I owe a lot to Wheaton. For one, if my mother hadn’t gotten a crush on him that was the final prod she needed towards Star Trek, then I by extension might not be a Trekkie as well. In addition, although I didn’t watch Tabletop, some of my family did, which is what got me into board games.

I will clarify I haven’t watched a lot of Discovery, Enterprise, or Picard.

However, problems of the sort you mention (not necessarily the exact ones you mention, but similar or of concern) aren’t exactly new.

For instance:

• TOS showed Chekov assaulting a Klingon women (under the influence of an evil space alien before).
• It is heavily implied Spock did something with Saviik in III. Also, in general, they just ruined a good female character. (III might actually rival V in terms of being the worst Trek film.)
• TNG did “Code of Honor”.
• Also, TNG very much did weird things to Troi, including rape to rape-adhacent things. Not necessarily as bad as T’Pel, from what I can tell, but still messed up nonetheless.
• I’m sure there’s an example for DS9, but my mind subconsciously puts it in a pedestal and is blocking me at the moment.
• VOY unnecessarily sexualizes Seven.

I think the truth of all Star Trek is it is flawed, but that we can critically acknowledge those flaws while managing to look past them so we can appreciate and enjoy the good parts.

Don’t blame Janeway. The real culprit is the same person who killed trans icon Jadzia Dax: Rick Berman. 😉

In all seriousness, I agree with you. Seven was a good character that the writers and producers made some egregious mistakes with.

Ah crap. You win.

In the words of Greg DeMayo, “If every pork chop were perfect, we wouldn’t have hot dogs.”

One of the best Trek scenes of all time: Fear: “I’m afraid.” Hologram Clone of Janeway: “I know.” Fear: “Drat.”

Fade to black.

Moral of the story: The only thing you have to fear will be born in Indiana and her name is Kathryn Janeway.

Honestly, there were weird things about that film, but I think you can’t go wrong with Kirk and Bones breaking out of a Klingon prison while Spock, Uhura, Chekov, and Sulu all say “to heck with protocol!”

Actually, there are several post-1900 copyrighted works mentioned in Star Trek.

Tom likes early 20th century B Sci Fi. Kirk and Spock reference authors who released work after the 60s in IV when discussing colorful metaphors. Hotel Royale is not a good example, but definitely counts.

Truth be told, I think copyright is a double-edged sword. On one hand, businesses have used it to gatekeep, leading to intellectual stagnation, as you seem to imply. However, at the same time, copyright is often the only legal framework defending small artists against those same businesses (I’ll concede not that well, but still.).

On merchandising, I’m also annoyed how low quality the printing of official Tees us, especially considering that some of them are actually fun designs.

Honestly, it’s tempting just to buy fanart tees instead - there’s an awesome one of Shaxs doing his usual pottery with his iconic “Fighting Fascism is a Full Time Job” as the caption on TeePublic. I kind of want to message the person and ask if they could sell a sticker as well.

That’s some Earl grey hot news.

I guess also, for Badgey facial expressions, I got some practice when I attempted to design a Lego Badgey figure (in addition to all of the Cerritos crew, most of which are fine except for Rutherford is really hard and so is T’Ana. Also, I need to fix up Billups’s face. I did like how Shax’s face turned out, though, even though he still needs a bit of work.)

Thanks. I actually overlayed a transparent image of Badgey over to get the relative sizing right. The eyebrows I did by myself, though, partly based on image reference; on the last one, though I tried to capture angry 10th doctor going stone cold through the ISS Cerritos hallways slaughtering fascists left and right.

I might add proportions were very hard and his eyes are actually proportionally much bigger than prime Badgey because when I tried to make the proportions the same, he looked TOO derpy.

So you felt nothing when they were briefly on DS9 and stopped by Quark’s before getting lost in the Delta Quadrant? You bring dishonor to your house! (In fact, Tom gets in a barfight with Quark (not shown on screen, unfortunately) in that one timeline where Harry was never assigned to Voyager.)

Just kidding about the “dishonor to your house part”. Honestly, I like some of the fun 90s Trek had with crossovers, especially how VOY sort of rehabilitated Barclay. Honorable mention to that thing where Bashir helped Data have dreams. I guess O’Brien and the eventual Worf being mains on DS9 count as well; I think despite his flaws getting really annoying, Worf gave us an excuse for the fun Klingon political plot lines.

As an actual question, though, do any of the following apply to you?:

1. Didn’t also watch DS9 as a kid.
2. Were watching Voyager out of order, only catching random episodes, etc.
3. All of the above

I was sticking with characters that had already been introduced at the time, which was hard because I wanted so bad to add Vic Fontaine saying, “Hey, what’s the big idea here, pally?”

“Such an amateur lack of focus and balance.”

Moriarty or the exo-comp makes sense, but I feel like Lore’s tried to blow up the Federation or whatever enough times she could at least spare an asterisk.

I think this answer is mostly right in the case of Seven and VOY.

However, on a more general societal note, this can be problematic, as two people may have different definitions of insane (for instance, challenging certain societal beliefs that aren’t necessarily actually related to sanity may falsely be construed as insanity), and as a result, a rational person is stripped of their agency. I think several conditions need to be established for what defines someone as insane. I think if at least one of these is true, it can be called insanity:

• An inclination for self-harm
• An inclination to harm others

At the same time, that’s half the point of Voyager - you’re in the Delta quadrant and so the line between wrong and right calls is blurred.

Although wrong in most cases, I feel like “context is for kings” very much applies here.

On that last bit, I guess it has precedent. For instance, the look of the Titan on LD is largely the same as the design shown on the cover of some novels, but Riker’s bridge officers are different.

So heaven?