Equality means we can admit that some female bosses are idiotic assholes.

See: Meg Whitman

Janeway was certainly somewhere on the Asshole/Lunatic spectrum. But her problem was the same as Discovery/Short Trek/JJ Trek, terrible writing.

They are both unpleasant to watch. They kind of sucked the fun out of Star Trek, and that is not easy to do. I actually enjoyed the JJ Abrams movies even if they departed from the series quite a bit.

The real problem with Discovery is they tried too hard to fit in all this conflict and the writing feels very forced. It doesn't feel natural, it just feels like they wanted to have the popularity and dramatic appeal of much better science fiction shows like BSG and instead the writers just ran out of steam really quickly. There's no fun in this series. Burnham is not a protagonist too many people can root for and there are many reasons for that, which have nothing to do with her being a black woman.

This episode of Short Treks really bothered me because the captain humiliated her crew member in front of other crew members. It seemed more like bullying than assessment. The Star Trek universe was about togetherness and even Janeway had several episodes where she tightened the reins of the crew's relationships because she knew how important that aspect of being on a starship was. You have to work with these people every day. You should encourage them and not try to find weaknesses you can mock. The writing here has been terrible.

Discovery got a lot better between its first and second season. I even liked Burnham from time to time. The big problem it needs to address is breathlessness. Every! Scene! And! Every! Incident! Is! Treated! With! Equal! Importance! Giving! The! Show! A! Paradoxical! Feeling! Of! Urgent! Monotony!

The Alternative Factor, The Turnabout Intruder, Code of Honor, Up the Long Ladder, Profit and Lace, The Storyteller, Threshold, and all of Enterprise would beg to differ.

Look. The highs of TOS, TNG, and DS9 were stratospheric indeed. But let's not pretend they didn't have some absolute shithouse stinkers in there.

Ooh, don't forget Shades of Grey!

Good god just chuck a horny Lwaxana Troi into anything and you've instantly created garbage.

And don't get me started on DS9's entire season of Vic Fontaine's wacky holosuite adventures.

The Moriarty episode of TNG always annoyed me.

That being said, as bad as the crappy parts of Star Trek can be, at least they weren't seemingly written by and for resentful assholes like this shit.

Good calls y'alls.

Also, I'm pretty sure Deep Space Nine, the solitary bulwark of Federation power standing alone against a hostile and alien frontier, was once conquered by Rumpelstiltskin and one of the New York Yankees.

"Space Blacks kidnap blonde for use as concubine" wasn't written by and for assholes?

Threshold was pretty fucking bad. Nothing beats the Irish people episodes of both TNG and Voyager, though. Why the fuck do Star Trek writers always think Irish people are all a bunch of leprechauns? I'm surprised no one tried to give Geordi some Lucky Charms. Jesus.

Lay off Lwaxana.

Nothing says Star Trek more than horny cougars wanting to fuck Patrick Stewart.

Lost fucked up its ending so badly. They could have done an alternate world ending. They set it up as an alternate universe and that was much, much more interesting than the fucking afterlife bullshit they came up with. It basically meant everything that happened to them in the alternate version doesn't fucking count for anything. It was such a lazy cop out.

It's a symptom of poor writers combined with success/streaming dollars funding anything.

They may have labored years to make one or two seasons of decent material (or maybe one or two episodes at best) and when that runs out they just asspull fantasy drama 101 tropes because someone says they're awesome and will pay them 50 million for another season due in 2 months.

Anime predated this trend by decades, when increasing demand combined with cheap Korean/Chinese animation studios meant any author with mediocre sales could expect an anime adaptation. Leading to anime being 80% trash while still being profitable.

The light at the end of the tunnel is saturation. Recently anime seems to be heading towards a crash as an exponentially growing hoard of anime studios spend increasing amounts of money over a growing but finite fan base. There is only so many blu rays and figures people can buy, and there are only so many streaming platform subscriptions people can stomach. Studios that produce quality work are going bankrupt not because of shit output but because the pie can be sliced only so thin before someone doesn't get enough.


TL;DR it's a boom/bust cycle and we're in the shit end of the explosion.