presenting your critiques in such a way that people are assuming you’re bigoted, perhaps you should reevaluate how you’re constructing your criticism.
Ooooo I can do this too!
STD had shit writing, unbelievable performances, and stands as a monument of what not to do making Trek. They did inclusion pretty well however, which I think opened the door to future, positive choices in the franchise.
SNW did all these things correctly. (I'm 100% not biased because I'm crushin on Captain Angel)
Picard S2 is legitimately the worst thing ever made in Star Trek. It physically hurt to try to finish it, and remains to this day the only Trek I skipped episodes of.
LD is just perfect. No notes.
I'm not really sure what the point you're trying to communicate here was?
Oh God and the gaslighting.
Valid Criticisms:
Max drama deviates from star trek standard format
non episodic / arcs within arcs make it hard to jump in and follow
Everyone talks too fast (lampooned on SNW | LD crossover even!) Deus Ex (Time Travel | AI | Etc.)
MultiLithium gets really explody if you cry hard enough.
Not Valid:
Everything is too (Gender | Sexual Preference | Skin Color) for ST (these people have a vacation fuck planet, and regularly bone holocharacters, get over it we all know if Kirk had a holodeck he would have died in that thing).
Mushroom warp is stupid (fuck you I loved mushroom warp).
You just reminded me of a bingo card Reddit Risa had during Disco S1:
ha! That's excellent. I was not in a position time-wise to watch DSC S1 when it actually aired, so I missed all these shenanigans. In retrospect it's probably the best trek to binge (which I did) since many episodes feel more like parts of a movie instead of being self contained. I'm a fan of all trek, even Enterprise. :D
Do people genuinely not like ENT?
The consensus leans to it being not that great.
The consensus has definitely changed with time.
Granted, that has happened to literally every iteration of Trek, except TOS.
(and TAS I guess considering that it remains an underrated gem)
I think it was the first truly disappointing ending for a trek show, and that kinda sours the whole thing a bit.
I agree the ending wasn't great.
I think in their efforts to make the crew less woke than in the TNG era to maintain continuity, they accidentally made the crew less woke than people are in 2024. I'm saying it aged poorly. For example I cite Trip being uncomfortable with polyamoury.
From my perspective, I didnt start to appreciate it until the final season and then I wasnt even that bummed because I knew I wouldnt have to hear budget rod Stewart sing over an old Timey map with crew member power point transitions
Yeah I think this song was kind of annoying.
I don't know I'm not really into TOS, it was too campy for me. I liked TNG just fine, something about ENT really had like a rough, we're doing real first time exploration kind of vibes to it which I really enjoyed.
Oh man do they. The years since it aired have been kinder to it but hot damn did it get a lot of hate online while it was fresh.
I think that was mostly when it came out. (Along with voyager) Over the years it is seemingly more appreciated.
I laughed at michael is a boys name.
Let's see, which ones could apply to me..."CBS All-Access sucks," "Ugh, another prequel?", "The Orville is real Trek," "Mary Sue." No bingo from me.
Mushroom warp invalidates warp drive as a travel method, that's a fundamental part of the setting here
This conversation is too Daystrom for Risa. I'll agree to disagree :old man shakes fist at clouds:
because I can't stop me:
Mushroom warp was "bat shit crazy" to pretty much everyone.
the last ship that tried it disappeared, presumed lost with all hands.
Section 31 probably has the whole story locked in a cabinet next to Mirror Universe Spock's Goatee.
I think there was a whole plot about how using it hurts the thing that is the mushrooms? So like, ethically, that's a no go.
By the end of Voyager, the Federation is beginning to understand how to build trans warp gateways (Borg tech) which is, at least practically, close enough to mushroom warp that it's good enough.
Mushroom warp is so dumb, I don't even know where to start. Disco is shit. Wokeness isn't the problem though.
Okay so you'll notice I didn't have any specific criticisms of discovery listed, and people in this thread are calling me a bigot, dismissing my opinion, and being general assholes to me.
There also is someone who comes in, implied that the legitimate criticisms that have nothing to do with identity politics are BS and the real reason OP doesn't like Discovery is that they are a bigot.
wanders into a thread to defend bigots
wonders why everyone assumes they're a bigot
Oh fuck off. You are blatantly just an asshole using social justice as an excuse to justify your cruel behavior.
50 years ago you'd be the type of person saying DnD players are satanists and bullying them in the name of Jesus.
WON'T SOMEBODY PLEASE THINK OF THE RACISTS
They aren't racists any more than DnD players are satanists. You just want targets.
