Bounding into Comics, one of the more boneheaded of the culture war blogs, which routinely blasts what it sees as excessive “wokeness” in comic books and films, has turned its attention to the latest comic book version of Star Trek, demonstrating in the process that it has completely missed the point of the whole franchise.
“New Star Trek Comic Disgusts Readers With A Vulcan Lecturing The Crew On Gender Pronouns,” the headline of a recent post by Jon Del Arroz blares.
The Star Trek franchise has become one of the most mocked properties on the internet in recent years, mired with controversies because of the identity politics constantly pushed by the show, books, and comics.
Uh, you do realize that show creator Gene Roddenberry was kind of a Social Justice Warrior himself, right? I mean, practically the whole point of the original show was to demonstrate, with true 1960s idealism, that a coalition of different sorts of people (and aliens) could work together to bring justice to the universe. This has naturally continued in all of the spinoffs since.
“Intolerance in the 23rd Century?” Roddenberry once wrote.
Improbable! If man survives that long, he will have learned to take a delight in the essential differences between men and between cultures. He will learn that differences in ideas and attitudes are a delight, part of life’s exciting variety, not something to fear.
And if Gene Roddenberry had lived a bit longer he might have referred to “human beings” rather than “men.”
So what exactly is bothering the Bounding Into Comics folks and these mysterious Star Trek fans who apparently hate the very thing that made the show distinctive and in many ways ahead of its time?
“The decline of Star Trek’s popularity among fans,” Del Arroz sniffs,
began with Star Trek: Discovery, which first flaunted racial divisions and an explicit on-screen homosexual relationship before pushing even further to the bottom of the identity politics barrel when they introduced a Trill character who, despite obviously being a woman, lectured her crewmates and audience on how she wanted to be called “they/them.”
Got it. Never mind that Star Trek, from the beginning, was a multiracial enterprise (featuring a multiracial crew on the Enterprise). The show, a favorite of Martin Luther King, rattled racists in its day by featuring one of the first if not the first interracial kiss between a white man (Kirk) and a black woman (Uhuru) on network television. This kiss was a lot more daring for its time than a gay relationship on television is now, or even someone calling themselves “they.”
Somehow I suspect the Bounding Into Comics guys, if they were writing in the 1960s, would have been cross-burningly indignant over that scandalous kiss.
So what about this new Star Trek comic is proving so “disgusting” to the anti-social-justice Star Trek fanboys?
The comics have been no refuge for Star Trek fans who want to keep current-year left-wing agenda out of their science fiction reading. In 2021, IDW named embattled personality Heather Antos as the line’s editor. Under her tenure, fans complained about how she took no care with continuity, which was highlighted in several editorial failures in a recent issue of a Deep Space 9 comic.
Nothing is more of a challenge to the survival of Western Civilization as continuity errors. I mean, this couldn’t possibly be something drummed up as an excuse to attack a female editor, right? Nah.
The current “controversy,” such as it is, stems from a scene in Star Trek (2022) #1 in which a Vulcan character tells a blue-skinned alien woman that “the gender binary is illogical.”
That’s it. A Vulcan calling something “illogical.”
Del Arroz explains the vast significance of this line.
The interchange is meant to reinforce 2022 gender identity politics propaganda based on the English language, which is nonsensical in a 24th-century era as the language wouldn’t be anything like it is today, and presumably, an Andorian and Vulcan would have the benefits of a universal translator which wouldn’t even likely have English-based pronouns.
Moreover, if a Vulcan were trying to reinforce the logic in this speech, he wouldn’t refer to an inanimate object like a ship by the term “their” which, despite being a plural word, is a pronoun. He would instead use the proper word “it”. The only reason to insert this kind of dialogue is to lecture readers on gender pronouns, making the Vulcan sound more like a current-year teenage girl than a logical scientist.
Is it logical to get this worked up about a single line in a comic book about space aliens?
But of course, Del Arroz goes on to point out, this is all the fault of Ms. Antos, the CONTINUITY DESTROYER.
This kind of pause in the story to virtue signal identity politics is creeping into comics more often and is yet another sign of the poorly thought-out editorial oversight of Ms. Antos, who has repeatedly demonstrated she is more interested in left-wing politics than maintaining accuracy in comic franchises.
Yes, that’s right: the most important thing about comics about space aliens is their commitment to accuracy. That and keeping “identity politics” OUT of anything having to do with Star Trek, which was actually all about identity politics in the first place.
