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Star Trek fans have held the national stereotype of being way too rabid about things for decades but they’re probably the nicest fan base in all of science fiction and the one least likely to have a large faction of them absolutely lose it over a torpedo being fired by a woman or dumb shit like that
It’s funny I was talking to the entire novel fanbase about a month ago and told him “well I dont hate all of Dune, the original David Lynch movie was excellent” and told me to get out. Haha
Even more than that fairly, uhm… graphic climbing scene in God-Emperor? Just started Heretics, so I’ll make sure to get the popcorn ready by the time I start Chapterhouse. 😋
This is throwing shade at SW fans. Thing is, SW is shit since the Prequeks. Disney SW only made it worse. However, Disney shills use muhsoggknee excuse everytime someone points out their shitty movies and shows. This is why they’re seething at Jenny’s 4 hour takedown of their Hotel.
Talking it out instead of shooting first and asking questions later is one of the things I admire most about Star Trek. It was sold as essentially a space Western, but unlike your standard Western, it says that violence is not the answer, talking and understanding each other is the answer.
And really, the only Westerns I truly enjoy are the same way. My favorite is The Gunfighter with Gregory Peck. He’s an aging “fastest gun in the west” who just wants to be reconciled with his wife and child, retire and live a quiet life. But he keeps getting challenged. Spoiler for a movie made in 1950: There’s only one gun fired in the entire film, shot at the titular Gunfighter by a young hotshot. As Peck’s character lays dying, he lets the hotshot know that the curse of a life of violence has been passed on and he’s about to have as dismal a life as the man he killed.
The same sort of moral lesson Star Trek teaches.
But they want John Wayne coming in blazing, shooting at those inhuman savages (they don’t have to worry about being called racist if they hate Cardassians).
The number of times in trek where they could easily destroy the ship or entity that was causing the problem in the episode is huge in Trek. But they spend most of the episode trying to figure out how solve the problem with the minimum damage to both sides.
I also love how they have different types of leaders.
Kirk is the Captain you’d love to have as a boss. He gets stuff done, but also has fun with it. He’d inspire loyalty through Charisma.
He’s the captain you want standing by your side in a bar fight.
Picard is the perfectly-distantly, dignified leader. He’s a diplomat and archaeologist who loves exploring not only space, but culture and the nature of life. His love for his crew is shown through his desire to develop them into better officers.
He was the captain who kept you from getting into a fight.
Sisko is the most militaristic of the Captains. We first meet him in a battle, and he doesn’t back down from many fights. When Picard was annoyed by Q he complained. When Sisko met Q he punched him. But Sisko was a great tactician who also had to be a diplomat in charge of a station inhabited mostly by people outside his command structure.
He was the captain who punch someone in the throat if he thought there would be a fight.
Janeway was a scientist and diplomat. She could be hard as iron, but she was absolutely devoted to her people and would do anything for them. Her loyalty would cause her to occasionally cross the line, however. More than any of the captains, she wanted to develop her crew into leaders. They had limited options for advancement, but she tried to give them all opportunities to grow. She also didn’t see any sense in playing fair if she was in the right.
She was the captain that would bring a gun to a knife fight.
The funny thing is that, contrary to how they act in their roles as Captain, Kirk was a studious nerd and a bit of teacher’s pet at the academy while Picard was a hard-partying drunk who not only participated in, but started bar fights.
Kirk would do his best to defend you in a bar fight and then would punish you after the fact, according to Star Fleet rules.
Picard would try to stop the bar fight from happening to begin with, would break it up if it escalated, but probably wouldn’t defend you specifically unless you had a good reason for being in the fight. He would only punish you if you were in the wrong and then it would probably be something more creative, more immediately punishing, and less impactful (career-wise), then Star Fleet’s regulations prescribe.
Picard got stabbed in the heart in one of those academy bar fights. Might have cooled his jets a bit.
Also, “a bit of a teacher’s pet‽‽‽” Kirk was so much of a golden boy teacher’s pet, he cheated on the Kobiashi Maru test by hacking the holodeck, and forcing a “win condition,” and the instructors allowed it to stand.
OK I love to laugh at Wesley, don’t get me wrong, but why the hate? I am a dirty casual it’s true. But next Gen is the one I know best, he wasn’t that bad was he?
