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[pisskop]

Did one pee on him?  with psi of like 50 psi that water would hurt a little 

[scriver]

Possibly the smell of a hundred other dogs having marked it.

[Draignean]

The vision of its creator was lost when the creator, and those who worked with him, died or left the franchise.

Now, it is just CBS/Paramount looking for money.


That's how. (It's also why fan-made tribute offerings look and feel more like the real thing, than the official offerings from the franchise holders.)

See, I don't actually mind the slightly older but still New Trek, which I'm going to refer to as Young-Kirk Trek. It's enjoyable so long as you're not expecting grand art, and there are some moments that are just genuinely good. Also some that are genuinely bad, but I'd still rate them as fun action movies that are worth their time as far as entertainment goes.

Star-Trek: Discovery is just... I wonder if they actually assembled the list of Mary-Sue traits before they made their protagonist. Sole survivor of a Klingon raid on a research colony, rescued by Sarek (the Sarek, father of Spock Sarek) via a bizarre form of life-saving mind meld, becomes the only human to ever attend vulcan science academy, gains the rank of commander and xo status on board a federation ship immediately after leaving school, serves for only seven years before the captain starts pushing the idea of 'you should get your own command', has a frickin' vulcan telepathic link (because that's apparently a thing) to Sarek where the two can chat, and insta-gibs a high ranking Klingon warrior during the opening episode. She's also a complete Woobie in everything she does, is incapable of making firm logical arguments, and her genuine response to being hauled off the bridge is to make puppy eyes at the captain. Any time she's in danger, the entire bridge crew reacts like their mother is on fire. When there are hull breaches across half a dozen decks, people on the bridge have been definitely killed by Star-Trek's patented exploding consoles, the captain and chief science officer have to share a moment of horror when they realize that one of the breaches might have put the protagonist in danger- TO SAY NOTHING OF THE DOZENS OF OTHER CREW MEMBERS THAT ARE DEFINITELY DYING.

There's not a single character I've liked yet, and that's almost impressive.

[Reelya]

Uh it's a girl? Not that strong girls/women is at all bad, but when they write girls like that they're just having a brainfart. It's like stuff written by committee to be as least "offensive" as possible and as "empowering" as possible. But they've decided to be "reductionist" and maximize how "empowering" literally every second of every scene is. She sounds like all the worst traits of Rey from Force Awakens. e.g. Rey only has to hear that any ability exists, then she tries it, and literally instantly masters stuff that any "mere male" in the franchise took years master, no matter what that skill is.

It sounds like you'd wonder when ST: Discovery person even has a crew, since she can clearly do it all by herself. Same as the Mahouka novels/anime where the (clearly author insert) gary-stu protagonist can do any ability better than any other man alive. In that one it make you wonder why it's an ensemble cast, since mr fucking mcguyver can do it all by himself, a point they make over and over to show his utter superiority over both friend and foe. And that includes having him usurp someone else's love confession scene, with the girl publicly announcing gary-stu was her actual first choice. the poor schmuck she then settled on was then apparently really chuffed to even be mentioned in the same sentence as Gary Stu. It was barf-worthy.

Hey ... maybe they should actually watch media made for women and decide how women are portrayed by women to women. Because the "ms. perfect" types aren't the heroine in those.

To be honest, if Star Trek: Discovery is in fact that bad, consumers need to punish that by not tuning in. It's not sexism. Women are not being catered to if they don't write good female leads, and that one just insults everyone's intelligence.

[CABL]

I accidentally bumped into /r/thedonald. Parts of my brain melted away. Like, the fuck, man? So much "I'm not butthurt, but here's an essay why le alt-left cucks suck so much". But then again, both extremes of the political spectral are incredibly insecure and easily offended.

[Tack]

Pff. Rey still can't swing a lightsaber for shit, even when she's leaning on her forceness.

In WTF news:
Actually this is worth a line.
IN WTF NEWS.
I bought a new Mic, because I wanted one. Turns out, the comptuer doesn't recognize it. Says it needs drivers. Go to the Blue website, they say it doesn't need drivers, go ask your mother.
So, I see that it could be because of a failure to windows update. Go there, try and run a couple of hundred (seems I've got a backlog), and what do you know, my update fails.
Que Chkdsking and Dism-ing and Sfc-ing - it all comes up with 'There's an issue, but we can't fix it.'
"Well fuck it", I think, and boot from disk. Click 'Refresh PC', it gets about twenty seconds in- unknown error, no can do.
Halfway towards just formatting my hard drive and realize that nothing is actually wrong.
The update holdouts have kind of disappeared into the nether and at the end of the day I can access all of my files and play my games just fine, I just can't use this one stupid mic.
Crazy how far down all that went.

[Reelya]

Pff. Rey still can't swing a lightsaber for shit, even when she's leaning on her forceness.

That's just plot convenience. Her uberness is put on hold the few times it would interfere with the plot.

[Flying Dice]

As for the question "What Star Trek should I watch," the answer continues to be "TOS, the first few films, DSN, and parts of TNG."

[Tawa]

I accidentally bumped into /r/thedonald. Parts of my brain melted away. Like, the fuck, man? So much "I'm not butthurt, but here's an essay why le alt-left cucks suck so much". But then again, both extremes of the political spectral are incredibly insecure and easily offended.

