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The strength of the Star Trek female fan base has always been slightly surprising to me: it’s military science fiction! That said, I can see it: it’s military sci-fi, but the military solves problems through the power of empathy and diplomacy, Kirk and Riker (my phone literally autocorrected his name to “Romeo,” which is hilarious) are… present, and most stories in Trek are soft science fiction, using alien societies or time travel to explore social structures and personal relationships. TNG always stood out to me as having a remarkable number of episodes about character romance, particularly for the female characters.
Trek also stands out to me for how it’s very formalized and society (in Starfleet — who knows what people do on Earth) is regimented, and I think that’s a factor in geek culture more broadly. Geeks seem to really like dreaming of societies with clearly-defined rules and chains of commands and even uniforms. I have a theory that geeks, often autistic or hypo-social, find the improvisational and non-explicit social rules of society hard to navigate or understand, and wish things were more explicit and systematic. I think this is what psychologically unites ren faire people who dream of m’ladying their way into a woman’s affections (or a woman who would like to be treated like a courtesan), and Trek fans who dream of color-coded uniforms.
Star Trek has ranks and command structures (but is highly non-rigid in social organization for a quasi-military organization — it’s how a progressive imagines a military should operate), Harry Potter has Hogwarts houses with found families based on character traits ordained by a magical hat. Both are about social institutions that provide the security of structure without the rigidity of oppression, with many stories revolving around how morality and justice override authority. There’s a fundamental liberalism at the heart of nerd interests, but one that absolutely finds the improvised social structures that actually characterize liberal society hard to fathom.
But also after a long period of miss after miss, even my geeky friends aren’t into Star Trek. I know more fans of The Phantom Menace than The Next Generation. I remember when I took IT classes and the instructor was appalled when I was the only one in the class who copped to liking Trek. Nerd culture has changed.
I don’t think it was Scott Bakula’s show that killed it — I’ll come out as actually liking Enterprise, but also I liked Voyager so I have terrible taste in Trek. Was it Abrams? I always used to joke that Abrams ruined Star Trek as a job interview for ruining Star Wars. No one should have let this man near a franchise. (While I hated The Last Jedi, I also generally like Rian Johnson, just not for a main episode in a long-running franchise focused on nostalgia.)
The only person in my cohort I’ve ever known as a Star Trek fan was an autistic, asexual girl who seemed to have picked it as her special interest, reading the novels, playing STO, and of course writing fan fiction. I would have liked to have known her better but she was a hard person to get to know.
It's basically sports teams for nerds as well.
Interesting that this applies to me, despite not really being a central example of a nerd (bounced between Africa and the UK and came to America relatively late) . I never really had "my" Star Trek show, I did catch some episodes and Nemesis (which didn't help) but I was more of a Star Wars/Stargate and then Battlestar kid. My impression was that I simply fell through the cracks between major ST shows but I checked and Enterprise was airing right up until the time of BSG's first season and Voyager and SG-1 overlapped so those shows were out there.
Might just be a change in values or people tiring of it? Stargate was milscifi without the utopianism.Battlestar was self-consciously made by former Star Trek writers to avoid problems they thought Trek had (and to be much darker in a post-9/11 world). Just as Sci-Fi Channel took BSG and Stargate out back and shot them when they were seen as outdated. I thought it was absolute folly but they may have been overcorrecting due to past experience.
Specifically, Ronald D. Moore had been a writer on DS9 and went over to Voyager after DS9 ended, but left Voyager not too long afterwards due to disagreements with the producers over storylines, basically in that they were reluctant to take seriously the implications of the premise -- that Voyager is on its own, without support, and their situation should be getting more and more desperate as time goes on. There was an interesting interview some fanzine did with Ron Moore after he left where Moore more-or-less ranted on this subject at length (and I wish I remembered the name of said fanzine and knew if that interview was online). It's interesting to think of that interview in light of the Ron Moore edition of BSG, which is more or less an attempt to "do it right" in this respect for both Voyager and the original BSG (which was also rather inconsistent on the whole issue on how desperate the Last Surviving Human Refugee Fleet is -- one week everyone's fleeing the destruction of the 12 Colonies, the next week everyone's whooping it up on the casino ship like nothing's wrong...). I like to imagine that every Friday night after a new episode of the Ron Moore BSG aired, Moore prank-called Brannon Braga and said "See! That's what Voyager should have been like!" and then hung up.
Which is not to say that Ron-Moore-BSG is not without its problems, they're just different problems -- the main one being that Moore tried for a massive story arc like JMS did in Babylon 5, but didn't want to spend the time obsessively planning out 5 years of stories like JMS did, so he decided to wing it as he went along. The thing is, Ron Moore is almost good enough for this to have worked, for a while anyway; the wheels didn't start seriously coming off the thing until season 4.
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I've never actually watched either Stargate or Battlestar!
My parents are boomers, so they watched Star Trek and The Next Generation when they aired, and especially saw the films when they started coming out. Talking to them about movies is an interesting experience: they remember a time when movie theaters were everywhere, and going to see a movie was almost an everyday occurance. My dad talks about how when Star Wars came out in 1977, he saw it several times before it left theaters.
So I grew up on watching Star Wars films with my parents, we'd pull the lounge chair into the center of the living room and I'd curl up with my dad and watch the OT. When the prequels came out, we watched those too, but my favorite was Empire, obviously. When I was a little older we started watching Star Trek too, I remember liking Star Trek 1 and I was surprised when I got older and found out everyone hates it. But I also was obsessed with the Voyager probes as a child, so I guess it hit the spot for me.
