:^>

i hate star trek because every time theyre like “oh my god the skringles have broken the crankus treaty with the skronglies which mean the flongles are starving because they cant get binkbonk berries” and every time im like “oh my god they cant get binkbonk berries…”

girls literally looooove data they love information

ill spend my twenties investigating the healing properties of salt i dont know about you guys

excuse me

Sorry op. That's my friend the Salt Vampire from the Star Trek episode "The Man Trap" which first aired in 1966. Blessings be upon you.

its just i dont feel blessed by its presence is all. sending love your way

god, i thought picard was ass because of its complete lack of ambition for storytelling and new ideas, but finding out that it has an extremely insidious treatment of queercoding that implies that the lgbt community is a social contagion spreading among the youths that i completely did not get to see because i jumped ship too early. like that’s just a whole other level of disturbing and it makes me sick that people are praising this show as some kind of shining beacon of what star trek should be

Hi. Old queer, here. Spoiler Alert:

A middle-aged lesbian couple is in charge of the Enterprise.

My fellow culture war veterans saw the Borg virus on Picard and thought, "Insidious social media has turned all the kids into incels."

okay. i’m starting to regret a couple of things about this post, mostly in the vein of phrasing. it’s kind of snappy instead of explaining my problems with s3′s use of queercoding, so i guess i also get a snappy answer back. that’s fair.

but i’m begging you to reconsider these problems as “culture war nonsense” when i did not come up with them, and they’ve been spotted by not just queer reviewers who may be hypersensitive to these kinds of narratives, but also conservatives who have read negative implications and are in fact, enjoying that their big symbol of “real progressiveness” is supporting their vision of the world.

why do i say the use of queercoding is insidious? i should have used another word, i realize now, because it implies intent, when in retrospect, terry matalas is just incompetent at using social allegory. but jack’s narrative surrounding his borg connection has the usual vein of superpowers as queercoding that became popular after x-men 2. jack’s got a secret, a secret buried so deep and that is so shameful that when deanna realizes it’s there, she immediately breaks patient confidentiality and leaves him alone after the realization to tell his parents. they are not supportive, and picard’s answer is to suggest institutionalization. jack is horrified, and he runs away to give in to this part of himself because his family is no longer supportive. all well and good, if a little cliché, except for the part that this secret that they’ve coded as gay is in fact, the fucking borg, which has been a symbol of authoritarianism for decades. and when jack goes to the borg queen, she then uses him to specifically assimilate everyone under the age of 25. they didn’t need to specify the age of the people, except that a huge theme of the season is the generational divide, and it very much does come across as “the gay agenda transing/queering your children”

again, i’m not saying it’s intentional. i feel like matalas just threw that narrative about jack’s borg side as superpowers as queerness because it’s kind of cool and he’s read/watched stories that do it for sympathy for the character. but by mixing metaphors he ended up with extremely unfortunate implications. and you can be not bothered by this, i understand if you think it’s kind of a stretch, but it does bother me considering it’s The narrative driving legislation efforts to attack lgbt rights in the us. it also bothers me considering this is the season all the assholes that have been railing against all the diversity in star trek since disco was announced have been praising as “the return to real star trek”.

also i’m not sure if you can say if seven and raffi are still together. even if they are, they got sidelined in the show they have been protagonists for for three seasons in favor of a bunch of straight couples and never even got to address their relationship aside from “ha kind of awkward to see you here!” you can see it as a win that they end up at the head of the enterprise, who am i to take that away from you? but again, know that when you see seven and raffi at the end just kinda looking like they might get together, the racist homophobes that railed against sonequa are satisfied with this story because seven and raffi got so sidelined and ignored that they’re considered basically a non-entity in their own show.

