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Owlofcreamcheese posted:That feels like another thing the show tells us about the show but rarely is shown in events. Star Trek really doesn’t seem optimistic. Nothing really seems that good for anyone. Everything mostly seems awful everywhere. We can assume off screen maybe there is happy people but every planet they ever show is always a real bad place to be. I mean, most of the places we see in Star Trek are outside the Federation itself, and almost all outside the "core" Federation...like sometimes we see colony worlds. And generally, except when that Starfleet Admiral tried his military coup in DS9, Earth, Vulcan and wherever look pretty content. (Well, Vulcan seems pretty physically unpleasant, but the Vulcans seem to like it). We don't see any sort of widespread misery or anything on Federation worlds.
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Feb 14, 2021 04:27
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So is Risa basically a brothel?
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Feb 14, 2021 04:35
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Sanguinia posted:Yeah, even in the post-scarcity full-luxury gay space communism of the Federation there are still problems and conflicts What evidence in the shows or movies is there that the Federation actually has post-scarcity communism? Or any kind of communism? What I've seen in the show is people talking about how great the Federation is - a lot - but not much evidence that the things they say about the Federation are more than jingoistic propaganda. -Visible class differences between aristocrats like Picard who inherit significant wealth and lumpens who don't -Mining operations shown exclusively on outlying worlds, including space-based strip mining -Military forces described both as a "humanitarian and peacekeeping armada" and a scientific organization that seems to spend most of its time and effort on the traditional imperial tasks of locating new targets for colonial expansion and fighting rival nations -Peripheral colonies with failed Federation governments like Turkana IV -Domestic insurgency -Quasi-governmental privately owned corporate states that are Federation-affiliated but not actually under Federation jurisdiction -Clearly visible gap in both living standards overall and presence of capitalist accumulation between core worlds (like Earth) and non-core worlds (like the Bolian homeworld) as well as colonies established purely for resource extraction and also "Federation protectorates" which is a term not well defined in the shows or movies but typically associated with annexation policies -Insistence by military officers that the Federation has advanced, highly rigorous government ethics; simultaneously the Federation has at least one "rogue" national security agency that kills enemies of the state at will while the official government apparatus turns a blind eye
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Feb 14, 2021 04:43
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Eric Cantonese posted:So is Risa basically a brothel? Pretty much. I mean, it also has beaches. Meanwhile, here's Dr. Sarah Taber, whose academic field is farming and land use patterns, going into a really deep dive into what we see of agriculture on earth in Star Trek, and some very disturbing implications that can be drawn from it (multi tweet thread) https://mobile.twitter.com/SarahTaber_bww/status/1200166974292140033 The Oldest Man posted:-Visible class differences between aristocrats like Picard who inherit significant wealth and lumpens who don't Or, as Taber puts it in the tweets https://mobile.twitter.com/SarahTaber_bww/status/1200230686763954181 Epicurius fucked around with this message at 04:51 on Feb 14, 2021 |
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Feb 14, 2021 04:43
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Star Trek's society and economy is obviously not based on any form of communism, even a layman's analysis of how the Federation economy functions would make that obvious. Its was a joke. Also jesus christ, I've read some whoppers in the old "Star Trek is a dystopia," category, but bravo for reaching news heights, D&D Scifi Thread. Usually for them to be this over the top the writers would be Randian Libertarians out to destroy Liberals with Facts And Logic about how Star Trek is actually advocating for Right Wing Ideology.
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Feb 14, 2021 05:19
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I mean, Enterprise is. Openly.
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Feb 14, 2021 05:24
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The Oldest Man posted:I mean, Enterprise is. Openly. "Making Star Trek significantly worse," has been on my list of George Bush's crimes for many a year.
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Feb 14, 2021 05:30
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I mean, I don't think any of them are actually right wing. Even in Enterprise, the whole Xindi arc, which is the show's equivalent of 9/11 and the War on Terror is ended when the Enterprise finds out the Xindi aren't actually hostile to Earth...they've just been tricked, and the few Xindi who don't believe that and steal the superweapon are stopped with the help of Shran and his Andorians, who have come to trust the Enterprise, because they've been working out peace between the Andorians and the Vulcans. I mean, it would have been easy to portray the Xindi as naturally evil, but they go out of their way not to do that. The real weakness of Star Trek TNG in terms of the premise is that, while they talk about how Earth is a utopia where there's no more poverty or greed, they don't actually think about the implications of what that means or show how that works, probably because they don't know how it works and because it's boring. It's like how, when Iain Banks was asked why his Culture series spends so little time in the Cullture itself, answered something like, writing about utopias is really boring. Not much happens. So he set his books outside the Culture, in societies that still had problems that the protagonists had to deal with.
