Introduction!

[melannen]

Hello everyone, and welcome to starry_sea! I'm still working on icons and layout and things (though if you would like to help or make icons, I would love the help.)

In the meantime, let's have introductions! Leave a comment here to let us know something about you and your relationship with Star Trek.

Here's some questions to get us started (not required, but fun):
1. Who are you? What are you looking for in this community?
2. How long have you been a Star Trek fan? How did you first become one? How would you describe your previous involvement with the fandom?
3. What do you consider part of your personal canon? What's your personal fanon?
4. For you, what is the most essential thing about Star Trek that makes it Star Trek to you?
5. If you could rec us only one book/episode/comic/movie, which would it be?
6. Link us to a fic, website, discussion post, or community - yours, or someone else's - that we should all check out.

I, your friendly mod, will start things off in the first comment. And will probably strain DW's comment limits in the process.

Comments

[leighton]

1. Who are you? What are you looking for in this community?
Name's Leighton, and I joined this community because I love discussing the themes and cultural impact of the show and its mythos.

2. How long have you been a Star Trek fan? How did you first become one? How would you describe your previous involvement with the fandom?

I've been a Trek fan since my early teens, when I watched The Next Generation whenever I could. I tried getting into Deep Space 9 and Voyager, but they just didn't do it for me. I recently rekindled my interest in it after I wrote a paper on race in science fiction for a graduate class. That led me to watch the original series, and now it has devoured my soul.


3. What do you consider part of your personal canon? What's your personal fanon?

The original series and The Next Generation. I try to deny that Star Trek V and the Next Gen movies happened.

4. For you, what is the most essential thing about Star Trek that makes it Star Trek to you?

Hope, optimism, faith in human ingenuity, Jim Kirk as an ideal of heroic masculinity, perpetuating the American mythos of a compassionate, uniting superpower envied by its enemies

5. If you could rec us only one book/episode/comic/movie, which would it be?

I'm partial to The Menagerie (both parts).

6. Link us to a fic, website, discussion post, or community - yours, or someone else's - that we should all check out.

I'm going to cheat here and link to a book that critiques the show's purported colorblindness: Star Trek and History: Racing Towards a White Future
http://www.amazon.com/Star-Trek-History-Race-Ing-Toward/dp/0813524660/ref=cm_cr_pr_product_top

[melannen]

Oooh, that book looks really interesting. I'd love to hear about what you found out for that paper.

Star Trek as American mythos - so very, very true, and so easy (for Americans, anyway) to overlook.

[leighton]

The book discusses how whiteness is constructed in the series and its basic critique, if I remember correctly, is that Star Trek's ideal future is colorblind only in the sense that minorities are allowed to become white.

One of the more interesting tidbits that I recall from it was that in the episode Plato's Stepchildren, infamous for it's Kirk/Uhura kiss, the network wanted them to edit the scene so that she would kiss Spock instead specifically because of his mixed racial background. I found that very interesting, as my research was focused on blackness as the ultimate signifier of 'other' in science fiction.