Because Wesley Crusher was written to be seen as an annoying kid who got in the way. That was the social slant of the time. But you watch those episodes now and you realize, “Hey, he was actually very smart, just trying to help, and he even saved the ship a couple of times.” So all the “Shut up, Wesley!” moments became so stupid, even if he did deserved it sometimes, that the community decided to lean into it ironically as an in-joke.
I kinda lost it when Janeway fired more photon torpedos than the ship had upon entering the Delta quadrant. Where did she get the extra torpedoes?! She’s a witch!
Head cannon is that 1/3 of voyager is taken up by a massive shuttle manufactory. It’s never discussed but it must be there…Otherwise, none of this shit makes any sense.😬
They could do it in the shuttle bay, they wouldn’t need much more space than a finished shuttle takes up. We know they have shipboard replimats for larger things, I figure replicating and building standard shuttle models on long voyages has standardized procedures and steps like Lego instructions. You only need to replicate one piece at a time saving on space. Gotta replace your shuttles somehow on those 5 years missions and the nearest Starbase is months away.
Yeah, if designing and building the Delta Flyer only took one episode, I think it’s pretty safe to assume that making more shuttles is easy and boring, and that’s why we don’t see it. Voyager was cutting edge when she was lost too
Because the first series didn’t age well :( although I loved it at 10… And the second was (controversial opinion incoming) too much of a soap opera for me.
It’s weird how the show just vanished. Even without all the sequels and prequels Star Wars would still have been endlessly referenced for decades after the 2nd movie. BSG is the cultural equivalent of a night of heavy drinking.
I remember binge watching it. I remember talking to people about it but nothing this past decade
Even without all the sequels and prequels Star Wars would still have been endlessly referenced for decades after the 2nd movie.
Not necessarily. Being able to stick the landing is hugely important for a series’ legacy. Game of Thrones disappeared from conversation after its disastrous final season, but would probably be fondly remembered if it had been suddenly cancelled after season five. If ROTJ had been a similar dumpster fire, Star Wars might have gone the same way.
Notice how basically no one ever mentions Lost or Game of Thrones anymore?
These shows were HUGE during their time. “This is AMAZING. Television has never been like this before. You can’t be an adult in society if you haven’t seen last night’s episode because if you say you don’t watch this show the conversation will immediately end.” soon “What the fuck was that ending? The last season turned to shit! Never mention this shit to me again.”
It’s like VindictiveJudge says, these shows are designed to feel like they’re going places but never actually get there. The writers of Lost put shit in that they thought looked intriguing but they hadn’t thought of any way to resolve it into something. “What do the numbers mean?!” Nothing! Absolutely nothing!
Those shows are built like big epic stories, they’re not Star Trek type adventure of the week that returns to the status quo, and yet they’re not designed to resolve. Of course you’re going to leave unsatisfied.
The original old show? It’s meh okay 70’s sci-fi TV. Not into the kid and his robot dog or whatever.
The 2000s remake? It’s basically what cured my television habit. I was never really into the “gritty realistic” heartburn drama shit anyway, so I gave up on the show itself pretty early, then spent the rest of my time as an SG-1 fan having Katee Sackhoff scream in anguish at me during every single commercial break for years on end. Then every TV show made from then on had to be a dark and brooding show about terrible people being terrible to each other and then I stopped watching TV.
Star Trek fans were some of the earlier cosplayers. Trekkies were wearing Starfleet uniforms and Vulcan ears to conventions decades before the word “cosplay” was a thing. My father has a book called the Starfleet Technical Manual published in the 70’s that is basically an official guide for fans to build screen accurate costumes and props from, including sewing patterns for the various tunics and wrist-length dresses and a page of color swatches, plus dimensional drawings of tricorders, phasers and communicators.
And the public at large in the 1970s wasn’t ready for that yet.
Yeah, I wouldn’t be surprised to learn the ancient Greeks were cosplaying their favorite characters from the Trojan war or something. But the word cosplay is only attested from like 1993 in English and 1983 or so in Japan
I read my dad’s copy cover to cover as a kid, it’s a great bit of fluff for fans combined with a useful prop reference. It’s also fun that it’s basically all hand drawn, even the text pages look l Iike a draftsman hand lettered them.
I used to have the original black cover version. Long lost, sadly. I have it as an ebook though. The one Star Trek book from my youth I had to buy once when I saw it used was this one, which used to be canon until TNG threw almost all of it away. But Rick Sternbach illustrated it and the ideas are pretty fun.