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Feb 14, 2021 05:43
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Epicurius posted:The real weakness of Star Trek TNG in terms of the premise is that, while they talk about how Earth is a utopia where there's no more poverty or greed, they don't actually think about the implications of what that means or show how that works, probably because they don't know how it works and because it's boring. It's like how, when Iain Banks was asked why his Culture series spends so little time in the Cullture itself, answered something like, writing about utopias is really boring. Not much happens. So he set his books outside the Culture, in societies that still had problems that the protagonists had to deal with. Yeah, the only real reason, narratively speaking, to go into detail on how a Utopia works is if your story's conflict is going to be about some kind of ideological or practical challenge to how it works, so that you can either have it withstand that challenge or collapse in the face of it, and thus express your theme. This was at the heart of a lot of Deep Space Nine stories. They found identifiable elements of the Federation's utopian-ness, and had the Dominion or Section 31 or whoever explicitly attack or exploit it so that the heroes could then overcome it or fail, and either way take a lesson away about the ideals the Federation stands for.
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Feb 14, 2021 05:55
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This is a really good thread and kind of reminds me that in addition to the unseen nature of a large part of the economic apparatus, we also don't actually see large parts of the military apparatus. We know that the characters we spend about 95% of our time with in Trek are officers who went to Starfleet Academy; we also know that a large portion of Starfleet's personnel never went to the academy With the exception of O'Brien, who's a very senior NCO with decades of experience, we never spend substantial time with any enlisted characters. We get some hints here and there that Starfleet's military aristocracy is riding around on the shoulders of an army of underclass military labor who exist for the most part just off screen (O'Brien's complaints when a junior officer rides his enlisted subordinates too hard, for example; or some of the comments made in the DS9 episodes where they're doing a lot of high-casualty ground combat) but I think my favorite weird dystopian hit on the military class divide in Starfleet is this one from Voyager:  The bottom of the ship where the proles work is literally built like steerage: the ceilings are lower, the hallways are narrower, the doors are smaller, the lighting is cheaper. Just to make it a little more stark, after six years in the Delta Quadrant with the same 140 or so people and nowhere else to go and no one else to meet, there are still places on the ship that Captain Janeway is unfamiliar with and people she doesn't know. She comments on this being upsetting in the episode in question, but it begs the question of what kind of anti-class-mixing institutional culture is so prevalent in Starfleet that it took six years for her to realize what she was and wasn't doing. Makes you wonder what some of those parts of the Enteprise D we never saw looked like, seeing as we had no main enlisted characters on TNG and there are huge parts of the ship on the technical schematics that the show never went anywhere near.
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Feb 14, 2021 05:57
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Sanguinia posted:Yeah, the only real reason, narratively speaking, to go into detail on how a Utopia works is if your story's conflict is going to be about some kind of ideological or practical challenge to how it works, so that you can either have it withstand that challenge or collapse in the face of it, and thus express your theme. Right. And they also put it outside Federation territory with a lot of non-Federation main and recurring characters, so that they could challenge Federation and ideology, while at the same time showing how these characters grew more sympathetic to the Federation and its values over time. I remember Deep Space Nine got a lot of criticism from fans for this sort of stuff. They thought it was too dark, or "not really Star Trek", but it's really my favorite Star Trek series, partly for those reasons.
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Feb 14, 2021 05:59
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Epicurius posted:Right. And they also put it outside Federation territory with a lot of non-Federation main and recurring characters, so that they could challenge Federation and ideology, while at the same time showing how these characters grew more sympathetic to the Federation and its values over time. I remember Deep Space Nine got a lot of criticism from fans for this sort of stuff. They thought it was too dark, or "not really Star Trek", but it's really my favorite Star Trek series, partly for those reasons. Deep Space Nine also went through the trouble of fleshing out a lot of those challenges to the Federation so that they themselves could withstand scrutiny. So many TNG episodes that are about Federation ideological aesops are taking on planets who's entire civilization amounts to a Straw Man Argument. Deep Space Nine, just to use one example, goes out of its way to more fully explain the functions of Klingon society, how their government works, how their Honor Code is meant to function in specific contexts and why it doesn't always follow those rules, the meaning of class in their society and how its evolved in recent generations, even how the likes of laborers, lawyers, and restaurateurs fit into their "warrior race." By making the Klingons more of a comprehensible species and a more comprehensible society, it makes them a more compelling antagonist because you imagine what might result if they actually triumph in their ideological challenges to the Federation, and thus the stakes of the Federation's success or failure are more meaningful.