Also, it's not like representation is the end-all of art's political messaging - let's not pretend like tossing LGBT people a few crumbs could possibly be enough to erase even just the cisheteronormative temporality underlying the focus on legacy characters and their children. Focusing on returning characters in their final hurrah and the youth representing "the future" is hetero time 101.

i’m never gonna stop cancelling you you wretched slut.

star trek has always handled trauma/mental illness well imo but sisko explaining to the prophets in the first episode that humans live in linear time and can't ever go back... and then the prophets are so confused and show him his wife dying and ask "but you exist here?" that was. that one.... hit

WHY WOULD THIS BE YOUR FIRST THOUGHT

i think this is my favorite interaction in tng

When I read “space...the final frontier” there’s a small part of my brain that is that audio of Patrick Stewart saying it but with a ridiculous french accent that makes it “eh-spay-zeh...ze final frahn-tee-aire” while Jonathan Frakes absolutely loses it in the background.

https://youtu.be/VV10in63_Ok can’t stop laughing at this

oh my GOD

miles obrien tribute break stuff

This one?

This one!

Star Trek: Deep Space 9 | Secrets of Quark’s Bar | Mugs

Imagine if your uncle insists on taking a family road trip to drop you off at uni (even though he hates the idea of you going) in his new BMW that his sketchy cousin got for him, which Immediately blows up because his cousin is an asshole and the explosion sends you back in time because of all the drugs your uncle had stashed the trunk. This is Nog’s life.

Dreaming of electric sheep.

In the episode “Bar Association”, when Rom remarks to Dr. Bashir, “ You don’t understand. Ferengi workers don’t want to stop the exploitation. We want to find a way to become the exploiters.” he echoes a key theme of Paulo Freire’s 1967 text, Pedagogy of the Oppressed, in which he states that, “during the initial stage of the struggle, the oppressed, instead of striving for liberation, tend themselves to become oppressors, or “sub-oppressors”” and further observes that “this phenomenon derives from the fact that the oppressed at  a certain moment of their existential experience, adopt the attitude of “adhesion” to the oppressors.”

Much like Rom, Freire goes on to notice that, [t]o surmount the situation of oppression, people must first critically recognize its causes, so that through transforming action they can create a new situation, one with makes possible the pursuit of a fuller humanity.” Surely in here, we can forgive Freire’s use of “humanity” and replace it with a broader “personhood” to include the needs of the ununionized Ferengi laborers. In this essay, I will… 

for star trek day, i think we should start talking and raising noise about how avery brooks has been, according to cirroc lofton, blacklisted for discriminatory racist reasons from being on the screen despite wanting to return to acting, and star trek corpo keeps absolutely silent about it despite still using his name/captain sisko/ds9 as a cute little cameo for all their new shows, including name dropping his character in the episode he directed which he is most proud of and according to everyone involved put his whole heart into, far beyond the stars, of course ignoring all context surrounding the episode.

The video of Cirroc talking about this!

it predates ds9 too - ira steven behr wasn’t actually involved in casting, but he talks here about getting phone calls from executives telling him not to hire avery brooks, allegedly because he was “too much trouble” and “[didn’t] like white people”

(which. quick note on this, because I think the historical context is crucial here: i’m having trouble pinpointing when the ds9 casting process took place, but may/june 1992 seems likely. this would’ve been in the fairly immediate wake of the april 29-may 2 riots in LA following the acquittal of the four police officers who killed rodney king, so racial tensions were notably high at the time, and i fully believe that would have played a role in a reactionary statement like that. anything a black actor said negatively about a white person could be easily twisted into a claim about them universally hating white people)

X

star trek explores these strange seemingly inconsequential extremes because it wants you to consider the possibility that your concept of ethics doesnt and could never possibly account for every scenario. It wants you to consider the ethical ramifications of just wiping out the little nanites taking over your ships computer even though eventually this will kill you all becuase

-What if they're alive?

-What if they're sentient?

-What if they don't realize they're hurting us?

-What if what hurts us is what they need to live?

-What if we can communicate with them?

Star Trek takes the situation of, "these computer bugs are eating our ship and in an hour we'll all be dead and we COULD just wipe them out utterly but...what if they're like us?" because the ramifications effect what risks we ourselves are willing to take in the name of pacifism and understanding. it says that even the smallest most immenently dangerous creature deserves as much of a chance to live peacefully as we can possibly give it through understanding.

without examining ourselves this way, through these made up seemingly inane situations, we will never be able to understand ourselves and what we're truly capable of, what levels of understanding can be achieved. without the ability to place ourselves in a difficult situation and reach beyond our first instinct of fight or flight and self-preservation, we will never be evolve as a global community