Progressive messaging in media.

Yes.

Then I'm sure next time they'll be rebooted all white, and Starfire and Raven will be men, and it'll be just gangbusters.

Blockbusters.

Nightwing in-joke there.

I've had some wine.

Maybe we need to put some money into wellness checks for the right wing conspiracy theorists? I wonder if we could diffuse a lot of these things by making contact with the person and helping them socialise better.

Maybe someone can come to their house and have a talk with them about reality and it's advantages. We could pay people to do this. We could target it through algorithms that seem to find the loonies.

No, that was the pitched but rejected "Star Trek: Uncle Albert".
Every week, an away team of insecure screeching man-children with projection issues beam down and start bawling and pissing until they drown their enemies.
Then the smart bridge officer goes "that was genocide " and the piss-baby captain retorts "you're genocide ".
They would have saved a lot of money on writers, but Depends Undergarments wouldn't play ball as a sponsor.
Depends are about dignity for their consumers, but CHUDs refuse dignity.

I like the writing somewhat better this year - I keep watching because the cast has a ton of potential but the storytelling still doesn't compel one's attention - but i think it's somewhat better.

I do however agree that - and I said this from the day it was announced - this was a profoundly, deeply, indescribably BAD casting choice for Bruce. The only way you could buy that dude as Batman is if you assume he always did his heroing in an armored power suit.

First of all, sorry, I didn't read the whole thread and hope for your forgiveness if I repeat points already made.

Second: yes, star trek always was progressive. In a time when it was a lot more difficult bring so than today.

Third, I'm all for a progressive star trek. I'm probably far to the left of most American star trek viewers and a bit to the left to the average wordforger, even now that all the right wing clowns are gone.

Fourth, I can understand why people have a problem with modern trek being progressive... It's so... Stupid, and unsubtle, and unoriginal, and in your face. Like... I dunno, Picard and the ICE detainment scene. It isn't clever scifi commentary. It seems more like writers ticking off boxes. It's lazy, inconsequential and risk free.

Yeah, so was the Bele/Lokai "white on the right side" stuff. Stupid, unsubtle.

To us. The folk it isn't speaking to.

Some fuckers out there still needed to be whacked over the noggin with it.

And their ilk are still around today, begging for a sock full of Progressive Pebbles.

"Battle For The Planet Of The Apes" is on.
Oh, Hell yeah, the gorillas are Republicans.
Vietnam was still fresh.
The boomers hadn't gone all "fuck it, this shit is depressing, let's focus on shopping, and raising kids" yet.

The ICE thing was terrible writing. Like, it could have been good. Maybe actually tie it in to needing to stick to the temporal prime directive, or had some effect on Rios for more than the time it took to get him off the bus, showed a human toll, but the very next episode he’s like “man the 21st century is awesome! Look, real cigars!” I don’t think it convinced anyone of anything. Let That Be Your Last Battlefield was a masterpiece of subtlety and good writing in comparison. Picard season 2 was box-ticking. It referenced social issues without actually talking about them.

there's virtually no difference, storytelling wise, between the Picard ICE scenes and the racism in "Far Beyond the Stars" or all that stuff about the Bell Riots

I can accept the contention that the young folks on Discovery is kinda ham-fisted at times (Not Culber/Stamets tho) but there's nothing forced about the ICE scene that isn't fairly common to Trek, particularly when adventuring into our time.

ETA: one can argue "bad writing" insofar as you feel that plot thread didn't serve the overall story or whatever - I'm saying the fact that they choose to do an ICE thread is not in itself "too woke" or whatever the chuds would say. A plot point can be well conceived and yet poorly executed.

For my personal tastes, that thread didn't take me out of the show nearly as much as the Soong stuff did.

I never thought TOS and most of TNG were ever attempting to be subtle at all. It was a modern parable IMO. They were meant to be sort of heavy handed with the message of the episode. even the TOS movies were pretty heavy handed with the blatant messaging. I guess I enjoyed them most because when I saw them I was a kid, and they were the parables that I was presented with. I never bothered looking for much more in them.

Maybe it is why I have not found myself able to really get into the modern trek series at all. I still have love and nostalgia for the old trek and will watch it again and again, but I have really fell out of my obsession with it.

It's not just Trek, though, and it's not just social commentary.

All of us have this image that it's "great" art that changes the world, and really moves people but it isn't. It's the stupid, ham-fisted stuff that does it. Star Trek and Star Wars, even if you just limit them to the first decade after their initial release, probably inspired more people to go into the sciences than 2001 did. Flannery O'Connor and William Faulkner wrote shitty books about stupid rednecks who kinda, sorta, figured out that racism was bad, but not really but the end of them. They had as much, if not greater impact on changing society's view of racism as did any of the writers of color in America at that time.