You haven't even seen the half of it. They're convinced that the Reddit admins "need them" and once tried to "hold the site hostage" by making the sub private. They utterly despise the admins, yet they use absurd amounts of Reddit gold. A mix-up involving ad view count convinced them that they had six million subscribers and that the admins were hiding 5,600,000 of them for... some reason.

They're also notorious for vote manipulation. They sticky some random post so that it gets bombarded with upvotes in hopes of getting it on r/all, then bitch about it when the thing gets downvoted to zero and are convinced that the admins are manually setting the score. They organize brigades via Discord to get around the site rules. Purportedly, there's so many upvote bots that you could submit a post titled "Hillary Clinton is the greatest human being ever born" and it'll get a few dozen upvotes before the moderators remove it.

[Draignean]

Against my better judgement, I kept watching. At episode 3, (technically 2, the first episode after the pilot), something incredible happened.

It began to suck less.

Not that it became good, by any stretch of the imagination, but it began to be less terrible. It's like if a priest started attending YMCA boy's yoga instead of actually raping altar boys. Not great, not even good, but much less horrible.

 I also quickly reached the conclusion that I would have liked everyone a lot more if they'd nixed the entire pilot and started on episode 3. Honestly.

The pilot is set up to vomit the main character's tragic backstory at you, and to tell you why she's a prisoner and how despite the fact that she's a mutineer [[Starfleet's first mutineer, to add to her sue list]] she actually an awfully good person and we should all just give her a chance while she's being hard on herself.  I would have been so much happier, and so much more willing to actually watch another episode (I'm rather conflicted) if you'd just dumped me into episode 3, in which the protagonist is established to be a mutineer first officer who sparked off the klingon war somehow- but lacks all the whiny suckfest of her actually committing said mutiny while all the other actors are painfully aware that they will never be seen again. It's a good place to start a character off, I just have to intentionally try and delete everything I learned in the pilot.

She's still Sue-ish. However, if I drop the context of everything that happened in the pilot, she's within acceptable levels of uncanny competence.

So, the WTF of this, I'm actually considering watching another episode. It was a fuckawful pilot, but there were glimmers of actually interesting characters in the non-pilot episode.
 

[EnigmaticHat]

I accidentally bumped into /r/thedonald. Parts of my brain melted away. Like, the fuck, man? So much "I'm not butthurt, but here's an essay why le alt-left cucks suck so much". But then again, both extremes of the political spectral are incredibly insecure and easily offended.

You're coming in late to the game.  During the election many people on it were... I dunno, extremists, shills, something, crazy for Donald I guess.  But there were other people who were just along for the ride and the sense of community/accomplishment.  I mean imagine you're young and newish to Reddit, you're on that subreddit and not many others.  /r/thedonald appears on the front page of /r/all, everyone on the subreddit seems like they're on the same page, and then you actually WIN the election.  I could totally see the draw.  I wasn't watching the Daily Show back then but I imagine during the Bush years Jon Stewart felt similar to liberals, he's funny and he says what you're already thinking and the crowd laughs along.

Its always been what it is now, but.  At some point because of the pushback from the rest of reddit the admins temporarily set the whole thing private, and all the relatively normal people went and did something else with their life.  So its just the core cadre, and now that the election is over they've had a hard time keeping things relevant.  Before it would be easy enough to see the thing as "4chan memers try to elect the memelord", now with posts like (to pick one off the current front page) "NFL ratings down and hollywood is unraveling" they've abandoned any pretense of discussion or an end goal.

What I'm saying is, before I thought it was crazy but I could see people getting sucked in.  I don't *think* anyone new is getting sucked in, they're just coasting on their massive gains from the election.

[Tack]

Okay now I'm confused.
Are we discussing Voyager?

[scriver]

No, there's a new Star Trek series called Discovery that premiered just earlier this year.

[Reelya]

Ironically, the "Mary Sue" concept was named after Star Trek fanfic which parodied bad fanfiction writing (usually written by women) common in the early Star Trek fandom.
http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/FanFic/ATrekkiesTale

The fic is a Parody of a Self-Insert Fic in which Lt. Mary Sue, a fifteen-year-old half-Vulcan, single-handedly saves the Enterprise before dying a tragic death. ... Paula Smith was a fan who happened to notice that many of the bad Star Trek stories had the same plot. They always centered on a female Original Character, who is the youngest whatever in Starfleet. Everyone falls in love with her and they go on adventures with her, typically ending with her meeting a tragic death to be mourned by all. After seeing a particularly egregious example of this storyline, Paula Smith wrote a parody

"Everyone" refers to the canon characters. e.g to cater to the Mary Sue, canon characters start acting out of character to dote on her. e.g. Sarek of all people helping her out sounds out of character, considering Sarek's relationship to his own son.

[EnigmaticHat]

I might have to watch that just to see if its good.  Not everyday you get a new Star Trek.

That being said I might like it anyway.  This is embarrassing to admit but as a kid I enjoyed Enterprise -_-  I was less picky back then.  Also if anyone has read The Name of the Wind, the main character there is blatantly a first time writer's Mary Sue and it never hurt my enjoyment of the story.

Also Guardians of the Galaxy Vol 2. is my favorite Star Trek movie