I watched the entire video, but I timestamped the link to where I believe it matters most for any comrade that ever liked Star Trek, liberal idealistic and quasi-militaristic flaws and all, and would like to see a succinct and thorough summary of what they might have already felt, may have already inductively collected for themselves, but got it drowned out by “well the TNG gang got together by the end of Picard Season 3 so just enjoy it like a popcorn movie, 4/5” or even worse brainworms like “section 31 is based and it’s just cold hard reality that such an agency would have to exist for the Federation to exist, just like in based Deep Space 9 which was totally about wars and genocidal biowarfare plots and how cool and necessary they are.”
The Trek fandom site in the Lemmyverse is loaded with insufferable liberal/libertarian 
and a fair amount of Thermian Arguments that justify anything that was presented on screen as not only good, but necessary if they were done by protagonist characters, and not just the flaws, weaknesses, and (for lack of a better term) sins of characters that weren’t intended to be infallible, let alone blindly emulated, no matter how cool it was when Sisko punched Q or whatever.
TL;DR: I hope comrades find value in this concluding section of a much larger video, or maybe even watch the whole thing, which I also think is worthwhile. Also, I fucking despise Section 31 apologists because they make the Lemmyverse’s Trek site unbearable for me. If Kurtzman gets his way (especially with that Section 31 series he keeps jerking off about), Trek will become increasingly murderfucky gory edgy black ops obsessed bootlicking schlock with a vague and redundant nostalgia flavor.
I have this running theory that a lot of Discovery and Picard was written by people who haven’t watched Star Trek, but do browse the wiki. I can just picture someone not really into Trek stumbling on the article for Section 31 and think, “Woah, this must be really cool and important!”
It’s disappointing. DS9 was pretty unambiguous in its portrayal – Section 31 is a violation of Federation ideals and shouldn’t be allowed to continue. There is potential for an interesting story, but it’s fundamentally not the story these guys are interested in telling. To them, Section 31 is just cool terminology to throw around; “I have the super-duper Q-clearance for top secret cool spy stuff!!!”
I agree, and i think 40k prefigured this. There are a lot of artists my age who remember how cool this stuff was when we were six, but they never learned why the slop was like that - they didn’t go back and watch kurasawa and the battle of midway and the maltese falcon. They just like star wars. So when they try to make star wars we get jar jar’s star wars. Like jj abrahms is a smart dumb guy so when he was given a big bag of money and told to make star wars he made star wars.
Rian johnson is a. Smart smart guy, so when he was told to make star wars he went and made, idk, casino royal and master and commander and a couple of other things, along with a meta-commentary on hero-worship that was frustratingly loyal to how Luke was portrayed (a petulant kid in over his head who kind of only won because of a moment of empathy when confronting a sith lord) and how the jedi were portrayed (a bunch weird old wizards living in exile who never told the truth straight and mostly fought by using clever misdirection.
Jj’s movie sucked because it was star wars fan fic. Rian’s movie had a bunch of good parts that didn’t gel, i assume because he’s in over his head. Subsequent star wars has followed the something vaguely like a pattern - when Mandalorian was Lone Wolf and Cub in space it was cool. When it started trying to be star wars it sucked. We’re lurching in to simulacra and simulacrum territory where star wars movies are cheap copies of star wars movies instead of being cheap copies of some of the best movies ever made but with rubber aliens in space. Rogue one threaded the needle by being a cool wwii partisans doing a heist movie, andor isn’t a star wars show at all and that’s why it’s the best star wars show, while a lot of the other stuff is increasingly fractally self-referential clone wars cartoon auto-eroticism.
Lotr? Peter Jackson made a Lord of the Rings movie. Then, idk, hbo or whoever said "well that made a lot of money let’s drop the orcs, add a lot of sexual violence, and make our own pastiche of Jackson’s movie and we got gambo. And then it started feeding on itself and we got epic fantasy shows that were trying to eb hbo’s rip off of lotr instead of either trying to be a rip off of a better movie, which is where star wars is good, or an original adaptation of a good story, which is why Jackson’s lotr worked.
