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 feel like i could sit across a slowly cooling basket of shitty diner fries with this woman going “right?” “Yes!” “I agree!” “Omg thank you!” Etc etc for like, idk, six, maybe eight hours two or three days in a row. I feel pretty much the same way about star wars, fallout, lotr, and when microsoft announces the Elder Scrolls series at some point in the next 18 mos i’ll feel the same way about that, too.
We’re entering some bold new hell. Capital is trying to turn very big, unwiedly, difficult entertainment products like massive shows, games, and movies in to something like paid per line victorian era pulp slop that can be churnned out endlessly on a tight schedule, while also trying to strip all the craft and expertise out of it and turn the helm over to “ai”, while also trying to meet their state mandated propaganda goals and their marketing goals and shore up the declining rate of profit. More and more parts moving faster and faster in ever tighter circles. And there’s no bottom so it will go on getting worse, faster, in more perverse ways, until something drastic happens.
In the mean time please join me in declaring yourself a co-equal owner, creator, producer, and writer of lord of the rings, star slop, or whatever other story you love, and start making your own slop and refusing to call it fan-fic and just saying " fuck you, this is the true and authentic cup of christ because if a welsh story about a cool guy can turn in to fucking Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade and speilberg doesn’t have to call it fan fic then I can write my own stories about random elves and I don’t have to be fake humble about it."
If we don’t steal our stories back from them they’re just going to keep doing this shit until they wring all possible joy out of them. Lancelot is a self insert slash fic character and so can you!
It’s getting harder and harder to even call out the enshittification of entertainment; I think consumers are sort of “entertainment malnourished” already and so they fight harder over whatever slop they still get. It may sound like hyperbole, but I truly sincerely believe that “to each their own” is a particularly potent cognitohazard cliche, where some of the symptoms of its influence include most discussions barely going further than “which product in this franchise do you like the most” and maybe “which product in this franchise can beat the other products” where even the idea of criticism causes wagon circling and tribalistic defensiveness. Just gobble the slop. Keep filing forward. To each their own.
I do agree with you that “fuck you, I’ll do whatever with this because it’s being turned into corpo sludge anyway,” buuuuuuut when it comes to fanfic… when the rich and powerful play with it, it becomes “canon.”
Remember how in The Force Awakens, the Force didn’t need to be awakened until a failson hack fanfic maker got the reins and decided to destroy the Jedi off-stage right after the previous movie had just returned them, and featured not-Tatooine, not-Yavin, and a not-Death-Star-BUT-BIGGER that destroyed not-Coruscant because the first spoken line of the movie was “this will make things right” because PREQUELS BAD AMIRITE TOP KEK RESET EVERYTHING THATS A GOOD TRICK. JJ Abrams is the adult version of that bratty rich kid in the neighborhood who destroys his neighbors’ toys by bashing them together or maybe scratching his name on them with a pocket knife to claim they always belonged to him because look at this mark here.
I don’t even think it’s possible for sufficiently connected failsons to actually fail in a meaningful way. How many franchises has Kurtzman damaged, or even destroyed, and yet he still keeps making bank (do you even remember the “Cinematic Universe” he claimed he’d launch with his horrid and deeply unfun Mummy rehash?)
More than ever, I outright reject “popcorn movie” as an excuse for lazy hacky slop. Some movies can be fun and lowbrow, but how many decades of “popcorn” should be allowed as an excuse to nod along as everything is further blended toward grey corpo sludge and reconstituted over and over again with larger and larger corporate acquisitions happening all the while?
Double replying but whatevs - i think the “too each their own” thing, people don’t have enough outside referrents to discuss media. All the star wars and marvel and bat slop are all made by JJ, Gunn, and like four other dudes so all the stories they’ve seen for the last ten years are the same man children telling the same stories the same way with the same actors. All that changes is how saturated the colors in the sweat-shop forced labor last minute cgi is.
You have to have seen some kurasawa movies and some wwii battlefield footage to appreciate and discus Star Wars and those who disagree can take a number, i an currently fighting the prior wrong person and will be with you shortly. You can’t talk about why star wars ships do that if you haven’t seen gun pod footage from the battle of midway. You can’t talk about lightsaber fights (forms, barf) if you haven’t got at least some idea that samurai cinema exists.
And people don’t. Their whole life they’ve been trapped in this world where since harry potter came out in 1997 every media product is part of an all fronts scorched earth campaign to take all of your attention all the time every day.