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Feb 14, 2021 06:06
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Sanguinia posted:Star Trek's society and economy is obviously not based on any form of communism, even a layman's analysis of how the Federation economy functions would make that obvious. Its was a joke. Uh you get there is a difference between arguing that the themes are intentionally conservative and right-wing, and just discussing the difference between what we're told and what we're shown on screen right?
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Feb 14, 2021 06:11
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Sanguinia posted:So many TNG episodes that are about Federation ideological aesops are taking on planets who's entire civilization amounts to a Straw Man Argument. I mean, to be fair, TOS did the same thing. A lot of episode were very much about hitting you over the head with a message, be it, "Racism is bad" or "Just because something looks like a monster doesn't mean you can't reason with it", or "The Vietnam War is complicated, ok, and while balance of power arguments make logical sense, there's still going to be a cost in human misery so I don't feel good about any of it,"or "Sometimes Joan Crawford has to die to keep Hitler from taking over even if you're in love with her and don't want her to." For whatever reason, the TOS ones seemed a lot less preachy about them, although maybe I just had the advantage of time and political distance.
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Feb 14, 2021 06:24
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VitalSigns posted:Uh you get there is a difference between arguing that the themes are intentionally conservative and right-wing, and just discussing the difference between what we're told and what we're shown on screen right? The most interesting parts of Star Trek are when they can't avoid showing us things that are meant to be part of the unquestioned utopia and we get little glimpses of what's behind that curtain.
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Feb 14, 2021 06:29
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We already have perfectly fine gem quality diamonds made synthetically that are much cheaper than mined diamonds, and yet people keep paying more for "natural" diamonds (even with DeBeers of all outfits going in on the synthetic market). Makes sense that the same kind of cultural prejudice could continue with other products. In a post scarcity society, you can still market authenticity, whatever that means in the setting context. That seems as plausible to me as cultural preservation. It'd also fill some plot holes indirectly dependent on scarcity, like why Klingons would ever be concerned about access to bloodwine of a particular vintage. (Which was probably a another one of those replicator-can't-do-it things, now that I think about it.) This does not undercut the rest of Dr. Taber's analysis, just saying. e: I do find the question of wasteful use of clean water a lot less interesting. Seems as easy to invent a handwavey reason someone is using or exporting large volumes of salts as it is to invent one for digestible organics. eviltastic fucked around with this message at 08:07 on Feb 14, 2021 |
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Feb 14, 2021 07:42
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The Oldest Man posted:The most interesting parts of Star Trek are when they can't avoid showing us things that are meant to be part of the unquestioned utopia and we get little glimpses of what's behind that curtain. Honestly I kind of just want to say 'everyone go read Trekonomics', because I really can't do it justice. eviltastic posted:We already have perfectly fine gem quality diamonds made synthetically that are much cheaper than mined diamonds, and yet people keep paying more for "natural" diamonds (even with DeBeers of all outfits going in on the synthetic market). Makes sense that the same kind of cultural prejudice could continue with other products. In a post scarcity society, you can still market authenticity, whatever that means in the setting context. That seems as plausible to me as cultural preservation. It'd also fill some plot holes indirectly dependent on scarcity, like why Klingons would ever be concerned about access to bloodwine of a particular vintage. (Which was probably a another one of those replicator-can't-do-it things, now that I think about it.)
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Feb 14, 2021 11:42
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Epicurius posted:I mean, most of the places we see in Star Trek are outside the Federation itself, and almost all outside the "core" Federation...like sometimes we see colony worlds. And generally, except when that Starfleet Admiral tried his military coup in DS9, Earth, Vulcan and wherever look pretty content. (Well, Vulcan seems pretty physically unpleasant, but the Vulcans seem to like it). We don't see any sort of widespread misery or anything on Federation worlds. “We are a communist post scarcity utopia but not for these guys who do mining or settling or factory work or exploration” seems like there is just one rich country and a bunch of third world
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Feb 14, 2021 13:05
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Owlofcreamcheese posted:“We are a communist post scarcity utopia but not for these guys who do mining or settling or factory work or exploration” seems like there is just one rich country and a bunch of third world I mean exploration will by definition take them out of the utopian society they control and expose them to "worse" ones? And the show gets a lot of mileage out of dilemmas based on "this place is poo poo but we're not supposed to force our values on others so what do you do about space hitlers?"