I have hope for that gargoyles adaptation if it ever happens because gargoyles is a fun rip off of shakespeare and Branaggahs entire career has been making fun shakespeare movies, so he just has to do what he’s good at but this time it’s softcore cgi monsterfucker erotica, and he’s a horny cornball so he’ll be great at it.
But what’s this war of rohan anime? That’s the most boring fucking thing in all of lotr and i 100% gaurantee you that the tolkien estate gave it to them because they thought “there’s nothing here for you to desecrate give us the check”.
Idk what else is even happening out there, i very rarely watch tv shows and i’ve seen little to make me regret that lately.
The batman stuff does this too, all the cape shit. Batman was a standard costumed pulp adventure dude. 60s batman was a fun silly movie about comic books. 90s batman was a high camp celebration of how silly comic books had become. Nolan batman was fascist erotica and where the wheels really started to come off. Everything since have been batman movies trying really hard to be batman movies and have, accordingly, sucked ass.
Likewise with marvel capeshit - blade was a cool movie about how bad ass Wesley Snipes is, and was way better and more popular than the blade comic. Iron man was about look at this cool fucking guy. WInter Soldiers, for me hands down the best one was a 1970s political thriller and for authenticity they even got fucking Robert Redford. Subsequent marvel movies have mostly tried to be marvel movies and have been dogshit. A thing trying to be itself is going to end up being a poser, and as we all know a poser is the worst thing you can be. Then with dead pool we had a couple of marvel capeshit movies that were entirely about how silly and absurd marvel capeshit was, and that was fun. Idk if the new one was good, but it does seem to be a movie about how silly it’s own success at being silly is so maybe it worked idk.
Godzilla minus one? Wasn’t trying to be a godzilla movie. It was a movie about modern Japan’s struggle between fascist nationalist revanchism and an attempt to finally move past that insane shit and let Shinzo abe and all his buddies, and the war, die. It was about how Japan is enslaved to the us at no benefit to itself and how it’s government are inept, useless neoliberal cowards who can’t find their asses with both hands. A bunch of civillians fight godzilla with crap they have lying around because neither their american overlords nor their captured, useless government will help, and the whole time they are looking directly at the screen saying “the war was a miserable failure that destroyed japan. There was nothing good or honorable about it except that some people were lucky enough to survive. We do not want to go back, we must not go back. The people of Japan must reject nationalist militarism, the US’s geopolitical manipulations, and our shitty government and chart our own path or godzilla is going to wreck us”.
Cool as fuck, best Godzilla movie sense the first one, all because it’s a movie about contemporary Japanese culture and politics that uses Godzilla as a stand in for the threats facing Japan - as is tradition - instead of being about godzilla.no one being able to afford to have children in Japan’s fucked up economy is a key plot beat. Excellent film.
Another Frank banger.
I loved Minus One. Great film
It triples down on the absurdity of capeshit in a way it’s hard to see how they top it.
Blade gets a brief cameo.
Thanks for writing about the Godzilla movie. I had heard some buzz but didn’t know about the depth to it’s concept. I’ll have to check it out!
I remember that Gambo was once directly marketed as exactly that: “this is Lord of the Rings except for GROWN-UPS.” Insulting Tolkein’s work that way put me off from the very start and then I had to keep hearing about the very mature murderfucking for like a decade after because cultural saturation.
I was so bored watching the trailer that I didn’t even complete the trailer. It was so… uninspired. Rankin/Bass did it better decades ago with more heart.
I’m the same way. I guess I’m waiting for the next and final season of Lower Decks before Kurtzman finally “Section 31s” away my remaining love for Trek.
