Risa: Your Home Away from Spacedock
Welcome to Risa
All the pleasure of shore leave, none of the holodeck glitches.
Rule 1 — Be Civil, Not Klingon
This is a vacation planet, not the neutral zone.
- No harassment, brigading, or trolling
- No bigotry
- Keep the banter playful, not hostile
Rule 2 — No Prohibited Cargo
Some things aren’t welcome aboard.
- No spam or scams
- No porn or sexually explicit content
- No illegal content
- NSFW memes must be properly tagged
Rule 3 — Keep It Trek
Posts should be Star Trek memes or Trek-adjacent humor.
- Crossovers are fine
- Low-effort “unrelated” memes may be spaced out the nearest airlock
Rule 4 — Gatekeeping Belongs in a Black Hole
You’re welcome to have your own opinions on what counts as “real” Star Trek but forcing your view on others or pretending it’s the only valid one? That’s not the Starfleet way.
Everyone’s Trek is valid, from TOS purists to Lower Decks shitposters, and you don't get to dictate what is real or not for everyone.
If you see a post that violates the rules, or that doesn't inspire Jamaharon, report it so the mods can handle it.
Otherwise grab a horga’hn, order a Risan Mai Tai, and enjoy your shore leave.
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I mean yes, obviously, but just liking a show doesn't mean you have to agree with the economics or politics within the show. Imagine extrapolating this viewpoint onto Game of Thrones.
Game of thrones is pretty explicitly about "basically all of these people are bastards and even the like two who aren't at least a little bastardy are in a fucked up context and just kinda trying and still do horrible shit because in a setting like that, morality isn't, like, compatible." I can think of like two characters who aren't m9rally compromised, and one of them wishes he could stay dead.
Star trek is explicitly Utopian. Even the darker and edgier spinoff or the irreverent comedy spinoff are still at least partially about this. The episodes are mostly explorations of morality, explicitly, argued between characters like a god damn Socratic dialogue! The characters regularly monologue about it, to the point it being anvilicious and a little corny is one of the things people bring up as a criticism!
You don't have to be 100% on board to enjoy yourself, but, like; you gotta be adjacent.
Not necessarily but there is an INSANE level of discordance between liking a show about diversity, inclusion, differences in others being celebrated, trying to avoid violence, acceptance, etc and then supporting Gul Dukat. I just don't understand what they like about TOS if they hate the messages in it.
I mean, I get it. Because if you look at it a certain way, it’s about an all-powerful military ship captained by a White Human Male saving the ‘savage’ (pale-skinned often human-looking) alien cultures and beating up those troublemaking dark-skinned aliens (and monstrous-looking ones) who are never going to act civilized because it’s just in their blood, so they can’t help themselves, don’cha know.
Admittedly it was a bit more obvious in the original series, but still. Unfortunately, while Star Trek is a wonderful example of a utopian post-scarcity culture that comes together despite its differences, it’s also a good example of unconscious bias making its way into art. I doubt the creators, Roddenberry especially, set out purposely to write things that way, but the biases he grew up around still crept in.
I consider the Culture books to be another example; despite the author talking about how members of the Culture are so unconcerned with sexuality or norms that they often even swap genders because they feel like it, none of the protagonists are anything less than Manly Men or Beautiful Women In Makeup. You never meet a MC who’s a genderswapped person, or even a guy in a dress.
Hmm, now that you mention it, I don't specifically remember much about the main characters. They were all sort of 'vehicles' for the plot. Buuuuuuuut I do know there were 'other' perspectives, as in the one male-presenting protagonist who used a culture gun to blow up a ship in order to save his lover from the evil mafia/gang leader. Said lover was also definitely male.
Okay, shit. I just went and read the summary of the short story. The protagonist was a female-to-male, with a male lover. So congratulations on getting that wrong.
Leaving aside for the moment that a lot of the protagonists are deliberately chosen to be from outside the Culture proper specifically to give an outsider's perspective there's definitely a lot of pov characters that talk about how they felt like gender swapping that decade and such.
I find a huge amount of the media I enjoy has messages embedded in it that I disagree with. As an easy example, The Dark Knight incorporated a pretty clear defense of the war on terror's erosion of civil liberties. Pretty good viewing experience, though.
So it would not confuse me to find a regressive minded person who enjoyed Star Trek despite disagreeing with it. What's bizarre is that what I end up encountering instead are regressive people who insist that they love Star Trek and that they've always agreed with its messaging until recently. Either they're lying or they are inconceivably media illiterate. Maybe they're all bots, because I really can't understand that level of delusion.
I actually get this one. Someone else opined on lead poisoning, but I really think it's just the overton window shift, propaganda from fox news, and social groupthink. The overton window has definitely been shifting right since reagan (and probably since fdr, but I'm not old enough to remember what that time was like). As our general culture became more extreme, fox news changed as well. Not only was it covering republican/conservative foolishness with palatable assholes, but now it's pushing the stuff that was never said out loud.
Combine all that with the way that politics has now become entrenched, and increasingly your social surroundings are dictated by political leanings, AND that the extremists are the most likely to be vocal, people are being pulled into ever more extreme views by dint of not wanting to cause a commotion and then slowly acquiescing to the views. I think we've all seen several of the 'how did my parents become fascists?' questions on various lemmy communities. People who may once have not wanted 'those types' nearby but would have stopped and helped them if they saw them stranded on the side of the road have now shifted into rabid hate, and would throw something as they passed.
I can totally see someone who once thought the first interracial kiss on star trek was silly, and not for them, but were otherwise okay with it now spitting venom at the actors/directors/writers/producers for daring to foist such horrors on them and **the kids (, ooooohh!!!!!!) on tv.