I think my favorite part is when an Earth expedition to Alpha Centauri meets Zefram Cochrane (TOS says he is from Alpha Centauri and there’s a lot of headcanon to explain it) and learns to communicate to him through mathematics. At the beginning, Cochrane draws a circle with a symbol next to it, the Earth mathematician realizes that it means pi and they move on from there.
Same man created the brilliant Star Trek Blueprints, the first detailed deck plans for the Enterprise. He did all this after his daughter took him to a Trek convention and he saw how passionate the fans were and what a need there was for material like this. It’s a great story.
I threw up the horns. It was nuts as a middle school girl, when Voyager first started airing, and everyone was so angry about Janeway and when I’d ask why they would turn red and shake their head, or change the topic.
The good old days, when sexist, racist, homophobes at least kept their mouths shut… Now they’d give you a speech about how she should be in the galley :(
It’s true. It’s not been a totally smooth ride. It’s taken work to educate fellow fans, and making the intolerant unwelcome.
Like there was early “controversy” about Geordie getting to be on the bridge. Which seemed kind of logical, but if you scratched below the surface you’d see how selective that critique was. That it was just racism and ableism
I don’t think anyone cares about a torpedo being fired by a woman
What people do care about is continuity, at least trying to keep characters consistent, good stories, etc.
Hence why most of the nu-trek shows and movies are such utter crap, as it’s CGI over story while completely ignoring 50 years of history.
Picard show, for example… Beverly crusher who once disobeyed a direct.order to save a victim after a bombing attack, who made a point about being peaceful is now a ninja assassin. Seven of nine, who made a point about improving, being better, now is a mad mass murderer who wants revenge for everything. Picard, who once was thoughtful, highly intelligent and respected, is now a bumbling old man.
Star trek which once was about being better is now about fuck fuck fuckerdy fuck fuck fuck because that’s star trek now, man, get with the program, it’s cool man!
I can go on for hours about Picard, let’s not. Discovery is somehow even worse. Those movies where they just did older movies again but now with new! And! Improved! CGI! CGI CGI CGI! Lense flaaaaaaaare!
With TNG I so could imagine living there on one of those star ships. Nu trek crap ships are just … I don’t even know where to begin
Add a broody darkness over that with regular over the top violence, and yeah, we really have star trek!
I don’t think most NuTrek is utter crap. Some is written for me, some isn’t.
SNW and Lower Decks are some of my favorite Trek.
Continuity doesn’t matter too much to me, just how the shows make me feel. TOS threw continuity out the window within the first few episodes when they introduced time travel.
Also, if you expect someone to be the same person, fictional or not, 30 years later into their life, you haven’t lived long enough. The person who is the same human they were twenty years ago, is someone who has wasted twenty years of their life.
Times change. The new shows have brought in a lot of new fans. That’s not a bad thing. Maybe instead of getting angry that new stuff isn’t made with your tastes in mind, watch something you enjoy instead.
Billionaire overlords are only funding dystopian sci-fi so that we see the evil society they plan to foist on us as inevitable. Utopian scifi like TNG is revolutionary.
It still bugs me that they make a big deal about how few resources they have and then fire so many torpedoes and lose so many shuttles. I would have loved to have seen them pick up some locally sourced equipment.
Honestly, my thought was always just that they could replicate equipment and components as needed but it was a power intensive process.
There is a whole episode of Voyager where they land the ship to do repairs on it, and I just figure that happens more than we’re shown.
I agree though, I would have preferred Voyager to have all crazy Borg shit forever. Would have been sick to have all this jury-rigged bullshit, almost like how DS9 is totally fucked.
They also designed and built a custom shuttle, but iirc it was an open question as to whether or not the ship’s larger replicators could handle it, which implies they left with all the shuttles they lost and the Delta Flyer was the first they made.
Also, sorry everyone, I was a Trekkie first and I will always come back to Star Trek, but the MST3K fan base is the nicest fan base. The only two bitter arguments I’ve ever seen the community devolve into was Joel vs. Mike (now very moot) and “I hate Crow’s new lady voice” for the most recent season. Other than that, everyone is super nice to a fault. The MST3K forums is the friendliest forum I have ever been on.
Shit, if MST3K, Cinematic Titanic, and RiffTrax have taught me anything, it’s you can’t win 'em all, but you’re always a winner when you’re laughing with your friends
If I would ever be in desperate need of help it would instantly comfort me to see a trekkie or a metalhead. The average wholesomeness is ridiculously high.
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