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Feb 14, 2021 16:18
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sean10mm posted:I mean exploration will by definition take them out of the utopian society they control and expose them to "worse" ones? And the show gets a lot of mileage out of dilemmas based on "this place is poo poo but we're not supposed to force our values on others so what do you do about space hitlers?" Clearly it's a fictional show and can just write whatever they want. It's just a show that tells us that it's optimistic and stuff more than it shows us that. Like it's not committing any sort of unique sin, and lots of stuff like it are written in the same way, but you could imagine someone writing a story where meeting a new alien they were mostly generally nice and good, the default was people could get along, things like poverty were being worked on even if they weren't fully solved yet. New solutions were things that helped people instead of a trap to turn evil. etc. Like star trek isn't that show and it doesn't have to be, but it's a show that constantly talks like it is that show, it will tell us in the future mankind ends racism and capitalism and war, then tells us that all happens off screen where we never get to see and shows us what seems like a major core of the society having none of that at all. O'brian still has to work late to get his daughter a birthday present, the federation is multicultural but you still get space racism from your doctor if your a data robot, most things outside the norm you grew up in are evil and will kill you, and so on.
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Feb 14, 2021 16:57
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Owlofcreamcheese posted:Clearly it's a fictional show and can just write whatever they want. It's just a show that tells us that it's optimistic and stuff more than it shows us that. Part of this is obviously because the show is commenting on current events so of course there are proxies for our current problems. If no relatable problems exist in the future then who is the audience? A lot of Star Trek is lazy and dumb but some of their worst poo poo ever was made when TNG leaned into exactly the kind of presentation you're talking about wanting.
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Feb 14, 2021 17:07
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I gotta say, I had never thought "what is the feedstock for all the replicators" before but I had a laugh when it was proposed that it was corn. Too perfect Anyway, Star Trek is communist in the rhetorical sense. It is clearly a society that has not built it yet so can best be described as merely socialist, following upon the Posadist path of nuclear war leading into alien intervention with the involvement of sea mammals to the eventual end of a technological elevation of humanity above capitalism Obviously there is no escape from contradictions, and no theory claims there ever will be, so you get things like mining colonies and barstaff strikes in deep space
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Feb 14, 2021 17:11
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What I always liked about Star Trek is that it's a proudly political Asimovian conceit that manages to avoid all the pitfalls that made his books so hit or miss. It is fundamentally a show about people sitting at a big table and talking and despite this was one of the most popular of all time. Incredible.
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Feb 14, 2021 17:13
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sean10mm posted:Part of this is obviously because the show is commenting on current events so of course there are proxies for our current problems. If no relatable problems exist in the future then who is the audience? Like of course the show would be too boring with zero conflict, but also the show never really says anything interesting about being a brighter or post capitalist future. It's never like the episodes have a conflict of showing some egalitarian system working then come into peril, then end being solved and showing the system works and was strong enough to be tested or anything like that, just showing systems breaking down and being flimsy.
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Feb 14, 2021 17:18
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Epicurius posted:Pretty much. I mean, it also has beaches. I actually find that a quite believable land use in full luxury gay space communism. Especially if it is FLGSC that grew out of a liberal social democracy, I can definitely see a transition state where there's a 1970's British Coal Industry propped up by policy not only once the mines aren't profitably productive, but then coal stops being a thing anyone uses because technology. Once you get to the point that almost any material thing is so cheap that any person can have as much of it as they want without having to work for it, you stop needing to pay miners to mine coal but at that point what's the reason to remove the mine? The interesting economic questions in Trek to me are what happens with the disconnect between human motivations and governmental needs implied by plot devices. TNG in particular is all in on people doing stuff because they feel like it, not to support their material needs. This should result in an Earth with way more philosophers and artists and artisans because those things have more intrinsic reward than, say, being a mass production machinist. But there probably are artisanal hand tool machinists who make elaborate parts with difficult tools because its fun and challenging to do that. The "Trek: Homefront" show we've been hypothesizing looks like a society made up entirely of YouTube nice enthusiast channels. Where this doesn't square with the narrative world is that they out of necessity claim that unobtanium X can't be made in a replicator. If dilithium isn't replicatable but you need it to build up a fleet of ships that can prevent the Dominion from conquering you, how does the Federation produce enough dilithium without changing their society or relying entirely on the enthusiasm of dilithium mining enthusiasts?
