Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by ctf1er 1512 days ago
People are saying that right now about the new Star Treks. And I don't think most disagree with the politics/social commentary, it's just so in your face/contrived that it ruins the show for many.
3 comments

Right, folks are totally cool with gays and blacks and whatnot as long as they don’t have to see them. “So in your face”!
Good grief, no need to take the comments of others in bad faith. What folks mean by "in your face", is the fact that these shows will throw in a bunch of woke characters as a substitute for actually writing a good show. Instead, they'll say something like "Look, we have a disabled multiracial transsexual lesbian as a character, isn't our show great?".

The reason all the Star Trek comparisons in this comments section are so wildly off base is that Star Trek was actually a well-written show with interesting plot lines and interesting characters, that happened to have a diverse cast. Most of what's on Netflix now is just junk that that thinks if it pushes the cultural envelope far enough, no one will notice that most of the shows are little more than clumsy preaching.

They have one gay character and a non binary character. The one character has (had) a trill symbiont. The trill host has always been shown as not being heterosexual in TNG in the 80s and Deep Space Nine in the 80s.

Again even back in the 60s with the original Trek “Let That Be Your Last Battlefield”, they showed two races fighting because one was black on the left side and white on the right side and the other race was just to opposite - to show just how dumb racism was.

They considered the kiss in your face too at the time.

As was Ellen’s episode when she came out.

Even more recently there was an uproar about “wokeness” when they decided to cast a Black woman to play an orange alien from Tamaran on Titans.

Strangely enough, there was not such an uproar about lily White shows like Friends and Seinfeild.

You’re comparing a reaction to something that was common but only recently televised to something that’s extremely uncommon and over-represented in their programming 20x compared with reality.
I think you underestimate how much things have changed to make that claim: it wasn't until 1996 that the majority of Americans approved of interracial marriage. Below 20% of Americans approved of it when the Star Trek kiss aired.

A larger percentage of Republicans support transgender rights today than Americans supported interracial marriage when in 1969. More Americans support transgender rights today than supported it 20 years after the Trek kiss aired.

Interracial relationships weren’t that realistic in the 60s and there were laws in the south against interracial marriage. It wasn’t until the 80s that laws against “sodomy” - ie homosexual relationships - were overturned. It was always those “liberal Hollywood types” pushing an agenda…
Uh, sodomy was legalized in many southern states as late as 2003.