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.
I have met conservative Trek fans. I think some people really do watch stuff without ever thinking about it beyond its superficial spectacle.
It’s like conservatives with [insert 99% of media they consume, excluding Fox “news”]
There are a surprisingly high number of educated conservatives in the high tech fields, engineers/programmers/etc.
It’s sad :/
One of the smartest people i knew was a former systems designer for NASA, I live close enough to the Cape to watch every launch from my backyard, anyway, this guy definitely worked for NASA, had his office decorated with the Patents that he held, really smart guy, complete conspiracy nut who was immediately on the Trump train.
I’ve always loved conspiracies too and we got along through that stuff, but then he went down the rabbit hole of Right wing and Russian propaganda/disinformation and no matter how much i tried to prove everything wrong, with good evidence, he went deeper down that hole, he died during COVID and one of the last things he sent me was about the “stolen election”, it was after January 6, to which my reply was “do you mean the 2016 election or the 2000 election?” and never got a response back and I’d heard he passed away a few months later from a mutual friend.
The educated laborers that perform highly skilled labor convince themselves that they have it better than everyone else because Capitalism worked and selected for them, it’s a comfy and delusional position to hold that requires having absolutely zero self-awareness. Unfortunately common.
Same with conservative Fallout fans that somehow unironically think it’s pro-Capitalism, despite nearly every instance of actual Capitalism and not just bartering being absurdly evil.
I couldn’t imagine not being able to enjoy a show without believing in it.
“This show is phenomenal, I will describe myself as a fan. I hate its ideology and the vision that drove it.”
I can’t name a single show like that for me.
The non-woke Trekkies (or do they call themselves Trekkers? ) didn’t think about interracial kisses or the post-scarcity society in which capitalists were small-time traders. They see Captain Kirk running roughshod over other societies and turning them into America (see The Apple and A Taste of Armageddon ) which was more about 60s Hollywood imagining cold war United States as the height of civilization.
The Next Generation dared to imagine a more internationalist sense of culture and got into the notion that even extremely weird aliens might be deserving of civil rights. But by DS9 the Federation was reimagined as a failing coalition with multiple rising renegade factions and worlds teeming with disregarded peoples. The story became less about rising to ideals and more about dealing with grimdark realities and compromising principles to preserve status quo.
Then the Kelvin Timeline Reboot got J. J. Abrams’d and Paramount got litigeous about fan films it previously endorsed and I became so disgusted with the state of Trek, I divested myself from it. Star Wars would suffer a similar fate, and I don’t watch many movies these days.
It was mostly indignation over me not kissing his ass and telling him he’s right, I’m generally one of the few in my family that will stand up to him at all never the less consistently, he’s pretty charming and the family that have never lived with him all think he’s just great usually, but he always has this condescending way of telling me “you weren’t alive then so you don’t know” as if there aren’t interviews with Roddenberry that confirms these things, or if it’s broader politics, as if encyclopedias and news article didn’t exist back then. Then when I knocked down that argument he just defaulted back to “well it’s too woke and preachy now” while citing examples of preachyness that are just examples of inclusivity in the show.
I’ll say this, my pop apparently helped do clean up at ground zero after 9/11, he was a guard at Rikers at the time and I could see him volunteering for it, but he’s also kind of a bullshit artists so we’re never sure what’s fully the truth. However fact or fiction he’s never been the same since that day, we all lost a bunch of people we knew, and we all have a lot of friends who lost close relatives and it impacted not only us but our community, because it’s a fire firefighter town we live in, we live next to the former chief and down the block from the station house and my pop hangs out at the bar near the station house. After 9/11 he fell down the Fox News hole and never was the same again, and now i gotta hear some “woke” bullshit every time he talks about something he seems to not understand.
So overall the reaction was a lot of indignation, a little bit of arguing followed by a hasty hang up.
Your father isn’t narcissistic, you’re only calling that because you hate him and you know everyone else hates narcissists, so you’re trying to draw an association. It’s ableist. People who hate narcisstists aren’t fit to like Star Trek.
You’re no psychologist or therapist. Nor do you know OP or their father. Which is how we know you’re no psychologist. You’re not qualified to speak at all. But you find yourself compelled to. Because you identify with the father. And defending him is defending yourself. Which uuuuh says volumes about you, but no one else.
I don’t identify with the father, the father is an asshole. I identify with the innocent narcissists OP is trying to slander by saying their father is one of them. Try paying attention to what I’m saying instead of projecting every bad thing you can think of onto me because I’m disabled, you ableist dipshit.
At this point media illiteracy is a requirement to be a Republican.
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.
Trek has no money in the Federation; no barter. Nobody who’s watched a season of any Trek show can avoid noticing that. It might be a bit murky with characters like Harry Mudd, or the Ferengi, but those operate outside the Federation; you’d have to be daft to miss that. TNG was more careful with their “capitalist” characters like Kivas Fajo, who was clearly a collector and trader rather than a travelling salesman.
Right-wing free-market Trekkies are self-deluding.
“ Star Wars is bad now”
I mean yah, the vertical integration, means tested everything, nostalgia bating and assembly line techniques that Disney does sure do ruin otherwise fine properties.
“No, I don’t mind that, that’s just good business. I just hate the gay people who kissed in the background”
Oh, OH ok, you’re just an idiot…
