"Your SciFi about how the VC are good and Nixon is Palpatine is too woke, that's why I'm a fan of the SciFi about how much space communism fucks and is Based"
i'm still mad they rewrote the Tau from 'hopelessly outnumbered genuine good guys who are too insignificant to make a serious difference in the galaxy, which is full of incredibly powerful factions who are too stupid/racist/xenophobic to ally with each other to take down the biggest existential threats' to '1984 alien mind control parasites make everyone subservient to the ethereals so they can genocide the humans they trick into joining their empire'
but in classic slopagandist fashion they will deny making any claim whatsoever about reality or related concepts, and insist that since the lore is written from the imperial perspective it might just be propaganda. this has zero effect on the wider culture and community, who continue earnestly 'larp'-ing as fascists, while absolving them of any specific wrongdoing.
Even the retconned mind control Tau are still by far the most benevolent faction in the universe, and better than actually existing humans in the current day IRL.
Like even their most muddled and uncharitable interpretation of communists is better than modern reality
Agreed. The Tau were actual proper grimdark done right. Fighting against hopeless odds in a war they cannot win just because it is the right thing to do. That's really dark. But I guess the empire stans got mad that there was actually a faction worth rooting for in the franchise so they had to fix that.
They also generally have an incredibly shallow knowledge of and grasp on Tolkien's works and either base everything off the movies cause they ain't read the books or project a lot of stuff that they want into it and ignore that reading the hard to read stuff will tell you they're wrong. I wish Tolkien were still around cause he'd be an absolutely vicious reply guy.
Dune is actually rightwing, a conservative morality play and distant future. Frank Herbert was what today would be called a chud and was very open about it. That being said, Dune is still amazing space opera and something unique.
I do find it funny when leftists who don't know the background of the author and his own interpretation twist themselves into knots trying to make Dune into some kind of leftist agitprop.
I've never watched Star Trek and only saw couple of the originals from Wars, but isn't the first one just fully automated luxury space communism written by libs and the second just Vietnam war allegory turned McDonald's toy?
tbf the original series is hella sexist. Maybe it wasn’t so bad for its era, but it is really tough to watch in 2023. Roddenberry was a sex pest and it shows.
One scene that stands out to me, a female officer walks onto the bridge (of course she is conventionally attractive, because Roddenberry). Kirk, Scotty, and some other male officer start talking how she’s good at her job but eventually she’ll meet a nice man, get married, and then want to leave Starfleet. Apparently it’s impossible to keep women officers because they only care about men. In the episode with Khan there’s another female officer who basically loses her mind because Khan is so sexually irresistible. That’s a recurring theme in TOS, the men are always cool and the women just want them. TNG is so much better and nothing like this (except for making Troi wear a non-standard low cut leotard uniform for no discernible reason).
If someone has never seen Star Trek asks me how to get into it, I tell them to start on TNG and go from there.
Having just rewatched it, it's honestly worse in a few places, because it tries to have Lwaxana/Crusher/Troi-centered episodes but all they can think of is "Ghost Rape", "Lol Menopause", and "Space Baby Jesus".
TOS almost only ever introduces a woman for her to fall in love with the sexy male villain/god/robot, and while being basically treated as set dressing is bad in itself, at least they spend less time writing them badly.
I guess the difference is that TNG actually has some good representation of women mixed in.
In my freshman year there was this Christian conservative kid who lived on my dorm floor that was obsessed with Star Trek (lol) and Ghostbusters (probably slightly more appropriate for his ideology)
DS9 says that terrorism is cool and good sometimes using an alien race formerly under a 50 year brutal Carassian occupation thst the writers said in interviews was analogous to the struggle of the Palestinians. Ds9 also has an episode where a main character leads a strike and quotes Marx. The captain travels back to this year and sparks a revolution over the homeless crisis in the most prescient piece of Sci fi ever, it was written in 1992. Garak is a queer icon and Jadzia/Ezri Dax are trans icons. Deep Space Nine is the most left wing Trek until Lower Decks happened. Also watch DS9, it's absolutely amazing.
Also, DS9 does a better job of depicting actually existing racism in mid-century USA than any other show or movie I have seen. Most media (think about “The Help” for example) shows white people at that time as totally non-racist except for the one Bad Apple. That’s not how it was, most white people at that time were pretty racist, except for some (not all) leftists. In that one DS9 episode all the white folks are either racist (Odo and the cops) or at best kinda ambivalent - other than the clearly very leftist Quark. Could be better but still get it more right than most.
Sometimes I think Fox News is some kind of deep cover left wing operation to get conservatives to agree to the dumbest, most ridiculous and contradictory ideas possible.