Is this my nerdiest post? Yes. Anyway,
The Star Trek wiki had something interesting...
Paul Schneider modeled the Romulans on the ancient Romans, naming the species' homeworlds after the mythical founders of Rome, Romulus and Remus. "It was a matter of developing a good Romanesque set of admirable antagonists that were worthy of Kirk," Schneider related. "I came up with the concept of the Romulans which was an extension of the Roman civilization to the point of space travel, and it turned out quite well." (Captains' Logs: The Unauthorized Complete Trek Voyages, p. 34) D.C. Fontana reckoned that Schneider basing the aliens on the pre-existing Roman civilization was the cause for the writer receiving insufficient credit for creating the Romulans. ("Balance of Terror" Starfleet Access, TOS Season 1 Blu-ray) Gene Roddenberry, interested in ancient Rome himself, approved of the initial depiction of the Romulan species. "He loved Paul's having endowed the enemy-Romulans with the militaristic character of the ancient Romans," wrote John D.F. Black and Mary Black. (Star Trek: The Magazine Volume 2, Issue 11, p. 19) Roddenberry's original concept of the Romulans, however, was that they represented 1960s' Chinese Communists.
Yes, Romulans are somewhat based on the Roman Empire and are xenophobic conquerers, but Westerners often ignorantly attribute these traits to communist countries anyway.
Then there is the Klingons, again, the Klingons are nothing like communists, (they're a patriarchal empire) and yet I've seen people say they were based on the Soviets.
So what do you think?
I think it will depend on who was writing, who was producing, and when the series was produced. The Klingons have served as stand-ins for China, which inspired their original appearance. In the 6th movie, they clearly meant to represent a post-Chernobyl USSR, though the strength of the analogy is questionable.
My theory is that when the Klingons were brought back for Deep Space Nine's 4th season, they were intended to represent the USA, whereas the Federation was now more analogous to the USSR. The Federation had largely eliminated class conflict, while the Klingons were still ruled by wealthy noble families. They Klingons couldn't take a shit without talking about how brave and honourable they were, but they snuck around in cloaked ships, and showed no hesitation in killing civilians. When the Cardassian fascist military government fell and was replaced by a democratic assembly, the Klingons immediately declared war on them. Feels pretty American to me.
It may not have gained the mainstream appeal of TOS and TNG, but DS9 is Trek at its absolute best. It is also Trek at its most overtly leftist. A cast that would be considered diverse today back in the 90's, an anti-facist insurgency portrayed in a nuanced but mostly positive light, absolutely biting racial commentary, a main character that could be considered a trans allegory, and one of tvs first homosexual kisses (again, in the 90s) to name just a few things. The entire series is about leftist ideals and convictions being tested and it's asperational AF. It's not perfect by any means, it had to make it on American television after all, but rarely does something so overtly leftist do just that. I recommend any comrades who haven't seen it check out the episodes "Bar Association" and "Far Beyond the Stars".
:quark: :rommunism: :dax-stoked:
hexbear is severely lacking in DS9 emotes
One of this sites many injustices is the lack of antifa Kira emojis.
Like the ending of DS9 probably has the most wild finale of any Trek show to date but the series as a whole is very good, especially in the later seasons when the Dominion war is in full swing.
Apparently they wanted to fully kill off Sisko but Avery Brooks made a huge stink about it saying it wasn't right, so it is some sort of compromise.
He wanted Sisko to promise to return cause he didn't want to depict a black man abandoning his son. Being killed was never on the table he was gonna just permantly and willingly go join the prophets
What? Voyager and Enterprise both have waaaaaay more wack finales.
I mean Sisko ascends to godhood, which I guess isn't the first time that a character has become a higher life form but it still felt kind of out of place for ST if that makes sense.
voyager's finale made more sense at the time it first aired because ds9's finale was SO loving slow and sentimental; that it both needed to set itself apart and it barely had any support for a finale from paramount.
also, at the time of the airing of it's later seasons voyager had been threatened by the type of cancellation that enterprise endured several times so we were lucky that we got a true finale at all. if it weren't for the introduction of seven of nine; garrett wang nominated as the sexiest man alive; the mild but significant enough notoriety of nasa's sojourner's success; stars wars movie revival; and ds9 hadn't ended a year before leaving voyager as the only trek on available for the first time in a decade on tv and movies we wouldn't have had a finale at all.
enterprise's finally was never meant to be a finale; but it became one once paramount pulled the rug out from beneath enterprise by surprise.
You really should, you're depriving yourself something beautiful
This is an interesting way to look at the Klingons, I honestly never thought about it that way.
For me the biggest problem is perhaps that very clearly everything Starfleet actually does is coated in liberalism ideals of the 90s where we(the Fed) are the only ones worth saving unequivocally. When the PD is invoked and when the Feds refuse to interfere in greater conflicts or choose "peace" it is seen as moraly justified. The Maqui arc, even though I still believe the "settlers" narrative is BS and a shitty allegory for hack writers of the time, that whole arc is just a hint at US blowback from "terrorists" they created themselves while refusing to admit they did anything wrong.
