Edit for others: Looks like I fell for your troll ragebait account.
(Or rather, it looks like your type of account has followed its propaganda marching orders from reddit and other places to make Lemmy shitty too.)
(For those unaware, pop fandom spaces are infiltrated by people stirring shit to keep a cultural miasma of misery going on, even for people who disconnect from overtly political/news subs as an attempt to try to avoid it.)
Still, I think what I said is useful, so I’ll leave it up for lurkers.
I’ve seen mindsets like yours coming into book fandom more and more as the years have gone on.
I’m going to say some things from a meta perspective that you might not like. And while I’m making assumptions, and they might even be wrong about you in particular, I think there’s still worth in trying to see my perspective, and trying to understand WHY I am saying what I am saying, and why I’m saying it in response to your post at this particular point in time, even if I’m wildly off base with you as an individual. You’ll probably learn more from doing that than by trying to get into a one-on-one argument with me over details. Like, even if I’m wrong with you–WHY did I choose to say this right now in response to your post? What details in your post made me react in this way?
So, as far as I can tell, looking in from the outside, it looks like takes like yours arise when someone is raised in a religious context, following a holy book of some sort (Bible, Book of Mormon, the Koran–any writing really that is supposed to be your highest moral guide), and then either has not left that religion, but is trying to understand other people’s moralities through the same lens because everyone they personally know forms their morality from the bible or another holy book (so surely everyone else must too? And maybe other people use Star Trek?), or comes from someone who HAS left but hasn’t yet examined old habits left over from that upbringing, and and thus brings them into new spaces, as you seem to be doing here with Star Trek.
Like, I see religious folks, or recently ex-religious folks who have not yet examined their inner drives to get over-involved with the media they consume. They interact with their show the same way they would interact with their church, or with the Bible or another holy book. Even if they claim they are no longer religious, they were still raised in a religious environment which has an effect on habits and thinking esp. re: the topic of morality, and emotionally fandom spaces and fandom drama can feel a lot like church from a socializing and discussion standpoint, so old habits of churchy stuff sometimes seep into fandom.
But not all people interact with stories in this way. In fact, when you look at how people actually interact with media, people often take bits and pieces here and there. They agree with some stuff, disagree or just ignore others, and transform things too. You can truth-check this by looking at your peers in school. How many times did a teacher say something, and someone next to you said it was bullshit? People take in, reject, and transform information all the time. Words are not a total telepathic mind-control, people have agency.
I’m a writer, and it’s fairly common to see a reader interact with what I said and take a totally different insight from what I said, because all of their life experiences are getting tangled up with whatever story I was trying to tell, and that MIXTURE is showing them something new that I might never have realized or thought of. And this is normal–this is how humans interact with fiction.
The idea that a work of fiction has to demonstrate moral things perfectly or else be doomed as irredeemably flawed is really in my opinion more of a religious-brain thing. And no, maybe you didn’t say that directly, but I question the drive behind why you posted this post, listing the things you did. I question your motivations and assumptions. Approaching Trek asking the questions you do doesn’t align with how people actually interact with media in my experience, but it does align with how I’ve seen people utilize religion, and holy books in particular.
I’d encourage you to look up a community college and see if there’s any ethics classes you can take. I had to take an ethics class for the degree I was working on. I didn’t actually want to, as I’m in my 40s and comfortable with my sense of morality–but it ended up being shockingly useful, because it laid out different frameworks in which people can evaluate the morality of something, and the pros and cons of each. It kind of started with the “gut feeling” a lot of people use when they feel more than think, then progressed through religious frameworks, then a few philosophers, and then storytelling frameworks, and basically gave me a lot of different and new tools to evaluate things I hadn’t explicitly had before. It was very useful, much to my own surprise, and I’d recommend the experience to everyone if they go to college.
My ethics and morals are based on what I try to make a good ideal: not liking discriminations, authoritarianism, objectification of people, that kind of stuff. If you want to put me in a box, “leftist” would probably be more accurate than “religious”.
I understand perfectly well that a show can give a million different messages based on the interpretation. But there are still many things that, if not objective, can be said with a good degree of confidence. What I criticised is not about shows not demonstrating a perfect world where nothing is wrong, but about them showing immoral (according to my previous paragraph) things in a positive light.
My motivation is simple: Star trek started as a show questioning the world and the notions of bad and good, working almost at a philosophical level (which is the point of science fiction), and it doesn’t seem to be the case anymore. What I try to do is to question what the recent shows contain, and to create some awareness on the reasons that lead me to believe there are many moral issues in them.
And yes, there are many opinions. But one will have to hold very, very strong arguments before I admit that it is morally acceptable to not be inclusive, to objectify people, to tolerate fascism, etc.
If you want to call it trolling to easily dismiss it, fine. The point is to try to make people think more (and not just react to gut feelings) if they are open to it, if they’re not they’re not going to ever agree with me anyway, that’s the magic of cultural bubbles.