• skisnow@lemmy.ca
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    1 day ago

    I guess the demographics are focussing on the LBGTQ’s

    I’ve seen sentiments like this expressed even by otherwise normal people I know in real life, not just internet blowhards, and I struggle to get my head around the sheer lack of self-awareness that comes with it.

    Think about how it makes you feel to not be represented for 30 minutes of airtime. That’s what minorities deal with for the other 23 hours 30 minutes of mainstream programming per day.

    • Bennyboybumberchums@lemmy.world
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      5 hours ago

      I dont give a shit. Im Scottish, Im almost never represented in Tv and movies by my nationality. But so what? What I look like and who are love, have fuck all to do with representing me. I dont want to see “ME”. The only representation that matters is character. Who a person is, not what they are. What they are means nothing. You can black, and be any number of things. Being black means… nothing. Just like being white means nothing. Being black or white doing make you good or bad, or smart or dumb, or interesting or boring.

      • skisnow@lemmy.ca
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        5 hours ago

        Not having to give a shit is a privilege you enjoy. You’re trying to claim some sort of minority status when you’re very heavily in the majority in your own country, and nobody elsewhere is complaining about how “that show didn’t need to have a Scottish character in it, that’s forced diversity”. There’s a ton of Scottish actors who get cast in roles outside Scotland without needing their Scottishness justified in the plot.

        Come back when being Scottish makes you a hate target for major religious groups worldwide and then talk about how you don’t care about representation.

    • Rikudou_Sage@lemmings.world
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      17 hours ago

      I mean, it’s very obviously not that, some people just like to pretend it is.

      Like, no one is going to complain that Brokeback Mountain is too gay (well, some people will, but those are bona fide bigots). But when you shove two men kissing in every other scene for no reason at all, it gets on my nerves.

      And I’m not talking about scenes that make sense and where perhaps having two gay dudes is cool, but the shows people complain about are not that.

      As an example the Netflix Sandman - an otherwise brilliant adaptation which for some reason puts gay scenes everywhere, especially where they don’t make sense. What’s the show trying to convey? That all day dudes are whores who have sex with each other just because they’re gay?

      And this shit is everywhere - there’s a story or whatever and suddenly a forced gay scene happens and the story wouldn’t change a single bit if it was skipped.

      So, chances are that your “otherwise normal people” friends are just tired of bullshit being shoved down their throats and breaking immersion.

      Make a romcom if you want gay dudes constantly being horny, for fuck’s sake.

      • skisnow@lemmy.ca
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        11 hours ago

        You never hear the phrase “forced straight scene”. Straight people don’t need a plot reason to be onscreen, and yet in your worldview gay people have to justify their existence each and every time. And no, it’s not “everywhere”, it just maybe feels like that if you’re a bigot.

        You seem to have just about enough self-awareness to realize that you were being called out, but not quite enough not to just double down on it. The limits of your tolerance seem to be that you’ll allow LGBTQ representation but only if it’s put in a clearly marked corner where you don’t have to look at it.

        You really need to spend more time thinking about just why you feel so triggered.

        • Rikudou_Sage@lemmings.world
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          5 hours ago

          You never hear the phrase “forced straight scene”.

          Oh, you do. Not using those same words, but people have been complaining about random sex scenes since forever.

          Straight people don’t need a plot reason to be onscreen

          They do - if I have to know whether they’re into noodles or lasagnas, there better be a good reason for that.

          in your worldview gay people have to justify their existence each and every time

          Wtf? Is projecting homophobia onto people your hobby or something? Fuck your strawman. If fallacies is your way to communicate, this is my last message to you.


          I feel so triggered, because every time someone even offers the opinion of “do we really need so much unnecessary gay scenes in everything,” people like you come and go “akchually you’re just a bigot because you don’t like bad cinematic devices that are just virtue signalling.”

          Anyway, changed my mind, this is my last message to you anyway, no need to have people like you in my life.

          • bramkaandorp@lemmy.world
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            4 hours ago

            Gay scenes, or gay sex scenes?

            Merely kissing doesn’t count, because straight people kissing doesn’t trigger nearly the same response as gay people kissing, exposing clear bigotry on the part of the complainants.

  • klemptor@startrek.website
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    2 days ago

    Discovery was legitimately awful in many ways, but not because it was progressive. It was awful because the writing was trash, it over-used CGI in many ways, including breaking canon with holographic interfaces, ruined the fucking Klingons, had a constant melodramatic after-school special vibe in which characters were constantly stopping in the middle of an emergency to talk about their feelings and kumbaya-cry it out…I could go on.

    But one thing I thought Discovery got right was the relationship between Stamets and Culber. It felt natural and lived-in, and I was really happy to see that. Because representation matters!

    • Bennyboybumberchums@lemmy.world
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      5 hours ago

      Representation, does not matter. Your skin colour, your sex, your gender, who you love, dont matter. Only your character matters. Who you are as a person. If you need to see yourself in tv and movies, thats what we call in the business “Narcissism”. But seeing the qualities that you share, well, now thats something people want to see.

      But you are right. The one thing that Disco did right, was in making these characters just characters. They werent special, they werent given special attention. They were just members of the crew like everyone else. THIS is how star trek is supposed to do it. By making it “normal” or everyday or regular. However you wanna say it. But then later on when they introduce the non binary character, they make a song and dance about it. Like this kid in year 3000 is going to have to “be brave” about correcting someone on their pronouns. Like Star Trek hasnt met thousands of other species of all walks and variations and no one in it would bat an eye. Having a lingering shot of Stamets beaming with pride is not Star Trek. To do that in a star trek way, Stamets should have just said “sorry” and they move on instantly.

