#Klingon Politics

[cogcltrcorn]

are we as a society gonna talk about how tos is a show made in the middle of cold war and has at its center a positive character from a communalist culture that appears withdrawn and cold to the human [american] pov characters, and is materialist in its core philosophy. what I am saying is: are we gonna talk about spock essentially fulfilling the role of the soviet communist in the narrative. are we gonna talk about vulcan as ersatz-ussr (again, communalist, philosophically materialist, but, because of rodenberry's utopic vision of the future, an ally)

[sapphosewrites]

I have seen many a gif and video from the SNW musical episode, but no one informed me about the Klingons.

[fauvester]

postwar cardassia :: postwar germany, after a few years of abject disaster they hit an economic miracle based on tech innovation and end up with a striking half rubble/half high rise postapocalyptic thing. ally with romulas and the klingons. get a very mod fashion reboot. i want romulan bobs to be the newest thing on cardassia prime

[faggotfuckery]

just thought there was a nazi in the train with me because he had a sewn on patch that looked like right wind stuff

turns out it's the Klingon flag

[animentality]

the Star Trek fandom always acts like either Riker or Kirk is the god of rizz in the Star Trek universe, and it's bullshit, when Quark exists right there.

he was literally pulling klingon widowers, cardassian enemies of state, trans ferengi, vulcan terrorists, amorphous he/they shape shifters. he constantly had men chasing after him too.

Kirk's womanizing ways were vastly overstated by people whose memories are clouded by age, and Riker's repertoire was the most generic humanoid hotties out there, whose personalities were basically omg i'd love to have sex with you do you like my skimpy outfit.

Quark was pulling much harder just by virtue of the fact that all of his pulls were people who had a good reason to not get involved with him at all, but couldn't resist in the end.

seriously. cardassian political scientist that hates him, ferocious klingon warrior who just wants to use him for political reasons, a trans ferengi who doesn't want to be outed, a Vulcan terrorist who REALLY shouldn't be helping him but does, and a cop.

he has that much rizz, mk?

trust me. I'm a scientist.

I have the qualitative data to back this up.

[tea-earl-grey]

the thing is that when you look deep enough, Klingons and Klingon society is actually pretty well developed by Star Trek standards. we know the ideals of their society and the way their ideals are corrupted by classism and archaic tradition. we see how "warrior" and "honor" are complex terms that involve more than just warfare and fighting. but we also see Klingon scientists and lawyers who are proud of their work but are pushed aside for not living up to their society's standards. we see how their political relations change over time and how strategic alliances are formed and dissolved. we know their marriage customs and holidays and mythology and history. we see a variety of Klingon characters with varying degrees of attachment to their species and culture. we see how they're stereotyped and discriminated against in the Federation for being "too alien" when the Federation is supposed to be accepting of differences. we have an entire real, usable language for Kahless's sake.

the thing is also that 90% of Klingon stories choose to ignore all this complexity in favor of bioessentialism and racist takes on "warrior society".

[quasi-normalcy]

It does, however, sound like the kind of thing that could become an in-universe slander of the Jedis by practitioners of rival religions.

I think one of the big reasons “the Jedi are baby thieves” doesn’t hold water for me is because that attitude is just not present in the movies or TCW at all, there’s nothing to indicate that they’re greedy for more people to join their ranks, and, just as importantly, our earliest introduction to the Jedi Order as a community is them going, no, we don’t think we should take on this extremely powerful child. Our first introduction to them is them turning down a child being brought to them, like that’s not the way a group of people behaves if they’re a bunch of baby thieves! You don’t make a major point of characters saying no to being offered a kid as pretty much your only example of the Jedi adoption process that makes it into the movies, if they’re meant to be baby thieves!  That’s not how you introduce characters if they’re meant to be baby thieves! It’s the only time it comes up in the movies, it’s the only time we’re given an explicit scene about Jedi taking on kids, and it’s one where they say no.

[flotter4eva]

Me: So..

My mum: No politics at christmas.

Me: You don't even know what I was going to say.

My mum: No, but I know you.

Me: Anyway. Opinions on the Khitomer accords?

[rivercule]

Watching Star Trek (original series) again. The Klingon design. is so bad

[doyouwanttoseeabug]

Star Trek crew but they're all different species hear me out:

Jim - Jim has to remain human. He's the humanist human around, and also there is infinite comedy in the idea of a bunch of other species making exhausted eye contact whenever he pulls his bullshit.

Spock remains Vulcan obviously.

I initially thought Tellarite Bones BUT I think Andorian Bones fits better. Adding an extra-spicy layer to his Thing with Spock if their grandparents were literally shooting at each other. Every time Jim is Extremely Jim, Bones pulls out the ushaan-tor with a Dammit Jim I'm a doctor not a duellist but DON'T TEMPT ME

Romulan Uhura. No listen, trust me on this. Escaping from the Romulan empire because her love of languages leads her to a love of other cultures and a fiercely anti-imperialist anti-hegemonic stance. Her poise and calm comes from a lifetime of lying to the Tal Shiar, who were aggressively trying to recruit her before she joined Starfleet. How did she become an expert in diplomacy? Well her favourite childhood hobby was not getting dissapeared by the state so the rest came naturally.

Klingon Rand was revealed to me in a dream.

SCOTTY is the Tellarite. Jim rings down to engineering all meek like "hello Scotty can you tell me why the "ship is about to explode" light is flashing" and Scotty's like your mother was a leper and your father was a clown. Yeah the engines are fucked.

