daggermoonIt's sad that people completely misunderstand what Star Trek is about.
gurtyAgreed. People should dislike modern Star Trek for it’s bad writing, not because it’s progressive.
The best progressive writing Trek did was when they addressed a social issue by having the actors pretend it wasn’t an issue at all.
Uhura was a bridge officer who was a black woman, and nobody cared or even noticed because in-universe there was nothing special about that.
James R KirkI like how in Discovery a character came out as non-binary and everyone is like “ok cool” and that was that and it was never brought up again (because why would it be)?
You can tell by the absolute meltdown conservative spaces had about that five second clip that it was absolutely the right thing to do.
Adira comes out
But that’s not what they did with Uhura. They never hung a lantern on her being black or a woman. She was just there and it was such a normal thing it didn’t need to be addressed in-universe.
Having a character “come out” means the world is one in which people are hiding in the closet because of a social stigma. A world in which that stigma doesn’t exist doesn’t require a character to come out.
Huh? How is Stamets supposed to know if nobody tells him?
EDIT: Also Uhura’s Blackness and femaleness were most certainly addressed in-universe in a longer scene than I shared above.
Star Trek - "The Charming Negress"
Don’t spend 5 episodes uses feminine pronouns for the character then have them “come out” as non-binary. Just establish their pronouns from the outset, and don’t make a big deal outside the show about how brave they are for having an NB Trek character.
You don’t normalize something by pointing out that it’s strange.
Got it, you’re saying you are happy to see the inclusion of a non-binary character, just upset that it wasn’t communicated a few episodes earlier?
Pretty much. And maybe in the off-screen bragging about it, at least say first main character or first crew member (someone argued about Dax, but I’d say that character was gendered, just fluid over the long term), not ‘first character ever’, since you had a number of instances, and pretty much dead-on a whole species dedicated to exploring gendered versus non-binary in TNG. That’s one habit of Discovery was leaving people wondering if they even watched the shows that preceeded them…
There should have been no good reason for Adira to only tell Gray despite their clear desire to be recognized as non-binary.
Or, alternatively, they could have established that 32nd century Earth cut off from the federation had backslid to MAGA-sensibilities to explain why far future human feels the need to tiptoe around their identity until they come to terms with the culture of the federation that might have been lost to Earth.
I’m discussing canon and “off-screen” is definitionally not canon. Canonically, it’s hard for me to see Adira’s gender as anything other than an extremely small side detail about the character as it’s only brought up that one single time in passing.
It’s that they are treating it as something weird. Uhura’s race and sex weren’t treated as weird because why would it be? There wasn’t anything especially special about Geordi being a blind helmsman when TNG premiered, because making accommodations wasn’t anything special - it was normal.
What Discovery did was performative inclusivity, which is a more subtle form of bigotry. It’s pointing at someone and calling them weird and claiming moral superiority for tolerating their presence.
Hm I don’t remember that. Can you point me to a line of dialogue or anything outside of that (again extremely brief) clip I posted to support your argument?