Star wars began the great work, hp completed it, and now every media project at least aspires to be a 24 hour all encompassing life style of food, clothing, cars, artifacts, apps. I’m sure there are hundreds of thousands of pages analyzing how often apps and ads should interact with your customers per hour based on their age, gender, etc. You’re not supposed to go outside. Each group of media products is supposed to be a walled garden that is at least capable of being some people’s entire living experience outside work hours. And, like, yeah, i’m exaggerating, but the combined effect of all these enshittifying products trying to take all your attention all the time, is they’re undergoing fierce evolutionary selection leading to convergence on a few forms, meaning people live in these horrible frankenstein prison’s stitched together from the rotting flesh of whatever media property group manages to grab their attention. They go from marvel to dcto star wars to potter to gambo to whatever, and it’s all the same plots presented the same ways by the same writers, actors, and show runners reinforcing the same messages, just this horrifying cybernetic hell cave out of plato’s most derranged dying multiversal ayahuascu death nightmare. The cave is inside us, around us, everywhere. There is no end to the cave. If you go outside the cave you only see yourself staring back. You cannot escape the cave. The cave is all. The cave loves you. Look at the shadows on the wall, consume, be upset in the ways the cave wants you to be upset so you buy more cave shit to assauge the case upset the cave caused you so it could sell you cave theme’d anti-cave upset cave products cave cave cave cave cave cave cave cave cave!
I’ma. Little concerned that my covid lead to an opportunistic strep infection actually…
I used to call this “Baytification.” I know it probably didn’t start with Michael Bay, but there’s still a mostly Gen-X rich bored asshole demographic that tends to get nostalgia IPs dropped into their laps and then they decide to “give it a shot in the arm” and “reimagine it” by turning their uninspired crude imitative fanfiction into “canon.”
The most cursed treats timeline I can think of would be one where “Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality” was somehow canonized in such a way.
I feel this so bad. It’s easier now that I’m in a more remote, older, and dare I say more rural area, but before I moved out of CA, many people around me were out and out treat hogs and they needed me to also be a treat hog and get excited about the next product because it has NOSTALGIA CHARACTER and that NOSTALGIA CHARACTER gets TORN APART IN A GORY WAY OMG SO SUBVERSIVE AND EPIC. Ever meet a NuTrek enjoyer offline? There aren’t many, I think, but those that existed were definitely concentrated in my area. Icheb’s death scene was talked about just as excitedly as “DAE LE RED WEDDING” and “DAE LE SHAME.” Bored lanyard liberals crave human suffering on their screens.
Yeah, fuck Multiversus.
On the upside, you had the most immersive Disco Elysium experience I can think of.
Oh shit that universal monsters… universe thing! I forgot about the bad tom cruise mummy movie.
It’s in gaming, too. “There’s no wrong way to play if you’re having fun!” Yes their fucking is! It’s a game. Games by definition have rules. If you’re not playing according to the rules in good faith in a multiplayer game you’re fucking over the other players. If you’re doing it to yourself in a single player game you’re ruining your own fun. A game without rules is either you cheating, or imaginative play. Neither is a proper game. It’s fine to cheat in sp games if you want, but people keep bringing this up as a justiication for demanding changes in the way sp and coop games are designed, implemented, and maintained and once you peekl back through the layers of people arguing about things they don’t understand - difficulty systems, artist intent, the relationship between player and dm, there’s a startling number of people who just fundamentally do not understand what “play” is. Like not playing games, or not being able to explain the different between play behavior and a game, they don’t know how to play because of the monetized restricted entertainment hell we’re all trapped in. They don’t know how to have fun. They can’t engage with a toy it it doesn’t have skinner box systems and victory condtions, nor can they even in theory recognize why a game might place rules and restrictions on the player. Like somehow the inborn human ability to play, imagine, and experience fun has been destroyed in a big chunk of the population and all that’s left is skinner box dopamine chases.
Almost without exception, when I saw “it’s just a game” during an online game, it was a justification for being an asshole, a bigot, or a bigoted asshole. It was the gospel of militant apathy, where the worst crime is caring about anything at all. It was hypocritical, of course: most of those assholes would get really mad if you used “unskilled” weapons in an online shooter, or if your team used strategies that were considered badwrongfun, or gods forbid someone is found out to be gay or feeemale, or worst of all, traaaaaaaaaaaaans. No longer just a game; shit gets real for them then
Treatbrains that bully “defaults” in Fortnite come to mind there. I’ve been around kids in school that did exactly that toward other kids, offline, tormenting them for being “defaults.” Teenage enforcers of monetization.
I see this in the “canon” obsessed lore humpers of most major fiction settings. Until and unless someone on a movie screen says it out loud, it can’t happen, stop talking about it, stop finding your niche in what is already fiction. I think there’s some symptomatic issue there where they can’t imagine themselves in the setting unless they are directly “canon” themselves. Most glaring example are the “Kirito Starks” of Final Fantasy XIV where they slap on what they can on “canon” character names, mix them up until the game accepts the entry, then lurk in Ul’dah chat channel raging about how much they hate trans people (while often playing female characters “because I want to look at this ass all day” as they often say)
That’s awful. We had pressure to have cool clothes and spending money back in the day, but not pressure to buy mtx. : p the most pressure i had to look cool in games was from the ultima online bank squatter crowd and most people would give you
Forgive me; I was sloppy in how I replied and didn’t really add contextual cues to link what I was ranting about to what you were ranting about.
Edited now and hopefully more coherent. I really should have been in bed like an hour ago, lol.
I firmly believe that everything is cannon and there is no such thing as fan fiction, but I have difficulty conveying why I believe that. I completely agree, and very well said.