I think the worst part about it is the dominon war arc. The Federation is represented as this ubiquitous undeniable force that must not fall, obviously they're meant to represent us and are the heroes, but when more objectively "moral" questions arises like the Dominion + Romulan pact we get Sisko committing a war crime just to bring their whole civilization to their side.
Heck I'd even say the Dom war aged extremely well, the entire Fed rethoric about how the
westgood guys can't fall to the brutal savage monstersRussia/Chinais entirely 100% on equal to 2020's US MSM rethoric about how it is US in the west and our liberal ideas vs everyone else.That to me is the biggest nod to American FP in the series? In the Pale Moonlight is a ridiculously awesome episode obviously, but Sisko is very much presented as an allegory of the US state department and the CIA doing whatever they need behind the scenes to get their "friends" and allies to do what they want.
Then there is the Klingons, again, the Klingons are nothing like communists,
I'd be more inclined to believe that the Klingons were just orientalist stand-ins for "Asiatic Hordes" more than Communists.
Yeah, this checks out, especially when you look at their original design.
Gene Roddenberry's wife said he was secretly a Communist, but if that's true he would have had to hide that REALLY deep while working in TV in the 60s-80s, especially the 60s, and taken a pro-America line. That's not a direct answer to your question, but it's probably why Star Trek seems very socialist in some ways and in some episodes, and very patriotic American in others.
Interesting, I never knew.
And yes admitting to being a communist would have been dangerous as hell.
but if that's true he would have had to hide that REALLY deep while working in TV in the 60s-80s, especially the 60s, and taken a pro-America line.
Star Trek was a Desilu production and Lucille Ball was a card-carrying communist party member in the 1930s. She later denounced it under threat but I’d find it hard to believe she didn’t remain at least a little sympathetic. That would have probably helped.
Gene was also very weird and also would sometimes be very meticulous with scripts, and other times would let writers do as they pleased. Also, at least with TOS, the sort of online pedant nerd culture didn't exist yet. It didn't exist yet because Star Trek basically invented it with conventions and later, usenet groups. So the writers didn't care so much about keeping with continuity because I don't think anyone expected TOS to be as influential and far reaching as it was. It didn't do so hot when it was first airing. It only started gaining massive notoriety in the early 70s after it had already been cancelled.
Gene had entirely incoherent political views and was for most of his life a booze and pill addled mess trying to make a buck and saying whatever the person nearest to him wanted to hear, near the end of his life, his Frank Reynolds phase where he got TNG and was back on top he had let fan worship seep into his brain and tried to make the vision he told everyone he had, which was different depending on the audience so it was utopian but also totally incoherent.
I think where the disconnect happens is that the overall geopolitical situation in Star Trek is meant to be somewhat analogous to the conditions during the Cold War, but that Romulans and Klingons aren't directly analogous to any specific group or nation. There are comparisons that could be made, but those are left to the audience. They did a similar thing with the Cardassians and Bajorans, where they aren't meant to represent specific groups in a specific conflict, but the audience can clearly draw comparisons to various parts of human history.
I've never once thought of them as a stand in for a nation, so much as stand ins for archetypes of human flaws. Klinks with their fascistic war mongering, worship of the military/state, mythology, etc. Romulans that operate with a sense of cloak and dagger manipulation. It's the sly trickster and the bullish brute.
Now the Ferengi... Like... Was Rodenberry antisemitic?
Edit: I picked it up the term "Klink" from formerly playing Star Trek Online (come to think of it, I played with some chuds). As some others have pointed out, this is clearly a slur of the fictional race. While it's not hurting the non-existent Klingons, the concept of slurs finding a way into our fictional vocabulary is clearly shows how fascistic ways of thinking can permiate our culture. Not only that, but Klingons can be a rhetorical stand in for real peoples to marginalize and malign. Unless there's a consensus that it should be deleted, I'm going to leave it up for now. I think of it as a call to be vigilant against how these larger systems can colonize our own ways of thinking.
no, they thought the ferengi were going to be the new klingons, and most of the grasping at antisemitism is from DS9, which Armin Shimerman (Quark) denies, after Gene died.
I thought the writers on DS9 said they specifically set out to flesh out ferengi and distance them from what they saw as uncomfortably close to stereotypes?
They did, Armin Shimmerman and Max Grodenchek (Rom) are Jewish and quite a few guest ferengi actors were as well. There was an intended effort there.
That's good to hear they were trying to un-flatten them. OG Trek had some... Issues. Their heart seemed to be in the right place, but it was def colored by the times.
