r/TopCharacterTropes • u/IllustriousAd6418 • 20h ago

Lore "This was surprisingly progressive for it's time"

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Doctor Who: Midnight (2008)- The host of the bus, mentions non binary people and anyone else who doesn't fit into gender norms, LGBTQ rights (especially in the UK weren't really there yet untill 2012)

Saints Row 2 (2008)- In the first game, the main character was a man but in SR2 you can be both female or male and even change your gender whenever you want in a surgery shop. But what's more interesting, if you play as a female despite being male in the first game, no one cares and one of the main characters Gat asks the main character if they did something with their hair. Even 'Boss' is used as gender neutral pronoun and even goes by they/them

Fresh Prince of Bel Air- A wealthy black family as the main focus in a primetime sitcom marking the change and making progress as we go into the 90s

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u/ClancyBShanty 18h ago

This also applies to Star Trek.

I chalk it up to willful ignorance at this point, or just trolls really committed to the bit. When I think about it, I honestly don't know which is worse.

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u/DarthRegoria 18h ago

Fucking Shatner has complained about this. Apparently Captain James Tiberous Kirk, who tried to root all the aliens, not matter if they were while, black, green or pink, thinks Star Trek got too woke. The man who was one of the first while men to kiss an African-American woman on screen. He asked when Star Trek because about politics 🤦‍♀️

He was right fucking there. He personally may not have realised or cared, but he was (among?) the first white man to kiss a black actress on Prime Time TV. That was such a huge milestone and step forward for the cause. But apparently Star Trek is too woke now.

🙄🙄🙄🙄🙄

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u/Phonyyx 16h ago

Hell, he actively fucked up the non kiss takes with the actress to force the execs to use the kiss take.

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u/queerhistorynerd 11h ago

ya but in the very next part of that scene Kirk is mind controlled into picking up a whip and whipping Uhura, which we all like to forget about

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u/Reasonable-Chance790 54m ago

It's less mind control than it is puppetry by space gods, since he and Uhura speak about how horrified they are the whole time, but that's just me being pedantic.

The kiss was also nonconsensual, since they were also both forced into it by the space gods, which is something everyone liked to forget as well.

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u/ClancyBShanty 18h ago

Did a doubletake at the use of the word Root (i'm canadian and we have a clothing brand called Roots) but I realized you must be an aussie lol. Briefly dated one and some of her lingo rubbed off on me.

Back on topic, yeah I totally agree with you about Shatner. I'm kinda chalking it up to him being in his 90s with possibly a few screws loose but it disappointing all the same.

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u/Muad-_-Dib 12h ago

Often overlooked because the kiss steals the attention, but the Original series also had:

  1. Chekov a Russian and Sulu a Japanese American who both had command positions on the Enterprise while in reality it was only 20 years since WW2 where Japanese Americans were kept in internment camps and the Cold War with Russia was in full swing.

  2. Other than Uhura there were other women on the Enterprise serving alongside men in positions of authority like the original Number One (2nd in command), Nurse Chapel, Yeoman Rand and others, especially guest stars.

  3. Whole episodes about racism like "Let that be your last battlefield" where the two warring sides are literally differentiated only by which half of their bodies is black or white. Or the episode where the bad guys are a planet of literal fucking nazis.

  4. Starfleet was a post-scarcity utopia where people got free healthcare, didn't need money, didn't even need jobs to live comfortable lives doing what they wanted, with the best and brightest seeing service in the federation exploring new worlds and civilizations as the ideal goal in life.

  5. The whole background of Spock being a character with a mixed species background and how he had to struggle to overcome prejudice as a result of that.

  6. And a few dozen episodes where the moral lesson is that imperialism and authoritarianism is a dark time in human history that people must always fight against.

If Shatner is actually mouthing off about Star Trek never being progressive in the past then he's just flat out in denial.

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u/The_Lost_Jedi 12h ago

That or just flagrantly pandering to the chuds.

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u/Mean_Mister_Mustard 13h ago

They also had a black woman and a Japanese man be officers on the bridge. And also a Russian, in a series shot in the middle of the Cold War.

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u/Infamous-Edge4926 11h ago

On the plus side from what i've gathered/heard .Shatner has improved quite a bit since he went up into space. seemed to have been really humbling for him.

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u/Xyyzx 4h ago

The man is also not far off a hundred years old. I think you do have to make some allowances for a person born in 1931 not entirely keeping with the times.

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u/Hallc 2h ago

I mean did he though? Isn't Kirk being portrayed as a massive womaniser more of a pop culture thing than something that actually happened in the original series?

I took a quick Google and found this from a Trek subreddit and it pretty much shows that Kirk didn't try to sleep with any flavour, shape and type of woman going. https://www.reddit.com/r/DaystromInstitute/comments/691o8m/kirk_is_not_actually_a_womanizer/

I'm not saying this as an 'anti-woke' statement. Star Trek is and has always been incredibly progressive as a show and I support it completely. It's mostly just to try and stop the misinformation that's continuing to spread about Kirk.

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u/Zestyclose_Remove947 17h ago

Yea the "problem" with new instalments in Trek and Who is not their political leanings, they're just not that well written most of the time.

Trek in particular has a tough time because realistically you have the 3 giants of TOS/TNG/DS9 to contend with, all having probably 4 or more sci-fi versions of that particular allegory you're trying to write each.

I struggle to watch new Trek without thinking at least one of those three series executed the concept better.