Follow me on Mastodon.
Send tips to dfutrelle at gmail dot com.
We Hunted the Mammoth relies on support from you, its readers, to survive. So please donate here if you can, or at David-Futrelle-1 on Venmo.
What’s next? Anti-fascist messages in Star Wars?
Reminder that, were it not for the devotion of a network of bored horny housewives playing house with action figures, Star Trek would have wound up like X Minus One: an esoteric footnote in SF TV history.
Apparently, they’ve never actually seen the show. The Trill are a joining of two races. There were many episodes about Jadzia Dax specifically dealing with this. “They” is the perfect pronoun.
Vulcans lecturing people? Yeah, sorry, but that’s on brand since Spock was introduced.
And I would not have said whatstheirface, whose name I do not recall, nervously asking Stamets to use their prefered pronouns to be a lecture. I rather liked that scene, his little smile as he agrees, like he’s proud they asked.
As an aside, Stamets was my favorite character in season one. He was the most stereotypical Star Trek character at the time.
I noticed people were upset he was an asshole at first, but remember he was basically dragged kicking and screaming into using his research that he had intended for peaceful exploration as a means to fight a war. He had every right to be pissed. He was the one person in season one Discovery who could be tossed into Next Generation and fit right in with his ideals and aims. (Next Generation’s point of view often being that which most people think of when they think of “Star Trek”.)
Just my two cents anyway. I suppose someone on here will turn around and make some compelling argument for why I am totally wrong about him. ;D
Oh yes, a universal translator will definitely be a thing in the 24th century. This is a fact. Unless, of course, the patriarchal death cult so very popular today — the one that elected Donald Trump president — gets its wish and sends everyone on the planet back to cave-dwelling days with lots and lots of severe weather and a toxic environment.
I mean, if you put DelArroz and a box of rocks together to take an intelligence test the safe bet is the box of rocks.
“New Star Trek Comic Disgusts Readers” — I suspect that when they say “readers”, they mean themselves. As when Trump says, “People are saying”, never specifying who allegedly says it.
If you’re going to lecture on grammar, don’t tell us to replace a possessive pronoun with a non-possessive. Then again, these are the same people who use pronouns to tell us they refuse to use pronouns. Are there no English majors in the alt-right?
LOL I don’t think Star Trek has ever really cared too much about continuity. They couldn’t even keep continuity about how Data’s emotion chip worked over the course of the first three next gen movies .
I get told this regularly! Well, not the Vulcan part, but that I don’t sound like a scientist.
I tell people they will have to get used to it, since as I am a scientist, that is how scientists sound. I reckon the same logic may apply here, and this person just doesn’t like it.
For a deep dive into the progressive nature of Star Trek (and its failures) I highly recommend Jessie Genders ‘Sex In Star Trek’ videos. They are quite long, though.
Star Trek has always meant to be about showing a more diverse, tolerant, liberal future… through the lens of characters in a military command structure, which leans somewhat exclusionary and conservative, so there’s already a slight bit of disconnect there. Classic Trek was ahead of its time in many ways, but it didn’t go as far as Roddenberry wanted, due to executive meddling. When we finally saw something much closer to Roddenberry’s original vision, that was early TNG… but by that point, it was already a little behind the times. When Berman and Braga took over, they caught up with the times in most respects but didn’t get ahead of it, and let Roddenberry’s utopianism fade into little more than a background detail of a galaxy constantly under siege by existential threats and negative space wedgies. I don’t know about the current crop of shows – last I saw was Enterprise – but I don’t think the franchise (at least up to that point) ever really lived up to its ideals.
(Some might say that it’s more about showing contemporary issues through a different lens. It did sometimes succeed at that, but quite a lot of sci-fi does that already without Trek’s supposed idealism.)
Which was probably unavoidable. A truly utopian (or close enough) sci-fi setting would not have space gun laser battles, alien nazi spies, cursed holodecks, or sociopathic god-beings who have to be talked out of turning people into lime pudding. At most it might have something akin to Lost In Space or Gilligan’s Planet*, but those would mostly exist apart from the setting (i.e. we merely get glimpses of it) rather than within it. Anything else would probably be something like a character drama piece over the course of a long journey or project, where a lot of the sources of conflict taken for granted today are basically nonexistent. That’s really hard to write and even harder to secure the big budgets required to make a sci-fi show/movie.
