Star Trek Discussion

I have seen the argument on a similar thing, some character was depicted as "gay" in some play when its quite obvious that they were originally and intentionally straight.

The backlash was the play was pulled by the venue, who had not known until opening night, of the controversy....

Cross-Gendering, or Cross-sexualising a character from the original intention, for the use of promoting Gay rights, for me, is in bad taste, and I would question the original writers ability to be able to pull permission to use his material in such a way.

It is not a reflection on the sexuality of homosexuals that causes the controversy, its the {person of questionable parentage}ization of that character intentionally when the re-writers know already that it WILL create controversy....

Suggestions that "There is no such thing as bad publicity", and that the controversy is enough to pull in an audience, is, for me, in bad taste.

How would the gay community react of one of their icons was claimed as being 100% straight?....
Pretty Badly?....

So I ask for a level playing field.

On the grounds that the controversy is just bad taste, and they should find another vehicle if they want to promote gay rights.

Heck, there are enough events and Mardi-gras type events already that everyone enjoys that are used for Gay rights...

Why try and take an Icon such as (For instance) Superman who is so obviously straight and {person of questionable parentage}ise the story?...
What, you cant write material good enough on your own you have to steal someone elses?...
Get a life?...



So how do you explain that.
Obviously the answer is to ignore the history of what has gone before.



A Good story does NOT need "Token" characters.
For me, its a sign that the writer has run out of ideas, and needs to pad the story to make it bigger to fit the size of book being written.

A few years back, Overthinking It.com had an article about the "strong female character" fad written by a female young adult fantasy writer.

As she noted, a lot of the "strong female characters" being presented by Hollywood (et al) are actually hindering the cause of gender equality because they're essentially living stereotypes, if not glorified male fantasy.

In reality, what people were asking for were for more well-written, well-rounded female characters.

I would go so far as to say that her complaint is valid not just for female characters, but also for far too many other characters as well.

As an aside -

Ongoing Battletech fan-fiction series I'm doing based in part on some real-life game campaigns I've either run or planned to run.

Whenever conversations about token character appeal come up, I periodically think back to this... and some of my previous attempts at writing, both for personal amusement and for attempted professional publication.

Current character list, as of most recent chapter:

Team Olympus Mons

*30-something white male combat veteran and owner of the organization. Has a knack for business. May or may not be somewhat unhinged due to losing his arm, his eye, and his fiancee during Operation Bulldog. Primary mecha is a commando unit that has survived as much as he has.

*20-something combat veteran who defected from his faction during Bulldog. Originally raised to be a Spartan-style warrior, but rather quickly adapted to life on Solaris. Wears tailored suits even when in the cockpit and is rapidly giving the "The Most Interesting Man In The World" from the advertising campaign a run for his money. Primary mecha is a heavy combat unit that serves as the team's juggernaut.

*20-something female combat veteran who looks and acts like a housewife due to her blue-blood upbringing. Has a natural talent for mathematics that could have earned her a doctorate if she had gone to a college instead of a military academy. Serves as both the team's scout (her math skills means that she can calculate artillery strikes and OPFOR rate-of-travel in her head) and team's public-relations person. Primary mecha is an ELINT machine that has had some of the excess gear stripped out in favor of hidden weapons.

*30-something combat veteran and ninja master who functions as the #2 man in the organization and also serves as the straight man. Primary mecha is a commando unit.

*The above's 20-something sister who has all of his training & skill but none of his patience. Primary mecha is a commando unit, but due to her lack of discipline she treats it like an over-sized interceptor instead.

*20-something "paper tiger" who has multiple college degrees but who can't sit still long enough to actually make a career of them. Serves as the team's shock trooper despite piloting the lightest mecha they have.

*20-something ELINT and SIGINT expert and single father who lost his wife to a blue-on-blue incident that might have been a pre-planned murder. Would be completely at home in a cyberpunk setting. Pilots the heaviest mecha in the outfit, with said mecha being customized to include electronic warfare gear.

*30-something weapons engineer and single father who lost his wife and much of his extended family to a failed hit. Doesn't mind busting his own knuckles when it comes to building and maintaining prototypes. Pilots a fire-support mecha.

