this post was submitted on 25 Aug 2024
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My next video is how Star Trek fans ruin Star Trek. It was the subject of the thesis for my PhD in Trekology.
The die hard fans ruin their favorite shows and movies all the time. It's a universal truth.
Star Trek, Star Wars, Marvel, it happens to all the big ones. Heck with Mass Effect, the Andromeda blowback resulted in DLC being cancelled and the entire IP essentially being abandoned until recently. That boiled down to some poor animations from a brand new team, with limited time (because EA is dogshit), and a few fans being extremely vocal about how the developers had the audacity to follow a new set of characters in a new setting instead of milking the finished trilogy and bringing Commander Shepard back to beat like a dead horse.
That same type of bullshit is exactly what Star Trek went through at the beginning of TNG. Some original series fans were extremely vocal about the lack of Kirk, Spock, etc. and refused to even give TNG a chance. Not to mention the audacity of the show runners for DS9 making a serialized show based around a station instead of a ship! And while those were before me, just reading about it after the fact, I personally saw the same with Picard, and Discovery when they first launched, and even continuing on now with some people even refusing to give it a try like some sort of child refusing to eat their veggies. And while Enterprise has managed to bring many people back in to watch the show, the absolute hatred for the intro is one of the biggest mysteries for me. It's like a bunch of fans just turned their brain off as soon as they heard the word faith, assuming it must be about religion, and started trying to justify their knee jerk reaction when others pointed out that faith isn't inherently religious and that in the show it clearly has nothing to do with religion, but rather faith in things like yourself, your crew, and humanity as it ventures out beyond Earth at a meaningful speed for the first time.
Star Trek fans have a long history of being intolerant of new shows.
Both Mass Effect sequels and Picard are fine examples of the recent abundance of things where the fan base (or the Internet as a whole) having earned a reputation for being inclined to complain about anything new is often used as an excuse to try and discredit the opinions of anyone who dares to point out what was a fairly disastrous drop in quality of the new thing compared to the old. Maybe there's bullshit in the field but that doesn't mean there aren't also apple trees, and maybe you've fixed your gaze on the wrong one.
I was cool with ME ending in 3, and Shepards fate, though the specifics of the end were an eye roll, story wise. There was more wrong with Andromeda than franchise fans screaming about a lack of Shepard. Generic tasky repetitive questing and plain oatmeal level companions (imagine Mass Effect 2 with 10 Jacobs). I gamed when gaming was a lot of reading (see Baldurs Gate & Neverwinter Nights), so I don’t complain about graphics, I figure it will sort itself by the next patch and it usually does. Story “punch” and companions matter though, and Andromeda didn’t deliver there. Andromeda was more like Fallout 4 than Mass Effect. It wasn’t new in that sense, and that was the real problem.
Andromeda's gameplay was clearly better than Mass Effect 3. Yes some facial animations were clearly worse, and were since updated, but it didn't actually affect gameplay at any point.
And considering the original end of Mass Effect 3, before they changed it after the backlash, anybody claiming things went downhill in Andromeda are out of their damned mind.
There's a lot I can say about the direction they went with Picard, especially considering the massive difference in the Borg they showed across 2 directly adjacent seasons. Like freaking whiplash.
Andromeda's gunplay was better but the gameplay as a whole was worse. The switch to an open world system wasn't handled well, you ended up with too mooch filler and not enough interesting story.
It felt like every side quest in ME1-3 was a little story in its own right that was worth exploring, with interesting and unique characters and plot twists. Andromeda was shallow by comparison, repetitive and not worth the time investment.
I completely agree about fans ruining things and the facial animations thing was way overblown, but let's not pretend that Andromeda was unfairly punished for minor issues and that fans are entirely responsible for it, there core game missed the mark on several fronts.
The gunplay was excellent though.
Agreed 100%, I got Andromeda at a heavy discount after more than a year after the release and I was still extremely disappointed. The animations are the least of the problems that the game had, it was just an soulless formulaic empty open world with terrible writing and horrible characters and dialogue.
If it weren't a mass effect game it'd just be a commercial flop and nobody would remember it in a month. Since it was, people were disappointed instead of being apathetic. It was by no means unfairly judged though, it is a bad game.
The first Mass Effect game was the good one IMO.
Yeah while I enjoy the rest of the trilogy, the world building they manage in just 1 game was amazing. Most games need multiple games to manage that level of world building.
I, sadly, agree with you. I’ve gotten to the point where if I am reading a thread or forum and the comments turn into nothing but criticism about things that I don’t personally feel deserve the time to read or apply energy to, I close it and never look back. I don’t mind constructive criticism, but I don’t make these things (like TNG or Andromeda) so it’s never practically constructive for me to endure the critique.