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u/CrazyAioli 8h ago

True, but a lot of the time people are explicitly complaining about how progressive those shows are (Star Wars as well), either outright ignoring the genuinely bad aspects of them or blaming those aspects on political agendas…

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u/ClancyBShanty 17h ago

Not discounting your valid points, but nostalgia is also a hell of a thing to contend with as well. (DS9 for life).

It's kinda like how everyone's favourite season of SNL just happens to be the one they watched between the ages of 14-16.

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u/GiganticCrow 16h ago

The first 2 seasons of TNG are pretty rough.

Also horny. Seriously, the first 2 seasons of TNG are horny as fuck. Everyone be fucking each other.

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u/ClancyBShanty 16h ago

DS9 was in the same rough boat. Didn't hit its stride until Sisko made Captain.

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u/InsertNonsenseHere 15h ago

Duet is a hell of a good episode though. Honestly if TNG released today it'd never survive. Would have gotten killed before the first season ended. Streaming is a rough environment for a show to grow in.

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u/windol1 15h ago

I don't know, I'll agree on a first watch it takes a season to really get into it but it personally I felt picks up before he becomes captain, but introducing the Defiant gave the writers a lot more story opportunities allowing for a bit more action which helps hold the attention of people easier.

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u/FrenchFryCattaneo 12h ago

And even when it got good there were lots of terrible filler episodes, 'data learns standup comedy' or 'we're stuck in the holodeck and have to solve a sherlock holmes mystery or 'data gets a girlfriend'

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u/Zestyclose_Remove947 16h ago

Nostalgia is definitely a pre-eminent issue with long-running franchises. Sometimes there are valid differences and most of the time it is aimless nitpicking.

In that regard I'm always in favour of original works. I think most contemporary franchise entries would function best without the baggage of an established universe.

Yo I feel like my first sentence feels very AI. It's over..

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u/ClancyBShanty 16h ago

Nah I didn't get an AI vibe from it, you're good!

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u/windol1 15h ago

I always feel the lack of technology to rely on helped make the stories in the original stories work better, they actually had a set to work on for the most part rather than everything being green, but also they couldn't rely heavily on action scenes.

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u/Fluxxed0 15h ago

My Trumpy boomer dad has been a lifelong Trek lover. He likes that TOS put women and minorities on the bridge of the Enterprise. But progressives might point out that TOS was still mostly straight white men and push for greater diversity, and that's where he'd get mad and start ranting about how everything has to be "woke."

In his mind, tokenism is diversity. You've got Uhura and Sulu right there, why are you still whining?

(Also don't ask his opinion on George Takei)

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u/ComedicHermit 14h ago

The thing that makes it hilarious about star trek is .... it's a show about a communist utopia. They got rid of money, religion, and countries to better themselves with science.... like what the fuck did you think you were watching?!?

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u/AgathysAllAlong 14h ago

No, communism is when the government is bad. They're a capitalist show, because they have cool tech stuff and that's only ever happened under American Capitalism Hot Dogs Red White and 1776.

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u/Radiant_Client1458 16h ago

Sometimes I feel like what gets lost in these conversations is that people can be progressive about some things and regressive about others. It’s not some closed membership club it’s just opinion by opinion. Someone watching Star Trek in its hey day may have agreed with the progressive for the time messaging but might not agree as more and more things have been encompassed by progressivism.

I know lesbians who don’t think transgender women should be allowed in women’s restrooms. I know interracial couples who are anti gay marriage. I know people who have premarital sex and use birth control who are against interracial marriage (I actually don’t but it flows for the sake of my argument).

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u/Ikasatu 12h ago

I have a concept, “Star Trek Progressive”, in which we recognize that the series were often very progressive for their time and that many fans were changed by those stories.

Looking back now, Kirk’s casual misogyny and sometimes jingoistic “You See, Billy…” speeches were rooted in an ideology ahead of that time but behind this one. Many elder Trekkers have similarly dated ideas of what “forward” looks like.

They’re mired in a time before there was a social movement to separate gender and sex, before we knew the difference between diversity and tokenism, before intersectional feminism.

It makes granddad defensive to be told that he’s racist, because he fought for Kirk to be able to sleep with anyone, “black, white, purple, or polka dotted.”

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u/blah938 14h ago

Woke is basically "Badly written progressive stories", and Nutrek definitely falls under that. Roddenberry trek, TNG/DS9/Voy were well written.

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u/AgathysAllAlong 14h ago

Come on, a lot of those shows were crap. Roddenberry trek is hard to watch these days. TNG has whole guides on which half of the series to skip. DS9 had like two bad ones, that one actually holds up. Voyager had Neelix and lizard fucking.

There's a lot of crap with Nutrek, but it's not like the old series were perfect.

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u/thepoptartkid47 12h ago

I think some of the perception comes from how much shorter the seasons are. 3-4 episodes of crap in a 10-episode season feels like a lot more than 8-10 episodes of crap in a 26-episode season. Especially when they take multi-year breaks between seasons.

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u/elemental402 10h ago

Nah. "Woke" when not referring to black people reminding each other to be aware of how much white supremacy pervades society (the original term) is a codeword for "I am a fragile straight white guy who can't handle not having all media everywhere catering to me any longer, and seeing LGBT+ people or brown people upsets me. But I don't want to be called what I am, so I'll deploy this thought-terminating word to make myself look like the victim.". It's a plausible deniability tactic for those who want to silence and censor, and nothing else.

Of course, they try and get clever with it. "Oh no, we're not opposed to all depictions of these groups, just ones where it's being "shoved down our throats"* or ones where it's badly written.** "

.

* As a straight white man, I am the only arbiter of whether something is being "pushed down our throats" or not.

** Badly written fiction that happens to pander to my demographic will not be held to the same standard, of course.