Star Wars & Sc-Fi Talk

kyanges

Junior Member
I think the comedic sequences and the dumbing down of the droids is because so many children watch this program. It's called cartoon violence.


I can understand pandering to the audience a bit. If the audience is mainly children, then by all means, lighten the violence, leave deaths ambiguous, clarify the moral divides or whatever.

What they've done however isn't cartoon violence. Instead, they've merely confused the tone of the show. Between decapitations and people dying in horrible explosions, there's firefights where droids throw in three-stooges style slap-stick. And the viewer is left going, "Huh? Am I supposed to be laughing or concerned for the protagonist?"

Star Wars had humor and violence. When Luke was barreling down the trench in his X-Wing, at no point did they throw in a scene where an Imperial pilot suddenly went, "Oh no, I forgot to calibrate my targeting sensor! I'm so silly, blast my Imperial training!" On this show however, they do something like this every few minutes in a battle.
 
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ABC78

Junior Member
Courtesy of youtube star trek vs star wars you decide.

[video=youtube;vFCBwob65Nw]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vFCBwob65Nw&list=PLOL2t8YQ7767_lbQyKHOemPxiN1DTMAnw[/video]
 
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Player 0

Junior Member
Hey guys, was browsing some reddit threads and i found something a bit disturbing, that is kinda a recurring theme in some fanon and the somewhat racist writings of Gene himself, that is the distinct lack of East Asian, primarily Chinese, and South Asians being represented in post-apocalyptic earth.

Putting aside all the Federation's other problems like the fact that it seems like 80-90% of Starfleet is a Terran organization, even Terrans themselves are pretty monolithic with a predominantly American or British cultural background for its peoples and maybe the occassional token white person from continent Europe, but everyone outside that area is usually British or American culturally.

A prevailing theory among some fans being that the poorly developed or explained WWIII and Eugenics war happened exclusively in Asia with the destruction of China and India. Considering how things are today, this just horribly dated cold war thinking and quite honestly seem to run counter to Trek's core themes, right up there with how Ex Astra Scientia has criticized Trek's repeated use of WWII German nazis as badguys in various scenarios, it really just shows a very narrowminded style of thinking, though i chalk this up to thoughtlessness and generational cultural issues than maliciousness or white supremacy.

With that said i think that kind of shows the superiority of comics over television, as new writings and editors are constantly brought in the culture receives constant facelifts while Trek was and still is the product of maybe a dozen or so writers and producers. A pretty good example is how universe reboots are used constantly in DC comics to update the universe and its sensibilities and rewrite aspects of continuity to match up with current generational culture, or you could also do this with the retconed introduction of the Denobulans, say they were always there but the stories were relatively narrow in focus and prevented their representation. Anyway i wouldn't personally remove the whole WWIII/Eugenics angle, because i do think it works, but i would rewrite it to say that all of earth was devastated or the damage wasn't bad enough to make it Fallout bad, more like the world we saw in Ghost in the Shell but with less advanced technology.

Looking back at descriptions of pre-Fed trek earth's history, it comes off as really Euro centric and incredibly anachronistic, seriously in Roddenberry's novelization of TMP he basically says Europe was unscatched and became a philosophers' paradise, something that i see as being akin to, if Trek were written back in say the 1500s, saying that only greece, Italy and Turkey would survive as the centres of civilization.

It just bothers me that in a show that venerates diversity, enlightenment and cultural inclusion that such anachronisms still exist, if Trek ever gets itself some real committed Worldbuilding projects going to reinvigorate the Prime universe's canon, this is definitely one of things that needs to be addressed.

Anyway just something i was thinking about for a while and wanted to share here, thanks for reading
 

AssassinsMace

Lieutenant General
Well not surprising when all the baddies of Star Trek have Asian traits. Back during the time of the original series China was seen as more evil than the Soviet Union. Klingons were obviously a representation of China. They even had Chinese names. In the episode where they had a planet that paralleled Earth but the communists took over and Americans were the romanticized version of American Indians, the "Comms" were Asian.

If you look at the history of how extraterrestrial aliens were depicted by the West, they are Asians. Short, hairless, almond eyes... You also have to remember that the West believed religiously the further away people where from the center of God's universe, which was Western Europe, the closer you were aligned with the Devil. Not only is the Far East probably the furthest away, Westerners also believed Asians weren't even from this planet hence the derogatory name of "Celestials" was given.