Speaking of Mass Effect: Andromeda, I was really enjoying that game when it came out and then I made the mistake of reading threads on Reddit and they were so fucking negative and hateful that it actually soured the experience for me. My own fault for letting it drag down the thing I was enjoying, but there was just so much vitriol that it got under my skin even though I didn’t really agree with the majority of it. My general rule now is to stay away from the fanbases of anything I truly enjoy and care about. Which obviously sucks. Somewhere along the line it became the norm for internet discourse to become an echo chamber of hate.
I generally agree with you, but then there are also situations where massive negativity is warranted.
The Witcher and Halo TV series for instance recently. They both deviated so far from the source material that it was clear the writers wanted to make their own story and couldn't get that approved, so they instead hijacked an existing IP and still tries to write what they wanted anyway.
For viewers that didn't know the source material that would probably be fine, but they decided to go with two very large IPs with very devoted fanbases and a lot of established lore. Interviews with the showrunners for Halo that mentioned the negativity just resulted in answers that showed clear contempt for the fanbase, shifting blame anywhere but with the writers/showrunners, and no actual attempt to understand what they might be complaining about. Or in the case of The Witcher, attempted to shift all blame to the one person the fans loved, and the only person that was keeping many people watching the show, Henry Cavill, trying to smear him personally. A person they were avoiding to cast for over two years before seemingly running out of options. It is my personal theory that this was solely because they knew he was a huge fan of The Witcher, and he would be advocating to make sure it was as accurate as possible, which would be an issue with them doing whatever they wanted with it. Cavill said publicly he was on board for 7 seasons if they kept it accurate to the books, and we clearly saw them make major changes immediately in the first season fundamentally changing main character personalities and core interactions, making it impossible to follow the original storyline well.
There are situations where overwhelming negativity is valid, the issue is that so many times it's overwhelming negativity for small issues blown way out of proportion by fans.
Weird take to suggest that it's the fans ruining an IP with criticism. As if we should all just be content with some executives shagging a hollow corpse of a franchise simply because it exists in name.
Mass Effect Andromeda didn't just have a few crappy animations. The whole story, quest, and dialogue writing was incredibly bad. People hated it because it sucked. And it got canned because it sucked.
If Star Trek were to get cancelled right now it would be a good thing. What we have today masquerading as Star Trek is cheap, low effort garbage that tries to make up for it by wasting its budget on as much off the shelf CGI sparkles that can be thrown at it. But no, of course it's the fans who are ruining Star Trek.
The first season of TNG got criticised because the first season of TNG is actually, genuinely bad. The difference with TNG and STD, however, is while STD remained the same level of mediocre throughout its entire run (with some aspects actually getting worse), TNG drastically improved in season 2 and only got better after.
Strange new worlds is good though. And it's "true trek". You know, with more than 1 character doing all the things. A full diverse crew with diverse skills working together to solve issues and having fun.
After Discovery and Picard, it's really refreshing. And even though it's reusing old characters, it's not in your face constantly the nostalgia.
I stand by SNW and LD. Strange New Worlds is a solid return to form and Lower Decks was the kitschy fan service with a lot of heart that I needed after some horrendously bleak years in real life near the end of the 2010s and through the pandemic.
I think both are doing a good job of keeping up with the times as past series have done when they aired. Cannot make it through Discovery, though. That one just did not grab me, despite me wanting it to and giving it multiple shots because I was stoked for Michelle Yeoh and Doug Jones.
Did your PhD recognize that most people don't post their opinions on the internet, especially if they find something to be mediocre?
To me it's the internet that ruins everything. Many times when I see something and I feel like "meh it wasn't great but it was ok" I end up seeing an endless stream of negativity towards it on the internet. But who am I to say the the ending to Game of Thrones was ok but needed a few more episodes so it didn't feel rushed, or Rise of Skywalker was really interesting but the editing was a bit janky or whatever? Say things like that and you get an endless stream of people telling you that you're an idiot for liking something and not conforming to the hate train. But talk to people in real life about these things and it's a different conversation.
I think the main problem is that the people making things in these franchises listen to the internet too much. This has resulted in a general lack of confidence by writers because they're too worried about how the internet will criticize them. But that's gonna happen no matter what they do. And the studio execs looking at the internet data and basing a lot of decisions on that.
Are you trying to tell me real life is real life? You need to spend more time indoors, you're clearly out of touch with what real people are actually saying on Twitter.
https://youtu.be/02LgdXVkXgM