Chekov is Orion for The Angst TM

I know I KNOW that the Federation hadn't made contact with the Cardassians in TOS but Cardassian Sulu. He's so nice and smiley and polite :) and he's just saying Captain that if you want anyone poisoned I might know a guy :) the guy is me, Captain :)

I really wanted a Ferengi on here but no one fits so. Ferengi Chapel I guess. She's actually incredibly nice and way more professional than Bones but occasionally there's a gleam in her eyes and you just know she's thinking Oh, if I wanted to, I could rip these suckers off.

[ireallyamabear]

The choice to put Una Chin-Reily on a Starfleet recruitment poster in the late 2370s seems a nod to the extraordinary person she is and her exemplary service, but Boimler’s enthusiasm for her as a personal hero cannot mask the fact of what Starfleet execs are really doing here: while it is Starfleet tradition to honour esteemed personnel from its centuries of history, we have to look at the poster as a product of its time: it seems clear that, shortly after the devastating death toll and the rapid militarisation of the Dominion War, putting a prominent figure of the Great Exploration Age - and notedly someone who had not served in the Klingon War - as the poster person for Starfleet is an indictment that contemporary young people of the Federation are not drawn to the service as it is in their time anymore.

Critically, Starfleet has to use somebody from a 120 years ago, a timeframe that would lap generations of even especially long lived member species like Vulcans or Denobulans, to attract new recruits. Boimler says himself that seeing Una as a representative and her motto - “Ad astra per aspera” was: “Uh, it was a really big reason why I joined.” Clearly there is a wealth of recognisable Starfleet officers from 2370 and onwards, but their entanglement in the Dominion War, or at least in the Borg threat makes them unsuitable as role models for people like Boimler who cannot help but associate these contemporaries with the horrors of war and intergalactic conflict. Thus, the retreat to a “safe” historical narrative, with Starfleet still being about peaceful exploration reflects the growing divide between the realities of a colonised galaxy, the ongoing need of new bodies to fill the posts on all those ships and space stations and the aspirations and values of young people today. In this essay I will question whether Starfleet can keep its promise of scientific integrity in the face of growing political unrest in the UFP and ask what “Number One” herself would have thought about-

[writergeekrhw]

Did you ever think much about how the human characters having strong attachments to their national identity (like Sisko and obrien) works in the globalized, or even galaxized, world of the federation?

I always thought it was interesting that people seem to yearn for the past in that sense, perhaps the fact that nations are no longer real things makes them feel "safer" than other identities (like human centrism of planets identities) that might be actually politically divisive? Or a reaction to the sense that the federation homogenizes people (in the "we come in peace" "root beer" way).

I feel like the Federation actually appreciates and even encourages its citizens to express their cultures of origin, if they want to. Since the Federation has evolved beyond national rivalries, they've likely eliminated toxic nationalism. Witness how Bashir willing plays Battle of Clontarf with O'Brien while O'Brien plays Battle of Britian and sings "Jerusalem." So instead of being a source of conflict, in the Federation, cultural identity is just another wonderful diversity that adds to the tapestry of their society. IDIC and all that.

My only regret is that we really only see this from humans and we never created "nationalities" for Bajorans, Klingons, etc. But in truth, that would have been a lot harder than filling out the aliens' cultures and might have confused the viewers.

[clementine-kesh]

this isn’t anything new or revolutionary to say but i hate how star trek portrays alien cultures as a monolith, maybe with two or three different subgroups at most. first of all it contributes to a lot of the weird bioessentialism written into the show second of all that’s just not how culture works. look at all those posts going around here joking about how what’s considered rude in one culture is polite in another, and that’s just in humans! “all klingons inherently have the Warrior’s Spirit” can you imagine if we said that about humans. sorry guys my ancestral scottish highlander genes are calling me to go beat the shit out of some englishmen i’ll brb

[worflesbian]

making a new post cause its kind of off topic but i really do find the commitment to writing klingons Like That baffling in the context of trek villains overall. like this isn't to say that these species are never written in a racist/bioessentialist way (far from it), but the romulans and cardassians are given complex political situations with many citizens disagreeing with the violence of their governments, the vorta and the jem'hadar are both shown to be victims of the founders' brainwashing (who were in turn victims of violent persecution), the borg are literally all individually victims of assimilation. and yet the klingons are just like that bc that's how they are. multiple attempts have been made over the decades to explain why the klingons have such a violent culture but none of them have made it to screen, instead trek has just doubled down on the idea that this entire race is just "naturally angry". and it's not like we've had plenty of sympathetic klingon characters! i'd say there's been more than any of the other species mentioned. but even when we're supposed to like a klingon character, the writing still insists on reminding us of their Inherent Violent Nature every so often in case we forgot. it's such bad writing and yet it remains an unquestioned part of trek canon. definitely has nothing to do with the klingons being the most consistently racialised of the long running villains of trek

[quasi-normalcy]

I know that we, as a culture, have outgrown the use of pop culture metaphors for understanding politics, but bear with me:

The Left sees itself as the Federation - Peaceful, egalitarian, and committed to science and human flourishing above all.

The Right sees the Left as the Borg - An aggressively hegemonizing swarm that brooks no dissent, cares nothing for established values, and wants to take away what you are in a very fundamental way.

The Right sees itself as the Klingons - Brave warriors committed to honour, duty, strength, and tradition above all.

The Left sees the Right as the Pakleds - A bunch of dumb, violent assholes who only care about power for its own sake and who delight in hurting people because it makes them feel strong.

Source: Reading YouTube comments under Star Trek videos.

[helpingfriendlybook]

currently in the trenches of season 4 and i am feeling this deeply. Come Back Michael

watching the way of the warrior . i already miss michael piller. baby come back