*20-something who wanted to join the clergy but was cowed into attending a military academy by his uber-patriotic and uber-strict parents. Found himself on the wrong side of a guerrilla battle after his planet was invaded, and was forced to pull out with the remnants of his team. Pilots the team's only stand-up fighter.

*20-something military police officer who helps serve as mission control. Was forced to flee his home nation due to religious persecution.

*20-something comms technician who wanted to serve her country but whose former superior officers dangled her like meat in front of the front-liners. Also helps serve as mission control.

*Twin 20-something brothers and extreme sports junkies. Both pilot urban combat mecha.

*20-something mecha pilot who was also raised to be a Spartan-style soldier, but was captured in battle before escaping. Briefly worked with a "green" non-profit before signing up with the team. Pilots a sniper mecha.

Team _____ (still needs a name)

*30-something combat veteran and intelligence operative who is the definition of "dissonant serenity". Pilots a custom scout unit.

*30-something wife of the above. Appears to be a "housewife", but in reality spent most of the past decade serving as a weapons designer for her home country when she wasn't in the field actively trying to track down examples of lost technology.

*20-something power armor trooper who serves as the team's bodyguard. Operates a prototype suit based in part on a design created by the above wife.

*20-something female doctor who is primarily responsible for making sure that the above trooper survives testing the prototype.

*20-something female technician who is primarily responsible for making sure that the prototype survives testing.

Others

*30-something veteran starfighter pilot who was given a minor landholding as a "reward" for exposing corruption within the system (re: kicked upstairs so that the corrupt parties could continue their corruption).

*30-something military psychiatrist who assisted him in his investigation. Later married him and joined him on his landholding.



One of the above characters is black.

Two of the above are Hispanic.

Two are Asian. (one was mentioned in-text as Japanese; for the other, you'd have to know the region of space he's from)

Seven are Mormon. (I've dropped hints, but left it at that.)

One is Arabic.

One is Baha'i.

I've got a bigger cast list going than some comic books, and I have another six peeps to add into the mix from there. This cast includes a fair number of female and minority characters (both racial and religious), some of which you'd actually have to see my notes on in order to know their race & religion. I have absolutely no tokens (although I do need to flesh out a few of them).

But at the same time, every time I go to write I can hear people screaming at me for not being "progressive" enough since these characters don't shout who and what they are in every scene.

my fiction work is a Cyberpunk Novella. it has:

a middle aged (early 30s) webcaster who took up his father's camera after he was assassinated in a riot.

a late 20s "ugly black" (self described) mercenary veteran slumming as a policeman after having lost much of his unit in a corporate betrayal.
a mid 20s female Hispanic point rider for an all-Hispanic nomad clan. (had lost both legs in a crash and had them regrown - with major lawsuits involved)
an early 20s male rigger of indeterminate race.- speech and motor centers severely damaged.
a male idiot savant of indeterminate age and race - natural computer tech.
a mid 20s female private security guard - of Scandinavian ancestry - which becomes relevant because naming practices. her father has been kidnapped.
a mid 20s female hacker who makes a point of being competent outside of VR as well. Whose girlfriend had been killed by the "bad guys" prior to the story.

in the course of the story, each one rescues the others, each one needs rescuing by the others, gender role assumptions are shattered, each one plays their strengths, and in the end, the girl gets the guy.

I have been watching Enterprise. Once question that Keeps popping up for me is "Have they completely forgotten the concept of doing data backups?"

They are constantly in a crisis because some important bit of data got deleted or corrupted. You would think that a simple backup of critical data stored in a place disconnected from the rest of the ship's network would do wonders. Especially critical data like reactor or other system control programs.

Of course they forgot about backups.

They also forgot about fuses and circuit breakers, given the large amounts of sparks flying from consoles...

You don't need to invent "beaming" to make a low cost SiFi Space traveling TV series!

What's wrong with climbing from window to window?

I think the basic premise had a great deal of potential, after all we never heard about the NX Enterprise or anything detailed about that period of Trek history. About the only thing we do know is that there was a War with the Romulan's that was fought against Earth not against the Federation, which could have made for some very interesting and dramatic stories and a hell of a lot of jaw dropping battle scenes - which the technology would have been up to showing us which wasn't the case with the earlier series*.