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Feb 14, 2021 19:58
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Centurium posted:I actually find that a quite believable land use in full luxury gay space communism. Especially if it is FLGSC that grew out of a liberal social democracy, I can definitely see a transition state where there's a 1970's British Coal Industry propped up by policy not only once the mines aren't profitably productive, but then coal stops being a thing anyone uses because technology. Once you get to the point that almost any material thing is so cheap that any person can have as much of it as they want without having to work for it, you stop needing to pay miners to mine coal but at that point what's the reason to remove the mine? Whaaaat Coal mining is horrible and ruins your health, the only reason people cling to it or the idea of it is because of a legacy of militant industrial labor activism that turned coal mining into a way into an actual secure livelihood in areas wracked by poverty, and people (rightly) don't have any faith that our current economic system would replace that with anything if coal went away. People might grow grapes for fun if they had a secure livelihood provided for them regardless, they would not spend their life breathing coal dust underground if they didn't have to do it to feed and house their family.
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Feb 14, 2021 20:10
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I think it's better to just simply take them at their word in the show when they say that the world is beyond wealth and inequality, because the alternative is to scrutinize background stuff and  "IT'S A SECRET DYSTOPIA!!!" like you're a nerdy teenager on the TVTropes forums.https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zh1pfrjikkM Like, the real reason why there's row crops irrigated by water and corn in Iowa, and cramped lower decks on the Voyager, and people living in beige and grey apartments with the same Crate and Barrel decorative objects is because the writers and show staff were and are a few dozen people in Hollywood in the 1980s-2000s. They were working on deadlines on a serialized show, or a Hollywood movie, not a focus group of leftist sociologists, economists, and futurists workshopping a plan for a utopian future. They were clearly blinkered by the limitations of the society they are living in, the ideologies they grew up with, the time constraints of their job, and the ultimate word of Hollywood studio corporate executives. Yes, a hypothetical group of futurists could have come up with a much more sociologically and economically robust way of depicting a far-future post-scarcity society based on luxury communism, but the showmakers didn't have that expertise, and were focusing on trying to make a show about "X of the day future thingy". Details and errata of how daily life in a post-scarcity future would actually be are obviously going to be put by the wayside in favor of dealing with the characters and personal drama.
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Feb 14, 2021 20:28
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FWIW Star Trek isn't the only major take on such a post-scarcity society in Sci-Fi --- there is another outstanding one written by people with very different background. (Strugatsky brothers work is generally great... except for gender representation. Modern Russian Sci-Fi is heavily into militant imperialism, though, and would probably fit the original premise of the thread much better).
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Feb 15, 2021 01:13
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DrSunshine posted:I think it's better to just simply take them at their word in the show when they say that the world is beyond wealth and inequality, because the alternative is to scrutinize background stuff and The most dystopian thing about is how the aristocrat military officer POV characters of command rank are constantly talking about how Earth has solved all its problems and is a paradise when every look we get at it suggests that while it's a much nicer place to live than it is now, it has serious unsolved issues that the people in charge simply pretend don't exist. Picard is actually the most interesting Star Trek show in years because it's the first one that has really spotlighted the creeping rot in the Federation and in Earth society that has reached a nearly terminal stage in 2399 but was always lurking around the edges of TNG, DS9, and Voyager when you go back and look. DrSunshine posted:Like, the real reason why there's row crops irrigated by water and corn in Iowa, and cramped lower decks on the Voyager, and people living in beige and grey apartments with the same Crate and Barrel decorative objects is because the writers and show staff were and are a few dozen people in Hollywood in the 1980s-2000s. They were working on deadlines on a serialized show, or a Hollywood movie, not a focus group of leftist sociologists, economists, and futurists workshopping a plan for a utopian future. They were clearly blinkered by the limitations of the society they are living in, the ideologies they grew up with, the time constraints of their job, and the ultimate word of Hollywood studio corporate executives. This is equivalent to giving Heinlein a pass for his writing because he was blinkered by libertarianism, anti-communism and an incest fetish and saying "don't talk about it or you're a teenager on TV Tropes." Every author and artist's work is made by their times, by their ideology and expertise, and by their medium. That doesn't make it any less valid or interesting to talk about what actually ended up (or didn't) in the embodied work. E: if you want a real Star Trek secret dystopian conspiracy theory though let's talk about Starfleet ships' counselors tacit role as political officers. The Oldest Man fucked around with this message at 01:51 on Feb 15, 2021 |
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Feb 15, 2021 01:28
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Star Trek never comes off as dystopian particularly, it’s just not a universe that lives up to the claims it makes. You wouldn’t know any of the qualities it says it has unless it told you.
