Updated for the 21st century: a status quo enforcer with police and presidential loyalty ties that really likes neon and having sex with people that like neon while maintaining the status quo in a way that makes them a Legend of Night City™.

It’s unfortunate, because I do find D&D creatively dry and stale especially now. WOTC focuses heavily on its “original monsters do not steal” and tends to rehash and rehash them for settings and stories a lot.

Pathfinder is close enough to D&D that I’ve had success converting people to it because fuck Wizards of the Coast and their recurring attempts to gouge everyone with mandatory subscriptions and predatory licensing rackets.

Also Pathfinder’s setting is downright more creative because they don’t keep digging deeper into that boring old “what if underdark and illithids… AGAIN?” well.

but for LD my daughter and I always skip to the nacelle-eating alien (we named him Yum Yums), yell “YUM YUMS!”, and then skip to the end.

That’s adorable!

It’s baffling to me too, but considering how much the post-DS9 “NuTrek” showrunners like to trot out Section 31 and give them more power and reach and even respectability among the protagonists each time they seem to show up (such as in Picard where for some reason Worf and Jurati were associated with them and they apparently “had all the best toys” in a way that sounded quirky and cool rather than an unaccountably self interested bunch of murderous criminals as seen in DS9), there’s a fair amount of overlap it seems between the “black ops special forces shadowy adults in the room that make the hard decisions and get shit done” power fantasies of typical right wing entertainment and whatever Kurtzman keeps trying to push on the Trek franchise.

That’s even more baffling because the average self-described conservative Trek fan seems to hate “NuTrek” anyway, even the stuff that I myself enjoy like Lower Decks, The Orville (yes I count that as Trek, it earned it), Prodigy, and Strange New Worlds.

The final 20 minutes or so of this video summarize how I feel about the Discovery/Picard’s preoccupation with edgy grimdark gimmicks that seem to be trying to appeal to a crowd that nonetheless can’t see past the “politicalness/wokeness” of having too many nonwhite nonmale characters and the like.

https://youtu.be/MdLHKdn0JTY?t=12063

YEAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAH!

I actually started to like that song.

The extended Cerritos refit montage/music was

It was fun to watch the Lower Decks intro gradually change over time, especially that shootout that the Cerritos runs away form.

Yet you’re still here, your last word game continues, and you can have it because you’re added yourself and your concern trolling, with distinction, to the toxic fans that I’ve already mentioned are red flags to me.

Now, get your last words in and congratulate yourself for wasting your time making me more convinced in how I feel about toxic fans like yourself.

Your ongoing “not mad” passive aggression and last word game is reinforcing how I feel about toxic Trek fans that stan for the Terran Empire.

you seemed to be getting worked up

You keep replying, all while trying to emphasize how very not mad you surely are with your passive aggressive fuming.

The point of this thread was red flags from toxic fans. You’re only signaling your exceptional toxicity to me, reinforcing how I feel about Terran Empire/Section 31 apologists, and all for… what?

And you keep doing it after your zero-self-awareness sniveling about bad communication. I hope you’re part of Trump’s election campaign because I really, really want to see him lose.

Can always be better at communicating

Take your own advice there. You have failed to persuade me and have come across as condescending and sanctimonious while also obviously picking a side while pretending to be a neutral mediator.

You should really consider

No.

I originally wrote, as per the OP, about what I saw as red flags with Trek fans, and that exchange (and this one) have only reinforced how I feel about Terran Empire and Section 31 stans and apologists, no matter how an edgy character in Discovery might have felt bad after the fact after making some friends.

All of this hinges on your belief that my meme-faced comment, loaded with space-this and space-that word choices, was insufficiently mirthful.

You’re taking this exchange way too seriously.

This does not read as mirthful

To me, neither does this:

So what about any of that screams “the Terran Empire did nothing wrong” to you? Or would you rather keep deflecting?

Hypocrisy is super common among people that wave around pretenses of enlightened mediation, so I’m not surprised. Playing the “mean spirited” card while selectively ignoring the escalating petty hostility from the other poster isn’t surprising either.

I’d rather just move on. If some edgy fan wants to stan for edgy characters from what might be the worst of recent Trek shows, I can’t stop them. What I said about what I see as red flags is only highlighted by that exchange, and will further advise me any time I see another edgy fan stanning for the Terran Empire or the like.

I really doubt they were taking their other conversation that seriously

Scroll up.

See how they reacted to my mirthful humor-intended comment, meme face and all, about the dubiousness of the writer-contrived “reformed” character mentioned.

Play enlightened mediator all you want but you responded to my post in particular, 16 hours later.

Even more bazinga trash made for planned obsolescence that requires rare earth minerals extracted from blood-soaked and exploited parts of the world. EPIC!

Godwin

https://www.rstreet.org/commentary/i-created-godwins-law-in-1990-but-it-wasnt-a-prediction-it-was-a-warning/

Do you have anything else to add but more seething rage? You brought up Godwin’s law first there. Was that because of some guilty conscience about the edgy contrarian character cliches you stan for that needs to be buried under more smug Reddity zingers?