So Discovery season 3 just finished and naturally all the haters have come out of the woodwork talking about how horrible it is, saying stuff like, “this isn’t Star Trek” and, “It needs to be cancelled”. Now there are definitely legit reasons to not like it (the style may not be for you, the writing isn’t the best, etc.) but a lot of the time it’s simply because they don’t like it when something is “woke” or “political”. They consider Burnham to be a Mary Sue, saying that they’ve made it so she could do no wrong, but then criticize her for all her faults. And the same thing is happening in the Star Wars fandom: toxic fans are spiteful towards the sequel trilogy for being “too political”.
What both groups have failed to realize is that these franchises have been political since the beginning. In TOS, Klingons were modeled after Mongolian leaders and the Federation-Romulan conflict was supposed to be a commentary on the Cold War that was going on at the time. The Original trilogy was a complete allegory for the Vietnam War and how the US involvement just made things worse. Speculative fiction is almost always inherently political, so you can’t talk about one with avoiding the other.
On the flip side of this, it is equally possible to be toxic in the sense of loving everything and refusing to admit that it has faults. The whole “if you don’t like something, then don’t consume it” is a bad stance because it is almost always interpreted as “if you like this then you shouldn’t be critical of it because you shouldn’t find any faults in it.” This is bad because almost every form of entertainment has some sort of problematic aspect to it. While Star Trek has always been praised as being progressive, it would be ignorant to say there haven’t been episodes with a lot of blatant racism, sexism, and homophobia.
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