The ones who aren’t being dishonest pieces of shit feeding into divisivism are usually complaining about the lack of quality of the writing and/or the overt nature of ‘leftist’ messaging. Meaning anything remotely progressive like gay people existing or touchy-feely things coming from guys in a manner where those things are not directly relevant to the plot or don’t actually change anything end up feeling forced, and thusly feel like they’re sprinkled in just to “be progressive”.
Often times there is some credibility to the complaints of the quality of writing, it’s just the ‘woke’ thing that triggered them to think about why the thing on screen is happening. Instead of noticing that it’s a general ham-fisted nature to the writing (which Trek basically always has in quite a few episodes of all series), they stupidly blame ‘woke’.
That is the power of the brainwashing coming from the dishonest propagandists like Ben Shapiro and their ilk: Legitimate shortcomings become things caused by “the other”, instead of basic variability of quality.
IMO, the bigger problem with Trek is Hollywood dumbasses like Kurtzman like pushing messaging more than writing good stories to challenge the alternate POV, which plays right into the shitty propagandists’ hands.
There are plenty of old episodes that would embarass modern Trek with being progressive since they didn’t make it an overt declaration (tell the audience), but showed why the bigoted view was bad. Whereas new Trek loves to just… declare the progressive view as good, and then go on to Main Character the problem away: Poor writing even when you agree with the message.
Sure, there are also quite a few hamfisted episodes of old Trek, but I’d much rather take 24 episode seasons smattered with ham than 10 episodes with an overarching story that loves to simply declare itself superior. It’s so much easier to ignore the poorly written episodes in old Trek when there is so much to take in, especially when there are some gems to find.
IMO, the overproduction is also hurting a lot of newer IPs even beyond being a huge cost. It sets the expectations higher. It’s so much easier to gloss over a 6/10 in writing which is inevitable in a long running series no matter the message, when the visuals and the rest aren’t a 10/10 in every scene. If the episodes weren’t insanely expensive, long productions, they’d be able to put out a lot more episodes to drown out the bad ones. Instead, they give us 10, in a season that’s almost always a bit rocky to begin with in every series.
I think setting expectation is one reason why Lower Decks gets so much love. It’s “just a cartoon”, so when the writing nails a mature topic, it feels like a proper treat.
He would be far more correct in the general sense if it were only bigots and idiots complaining that were never going to be fans of a more intellectual show anyways.
New Trek has had lots of criticism from actual, existing Trek fans that want to see the IP flourish into another 100+ episode series. Of course the usual bigots and propagandists also hated on it, but they were always going to! To thusly pretend there are zero honest fans who didn’t like Discovery or Picard, etc, is to completely ignore valid critique.
Star Trek might be different for everyone, but there are many core throughlines and principles that were heavily changed for New Trek. That doesn’t inherently make New Trek bad by itself, but it also means the old fans aren’t just whining to whine.
Maybe they actually have some good points when they’re comparing things that are getting dropped one after the other, not even approaching episode counts that the original hit with three seasons, to the rest of the older series which all have significantly more than that.
Yes, they all had silly episodes, so why did these older things with plenty of sillyness garner so many fans? It’s foolish to pretend it’s all bigots and idiots simply saying, “it’s different!”.