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Feb 15, 2021 02:09
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DrSunshine posted:Yes, a hypothetical group of futurists could have come up with a much more sociologically and economically robust way of depicting a far-future post-scarcity society based on luxury communism, but the showmakers didn't have that expertise, and were focusing on trying to make a show about "X of the day future thingy". Details and errata of how daily life in a post-scarcity future would actually be are obviously going to be put by the wayside in favor of dealing with the characters and personal drama. Yeah, this, it's okay to posit ideas as tertiary things in a story. We don't know how phasers work in star trek, just that they do, and it's fine for the story, and that's kind of how post-scarcity society is in star trek. To some extent this is sort of a reflection of the liberal writers of the show having somewhat limited horizons, but to some extent, it's a TV show- it needs plot and characters, things with direct relevance to a story rather than Land Use Policy in Post-Scarcity Earth.
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Feb 15, 2021 02:26
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Mass Effect has this fun tidbit where when you call out the Citadel's Information Booth program on the blatant inequities of galactic society it responds that Asari Futurists have predicted that societal inequity is inevitable until the development of Cornucopia Technologies that remove resource scarcity as a societal concern are developed. Which is, you know, a pretty convenient point of view to hold for the wealthiest, most technologically advanced civilization in the Galaxy who more or less dictated the terms of the political and economic status quo of interstellar civilization and have carefully controlled every major ripple that threatened to knock them off their pedestal.
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Feb 15, 2021 02:39
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Panzeh posted:it needs plot and characters, things with direct relevance to a story rather than Land Use Policy in Post-Scarcity Earth. You mean like an older brother who inherited the family vineyard and is angry his younger brother sought a military career rather than staying on the estate to do farm labor for him? Or a workaholic old man who can't give up his family restaurant even though the stress of running it is killing him? Characters aren't perfectly frictionless spheres, and through them we can see the operation and values of the society in which they live. Oh and we also know thanks to Discovery that when push really came to shove in the 31st century, Earth went full isolationist (and not a little bit fashy), hoarded its resources, and told the rest of the Federation to gently caress off and die cold.
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Feb 15, 2021 02:54
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Panzeh posted:Yeah, this, it's okay to posit ideas as tertiary things in a story. We don't know how phasers work in star trek, just that they do, and it's fine for the story, and that's kind of how post-scarcity society is in star trek. To some extent this is sort of a reflection of the liberal writers of the show having somewhat limited horizons, but to some extent, it's a TV show- it needs plot and characters, things with direct relevance to a story rather than Land Use Policy in Post-Scarcity Earth. I think other fiction does it well, on tv that would be mostly children’s fiction but in books there is a pretty wide selection of “the future is optimistic, our problems have solutions” That aren’t all boring kumbiya hippy stuff or just utopia gone wrong stuff.
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Feb 15, 2021 03:06
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Sanguinia posted:Mass Effect has this fun tidbit where when you call out the Citadel's Information Booth program on the blatant inequities of galactic society it responds that Asari Futurists have predicted that societal inequity is inevitable until the development of Cornucopia Technologies that remove resource scarcity as a societal concern are developed. "It's a total coincidence that everything just happens to work out the way that is most favorable to the Asari and there's nothing conspiratorial about that so don't ask." The Asari military doesn't fight high-cost stand up engagements and leaves the dying to others even though it's one of the largest militaries. Why? Reasons. The first and most prevalent of the Council Spectres are Asari. Why is everyone ok with the extra-judicial special forces being mostly Asari? Good reasons. The Asari are the largest economy by far and the implicit threat of embargo by the Asari forces any non-cooperative species to the table. Why don't the other nations team up to counterbalance this and instead continue to treat them simply as a peer? Awesome reasons. And of course the obvious; The Asari can have kids with anyone and are attractive to everyone, but all of the kids from those unions are Asari and adopt Asari values. Why isn't anyone disturbed that they are being colonized by an economic and military superpower? Sexy reasons. The Oldest Man fucked around with this message at 03:17 on Feb 15, 2021 |
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Feb 15, 2021 03:14
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The Oldest Man posted:E: if you want a real Star Trek secret dystopian conspiracy theory though let's talk about Starfleet ships' counselors tacit role as political officers. Wait what?
