Hey guys, was browsing some reddit threads and i found something a bit disturbing, that is kinda a recurring theme in some fanon and the somewhat racist writings of Gene himself, that is the distinct lack of East Asian, primarily Chinese, and South Asians being represented in post-apocalyptic earth. Putting aside all the Federations other problems like the fact that it seems like 80-90% of Starfleet is a Terran organization, even Terrans themselves are pretty monolithic with a predominantly American or British cultural background for its peoples and maybe the occassional token white person from continent Europe, but everyone outside that area is usually British or American culturally. A prevailing theory among some fans being that the poorly developed or explained WWIII and Eugenics war happened exclusively in Asia with the destruction of China and India. Considering how things are today, this just horribly dated cold war thinking and quite honestly seem to run counter to Treks core themes, right up there with how Ex Astra Scientia has criticized Treks repeated use of WWII German nazis as badguys in various scenarios, it really just shows a very narrowminded style of thinking, though i chalk this up to thoughtlessness and generational cultural issues than maliciousness or white supremacy. With that said i think that kind of shows the superiority of comics over television, as new writings and editors are constantly brought in the culture receives constant facelifts while Trek was and still is the product of maybe a dozen or so writers and producers. A pretty good example is how universe reboots are used constantly in DC comics to update the universe and its sensibilities and rewrite aspects of continuity to match up with current generational culture, or you could also do this with the retconed introduction of the Denobulans, say they were always there but the stories were relatively narrow in focus and prevented their representation. Anyway i wouldnt personally remove the whole WWIII/Eugenics angle, because i do think it works, but i would rewrite it to say that all of earth was devastated or the damage wasnt bad enough to make it Fallout bad, more like the world we saw in Ghost in the Shell but with less advanced technology. Looking back at descriptions of pre-Fed trek earths history, it comes off as really Euro centric and incredibly anachronistic, seriously in Roddenberrys novelization of TMP he basically says Europe was unscatched and became a philosophers paradise, something that i see as being akin to, if Trek were written back in say the 1500s, saying that only greece, Italy and Turkey would survive as the centres of civilization. It just bothers me that in a show that venerates diversity, enlightenment and cultural inclusion that such anachronisms still exist, if Trek ever gets itself some real committed Worldbuilding projects going to reinvigorate the Prime universes canon, this is definitely one of things that needs to be addressed. Anyway just something i was thinking about for a while and wanted to share here, thanks for reading
Posted on: Fri, 14 Mar 2014 08:09:41 +0000
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