The myth of the obscure writer who becomes famous and respected after they died, while their more popular contemporaries is a powerful one, but it is, only a myth. James Joyce was an incredible writer who wrote about sex and feminism but far more people have read lesser works like "The Story of O," and "Lady Chatterley's Lover" than have read Joyce.

Shakespeare's plays were wildly popular when they were first produced, but even she* complained that she couldn't write what she wanted, but what would please the vulgar masses.

As a kid, I can remember watching that episode of The Twilight Zone called "Eye of the Beholder," and within a few seconds, I had already figured out that the twist was going to be that society didn't like her because she wasn't ugly like they were. A few years ago, on another message board, a poster there was extolling that very episode and talking about how much it blew his mind when the twist was revealed. He never saw it coming, even though to me it was as obvious as the nose on her face. Most people had the experience that he did, not the one that I did.

Serling created The Twilight Zone because he saw it as a way to get his ideas out there in a manner that would appeal to people and slip past the censors. He'd learned that he couldn't tackle things head-on and in the open, like the murder of Emmett Till, because it upset people. If it was presented in something that could be argued was "high art," it'd be rejected (assuming it even could make it to air). But put it in a "silly" SF show, with characters that were some other species and he could get his point across.











*Yeah, "she." There's a good chance that much of Shakespeare's work was written by a woman named Emilia Bassano and Will passed it off as his.

Sterling, for all the respect he gets, may still be the single most underappreciated writer in American history.

His daughter is on Twitter and worth a follow. Not infrequently, she posts things that her father said that would be remarkable for someone in our time saying them, let alone a guy from his era.

Is she on some service that is not presently burning and owned by a racist fascist madman who I refuse to support? Before I might have ventured onto twitter as it did not directly support the republicans, but I am not giving elon another account even if it is for a better view of it's end. I would not piss on it if it was on fire and my bladder was full of gasoline.

There is so much more nowadays:

(NSFW!!!!!!)

https://store.steampowered.com/adultonly/

OK, what is up with that linkj? I am signed into steam and I don't get it

Interesting and provocative theory, but at it’s root it reminds me of the Ancient Aliens schtick: “I can’t figure out how ‘x’ did ‘y’ so it must have been “someone else” or “space aliens”

I didn't fully realize the new season had started. Despite having a plethora of better options to watch or rewatch, I will probably check out this season of Titans and cry at how they do Brother Blood. Growing up, I thought he was a great comic villain, but then even the comics kinda wrecked him IIRC.

I would argue that for at least some, talking about racism a la "Far Beyond the Stars" is easier to swallow because most people accept 'Hey, it was a problem when lots of people were racist back in the real world 50s." And along the same lines it's easy for people to accept in LTBYLB that it is foolish to build a society on such superficial differences as black and white skin or even that the extremists on both sides are self-destructive mirror images of one another.

It's far tougher to for many to swallow "Hey, we're being racist and classist RIGHT HERE RIGHT NOW." Which probably explains why some people have are bothered by stuff in Picard and Discovery but aren't by equally anvillicious stuff in TOS and DS9.

A day with UA projecting is a day ending in Y.

Does it hurt being a walking stereotype, or do you not have the part of the brain that feels it?
Or lacking that part, do you not even know?
How deep does the lack of awareness rabbit hole go?

Kinda like you making dishonest, unsupported accusations. What am I projecting? What have I brought to a halt? When have I elevated "messaging" over storytelling?

Entitlement.

Every MC thread you get your greasy mitts on.

Bringing anti-woke whining into everyone just trying to have a good time.
As I have to keep repeating, you've made this shit your personality. What little fun you used to be is dead. You're a fucking drag.
I'm sure people avoid you in real life, and you tell yourself "they just can't handle how REAL I am".

Ah. So it's an echo chamber you think you're protecting. That's nice.

Any place that doesn't have enough assholes yet.

speaking of Bill Burr, y'know what "F is for Family" was called in 1972?

yeah, this...




they get it backwards... you couldn't do a tenth of what gets done today 25-50 years back.

conversely, what was edgey back then doesn't sell any these days not because it goes too far, but because it's almost entirely too simplistic.

You don't own Media Central. People are allowed to talk about aspects of the show that they don't like and you don't have to read it or respond to it.

Yes, I do. I slipped Anc a Kit-Kat and a skee ball token.