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Feb 15, 2021 03:31
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The Oldest Man posted:The Asari can have kids with anyone and are attractive to everyone, but all of the kids from those unions are Asari and adopt Asari values. Why isn't anyone disturbed that they are being colonized by an economic and military superpower? Sexy reasons. The really interesting thing about this is that Asari society has a level of internal racism to regulate this aspect of their society and allow their dominant cultural norms (and thus their cultural imperialism) to propagate that would make the concept of Whiteness blush. Every time a character acts in a "non-Asari-like," way, some other Asari is ready to make a comment about their parentage. Asari acts aggressive and combative? Must've had a Krogan parent, better make a snippy WASP-y comment about it so they feel ashamed of not fitting the mold. And of course the only thing that's worse than an Asari that acts more like their non-Asari parent is an Asari that doesn't HAVE a non-Asari parent. That's how you get genetic defects like Space Succubus Vampirism don't ya know. Better shame any Asari that isn't out sewing that Space Seed and thus subtly helping to ensure our galactic dominance. The amazing thing is that Asari know that's now how their reproduction works, but they're so good at perpetuating the false and blatantly racist interpretation of their own biology that not only do most of them seem to accept it as "common sense," despite the actual science, they've made sure that most of the OTHER races more-or-less believe the wrong version. Sanguinia fucked around with this message at 03:56 on Feb 15, 2021 |
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Feb 15, 2021 03:53
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The thing about the Council is that every new recent race is brought on to counter the last. The racing show up and are a threat, so the Krogans are brought on to fight them. The Krogan, because of their birth rate and desire to expand, end up rebelling, so the Council brings in the Turians to fight the Krogan. Then eventually, the Turians encounter the humans, first contact goes badly and a war breaks out between the Turians and humans. The Council solves the problem by bringing the humans, who now have a grudge against the Turians because they believe the Turians attacked them unprovoked, onto the Council, which has the effect of checking the Turians.
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Feb 15, 2021 04:07
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Epicurius posted:The thing about the Council is that every new recent race is brought on to counter the last. The racing show up and are a threat, so the Krogans are brought on to fight them. The Krogan, because of their birth rate and desire to expand, end up rebelling, so the Council brings in the Turians to fight the Krogan. Then eventually, the Turians encounter the humans, first contact goes badly and a war breaks out between the Turians and humans. The Council solves the problem by bringing the humans, who now have a grudge against the Turians because they believe the Turians attacked them unprovoked, onto the Council, which has the effect of checking the Turians. Now replace "the council" with "the Asari" (who were the very senior partner to the very junior salarians at the way back beginning) and an interesting thing occurs.
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Feb 15, 2021 04:30
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| # ? Jun 8, 2024 08:24 |
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Epicurius posted:The thing about the Council is that every new recent race is brought on to counter the last. The racing show up and are a threat, so the Krogans are brought on to fight them. The Krogan, because of their birth rate and desire to expand, end up rebelling, so the Council brings in the Turians to fight the Krogan. Then eventually, the Turians encounter the humans, first contact goes badly and a war breaks out between the Turians and humans. The Council solves the problem by bringing the humans, who now have a grudge against the Turians because they believe the Turians attacked them unprovoked, onto the Council, which has the effect of checking the Turians. Yeah, but at the same time the Council and the system it governs were conceived by the Asari. Its not a coincidence that the Krogan were not made a Council Race after they saved the galaxy from the Raccni, and its not a coincidence that when they felt maligned and under-served by the system compared to their needs and rebelled that they were victimized by biological warfare, as compared to when the Batarians did the same thing. The Krogan were a threat to Asari dominance if put on an equal footing to them, something which was not the case for the Salarians, Turians and Humans, so of course they were ostracized rather than elevated when conflict arose. Yeah, it was the Turians that actually used the weapon, but who recruited the Turians to be the Council's weapon against the Krogan? The Salarians were apparently totally ignorant of the Turian mentality toward warfare and expected the Genophage to be a deterrent. Are we supposed to believe the Asari were just as blindsided? I'm certainly not so sure.
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Feb 15, 2021 04:37
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