Recently had an argument with my conservative father, he’s always been big into Trek and Wars, and I had just started really watching Trek again, never watched a lot of the shows all the way through. So this father of mine started going on about how woke Trek was now, and I just lost it on him, I just get so tired of the “anti-woke” nonsense and he just finds some way to insert it into every conversation. So I was like “oh no, not woke Star Trek, the series about a socialist utopia, the series that holds the title of “the American show with the first interracial kiss”, the show where Kirk throws his dick at every species with a quim, the show that had a Ruskie character in the middle of the f’n Red Scare.” Star Trek was always woke, and my father was always too dumb, racially biased, and narcissistic to pick up on the lessons that they were trying to teach us when he watched it as a child in the 60’s.
I have not even tried to bring up Star Wars since the Disney acquisition, I’m sure my father has an insufferable take on that series now as well.
There is a weird right-wing contingent of Trekkies who think it’s all about pew pew fights with the Borg and they confuse the rest of us who love the idea of a socialist utopia where indigenous cultures are respected and people try to talk things out before shooting in hostile situations.
They don’t have money but they do have the classic authoritarian hierarchy of SciFi.
Want to travel the galaxy? You need a starship. How do you get a starship? Join the federation.
Picard retired to a grape farm in France. How did he get that perk? Can anyone have a grape farm in France?
SciFi has an inherent power imbalance between the fleet and grounders. This comes from the ability to move around and drop bombs on people. As much as they try to stay in a socialist paradise, they still have tons of incidents that end up being solved the starfleet way.
It’s a quote from starship troopers, but the idea of “Service guarantees citizenship” is what draws fascists to SciFi. It’s a tough problem to fix in fiction and most of the time it’s overlooked because spaceships are cool on paper. They make great entertainment.
The reality is that serving in the federation usually would mean you’ve never been on a starship bridge. You’re 20 levels down in a maintenance hold with no outside view. Nobody tells you shit and all you know is the ship is being fired at and you’re fucking terrified.
Even if you can pull up an external view on your tablet (which is a massive security problem), you still don’t have any control over the fight. Now you can watch torpedoes coming straight at you and realize the captain can’t stop it, and you can’t either…
Morale would be constantly in the toilet, and without a bigger reward than to explore strange new worlds you can’t see from the hold, people would be constantly quitting.
In conclusion, I’m not saying that star trek is fascist. I’m just saying it hand waves away 90% of the problems with their alleged utopia and people like watching action packed SciFi adventures.
I have a whole separate rant about weapons like lasers that travel at the speed of light. In the real world most fights would happen across distances, with ships being undetectable against the blackness of space, until a beam comes out of nowhere and instantly destroys your ship. But because it’s fiction you can ignore this.
