By Chris Snellgrove
| Published 19 seconds ago

As someone who writes extensively about Starfleet Academy, I frequently find myself in the trenches of fan spaces, ranging from r/startrek on Reddit to Star Trek S**tposting on Facebook. As you might expect, these spaces are filled with those who are passionate about all things Trek, and they love to swap memes while sharing their love for Gene Roddenberry’s seminal sci-fi franchise. But there’s trouble in paradise whenever someone breaks the one, unspoken rule: “never say anything bad about NuTrek.”

Such posts are likely to get removed altogether, especially on Reddit, where the Paramount astroturfers tirelessly work to remove any and call criticism. But when a criticism does make it through, the critic faces a deluge of hatred from Star Trek fanboys who act like a critique of their favorite show is nothing less than a deep, personal insult. Because of this, I think franchise fans of every quadrant need to accept a blunt truth: IDIC includes people who disagree with you. 

Where It All Started

My most tinfoil-hat Star Trek conspiracy theory is that this problem goes back to the earliest days of Star Trek: Discovery. At that time, many YouTubers realized they could hit the click lottery by going all-in on criticizing the new show. For example, Nerdrotic led the charge in criticizing the show as forcing diversity down viewers’ throats (often to the detriment of the story), and that Star Trek had suddenly gone woke.

Channels like Midnight’s Edge echoed the wokeness claims and similarly griped about Star Trek: Discovery’s perceived identity politics. It didn’t take fans long to strike back, pointing out that Trek has literally been diverse from the very beginning (just look at that Original Series cast).

Eventually, those earlier criticisms were used by moderators to make sure nobody was allowed to criticize NuTrek in any way without being canceled by their fellow fans. 

Criticism Of NuTrek Is Now Completely Forbidden

While the aforementioned YouTube channels made some salient points about Discovery, some fans understandably seized on parts of their opinions they felt missed the mark. The primary things that made this new Star Trek show “diverse” were, seemingly, the Black female main character and a supporting cast that includes two gay men. Therefore, such criticisms were condemned by the Reddit-style fan community as being both sexist and homophobic.

However, Discovery fanboys soon began to use those earlier critiques to silence all opposition to their new favorite show. If someone disliked Michael Burnham’s character for more legitimate reasons (like her being written as a Mary Sue with plot armor as thick and obvious as transparent aluminum), they were dismissed as just another bigot who had a problem with a strong, Black, female character. If someone said they thought Stamets and Culber could have had better chemistry, they were denigrated as a homophobe who just couldn’t handle Trek’s first openly gay couple.

Unfortunately, this foundational aspect of NuTrek discourse continues to this day with Starfleet Academy. If you criticize Jay’den (the stuttering soft boy Klingon pacifist) for being a poorly written member of his warrior race, you will be labeled as an old sexist who just can’t appreciate this alien’s slow burn journey of gay self-discovery. If you criticize SAM (the happy-go-lucky hologram with the literal mind of a child) for being a walking meme, you’ll be labeled as someone who hates Black women (and probably autistic people).

Forgetting The Franchise’s Most Important Rule

Do some members of the Star Trek fandom still make racist, sexist, and homophobic comments about Starfleet Academy and other shows? Of course, and they need to be called out by a comment section that sets their phasers to “kill.” But it’s important to remember that not every criticism of NuTrek is a coded dogwhistle; sometimes, people just have a difference of opinion, and somebody not liking something that you love is not a personal attack on you or your tastes.

All of this had me pondering the most important rule in all of Star Trek: IDIC, which stands for “Infinite Diversity in Infinite Combinations.” NuTrek is often praised for adhering to this more than earlier shows, and its diversity is part of what those problematic YouTubers freaked out about when Discovery premiered. Obviously, diversity is a good thing, and shows like Starfleet Academy deserve full credit for giving us the kinds of characters that we wouldn’t have previously seen headlining a Star Trek show.

IDIC Includes People Who Don’t Like Your Favorite Show

However, diversity of thought and opinion is also part of IDIC, and this has always been baked into Star Trek’s DNA: we see McCoy and Spock argue over the different cultural perspectives of humans and Vulcans in The Original Series, for example. In The Next Generation, Worf’s stories constantly forced characters like Picard to consider the wildly different (yet no less relevant) perspective of the Klingons. Meanwhile, Deep Space Nine used the Ferengi Quark to constantly contrast the Federation’s hippie, humanistic values with naked faith in the power of free market capitalism.

In a perfect world, the Star Trek fandom would more readily embrace this basic concept of IDIC: not everyone in the fandom is going to agree with everything you say. The person criticizing the childish humor of Starfleet Academy isn’t someone who hates the franchise or hates you for liking the show; he’s just somebody who wishes NuTrek wasn’t resorting to d*ck and fart jokes to make audiences laugh. Similarly, the people complaining about the nonstop slang and vulgarity of these young characters aren’t just old and out of touch; they just remember when you could show Star Trek to your kids without cringing and reaching for the remote. 

Fans Need To Stop With Friendly Fire

Not every Trek is for every fan, and disliking Starfleet Academy is no more inherently problematic than disliking Enterprise or the Kelvinverse. But it’s important to remember that the vast majority of fans criticizing this new show are doing so from a place of love because they want Star Trek to succeed. By assuming that every critic is a bigot, fanboys shut down any chance for genuine discourse while making Paramount think that nothing about their new show (the one that’s already fallen out of the Top 10 streaming charts on Paramount+) needs to be changed.

Simply put, this mentality goes against the entire IDIC philosophy of Star Trek and will ultimately doom the franchise in a sad attempt to pretend that NuTrek is absolutely perfect. If we can’t argue in good faith about the things we love about Trek, then there will soon be no new Trek to love. But if the fandom can finally drop all the culture war garbage (including painting all critics as fascists to the right of Colonel Green) and have a reasonable discourse, we might have something that seemingly disappeared decades ago. Namely, a Star Trek show that most fans are actually excited to watch each week!