TNG still had a fair number of godlike energy-based or “sufficiently advanced” beings outside of Q. Off the top of my head there’s the extradimensional god of the Edo, Nagilum, Kevin Uxbridge, and “Isabella”. Beyond TNG, I do think you’re right; there really weren’t any in DS9 outside of the Prophets, and VOY and ENT avoided the trope entirely. There are other ways the consolidation of the Trek universe under TNG changed the types of stories that were told. There was a recurring trope in TOS of fellow captains who suffered some sort of horrible tragedy and ended up going off the reservation in some way, and the only time that plot comes up in TNG is with Benjamin Maxwell and the Cardassians. @abigailnussbaum also made the point in her old TNG critique that as the show went on, the planets-of-the-week Picard and co. visited were increasingly worlds that had preexisting relations with the Federation rather than being new discoveries. While this didn’t really change the types of stories that were being told, it had the effect of making TNG more about maintaining the Federation than exploring strange new worlds.
One of Star Trek: The Next Generation's missions was to give coherence to a world originally developed as a frame for the one-off episodes – completely disconnected SF stories using the same stock cast and setting – of the original series.
There's an abortive first season plot about corruption in Starfleet that's dropped once it's established Starfleet isn't interesting enough to bear more weight than as a plot device telling the Enterprise where to go this week.
Something underappreciated as a success though is that the original series had scads of godlike but trickstery or inhuman beings because individual writers (the Trek franchises were famously full of episodes by published SF writers and continued to take freelance episode pitches well after this had been widely abandoned in TV) kept finding the notion of the Enterprise dealing with one a solid premise.
And in TNG we instead get Q, this type condensed into a single recurring character, introduced in the pilot, getting 6 episodes to himself and then blessing the finale, going on to appear in other Trek shows across multiple galactic quadrants (also, basically My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic, as the John de Lancie-voiced season 2 big bad Discord)
He has special eyes.
At first I was kinda confused as to why no-one said anything about Jonathan’s eye situation but then I realized that people know him as the night shift doctor…
I’ve been playing Vampyr lately and despite it’s flaws I think it’s a good game. I’m currently on chapter four, so, about half-way there! Also, I just noticed that I misspelled Pippa’s name, but oh well, I’m too lazy to fix it.
The mirror universe, transporter accidents, other parallel universes, time travel, cloning technology operated by unscrupulous doctors and scientists, the holodeck...the list goes on and on.
The “would you fuck your clone?” question is so uncomfortably real in Star Trek because of the Mirror Universe.
Something to keep in mind when watching ENT is that Archer is a contemporary of all those starship captains from the late 22nd and early 23rd century that got their crews killed or committed horrendous Prime Directive violations that Kirk and Picard had to clean up a century or two later. Hell, Archer’s probably the one who gave the Iotians that gangster book.
Captain Archer’s smugness is so annoying. Especially because he is so wrong. They go down to the planet and all get high and paranoid off some chemicals in the air, and Trip tries to kill T’Pol.. You know, chemicals that they might have detected with a probe, but fuck caution you know
For the Daily Kuvira thing (and I thank you for that~), maybe a sleepy Kuvira? Or a sleepy Kuvira that's too stubborn to admit that she's tired.
Daily Kuvira #6
Long night…
Maybe I was just at the wrong age when I finally began reading them, but I never got into LoEG, and I think a lot of the above explains why. Heck, I’m still steamed over what Moore did with the Maschinenmensch (a.k.a. “false Maria) in The Roses of Berlin.
What do you dislike about league of extraordinary gentlemen?
Short answer: What I dislike about the comic is the same thing comic fans disliked about the movie- it turned my favorite characters into caricatures.
Long answer:
Make up your mind, Alan Moore- is the League okay with rape or not? It’s horrifying when Hyde or Bond do it, but they first come across the Invisible Man in the process of raping children and basically laugh it off.
Bull-freaking-shit would Jonathan dump Mina over having ugly scars. If you really needed to get him out of the way to hook Mina up with your preferred guy, why not just kill him off and have Mina angst over his death Gwen Stacy-style?
If Jonathan did ever dump Mina for her scars, Van Helsing would be waiting outside the house with a baseball bat (for Jonathan’s kneecaps) and a bouquet of flowers (in case Mina wanted to trade up.)
Why did Mina fall in love with Alan Quartermain? I’m not opposed to younger woman/older man pairings, but…why? Some amount of looks can be traded for some amount of personality or vice versa, but Quartermain as written by Moore had neither.
Why did Moore’s idea of “strong female character” mean “take a woman who was canonically kind and make her a straw feminist ice queen”?
If Jekyll became Hyde because he was ashamed of being gay, then why the everloving hell was Hyde into women?
People Alan Moore cannot do pastiches of: Shakespeare, P.G. Woodehouse, Jack Kerouac.
Pirate Jenny canonically (insofar as a throwaway song is canon) became murderous over doing humiliating menial work. This was not enough for Alan Moore- she had to be raped, because that’s the only possible reason a woman would become a supervillain.
Since he’d already made her Indian, if he wanted her to have additional motivation to be mad, couldn’t it have been about racism?
I don’t like what he did with James Bond, but defending James Bond really isn’t the hill I want to die on. Suffice it to say that it felt mean-spirited.
Speaking of mean-spirited, what does Alan Moore have against Harry Potter and Peter Rabbit?
If you’re going to write a series of comics that amount to “look how much better I am than these other sexist, racist authors!” then your comic should be 1) actually better, and 2) not sexist or racist.
Neil Gaiman goes on about how the movie adaptation was the first time everyone agreed the movie sucked and the comic was great, and it annoys me because I *don’t* agree that the comic was great.
In fact, that’s a big part of why it all pisses me off- I feel like I’m supposed to love this comic. I spent years trying to love this comic. I do not love this comic.
Now, do I think you can do this kind of critique well? Yes, and I’ll point to a series I love, Jane Carver of Waar. An expy of John Carter of Mars shows up in the second book as the villain, and poorly handled it could have felt like a snide “fuck you to all my predecessors in this genre.” As written, though, it was “isn’t it fucked up that John Carter of Mars owned slaves and fought for the Confederacy?” This works because it is a valid point. It is fucked up that John Carter of Mars owned slaves and fought for the Confederacy.
League, on the other hand, is like going “It’s it fucked up that John Carter of Mars ate children?” It’s not a valid point, and it just makes me go “But…he didn’t?”
Even more than Betterman? How is that possible?
It’s taken me 30 minutes to take down notes on like 2 minutes of this scene happening. I don’t know that an anime has affected me as much as this has.
If your ever feeling embarrassed or frustrated with your voice just remember S.H.O.D.A.N from System Shock got to remake herself in her ideal of beauty and decided to have a stutter and inconsistent tone.
Hello there! I'm nesterov81, and this tumblr is a dumping ground for my fandom stuff. Feel free to root through it and find something you like.
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