I didn't invent it, I picked it up from formerly playing Star Trek Online. Upon retrospect, though it is a fictional race, a ehem "nick name" of a fictional race that could be a stand in for any number of actual peoples is problematic. Seems to me that this is an artifact of the larger cultural influence that fascism has on us. That said, I feel I should leave it up as a case study/reference of such things. Unless we come to a consensus that it should be taken down.
Oh shit, didn't think of that lol. I used to play Star Trek Online and it kind of found it's way into my vocab.
Well Star Trek was made by liberals. (Therefore it's absolutely fitting to call it FALGSC 😉)
the soviet thing is strongest in undiscovered country and in kirk's rivalry with specific klingons, but it's more about the international political relations rather than the actual ideologies of any of the players.
They were both created in the sixties and next Gen retcons most of it. The Klingons were stsnd ins for the Soviets in a strictly plot sense in that in TOS they were in a cold war with the Federation and a lot of TOS episodes featuring Klingons explored cold war stuff allegorically but culturally they were more of an old timey Asian stereotype during TOS than anything that could be meant to represent the ussr or Russia.
As far as the Romulans go, they were based on Rome and communist China never played into it aside from the one interview that Gene said that, according to his wife he was a Maoist when he died as well. Gene was what we call absolutely full of shit and would just make shit up in interviews or convention Q and As based on what he thought the recipient would like to hear. By the 80s he was believing his own bullshit and that's why the first 2 seasons of tng are weird as hell. I'd recommend the feature length documentary entirely about how fucked up those first 2 years were for production, it's called Chaos on the Bridge and it's a wild wild ride.
Yeah I was going to say, the parallels of the enemy empires in TOS Star Trek are just there for plot reasons. Klingons were just brown foreign people who might as well represent Japan in WW2 or whatever orientalist stereotypes the writers could think up. They're just these foreign brown people who have a culture around vague concepts of honor and duty as a contrast to the Enterprise who are more fueled by curiosity and helping or whatever. The Romulans in their appearances in TOS were almost the same way. Most of their plot elements were copy and pasted from things like WW2 submarine movies. If any of them were supposed to strictly represent communism, it didn't work out that way, because TOS is very adamant that all of humanity is working together in spite of political or national differences (unless you're a woman, then you can still be on the receiving end of bigotry sometimes).
It can't be understated how powerful Star Trek was by showing an Asian man or a black woman being a respected officer on a spaceship, in full color in 1966
All I know about Gene Roddenberry is that he was very, very horny
I always thought the Klingons were more like an absurd caricature of imperial Japan circa 1942
I have two somewhat incompatible ideas about klingons
-
when i was watching one of the newer "viking" TV shows it was like watching one of the klingon court intrigue episodes. then someone told me klingons were meant to be like vikings but I never looked into if that was at all true but I tihnk it's funny.
-
It almost seems like "klingon" doesn't refer to a species so much as a class, ethnicity or subculture of a minority within a species. it isn't plausible for all the attitudes about "what is a klingon" to be pervasive through a large population. you need to own land. you need to have something to do with the high council which is like 8 people. you can't have an even nominally productive job. famers, lawyers, cooks, scientists: all are disgraced.
we do occasionally meet people who don't fit that mold but they spend the whole time crying about how they are outcasts from "klingon society" but it would really be like 95% of people. OTOH if "klingon" was just a single, small group that was extremely powerful it would make more sense. "klingon" is a group more like "catholic clergy" than like "humans".
Klingons were retconned during the TOS movie Era from what they were in the original TV show to more or less what we see in TNG. TOS is incongruent with later trek in many ways.
-
It's too all over the place to many any one particular thing. I remember one episode where they being back a ancient klingon and he is just a rad punk/heavy metal biker kinda guy. He throes shade at all the other klingons for being too much about honor and not partying. That would be a good direction for a space warrior race that could use a replicator to fix broken bones instantly you know? Plus Gene Roddenberry would have liked the excuse to get more weird fuckin' in the show. Like all the Sci fi writers of the time he was hornt more than you can imagine. I am pretty sure that is how he got Into Hollywood.
I think you're combining 2 episodes. They cline Kahless the ancient Klingon dude in a tng episode and Worf gets berated by normal klingons for not being a biker punk party guy. Worf was raised on earth and only understands klingons from the outside but desperately wants yo live up to the image where they klingons in the empire know a lot of the philosophy and stuff is practiced seriously. He's like a weeb for klingons.
I like Diane Duane's Rihannsu concept of the Romulans that merges both the Chinese and Roman mythos into something unique and actually interesting. Gene hated it but the Enterprise writers loved it and wanted to incorporate it where the Romulans militarised their entire society in panic upon first contact with humans (Vulcan first contact was an invasion by Orion Slavers and Romulan experiences during the exile didn't help) and stole the federation ship's warp drive, having fled Vulcan on sublight ships.
Much of the fandom accepts Rihannsu as the "supercanon" Romulans and Star Trek Online uses them, with a fig leaf that some of the missing exile ships survived and formed similar factions that have all been conflated.
