Like, my post is entirely in reaction to the Facebook post included there as image that the new “hey here’s some stuff” feed showed me. (Not knocking, “hey here’s some stuff” has been the basis of mass media since newspapers)

I started checking out with DS9 and haven’t personally watched any since Voyager.

Even given that Star Trek was like the ur-nuts fandom and its place within broader SFF fandom and fiction scenes made it culturally central to a huge number of authors and author-aspirants, this sentiment seems like the kind of absolutely Marvel-brained shit you’d never have seen before the 2010s.

That Picard was a humanist but he just accepted he’d have to deal with these Ferengi living by the Rules of Acquisition because it’s not like they or anyone really had anything he needed is a lot of where the 90s were at

TOS was at least honest w/ dilithium crystals – sometimes we’re just going to have to ::ahem:: deal with some randoms over fuel sources

Remember when the Cold War ended and Star Trek series had to figure out what to do with their setting and then for a series pretended that “the R2P global cop knitting together the bloody borderlands” was actually a meaningful substitute?

Voyager was kind of that too, the Maquis/Federation mixed crew was kind of riffing off the Irish and South African peaces, but then they used that to tell “explorer in the savage land” stories even more primal to American colonialism than TOS’ “Wagon Train to the Stars”.

Shirtless Kirk™