#so until & unless tarantino proves otherwise it's not actually a step DOWN so much as a potential lateral move in suckitude

[princessnijireiki]

@femmefareeha replied to your post “quentin tarantino's going to find a way to have a white guy say the n...”

Ppl are rlly saying tht... Like the politics of the Klingons are more ... Weird mb about bush & 9/11 but literally....that's so ugly claiming they aren't black nemore bc what ? The pigment ? When they literally flattened the nose bridges ?

I don't Agree w wht the article said abt discovery fully though

@pikeisaman replied to your post “quentin tarantino's going to find a way to have a white guy say the n...”

"Aren't black coded anymore" what the fuck they are especially black coded now

I’m gonna put this under a cut bc I word-vomited a little bit but short version: word pp are wiling over the klingons trying to pretend it’s not a racist reboot & that article... had issues.

the main defense I’ve seen for the new klingons is that they’re “supposed” to represent the MAGA/alt-right crowd with their militancy, religious zealotry, isolationism & xenophobia, etc. ... even though tbh I saw people right after the pilot aired saying the vibe felt more like reminiscent of ISIS/daesh, and I saw one person say that (possibly due to the more exaggerated mouthpieces; the prosthetic teeth are more prominent in this klingon design than they’ve ever been before) the accent & intonation in the klingon-language scenes-- which for sure has changed since the sort of standardized tng & ds9 inflections, like there are official klingon language tapes that were made in the ‘90s for nerds to teach themselves with-- sound more like they’re imitating a cliché “sub-saharan african accent.”

even before you take the redesign into account (which is... bad), there’s a lot of very loaded shit going on that very much points to increasing the correlation of negative stereotypes of ~primitive or ~savage blackness with these particular klingons. and it’s a ham-fisted allegory that I don’t think would be a progressive conversation even if the klingons suddeny were klan-coded or whatever, not just bc it undermines the previously established narratives of klingons, klingon culture, etc. over the last 50yrs, to idea of marking that kind of racism or “takeover” as an ethnically marked “other” & an outside problem rather than like... internal bigotry and bias even among “good” & “normal” humans... is not a helpful conversation.

even when tos tackled that kind of subject, like, the literal nazi episode featured human neo-nazis; episodes with aliens having their own racism to contend with had humans as outside observers noting that this was not going to be easily resolved & looks like absurd bloodlust once you’re able to be detached from the situation.

and even though you can argue that the tng & ds9 klingons were racist, too, bc there was a significant amount of brownface/blackface going on (I mean: this extends to tos as well, but brownface in star trek: tos is its own like... essay) trying to maintain a certain “aesthetic” for the species... and not to excuse that, but for one thing, it did get toned down over time, and for another, it wasn’t to this like goddamn... tar baby drow extent that dsc’s klingon makeup is on, and it wasn’t for sake of demonizing the species & the sort of conversations the show was trying to have about/involving klingons. like it wasn’t “they are savage + we coincidentally want the blackest makeup & widest prosthetic nostrils you have,” it was in the context of two series that explored klingon internal politics & culture and displaced diaspora, transracial adoption, rebuilding culture, etc.; there wasn’t a color difference between good & evil klingons, and there wasn’t a color difference between klingon & human skin color ranges to mark the klingons as excessively alien beyond facial prostheses and culture. they still looked like “people” to an extent, and moreso than several other characters did on those shows.

(tng & ds9 did ofc also have other racial-caricature characters that are v. much worth discussing and critiquing, like the ferengi, but again: another subject that could be a full-fledged essay.)

but so tbh if the dsc klingons had been presented as a new species... they would still be an aggressively racist set of tropes bound together in minstrelsy-looking blackface, and people would probably notice more that it’s fucking weird bc there’s no excuse of nostalgia or “reimagining” to slide this bizarre concept under the radar by labeling them as something familiar.

and as klingons, there’s a lot to be said for dsc going further backwards than tos did 50+ years ago wrt making them more caricatured in this racist way, and in so doing, less human than they’ve ever been on both an in-verse and on this meta, audience watching a screen sort of level.

as far as the article goes, I don’t agree with everything the author wrote, either-- though I really didn’t watch dsc after the pilot bc the klingons made me super uncomfortable and tbh... made me feel like I couldn’t trust what the storytelling & production values were going to be for the show, between that and kurtzman/orci still being involved (they took the reins from abrams more with star trek into darkness, which I thought was heinous, personally, and then one or both of them acted like v. dramatic over it when critique rolled in iirc).

but like I disagree with him that enterprise is a direct copy of tos, though that’s what it was aiming for-- ent was like weirdly conservative & felt like exactly the post-9/11 bush era media that it was... I think tng gets a bad rep as time goes on bc of people wanting to distance themselves from pc politics when it did a lot of groundbreaking stuff. ds9 was the bomb but a lot of people don’t want to acknowledge that it never got its due bc of having a black captain and a lot of poc or poc-coded aliens in the main cast, and that tbh part of why it doesn’t get pointed out as the “cool star trek” is bc not only was paramount not trying to make a sisko movie like that, st fandom is as racist as any other & won’t build internal buzz either vs. clamoring for a new tos movie in ‘09.

the conversation is just... not what the author presented it to be, I don’t think, but it’s better-written & better-thought-out than I thought any article defending tarantino for star trek would have or could have been. bc a lot of fans are just at very least not vocalizing or verbalizing... the fact that the franchise has internal issues on top of its issues reaching out to / profiting from “mainstream” audiences, like there’s that lack of critical awareness. and when you get that reality check of, ok, abrams never wanted this & tried to sell a plot about missiles & drone strikes with benedict cumberbatch as a genocidal eugenicist übermensch orchestrating poc suicide bombing shit in “the wrath of khan 2.0,” all dedicated to 9/11 first responders, like... that’s already happened. that fuck up is already here. so then, yeah, that’s a damn good point in favor of giving someone else a shot who actually says they want to be here, and who at very least won’t do & presumably isn’t interested in doing that specific dumbassed shit all over again.

I still don’t want him in charge, but like. it was a good argument, ngl.