THE RACISTS YOU ARE TALKING ABOUT ARE NOT RACIST
Why is that not valid though? It's shoved in people's faces. Why can't they just have a normal relationship? Why bring it to the front and center?
I genuinely don't understand this question. What "that" are you referring to, what "it" are you referring to, who's "they", what's "normal" for "they"?, and what "it", again.
Gaslight me harder please
You don't understand what that term means. You might think you do, but you don't.
Okay. If you say so 😂
Does that mean it's okay to douse me in accelerant too?
look, I'm not here to kink shame you
You assholes hop into IPs that were longstanding homes of nerds and then act like high school bullies.
Honestly I doubt you give two shits about social justice. You just use it as a justification to be a cruel asshole to people.
This comment is very telling.
The whole "it used to be other nerds (read as social awkward straight men) until you guys came along" narrative just shows you have an "us vs them" mentality about the whole thing.
And my guy, you're the one being an asshole here.
Please explain to me, in detail, how the people responding to my comments aren't being overly aggressive, outright hostile, extremely dismissive, and overall disrespectful.
The main dude responding to me immediately called me a bigot, and is in other parts of this post is "joking" about how bigots should be burned. When I pointed out that was kinda fucked, he made a "joke" that I was a sexual deviant.
This is high school bully behavior. You guys are bullies who tag people are problematic to justify shitty behavior.
You made the first comment mate. Of course people are going to br dismissive of you when you start off acting like an asshole.
And honestly getting clowned on for being an asshole isn't bullying, and crying about it is only going to make you look like even more of an asshole.
Calling people assholes and gatekeeping is clown behaviour. Take a week off.
It's definitely true that some people with legitimate criticisms get misread, but I think it's inaccurate to say that it's "a lot more common" to see legitimate criticism construed as bigotry than actual bigotry.
Just look at this thread, there are a bunch of people whining about queer characters being forced in your face just for being a part of the show. The bigoted fans come out in force with talk of "STD" (ugh) all the time, which is what created that expectation in the first place.
I feel like dismissing all the bigotry out there (including in this very thread) as "it's just the internet" while dwelling on a few dumb comments you read in the past (probably on the Internet?) is disingenuous.
Ffs. Let's look at this thread.
The top comments are by far just assholes. They dismiss and demean people like high school bullies. They are overly cruel, and blatantly attempt to justify that behavior like pretending their targets are just deplorable who deserve to be treated like this.
I find it disingenuous that you focus on the comments downvoted to hell and completely handwave away this obviously shitty behavior.
My instance has downvotes disabled, so if those comments are downvoted to hell I wouldn't know. As a result they show as reasonably highly upvoted on my end. Even if those opinions are controversial, the number of upvotes they get (plus the fact that there's several such comments, even here) show that there's lots of people who share the opinion. We just happen to be in a community that tends to be biased towards Discovery, so those opinions are in a minority here. Go to other communities, and suddenly people will be complaining about "woke Trek" left and right and getting majority support.
People came at you because you responded to a meme about bigots complaining about wokeness, which even you seem to concede exist, to make a complaint about how legitimate criticism gets construed as bigotry—which the meme in the post is not an example of. It comes across a little like a self report. It's like if you make a post saying "Nazism is bad" and some conservative randomly responds "this is hate speech against conservatives". You were talking about Nazis, not conservatives, but their response comes across as them admitting they're a Nazi.
That said, people came at you really aggro. It's easy to get caught up in labeling people as bigots and then get carried away in the dunking. I don't want to handwave away that fact.
Thanks for that last part.
The reason I immediately jumped to the bullying is because I feel like I've seen this story a million times. Someone loudly proclaims some extremely popular moral opinions. In the process, they then proceeded to insult whatever morally defunct out group.
At first it seems great. After all, bigots/Nazis are horrible people that need to be put in their place.
However, over time, the definition of bigot/Nazi widens to the point where it essentially becomes meaningless, while the vitriol towards whatever group becomes more and more unhinged.
I remember on reddit there was a sub called justneckbeard things. It started by roasting toxic neck beards. However by the end they'd just be posting pictures of obese nerds, making wild and completely unfounded moral assumptions, and then using those assumptions as a justification to bully people.
I honestly don't think most of the people complaining about bigots are here to protect tolerance. I think they're just toxic people who enjoy being cruel.
I don't like Discovery because Burnham isn't woke enough. She stages a mutiny so she can fire on the Klingons unprovoked in the first episode.