Burnham is a female kirk Pulaski is a female bones Jet is a female Tucker. need I go on? I don't care if the character is ridiculously good at everything. As long as I am not pulled out of the story by the action. IOW, the actor, the director, the writer MUST make me believe it.
Re: #3 Doing it without shitting on those straight white men, blaming them for everything, or shoehorning them into either "incompetent side character" or "eeevil villain." We can all live withour bitchy sniping from some hack writer with an obvious axe to grind.
How many other classes of people is it ok to pull that hacky self-insert power fantasy, can't elevate themselves without dragging someone else down nonsense and still expect to be praised instead of cancelled? "They deserve it because sins of the father and our personal grievances." FUCK OFF.
I actually think that is inherent in #1 - the notion that all of them are treated with equal gravitas. Which is not to say that I believe that has ever been the case in Trek that any of the main characters were shat upon or blamed or shoehorned in. Because they weren't IMO. I challenge you to point a Trek series that dumped on straight white men, blamed them for everything or the like. Yes, there was the occasional side character who happened to be a straight white man like Barclay. But even he got mad respect and helped save the day from his very first episode. At most, you have ones like Discovery and SFA where there were not as many straight white men in prominent roles.
"An entire series where they were blamed for absolutely everything" is a bit unreasonable. Discovery would be a good example of where they were mostly peripheral, incompetent and/or evil.
I didn't necessarily mean that the series did it for the entirety of its run. I'm open to examples in any of Trek where you felt like the writers were dumping on straight white men or blaming them for everything. I personally don't see it. Discovery did not have a ton of straight white men in the main cast, it is true. But its recurring cast included in S1 Lorca (central, competent, and not revealed to be evil till the end); S2 Pike and Spock (central, competent and good), S3-5 Admiral Vance (competent and good) and the S31 guy Kovich (competent and good). Plus more that I am undoubtedly not thinking of. I don't think that there were any/many straight white guys (or for that matter, characters, period) who were portrayed as incompetent. I would say that there are straight white guys who are portrayed as evil, but then, it didn't seem to be because they were straight, white or male, and I would imagine that there are probably some characters of various demographics so portrayed. This of course discounts that Stametz is a white guy who is portrayed as a genius. I'm not sure why the fact that he's gay makes his heroic nature irrelevant.
The introduction of sexuality does potentially complicate things. We saw Lorca hooked up with a woman, but maybe he liked the D as well.
Splitting hairs. Still the bad guy. Spock is an alien, overshadowed by Burnham with his own fucking parents. Pike needed his job explained to him by Number One, Wynona Earp, or his mostly female command staff how many times? Not white. Cowed by orion chick and the president. The shady manipulator who turned out to be Daniels. Sure. Burnham's klingon double agent boyfriend would be a fine example. Obviously they don't announce and explicitly label them . Now ask yourself how many nonwhite, non-straight and/or female humans were actually villains. Georgio, who they tried to hastily retcon as a protagonist. No real complaints about him or his resurrected boyfriend. Other than them using a bit more of that current-day therapy language modern writers seem to think is super fucking clever.
For fuck's sake, Discovery is the show that first gave us Anson Mount's version of Christopher Pike, a classic hero in the Captain Kirk vein. Then there's Paul Stamets, portrayed as both brilliant and compassionate. And then Saru is consistently portrayed is a positive light, and while not human, he's played by a white actor and I would say is appearance-coded as white in much the same way that Worf is coded as Black. Incidentally, isn't the usual line something along the lines of "representation doesn't matter and everyone who cares about it is stupid"?
Already addresed. Not straight, so he's allowed to be a hero. Not female, so he's allowed to accept help from men. Wishy-washy, I'm in command until I gracefully step aside for my better-at-everything female subordinate. I would rather say it's not an end unto itself, and should never be the top priority unless your product is called "Self-Insert Representation Theater."
Pike had to have his job explained to him? For fuck's sake, in order to reach that conclusion you have to really want it. You seem to be approaching this from a worldview where if a man has respect for a woman in any way, it's emasculating, which is pretty fucked up. Incidentally, how is it that Admiral Vance (played by Oded Fehr, an Israeli of Ashkenazi descent) is not white, while Ash Tyler (played by Shazad Latif, who is of Pakistani descent) is? Aside from the fact that you're desperate to prove that white people are persecuted, so any who's portrayed negatively must be white and anyone who's portrayed positively must not be?
Then let's count the nonwhites in fast-food commercials, and get pissed about that. Let's really shake it through the litter-sifter, and then get out the tweezers. We need to know exactly how enraged to be.
Representation shouldn't matter! (But if white people ever have less than an overwhelming majority of the representation, it's an outrage.)
They don't seem to mind majority-minority shows so long as they're segregated franchises, like the Power universe, the BMF-iverse, etc, etc. There's some weird territorial shit going on with Trek, even though Roddenberry would have applauded an all minority crew. Every nudge forward on that while he was alive was just what he could get past the suits, not some allegiance to his own skin color.
It's not splitting hairs to say that Lorca is not incompetent nor peripheral. He is evil in that he's from the Mirror Universe. Spock is 50 percent white human. I am not sure when Pike needed anyone to "have his job explained to him." Please provide examples of this. Vance is darker-skinned perhaps than your average white guy, but he's played by a person of Israeli descent. I wouldn't say he was "cowed" by anyone, unless what you are really asking for is for there to never be a situation where a white man is outranked by or opposed by a woman, or where the woman doesn't ever get the best of them. Which...yeah, if that's what you want, I think you're in for some disappointment. Also, I'll just come out and say it: that's some pillow-fort bullshit. Kovics being a "shady manipulator" doesn't make him either evil or incompetent. It makes him pretty damn smart and central not just to Discovery but also Enterprise. "Ash Tyler" is not white nor even human, so I don't know why you're counting him. But to the extent that we're going to, I fail to see how he is evil, peripheral or in particular incompetent, which is what you claimed he was above. Discovery villains who were female besides Georgiou (which is a big exception) include: L'Rell, one of the main villains for S1, Osyraa the main villain of S4 (the Orion woman who you claimed Vance was cowed by) and Moll, half of the main villain duo in S5. I suppose most of them are non-human, but then most of the characters are also nonhuman, so there's that.
Exactly how much energy does it take for you to stay this whiny of a wimp every day? And you complain about trans people wanting people to n play along with their "fantasies"?
yeah, I mean the gayest thing we saw with Paul and Hugh in the first season was they brushed their teeth together... Sure, double sink bathrooms are a kink that should be shamed, but reno shows are a whole other thing. or is it after when they adopt a pair of non binary 17 year olds like diff'rent strokes or something into a chosen family dynamic? and when the fuck did the poor straight white men get shat on?
UA had better never watch "The Jeffersons". All those times George called a white guy "honkey" would literally medically kill him.