*This was an actual cartoon. Really.
Now, I’m sure there are a lot of people (read: mostly conservatives) who would love to see an old-school Trek with the cultural sensibilities of Classic or TNG era Trek, but that’s basically a nostalgia thing even if they weren’t around to see them when they first aired. Nostalgia products do exist, but only as a niche market. Niche markets don’t command the kind of money needed for big-budget shows or mass-market publications. Sorry boys, unless someone Kickstarters it you’re out of luck.
Side note: One of the darkly humorous ways which TNG was behind the times technologically rather than socially – the reason why things kept exploding in a shower of sparks was because they had miniature plasma conduits embedded in them. Seriously, a ship’s or station’s power system was basically a plumbing system that used plasma instead of water. Um, hello? Have you ever heard of fiber-optic cables? Invented 12 years before TNG first aired? And then they probably just kept it going forward despite how objectively stupid it was because it looked cool and helped create a sense of emergency.
Besides everything else, something that irritates me here is the use of the word “lecture”. Star Trek has its fair share of genuine morality lectures, with a character (often the captain) going on for sentence after sentence after sentence.
That scene in Discovery? That was one character saying “I think I feel more like ‘they’ rather than ‘she’.”, and the other one going “Ok, will do”. No big deal. Definitely no ‘lecturing’. Just a non-binary character existing on screen.
@Snowberry :
And then they probably just kept it going forward despite how objectively stupid it was because it looked cool and helped create a sense of emergency.
See also the 22nd century’s curious amnesia regarding seatbelts.
Jon Del Arroz has been an asshole for quite some time now, so… <shrug>
There’s still Star Trek?
There seems to be a surprising number of conservatives among Star Trek fandom. They’re in the minority, but there are more of them than I would have thought. I don’t really understand it either. It’s not that every single episode has a political message, but the ones that do are usually from the left. The only exceptions I can think of are a few times when the Prime Directive starts to sound a little like isolationism.
Seconding Jessie Gender’s “Sex in Star Trek” videos. Actually, just watch her Star Trek videos – they’re pretty cool. This one feels especially appropriate right now:
The backstory is that Heather Antos, while previously working at Marvel, was the target of the notorious 2017 “milkshake selfie” incident, in which she posted a picture of herself and some other young women from Marvel drinking milkshakes on Twitter, leading to a flood of abusive comments about their alleged “stereotypical SJW” appearance.
@FlyingSquirrel
This is a pretty good video about Conservatives and Star Trek
@ Victorious Parasol
Well, you just netted Jessie a new fan. Starts the video talking about O’Brien? He is another favorite character of mine. Can be a cranky dick at times, but he is something of a rarity in Star Trek: A blue collar family man.
However, no mention of Errand of Mercy? Jessie brought up A Private Little War in which Gene Roddenberry wrote a straightforward, The-US-is-right-to-interfere-in-Vietnam, no questions please, while Gene Coon instead led Kirk to slowly realize he was a bad guy for trying to do the same with the Organians.
That scene in the end where Kirk reacts with blind passion, saying “You have no right…!” and then has to eat his words and tries to save face with a mumbled excuse of proper channels? That was a far deeper introspective bit on the US activities at that time than anything Roddenberry ever wrote on the subject. In one Kirk was simply right and in the other he was forced to stop and think about his actions and intents.
(Not wanting to bash Roddenberry here, but the man had his issues and I’d honestly say the best parts of Star Trek usually had nothing to do with him. He brought Star Trek to life and for that I am greatful.)
<i>There seems to be a surprising number of conservatives among Star Trek fandom.</i>
I seriously doubt that any of those “conservatives” are, or ever were, actual fans. People who HATE a series the way these “conservatives” seem to hate all the LONGSTANDING messages and values in “Star Trek” cannot be called “fans” — that’s not what the word means. “Obsessive hate-watchers” maybe, but that’s really not the same as “fans.”
@Snowberry
The explanation of plasma conduits was completely unnecessary anyways. Purely due to the energy transfer from the monsterously powerful weapons being used. Not only would consoles and duty stations explode, so would sections of the ships hull. Due entirely to the massive amount of energy transfer. That’s one part of deep space combat David Weber got really right in his hard scifi Honor Harrington series.
P.S. Everyone should read the Honor Harrington books, they’re fantastic. The first two On Basilisk Station and The Honor of the Queen are both available for free from baen books.