I remember I told this little history to someone once and he had that knee-jerk reaction that I was trying to make everything look like racism. Then I just said, "Ming, the Merciless, from the planet Mongo" and he shut up after that.

When George Lucas took all that heat when the prequels were released about having alien characters sounding like stereotypical ethnicities, I thought Star Trek was more guilty. When you look at the traits of Ferengi... stereotypes of Asians being money-driven and materialistic and demeaning towards women and they use chopsticks.
 
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Miragedriver

Brigadier
Has anyone here been watching the HBO series Game of Thrones? I have gotten completely hooked on it. I just finished watching season three….Wow! They are killing off cast members right and left.
 
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AssassinsMace

Lieutenant General
Has anyone here been watching the HBO series Game of Thrones? I have gotten completely hooked on it. I just finished watching season three….Wow! They are killing off cast members right and left.

Yes that's a great show. They just announced that season 7 or 8 will be the last and the producers already know how the books end.
 

Blitzo

Lieutenant General
Staff member
Super Moderator
Registered Member
The books are pretty amazing too. The battles and everything are on a much bigger scale, and the intrigue and plotting is much more detailed too.
 

Player 0

Junior Member
Well not surprising when all the baddies of Star Trek have Asian traits. Back during the time of the original series China was seen as more evil than the Soviet Union. Klingons were obviously a representation of China. They even had Chinese names. In the episode where they had a planet that paralleled Earth but the communists took over and Americans were the romanticized version of American Indians, the "Comms" were Asian.

If you look at the history of how extraterrestrial aliens were depicted by the West, they are Asians. Short, hairless, almond eyes... You also have to remember that the West believed religiously the further away people where from the center of God's universe, which was Western Europe, the closer you were aligned with the Devil. Not only is the Far East probably the furthest away, Westerners also believed Asians weren't even from this planet hence the derogatory name of "Celestials" was given.

I remember I told this little history to someone once and he had that knee-jerk reaction that I was trying to make everything look like racism. Then I just said, "Ming, the Merciless, from the planet Mongo" and he shut up after that.

When George Lucas took all that heat when the prequels were released about having alien characters sounding like stereotypical ethnicities, I thought Star Trek was more guilty. When you look at the traits of Ferengi... stereotypes of Asians being money-driven and materialistic and demeaning towards women and they use chopsticks.

Pretty much this and you can still see it just by reading any piece of American fiction written by someone who is linked to the bible belt, its an attitude and ignorance strongly propagated for propaganda reasons, something not helped by the fact that it seem a lot of Americans who hold these attitudes see things like higher education or even just reading or watching news sources other than fox to be poisonous brainwashing.

Also to be fair, the Ferengi were really more stereotypes of western capitalists, especially jews so its fairer to say the Ferengi are more anti-Jewish than anti-Asian, with that said Ferengi is actually derived by the Iranian word Ferang which is a transliteration of the word Frank, and thus refers to European traders in general. In their introductory ep it was explicitly stated by the characters, maybe Picard or Data that Ferengi culture resembled those of Yankee traders. So yeah early TNG was more an indictment of American culture
 

Equation

Lieutenant General
Also to be fair, the Ferengi were really more stereotypes of western capitalists, especially jews so its fairer to say the Ferengi are more anti-Jewish than anti-Asian, with that said Ferengi is actually derived by the Iranian word Ferang which is a transliteration of the word Frank, and thus refers to European traders in general. In their introductory ep it was explicitly stated by the characters, maybe Picard or Data that Ferengi culture resembled those of Yankee traders. So yeah early TNG was more an indictment of American culture

Still, it's not right to stereotype a group of people like that, deeming them to be less than human. That was not Gene Roddenberry intended Star Trek world.
 

AssassinsMace

Lieutenant General
By the time of TNG, they were a little more politically correct about it. Notice when Klingons and Ferengi became more likable, they moved away from the stereotypes? How about the Cardassians were the Chinese and the Bajorans were the Tibetans. I know... many groups have identified themselves as Bajorans. I've heard Palestinians identify themselves as Bajorans and the Israelis as Cardassians but given Hollywood's history who do you think they molded the situation more from?
 
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