Christ, right?i read gambo years before the show, got to the end at that time, and moved on. And then the show happened and i started re-reading it and was like “this is all miserable, all these people are horrible, only bad horrible things happen. Nooooooope” and put it down. All i remember about the show is that the armor looked awful. But i still got to hear about it for years while being unable to participate in any conversations because ir ead the books and knew what happened next! it was agony!
I’m glad we got lower decks. At least some group of artists out there “got” it.
Years ago, before the show officially shit the bed, when I so much as expressed dislike for that “everything sucks, everyone sucks, everything’s smeared with shit and everyone left alive with any agency is an asshole” setting I got back “heh, not everything can be sunshine and rainbows, snowflake. Not everything can be a morality play, either.”
GAMBO IS ALSO MORALITY PLAY. THE MORAL IS THAT BETTER WORLDS ARENT POSSIBLE, ATTEMPTING TO CHANGE THEM IS NAIVE AND MAKES THINGS WORSE, AND YOU’RE CHILDISH IF YOU AREN’T OINKING ALONG AND GOBBLING THE SENSATIONALISTIC SLOP.
One of the few timelines I can think of that’d be even more clownish than this one would be where the “D&D” trust fund sexpests had Star Trek fall into their laps instead of Gambo.
: p
Yeah i would not want to see their star trek. JJ’s Star Trek was bad enough.
Kurtzman’s long wet dream of making some “Section 31” production, so I hear, may finally happen in movie form.
I hope it crashes and burns like most of his giggly edgelord trash. There’s definitely still a market for grimdark hog slop, but he tends to be too pretentiously liberal and inclusive in his murderfucking to court enough hogs to the slop trough.
Black ops
is also a convenient writing trick because if it’s all super duper maxi extreme double secret things can just pop in or out of frame with only as much explanation as the writer feels like giving to justify it.
It’s like those really pretentious “genius serial killer” movies from years back where the laziest possible writing move is “HE’S SO SMART HE PREDICTED EVERYTHING WE DO! WE’RE JUST PLAYING HIS GAME!”
Yeah, its lazy writing. At least in Deep Space 9, you get the sense that while Section 31 has enough connections to keep itself hidden, it wasn’t all powerful. If I were gonna pick up the plot threads, I’d have it be what it was first stated to be: a small group of essentially vigilantes, high on their own mythology and exploiting the gaps and shadows of a huge organization like the federation.
I think in some ways, Star Trek let liberals indulge in American Exceptionalism. Like, here’s all the values we purport to hold, being evangelized by a good democratic federal government and its space-navy! Yes, they’re socialist; but its because of replicators! Don’t worry about it! Obviously, this varied across episodes and writers. Some might be more explicitly socialist, some might have a little more yankee-brainworms. But New Trek feels like its all in on the American Exceptionalism. So now Section 31 is just Federation CIA and they do “critical work” whatever that means
Bashir’s encounter with them made them seem like a few assholes that were propping up a more menacing front with more resources than they actually had access to, and pretty much just criminals with too much clearance.
Theeeeeeeen NuTrek gave them le epic drone armadas and le scary AI cliches with “Control.” And for some reason massive drone swarm battles where it’s hard to tell what’s even fucking happening and it’s all smeared and pewpewpew in a boring way.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HI6QQs8ImWg
Compare that to, say, the Battle of Dollyworld in Orville where I find myself actually caring because the stakes emotionally matter and it isn’t just a bunch of copy-paste wanking and one-upmanship special effects:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=caBzvF9hwkI
That was my experience with the smuglords of the Lemmyverse Trek site. “Believe whatever you want but this is all about sports teams and of course the coolest seeming team is the bad guys but don’t call them bad guys because it’s totally more complicated than that. We’re the adults in the room.” It’s that “Grey Jedi” power fantasy from Star Wars all over again where a fandom conjured up a bullshit escapist way of having cool dark side powers without being dark siders.
I found YouTube links in your comment. Here are links to the same videos on alternative frontends that protect your privacy:
Link 1:
Link 2:
I SAW THE KOBAYASHI MARU AND I CLAPPED