""""loudly declare""""

Adira tells Stamets their pronouns, and Stamets says "okay" approvingly. That's it. That's the full extent of what you are calling a "big deal."

You understand that even in a society where everyone is allowed to "just be," accidental misgendering is still going to happen and corrections will still need to be communicated, right? Marco misgendered Nico on their first appearance, so Nico must have corrected him. You are effectively arguing that enby representation is only acceptable if actual conversations about gender occur off-screen.

... photoshop?

You're telling me that Robert Duncan McNeill isn't shredded?

EDIT: Apparently everyone on this website is insane

The inmates are running the asylum

Star Trek is cool

It’s almost as if time itself is pushing back and events reinsert themselves and all this was supposed to happen back in 1992 and I’ve been trapped here for 30 years!

This line is a pretty conspicuous breach of the fourth wall placed there by the current stewards of the franchise to tell us that we’re back to pre-Kelvin timeline time travel rules. The whole “time travel creates two discrete timelines” notion is gone. It was a one-off to justify the Kelvin timeline, and now we’re done with it.

It’s all one timeline and while that timeline is in a constant state of flux due to time travelers tinkering with it on a regular basis, it’s still one big wibbly-wobbly timey-wimey timeline. Therefore, the answer to every “are X and Y in the same timeline?” question is a continuously shifting “maybe” which largely depends on how you choose to understand “the timeline.”

To put a finer point on it, this is the writing staff telling the fanbase to chill out about timelines. Akiva Goldsman speaking to CinemaBlend, emphasis mine:

This is a correction. Because otherwise, it’s silly, or Star Trek ceases to be in our universe…By the way, this happened in Season 1, so this is not a Season 2 [issue]. It’s a pilot issue. We want Star Trek to be an aspirational future. We want to be able to dream our way into the Federation as a Starfleet. I think that is the fun of it, in part. And so, in order to keep Star Trek in our timeline, we continue to push dates forward. At a certain point, we won’t be able to. But obviously, if you start saying that the Eugenics Wars were in the 90s, you're kind of fucked for aspirational in terms of the real world.

Translation: the Star Trek canon is going to keep shifting forward to accommodate keeping it in our future. More broadly, we should all accept some measure of canon flexibility so Star Trek is always set in an aspirational future, well suited for telling morality tales in space which are relevant to modern issues.

I love it when the "come to my free speech zone!" pitch reaches the point where a total lack of self-awareness is put on display

I really hope the mods here let you keep digging

You're not wrong, but man the Prime Directive would make a whole lot more sense if it did. The commonly misunderstood version of the PD that is intended to prevent cultural contamination is clear and simple. Given its status as the literal top rule, the actual PD—a generalized non-interventionism/pro-isolationism dictum—is oddly complex, vague, and lacking a focused objective.

there is literally an entire genre of subreddit dedicated to this kind of post

why are you feigning surprise about it?

What about Paramount+ is worse than all the other streaming services? Aren't they all hoovering up data about our watch habits? Isn't that the point?

If you don't want to stream it and you don't want to buy it outright, I don't know why you're asking us to tell you what the only remaining option is, matey.

To point one, yep, fair. I've unceremoniously dropped "The Enemy Within" into a context it was never intended to be examined from.

To point two, I agree that Janeway was both the source and the termination of Tuvix' personhood, but I don't see the relevancy. What bearing does Tuvix's personhood have on how we describe Janeway's actions, or the discussion about whether those actions were justified?

It depends on whether or not you think the act of distributing is part of the commonly understood definition of canon.

The definition most reasonable Trek fans operate on is "the shows and movies made by the rights holders," although most aren't aware they've internalized that second part because nobody wants to admit they spend any amount of time caring about "the rights." (Ask them if they think Continues or New Voyages is canon and you'll cut to the heart of that matter real quick.) That latent "rights holders" qualification isn't there out of any particular deference to Paramount, it just gives us a convenient and durable boundary that a huge, varied, and global fanbase can largely agree on. Paramount decides what Star Trek to produce, but that decision results in canon Star Trek because it's a simple enough boundary for Trekkies to collectively accept without much friction.

Point being, Paramount is part of the definition but Paramount is not the source of authority for the definition. The fans are. This is an important distinction if you want to investigate whether or not this ugly Prodigy business has altered or clarified the definition of canon.

This act of cancelling and archiving is uncharted territory, yes. Assuming you agree with my earlier definition, it comes down to whether or not you think there are more qualifiers hiding after the word "made." Something like "made, released, and currently being distributed," which is an interesting set of qualifiers to add because it would decanonize pre-remaster TOS.

Personally, I think that's too much control over the definition to hand to Paramount. We care about "made" because it's the most minimal way to establish this "rights holders" boundary. I think we could have a reasonable debate over whether or not "released" is already part of the intuitively understood definition (i.e. "are deleted scenes canon?") but I would wager most Trekkies will agree that "currently being distributed" is not part of the intuitively understood definition.

So, yes. Prodigy is still canon.

Nobody Goes There Anymore, It’s Too Crowded

Given the option between hanging out with 3,000 Trekkies who are willing to plunge headfirst into a strange new ecosystem and 600,000 Trekkies who find making an account to be an onerous process, I'll take the former, thanks