      Back in the day, they didnt make a big song and dance about Uhura on the bridge. She was just there. It was “normal”. This is how Star Trek should be doing stuff like this. Because thats what star trek is, or was. Star Trek is supposed to be about showing us who we could be, not showing us who we are.

    • MajesticTechie@feddit.uk
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      1 day ago

      had a constant melodramatic after-school special vibe in which characters were constantly stopping in the middle of an emergency to talk about their feelings and kumbaya-cry it out

      Nail on the head.

    • Dasus@lemmy.world
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      2 days ago

      Honestly I don’t think it was any of those, really. Not that I’m dismissing them, but I don’t think they were the central issue.

      It was just cheap action fantasy disguised as Star Trek, without really the spirit of Trek. It was individualistic and character-centric, as opposed to the classic TNG vibe of a family and an adventure that just happens on you while you’re trying to just do peaceful exploration.

      That’s what SNW works so well, it abides by the traditional formula.

  • hddsx@lemmy.ca
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    2 days ago

    It took me forever to figure out why the bottom picture was “bad”…

    • helpImTrappedOnline@lemmy.world
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      2 days ago

      I recall there being angry letters sent about how it was inappropriate for a kid, and who ever responded basically said [heavily paraphrasing] ‘there’s guns, violence and death and you draw the line at two women kissing? Fuck off’

    • krunklom@lemmy.zip
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      2 days ago

      one theory is that ds9 was fucking great and discovery waa poo poo.

      which had fuck all to do with gay people. I mean, I guess it may have in a sense now thst I think abojt it, but only in the narrowest of ways and as an overt symptom of 2 dimensional character writing. Paul Stamets’ partner’s whole character was basically “I’m a gay doctor”, which combined with “my whole character is that I have anxiety” Tilly and Michale “I have problems with authority” Burnham really show how weak the writing was.

      which, if you stop and think about it, has anout as much do with being gay as flowers do with the plot of The Room.

      • observantTrapezium@lemmy.ca
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        2 days ago

        100% right. Plus they were late to the party: the Shatner-Nichols kiss was absolutely groundbreaking on television in 1968, but a gay kiss on streaming in 2017 was not.

        Some people hated Discovery because of progressive values, sure, but I hated it because these values were packaged in such flat characters as you said, participating in sci-fi stories that were just plain bad.

        • krunklom@lemmy.zip
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          1 day ago

          The only reason I disliked any of the gay was that it was pandering. Everyone was gay first and a person second.

          Maybe I’m a bit backwards in this but I seriously could not give less of a shit who someone chooses to fuck and be romantically involved with.

          I do. not. fucking. care.

          I don’t care if your partner is the same gender as you, a different sex, or a fucking level 13 druid owl otherkin.

          It has zero effect on me.

          Which also means that if your whole personality boils down to “I’m gay” or “I’m straight” then your whole personality is SUPER uninteresting.

          It applies to art, too. Pandering is lazy, it is not engaging, and it is straight up bad writing.

      • 13igTyme@lemmy.world
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        2 days ago

        I tried to watch Discovery. Forced myself through season one and only could manage a few episodes in season two.

        The writing is just so bad, I can’t handle it. This coming from someone that regularly rewatches older Trek and DOESN’T SKIP the few awful episodes.

        • Deceptichum@quokk.auOPM
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          2 days ago

          I forced myself through every episode. It picked up and I got kinda into it and then crying space baby shit happened and threw it all away.

          • observantTrapezium@lemmy.ca
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            1 day ago

            By the point we saw the crying space baby, my expectations were already very low 😂

            The whole concept of The Burn annoyed me from the beginning. It’s not that it makes less sense than warp drive or subspace comms, but it somehow didn’t fit with the established “science” of Star Trek.

  • Blackmist@feddit.uk
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    2 days ago

    If you think gays are the worst thing about Discovery, you haven’t watched Discovery…

    • glitchdx@lemmy.world
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      1 day ago

      I watched this episode and I’ve never been more embarrassed to be gay.

      I also watched a couple other episodes (out of order), and I’m confident that I didn’t miss much because each episode is 10% plot and 90% “let’s talk about what you missed while you were watching tiktok”.

      I think the latter is the bigger offense.

    • Clay_pidgin@sh.itjust.works
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      2 days ago

      Depends on what you mean by interracial. Lucy and Desi (I love Lucy) were pretty controversial at the time, and that was before Kirk and Uhura.

    • Aganim@lemmy.world
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      1 day ago

      While the first interracial kiss on TV is still debated, Kirk/Uhura most definitely wasn’t it. This was '68 or '69, on Dutch TV we already had the first interracial kiss in 1959 and there are other American examples before '68. The actress from that Dutch scene passed away this year at 95 by the way. Unfortunately I only have a Dutch source, but here you go: https://nos.nl/artikel/2574061

      It might not look like much these days, but in '59 it made the headlines in international news.

    • rottingleaf@lemmy.worldBanned
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      2 days ago

      Lucas is married to a black woman, Star Wars in general is full of aliens representing, ahem, different races, Star Wars 1980 and 1983 have Lando, and Star Wars prequels have a few black people on screen.

      With Star Wars 1977 the story was that most of the people in the background were hired from the union in London when filming, probably not many black chaps there then. Or so I’ve read recently.

      About interracial relationships - yes, not much of that on screen, if we don’t count the heavily implied Leia-Jabba pairing.

        • rottingleaf@lemmy.worldBanned
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          2 days ago

          Well, I suppose there were also limitations to casting black people as Imperial military personnel (those people reminiscent of the British Empire and Nazis) and Tatooine, being somewhat reminiscent of Texas with Middle-Eastern additional vibes, too may not have been too suitable. But … whatever.

          I don’t know, maybe Lucas even was racist sometime around 1977, but by 1980 no more. Who the hell knows.