[dragonwriter]

> the people who think Star Trek is some post-racial utopia -- even though the bad guys are still mostly dark-skinned

That’s... not true of the franchise as a whole, or even any of the individual series.

So, this is hardly creating confidence in your reading of the other works under discussion.

[busterarm]

Are you kidding me?

Klingons, Romulans, Cardassians, Jem'Hadar, Ferengi, The Kazon, maybe the Hirogen.

All of these _villain races_ (which already is a wow conceptually) are portrayed as being dark-skinned.

The list of other prominent villian species is quite small, especially when you have to exclude the Borg, Changelings, Tholians, the Breen.

And I'm not making this argument out of nothing. People have been big-upping the show for being racially aware and talking about that context of the show for decades now.

[dragonwriter]

> Klingons

Appeared in eight of 79 episodes of TOS, and weren't, as a group, “bad guys” (heck, even though they were antagonistic to the Federation , they weren't even the bad guys in some of the episodes thet were in in TOS) in later (in setting) series.

As a series, they are a little more dense in Enterprise, and in Discovery, deapite being setup in the pilot as the main adversary, they end up not being that even in the seasons set pre-TOS (the first season prime adversary is... the alternate Universe Terran Empire.)

> Romulans,

The Romulans are, like Vulcans, predominatly white; exclusively so on screen in TOS, though later shows had occasional non-White Vulcans and Romulans.

> Ferengi, The Kazon, maybe the Hirogen.

Not particularly dark skinned.

If you actually look at who the bad guys in episodes (not who the Federation or United Earth’s astropolitical opponents are) if there is one where skin color is even a concept (often there either isn’t one, or its not a being where skin color is an issue), they are usually White.

> And I'm not making this argument out of nothing. People have been big-upping the show for being racially aware and talking about that context of the show for decades now.

A bad argument made for decades doesn't become better for it.

[jncfhnb]

> Klingons, Romulans, Cardassians, Jem'Hadar, Ferengi, The Kazon, maybe the Hirogen.

These all look “dark skinned” to you?

[busterarm]

They look fair-skinned to you?

(No, only Vulcans and Bajorans got that treatment...)

[dragonwriter]

Vulcans and Romulans have basically the same look (in TOS they were distinguished largely by the Romulans distinctive garb and the fact that Ronulans were only encountered on Romulan ships, in TNG and later shows the Romulans often had ridges, but not all individuals did.)

That they looked identical (except for the ridged Romulans) because of their shared origin was a quite important point from their introduction.

[jncfhnb]

Some of them do. But mostly they look like aliens and any attempt to contextual is it as a race thing is about as poorly warranted as the Heredity link that you were (reasonably) shitting on.

[busterarm]

And yet the bias towards an end of the spectrum in skintones for the villains is still overwhelmingly there in the choices made by the costuming and makeup departments.

[dragonwriter]

> And yet the bias towards an end of the spectrum in skintones for the villains is still overwhelmingly there in the choices made by the costuming and makeup departments.

The range and distribution of coloration for races that are mostly antagonistic vs those that are mostly found aligned to the protagonists, at least geo... well, astropolitically, doesn't seem that great, well, except maybe for a bias in the use of blue specifically for Federation aligned races.