Star Trek and Star Wars have always been the most mainstream of the space franchises, so I grew up with them as normal popcorn movies that my parents liked. Now, if you start talking to my mom about Lord of the Rings, that's where you'll start finding the nerdiness.
So part of this is that I grew up on a bit of an older wave of nostalgia, and I don't know what the Xer and Millennial parents of my cohort raised their kids on.
Some people would say you should go out and watch all of SG-1 now, but don't listen to them; it's fine to stop after season 8.
BSG, on the other hand ... "The humans haven't figured out what the Cylons are doing" is a compelling premise, right up until you add "the BSG writers are humans" and complete the syllogism.
I'd think LotR was the least nerdy thing you've mentioned, though. Pre-Peter-Jackson, sure, knowing the name "Frodo" marked you as an ubergeek, but today they're still top-100-lifetime-gross movies; when The Return of the King came out it was like top 10.
You're not mixing up 1 and 4, are you? Everybody thought 1 was dull but loved 4.
I tried to suggest to them at least a little of everything I knew was decent as soon as it was mostly age-appropriate; sometimes sooner if the writing was clever enough to slip by ("Under a blacklight this place looks like a Jackson Pollock painting!" - Guardians of the Galaxy) or pointless enough to edit out ("What if we reuse the same joke but don't understand subtext?" - Taika Waititi). I try to tell them which yet-unwatched options are better or worse or scarier or slower or whatever than others.
And they take turns getting to pick what we watch together, which is sometimes the hard part (Gravity Falls was good, Owl House less so, and was Amphibia really worth three seasons?) but is still the important part, because their preferences often surprise me. They've all soured on the MCU and Star Wars (except that we're planning to watch Andor). My oldest loved TNG and likes DS9 but dislikes Kirk too much to watch more TOS. My younger two just tolerated Trek (and won't watch any more scary Borg episodes) but they really like Babylon 5. Everybody loved The Martian, though not as much as the book.
Yeah, she’s been a fan since the 80s! Tolkien has always had a loyal following among college-educated conservative Christians, and my mom was recommended The Hobbit at a Christian college. She does love the Peter Jackson films, but insists that everyone should watch the extended editions.
Nope! The Motion Picture with V-ger was a movie I really enjoyed. It could be slow but the V-ger accumulations over time and the sequence of them flying in to the center of the mysterious spaceship was so epic that it impressed itself on my memory. I also like 4, and as an adult I like it more than 1 because of the character moments (and Spock swearing) despite thinking that it has a weaker overall concept than 1. “What if the voyager probe gained sentience and RETVRNED to Earth?” is just a more interesting premise than “what if whales seek revenge on humanity?”
Oh, no, I'm mixing up the premises of 1 and 4! I'd like to say that it's the scriptwriters fault for going to the "mysterious alien menace threatens Earth and the twist is that it's actually connected to 20th century humanity" well more than once, but I'm just trying to rationalize away my own shame.
I think he had a lot of loyal followings. My first introduction to Tolkien by name was in writing by Isaac Asimov (Jewish atheist), and of course modern medieval-fantasy from D&D onward is like 80% Tolkien with the serial numbers filed off.
Of course! Especially the Two Towers extended edition - the theatrical version didn't include Saruman's death, and without knowing that Jackson had made that change to the plot it was unnecessarily disappointing to see The Return of the King end with no scouring of the shire.
Also, you have to watch the Hobbit films either first or not-at-all. My kids got to enjoy them for what they were, not having seen the Lord of the Rings first, but then looking back after the LotR trilogy they understood how disappointed I must have been.
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RDM complained about Star Trek tropes and went out of his way to avoid them, only to then fall into the basically-unbuilt mystery box nonsense we had to deal with for a decade after Lost launched (to add insult to injury Lost probably also paid off its myth stuff much better than he did)
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I agree and disagree. I think Trek's fandom has always been predominantly male, with a substantial distaff side. The boys like geeking about the Warp specifications and photon torpedo load-outs of the various versions of the Enterprise and playing Starfleet Battles -- the girls like cosplaying as Orions and shipping Kirk and Spock.
The quasi-military structure of Starfleet was always a bit of thematic dissonance; Roddenberry was really envisioning a post-religious, post-military, globalist society, but framing a crew of explorers who also sometimes have to fight Klingons (Chinese/Soviet analogs) as anything other than a military vessel would not have made sense to a 60s audience. Making them a space navy was an easy way to get the normie audience oriented, but the show itself was, as has often been noted, actually Wagon Train in space.
You'll notice the officer/enlisted distinction in Starfleet is practically non-existent and getting promoted rarely has much to do with command as opposed to just being good at your job (like in a civilian job).
I think this cognitive dissonance has continued through various iterations of Trek; sometimes they try to lean away from the military themes and more into political or social ones, and sometimes they lean into it and tell a war story (DS9, the best Trek), but lately, it's just kind of incoherent as Trek parodies itself. That said, Trek has also always been a commentary on contemporary issues, told through the medium of sci-fi, so it's not surprising that as woke spread, Trek became more woke.
The fundamental problem with Trek is largely the same one as Star Wars (and to a lesser extent the MCU) - it's running on fumes. It's got a huge fanbase of aging nerds who loved it when they were 12, but a franchise can only live so long on nostalgia, and both Trek and Star Wars are having trouble pulling in the next generation. I think this is something we are starting to see with cape movies as well. How many Zoomers are invested in 60 years of Superman or X-Men lore? Will alphas even read comic books at all?
That's not a fundamental problem. It's something perfectly manageable, and something that was managed competently in the past - there's a reason it's called TNG. All these franchises, in all their media forms including comics, deliberately turned hostile on the kinds of people that enjoyed them, and are now doing a surprised Picachu that the next generation is not picking them up.
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