This is firmly Memory Beta canon, but this bit from the Star Trek Adventures Core Rulebook still feels like an interesting addition to this conversation:
This might be right. I mean, Migleemo also doesn’t wear a standard uniform:
Ubuntu doesn’t deserve Uhura. 🤣
But in all seriousness, guess I’m a Denobluan now, minus the polyamory.
I view satirical voice impression and speech synthesis of a real person as two different ethical issues entirely.
I find impressions intended for satire fall within the real of the first amendment, while the latter can be an unwelcome appropriation of identity when done wrong.
I mean, the creator of Dilbert is basically option 2 incarnate in the most terrifying way possible, so it makes sense.
It was actually an attempt to use indirect characterization - by using "lasers" instead of "phasers", it shows that the demographic I am describing only pays attention to the superficial aesthetic of Star Trek rather than its meaning or even common technical terms in the show.
But still, I derive quite a bit of humor from your comment.
Oops.
There’s 2 kinds of people in Trek fandom:
- The sane people who know Berman sucks and her outfit is a known unfortunate symptom - we just pretend Seven had real clothes.
- “I liiiike Seven of Nine” - creepy gen X white guys who just watch Trek for boobs and lasers.
I haven’t gotten all the way through it yet, but I have very occasionally come back to it as a hobby project over the past year because I have been trying to collect a dataset of Majel’s lines in order to train a text to speech voice.
Usually, I’d find that a bit unethical, but in this case, they literally tried to collect a dataset before she died, which I think is as close to consent to such a reproduction as most passed actors could give. Also, it’s mostly for fun for something like HomeAssistant on Raspberry Pi.
While DS9 quality is an issue, I think Keevan is just a PS1 character- a beautiful one.
I find Pegasus a decent episode. I think that while utopian aspiration is a fundamental tenet of Star Trek, I think it’s a bit reducto e to call it completely a show about perfect humans.
Heck, from the get go we had Garry Mitchell doing pyscho god stuff and Charlie X groping people, and a captain who sacrificed his crew to the weird space Romans so he would survive.
I think in truth, Star Trek is both about the best humanity can be and how the best in humanity can overcome the worst in humanity - you can’t exactly do that without episodes where the protagonists or the Federation makes mistakes, sometimes small and sometimes on the magnitude of Pegasus.
In many ways, DS9, darker as it is, feels the most Trek - a team of very different people with different beliefs overcoming/respecting their differences and forming a beautiful community despite the folly and evil around and within them.
It looks like this rulebook was released 2 months before the Discovery episode.
Honestly, I think I’d personally consider the Disco naming a canon goof up - Daystrom was only 37 years old at that point. While he’d certainly done a lot in his career by then, it still feels weird to name such a major part of Starfleet after him when he’s still relatively young.
I think my headcannon, and a reasonable retcon in my opinion, is that there was a predecessor organization to Daystrom, somewhat like how there was NACA before there was NASA. When Discovery mentions Daystrom, they should actually be mentioning the predecessor organization.