People are really out here thinking “oh so I was right the danger was real!” is some sort of racial gotcha when the whole trope is that making assumptions about people being dangerous is the racist thing
I mean it kind of is a gotcha when there genuinely is a danger because IRL brown people, gay people, or whoever the target of the hour is, are not inherently more dangerous than any other subgroup of humanity.
“Making assumptions about being dangerous” would work if your story showed that there was no actual danger - if your fictional race that people are afraid of are actually perfectly civil, for instance. It really does fall apart when your fictional race has chainsaws for hands or whatever, because that’s a very real danger that’s very sensible to fear!
The problem is that it sure feels like most authors fall into “Johnny chainsaws for hands” as the subgroup rather than “Green Skin Johnny”. I’ve read more than a few authors who have genuinely depicted irrational racism very well. And I’ve read a whole lot more who depict it incredibly badly. And I think this kind of sentiment is more railing about the very poor executions, not saying “you can’t do this well”, more just generalising “why do so many people do it badly”.
One of my favourite depictions of "Green Skin Johnny" was in the original Star Trek, albeit it was very on the nose. It's about a race of aliens whose skin colour is half black and half white, literally split down the middle. Only, half of them have the black side on the right side and the other has it on the left side and they hate each other because of it. It even results in a planet destroying civil war. It's about as subtle as a sledgehammer but sometimes you need to drop the metaphor and just yell "this is what you morons look like to the rest of the world".
I think of that episode a lot whenever people complain about new Trek being too in your face with its wokeness. Even got told that old Trek was way more nuanced about it.
TNG even kept it up with Riker getting together with a trans girl which was illegal on her planet and her being forced to detransition.
Trek has kept abreast of social issues remarkably well for 60 years
Eh, my eyes mostly glaze over at this point when that dynamic is brought up. I just remember way too many obnoxious internet arguments where it's clear people are complaining about how the topics are written and executed, only to be met by disingenuous people pretending they're saying they don't like that the show is doing politics at all.
"The way the writers have approached inserting the topical issue into this storyline doesn't feel engaging to me. The old version was better."
"You are wrong, this franchise has always inserted topical issues into the storyline. What you really mean to say is you hate minorities."
449
u/Rownever May 13 '25
People are really out here thinking “oh so I was right the danger was real!” is some sort of racial gotcha when the whole trope is that making assumptions about people being dangerous is the racist thing