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The irony is in thinking it's progressivism that is making Star Trek grimdark. Of course I know some people think all liberality (even going all the way back to the Enlightenment) is an inevitable path to the grimdark authoritarianism we see today, but Star Trek was originally a very liberal vision. I guess technically it still is, unless you are one of us liberals who have become by modern progressive standards fascists. Though to be honest I haven't seen the last few shows or movies, so I only know what it's like from cultural osmosis and memes.
Strongly disagree with this. You can have complex, three-dimensional characters, like villains who have sympathetic motives or heroes who are flawed, in genre fiction. It doesn't all have to be black hats vs. white hats. "What if the bad guys aren't really all bad?" "What if Orcs aren't all evil?" "What if the Jedi fucked up?" Those are perfectly fine questions to introduce even into a genre set piece with bright lines between good and evil. The problem is not with introducing moral complication and nuance, the problem is with fundamentally rejecting the idea that "good" or "evil" exist, even within the context of a universe that was built on the premise of a conflict between Good vs. Evil. Deconstructing that and saying "Well, actually they're all just the same; Sauron vs. the Fellowship is like the Republicans vs. the Democrats, the Rebel Alliance vs. the Empire is like rooting for the Packers or the Cowboys... at the end of the day it doesn't matter who wins," that destroys the narrative unless you are just that level of cynical.
Was it though...? It was set onboard a military ship, with a strict hierarchy, and the characters all strongly demonstrating classical virtues. It had some worldbuilding that could be seen as liberal, like the replicators that made everything free, but that's just sci-fi plot stuff. It certainly had some moments that would have been considered liberal for the 60s, like the famous "first interracial kiss on TV," but that was also, you know, a captain kissing his secretary. The themes of the show were classic western/hero's journey stuff, "wagon train to the stars." Most of the plots were along the lines of "a big bad Other shows up, and the heroic Captian Kirk must punch it to death."
The problem is, we get all that in real life. We look to entertainment to simplify and escape that sort of thing. If you want to write a story where the orcs aren't evil, it just ends up being a grimdark slog where Aragorn was ruthlessly genociding a sentient people and "we all need to feel sad, man, because that's just like what happened with the Native Americans, you know?" You can just read actual history for that. Or, perhaps, an avant-garde literary novel that assumes you've already read thousands of pages of both popular entertainment and criticism. It's not going to work for a normal human who just wants to experience the feeling of being heroic for once in their life, without having to feel guilt and shame for it.
Same thing with "what if the Jedi fucked up..." you mean like all politicians do? Just go watch the news for that. The Jedi were awesome as this mystical fictional ideal. We don't need to see that perverted into something corrupt. Surely you can find some other example of a corrupt politician, if that's what you're interested in.
edit: to me, that sort of criticism is like saying "what if the unobtanium is not really unobtainable?" It's not some profound insight, just poking at something that the writers used to tell an entertaining story in a simple way. Maybe that could be the basis for a great story, but you'd have to really think about why you want to tell that story, and make sure it's not just "because I want to depress the hell out of the audience."
Those were not seen as incompatible with liberalism at the time.
Harlan Ellison famously denigrated Uhura as a telephone operator, but she was not Kirk's secretary. The "secretary" position was filled by Yeoman Rand, who had a thing for Kirk (at least until "wolf" Kirk tried to rape her). Further, I don't think the idea that a power imbalance was inherently rape entered the mainstream until the 1970s. The past remains a foreign country.
I think thats really the crux of it. I wouldnt argue that TOS star trek is some sort of alt-right bedrock, but it's hardly modern woke either. Even the existence of a heroic straight white male main character would invalidate that. It's... its own weird thing. A weird mix of ww2 nostalgia, 60s california hippies, and Gene Roddenberry just being weird.
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Mm, speak for yourself. Unambiguous Good Guys vs. Bad Guys can be fun sometimes, but not all of us want "simple" entertainment.
Introducing moral complexity and shades of gray doesn't mean you have to go all grimdark and nihilistic.
Agreed, but writers should think about why they're adding these "shades of grey."
Like, if I go to a bakery and buy sugar cookies, I expect them to taste sweet. Sweet tastes good. Perhaps it might be interesting, sometimes, to dump in chili pepper or coffee grounds or whatever and "subvert expectations" with complex flavors. But unless you really know what you're doing, it mostly just tastes bad.
JRR Tolkien was not a stupid man. He fought in WW1, and was well familiar with the horrors of war against a morally complex foe. But he still used orcs as a simple, pure evil, because that gave him the space to focus on other elements of the human condition. Saying "well what if the orcs arent pure evil" would overwhelm the rest of the story.
I actually had that happen in a DnD game once, sorta. We were being attacked by bandits, and knocked them unconscious. We were lawful good, so we couldnt just execute them. It basically turned the rest of the campaign into a boring slog as we ran a prison camp to try to keep these stupid NPCs alive, instead of doing any fun adventuring stuff. If I wanted to hear a story about the human nature in prison, there are other, better places for that.
Bad GM. Should discuss player expectations. In most pseudo-medieval D&Dish settings, executing bandits is a perfectly Lawful Good thing to do.
Which ties back to the point above. You are right, people don't want to see the Federation turned into a fascist dystopia, they don't want to see Aragorn called a genocider, they don't want the Jedi turned into a corrupt space Nazis. The problem with the new shows is not that they are too gray, it's that the writers don't think about why they're "subverting" the narrative. (Or worse, they do, and it's malicious.)
I think to me it's about- what is the focus of these stories? because we don't have infinite time and attention span. Executing bandits would be fucked up if that were real life, but in a story it's just a minor thing you do to move on to the more interesting parts. Having a simple, cartoonish villain like the original Darth Vader allows for an operatic story where you can enjoy the heroes being awesome and explore the other parts of the world. It would just slow things down if the original Star Wars spent an hour discussing his traumatic past and how he's really not such a bad guy after all. If that stuff is actually interesting (debatable) it can go in its own, separate movie (the prequels).
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