Star Wars fan here. Star Trek has always been an incredible example in pop culture of progressive values. They’ve supported love in all its forms, diversity, inclusion, and other “woke” values. They’ve created a world where everyone looks out for each other, protects each other, and includes each other. Star Trek is the future I want to live in. So, to all Star Trek fans, I give you a very enthusiastic “live long and prosper”.
The thing is, you have to be at least slightly media literate to realise that. Old Trek just lived in a world that was comfortable in its wokeness. It never signposted it, it just did the woke thing. At times this was having the first interracial kiss on TV. At others, it was using an alien species where everyone except one member is non-binary as a metaphor (at the time, it was intended as a metaphor for oppression of gay people, but today it reads much more strongly as a trans metaphor). In today’s Trek, you have characters directly coming out of the closet as trans; it’s much more direct and hard to miss. I saw one person half-jokingly suggest that they started deliberately doing this stuff specifically to drum up controversy to get people talking about their shows.
And let’s be honest, the kind of people who would complain about wokeness as though it’s a bad thing are not exactly the most media literate. These are the people who saw Fight Club and thought the protagonists were heroes, or who idolised Rick in Rick & Morty.
I recently had a conversation with a relative telling me they could not watch one of the recent Star Treks because they heard it was “woke”.
It’s Star Trek. It is ALWAYS woke. Star Trek (1966) was woke fifty years before “woke” was defined as a thing.
You can’t have Star Trek without “woke” because that’s what Star Trek is.
Star Wars fan here. Star Trek has always been an incredible example in pop culture of progressive values. They’ve supported love in all its forms, diversity, inclusion, and other “woke” values. They’ve created a world where everyone looks out for each other, protects each other, and includes each other. Star Trek is the future I want to live in. So, to all Star Trek fans, I give you a very enthusiastic “live long and prosper”.
It’s not too late to join us.
“Peace, and long life.”
The thing is, you have to be at least slightly media literate to realise that. Old Trek just lived in a world that was comfortable in its wokeness. It never signposted it, it just did the woke thing. At times this was having the first interracial kiss on TV. At others, it was using an alien species where everyone except one member is non-binary as a metaphor (at the time, it was intended as a metaphor for oppression of gay people, but today it reads much more strongly as a trans metaphor). In today’s Trek, you have characters directly coming out of the closet as trans; it’s much more direct and hard to miss. I saw one person half-jokingly suggest that they started deliberately doing this stuff specifically to drum up controversy to get people talking about their shows.
And let’s be honest, the kind of people who would complain about wokeness as though it’s a bad thing are not exactly the most media literate. These are the people who saw Fight Club and thought the protagonists were heroes, or who idolised Rick in Rick & Morty.
Its literally a post-scarcity socialist utopia on Earth
Woke has been part of African American Vernacular English since the 1930s.
PREACH