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  • My next video is how Star Trek fans ruin Star Trek. It was the subject of the thesis for my PhD in Trekology.

    • The die hard fans ruin their favorite shows and movies all the time. It's a universal truth.

      Star Trek, Star Wars, Marvel, it happens to all the big ones. Heck with Mass Effect, the Andromeda blowback resulted in DLC being cancelled and the entire IP essentially being abandoned until recently. That boiled down to some poor animations from a brand new team, with limited time (because EA is dogshit), and a few fans being extremely vocal about how the developers had the audacity to follow a new set of characters in a new setting instead of milking the finished trilogy and bringing Commander Shepard back to beat like a dead horse.

      That same type of bullshit is exactly what Star Trek went through at the beginning of TNG. Some original series fans were extremely vocal about the lack of Kirk, Spock, etc. and refused to even give TNG a chance. Not to mention the audacity of the show runners for DS9 making a serialized show based around a station instead of a ship! And while those were before me, just reading about it after the fact, I personally saw the same with Picard, and Discovery when they first launched, and even continuing on now with some people even refusing to give it a try like some sort of child refusing to eat their veggies. And while Enterprise has managed to bring many people back in to watch the show, the absolute hatred for the intro is one of the biggest mysteries for me. It's like a bunch of fans just turned their brain off as soon as they heard the word faith, assuming it must be about religion, and started trying to justify their knee jerk reaction when others pointed out that faith isn't inherently religious and that in the show it clearly has nothing to do with religion, but rather faith in things like yourself, your crew, and humanity as it ventures out beyond Earth at a meaningful speed for the first time.

      Star Trek fans have a long history of being intolerant of new shows.

      • Both Mass Effect sequels and Picard are fine examples of the recent abundance of things where the fan base (or the Internet as a whole) having earned a reputation for being inclined to complain about anything new is often used as an excuse to try and discredit the opinions of anyone who dares to point out what was a fairly disastrous drop in quality of the new thing compared to the old. Maybe there's bullshit in the field but that doesn't mean there aren't also apple trees, and maybe you've fixed your gaze on the wrong one.

      • Weird take to suggest that it's the fans ruining an IP with criticism. As if we should all just be content with some executives shagging a hollow corpse of a franchise simply because it exists in name.

        Mass Effect Andromeda didn't just have a few crappy animations. The whole story, quest, and dialogue writing was incredibly bad. People hated it because it sucked. And it got canned because it sucked.

        If Star Trek were to get cancelled right now it would be a good thing. What we have today masquerading as Star Trek is cheap, low effort garbage that tries to make up for it by wasting its budget on as much off the shelf CGI sparkles that can be thrown at it. But no, of course it's the fans who are ruining Star Trek.

        The first season of TNG got criticised because the first season of TNG is actually, genuinely bad. The difference with TNG and STD, however, is while STD remained the same level of mediocre throughout its entire run (with some aspects actually getting worse), TNG drastically improved in season 2 and only got better after.

      • I, sadly, agree with you. I’ve gotten to the point where if I am reading a thread or forum and the comments turn into nothing but criticism about things that I don’t personally feel deserve the time to read or apply energy to, I close it and never look back. I don’t mind constructive criticism, but I don’t make these things (like TNG or Andromeda) so it’s never practically constructive for me to endure the critique.

        Speaking of Mass Effect: Andromeda, I was really enjoying that game when it came out and then I made the mistake of reading threads on Reddit and they were so fucking negative and hateful that it actually soured the experience for me. My own fault for letting it drag down the thing I was enjoying, but there was just so much vitriol that it got under my skin even though I didn’t really agree with the majority of it. My general rule now is to stay away from the fanbases of anything I truly enjoy and care about. Which obviously sucks. Somewhere along the line it became the norm for internet discourse to become an echo chamber of hate.

    • Did your PhD recognize that most people don't post their opinions on the internet, especially if they find something to be mediocre?

      To me it's the internet that ruins everything. Many times when I see something and I feel like "meh it wasn't great but it was ok" I end up seeing an endless stream of negativity towards it on the internet. But who am I to say the the ending to Game of Thrones was ok but needed a few more episodes so it didn't feel rushed, or Rise of Skywalker was really interesting but the editing was a bit janky or whatever? Say things like that and you get an endless stream of people telling you that you're an idiot for liking something and not conforming to the hate train. But talk to people in real life about these things and it's a different conversation.

      I think the main problem is that the people making things in these franchises listen to the internet too much. This has resulted in a general lack of confidence by writers because they're too worried about how the internet will criticize them. But that's gonna happen no matter what they do. And the studio execs looking at the internet data and basing a lot of decisions on that.

    • https://youtu.be/02LgdXVkXgM

  • Much as I don't care for seasons 1 and 2, the show does provide some interesting bits of history that fill in the gaps from the late 24th century. Primarily, the destruction of Romulus introduced in the Kelvin timeline is confirmed (beyond just Spock saying so) to still occur in the main. The android ban could use some more exploration.

    • Sure, but I can't get past the tedious plot, the "oh by the way" style exposition, and so much of the dialog is so unnatural and bad it gave me a headache.

      But I do love Shaw! I'd be happy for a series that focused on him--oops, nm.

      • I know, the 10 episode seasons really hamper the writers' ability to explore and "show not tell" what's going on. As for Shaw, I should think it'd be possible to utilize a form of ECH (Emergency Command Hologram) like the Doctor. Not that we're gonna get a Legacy show anyway, sadly.

  • I mean, the headline couldn't be more true. Not sure if I'm willing to watch a multi-hour long critique about it, but I'd say she's probably right on a lot if things in the video based on its title alone.

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