(*Imagine the effects from Enterprise being used on DS9's Dominion War arcs....)

The execution was a different matter. Old retreaded scripts that could have come from any version of Trek in the first two seasons and a distinct lack of fun and humor in season three (which also had more than its fair share of retreaded scripts). Season Four started with two of the worst episodes Trek has ever made, and ended with a dramatic fart that succeeded in turning it into an extended episode of TNG.

The problem really was that the producers of the show had been working on Trek since TNG, and indeed they were handpicked by the Great Bird and seemed intent on following his vision of Trek rather than trying to find their own. DS9, notably, had different producers and was more or less left alone to find its own identity rather than trying to steal it from TNG or TOS - using those shows as a very basic framework for the setting rather than as guide.
This caused a problem because it became clear that they'd run out of ideas, or at least run out of the ability and willingness to take chances in format and tone. Instead playing it safe by recycling ideas* and relying on special effects** and technobabble to carry stories and doing their level best to make sure nothing really changed***

(*In TOS time travel was used in three episodes over three seasons. TNG usually had one time travel story per season, increasing to maybe two in later seasons. DS9 only had five or six in its entire run (one wasn't actually a time travel story but something else). Voyager had time travel in some form three times in the first half of its first season. Enterprise had time travel as an integral part of its 'story arc' in the first two seasons, was the entire basis of season three and the premise behind the opening episodes of season 4 - at which point it dropped time travel entirely)

(**A LOT of episodes of Voyager and Enterprise are remembered purely because of the effects shots, with the plot being optional.)

(***Voyager, a ship seventy years from the nearest dockyard and supplies, remains in perfect operational condition for seven years regardless of the number of battles she gets into...Unless the plot of the week requires something to stop working. Compare this to Battle Star Galactica, which was falling apart after some three years, and you can see how badly ST missed out on dramatic stories and plots.)

What is so notable about Enterprise was that season 4, except for the first two and last episodes, included some of the very best Trek ever made. This because they brought in new writers who were willing to experiment and drop many of the old tropes, while using the effects to further the plot instead of carrying it.

Today it seems likely that Trek will get a new series in the next few years. The pattern for Trek has been to keep the franchise going on the big screen while a series was being developed - it is interesting to note that the best of the ST films were developed and released when there was no series in production. As I noted before, the next in the recent films in due for release in 2016 and it seems logical to conclude that a new series of Trek would be aired around this time, most likely during the Fall Season 2016 which would probably also be around the time of the DVD release. Later than this and they miss out on free advertising and hype, although they could if they so wished announce a new Trek series around this time and maybe, just maybe, air a new series over the summer rather than the fall onwards - risky, but a high profile show *might* pull in more viewers as it would have less competition.

Ironically relying on the films to carry the franchise is as much a liability as a boon. Most of the sets used on TNG were originally built for the films, and in order for them to look part of the same ship this meant that any new sets (or at least the standing sets) had to be built to the same standard. That said, given the increase in HD TV this might not prove to be much of a problem, and in fact *might* prove advantageous since even reused sets are going to be movie quality by design which might save them a lot of money.
Or if you like they are not going to scrap the standing sets and start afresh.

From what I can tell it appears as if both the 'Renegades' and 'Dorn' projects are more or less fully developed. If so then the studio probably doesn't have to worry about starting development right now, only in what tone and direction they want a new series to have. I'd guess more adult and darker, but the question is how dark they can get without loosing too much in the process. The lighter/lens flare tone of the films would not work on the small screen anymore, but the 'serious' tone of Enterprises season 3 didn't exactly win viewers over either. So they need to find the right balance.
In this context it would actually make sense for the studio to sit back and see how Renegades is received. They have not spent any money on that, but can use the reaction to judge what type of show is likely to be successful. They can then make a decision as to which of the two projects they should press ahead with. As both are already well along in the development process this might well make it possible to move from picking one (or for that matter even both) up and being able to have that series filming within 12 months and on air within 18.