fandomsecrets | [ SECRET POST #2327 ]

⌈ Secret Post #2327 ⌋

Warning: Some secrets are NOT worksafe and may contain SPOILERS.

#14 is a moving .gif.

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02.

[Sofia the First]

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03.

[Once Upon a Time]

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[Tara Strong, John de Lancie]

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[Iron Man 3]

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06.

[Cristiano Ronaldo]

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07.

[BriTANick]

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08.

[Teen Wolf]

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[Community]

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[Batman movies (Nolan)]

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11.

[Nine Inch Nails]

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[Harry Potter]

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13.

[Romeo and Juliet, 1968]

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14.

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[ ----- SPOILERY SECRETS AHEAD ----- ]

15. [SPOILERS for Supernatural]

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16. [SPOILERS for Star Trek: Into Darkness]

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[ ----- TRIGGERY SECRETS AHEAD ----- ]

17. [repeat]

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18. [WARNING for suicide]

[Supernatural]

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19. [WARNING for non-con]

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20. [WARNING for dubcon]

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21. [WARNING for eating disorders]

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Notes:

Secrets Left to Post: 00 pages, 000 secrets from Secret Submission Post #332.
Secrets Not Posted: [ 0 - broken links ], [ 0 - not!secrets ], [ 0 - not!fandom ], [ 0 - too big ], [ 0 - repeat ].
Current Secret Submissions Post: here.
Suggestions, comments, and concerns should go here.

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

I'm pretty sure that's why the original didn't make Khan white - they were trying to divorce the idea of 'genetically superior' from 'white'. It's still problematic because he's the villain, but having a show say that the strongest and longest-lasting superhuman who emerged from a period called the Eugenics Wars wasn't white still goes a long way towards refuting that 'white' is inherently superior genetically speaking. Considering that the show was coming out in the middle of the Civil Rights movement, that was an incredibly strong statement.

Which is why it's doubly disappointing that the new Khan is the whitest white to ever white.

And from another point of view, it's more problematic for a character like that not to be white. Eugenics are a horrible thing and the type of whiteness traditionally associated with it is bad by association; stories involving it are one of the special cases where the whiter you are, the worse a person you are. So if the subversion here is that the ultimate being to come out of this horrible practice is in fact not white... what does that imply about non-whiteness?

I don't think there's any way to win this one.

Also, along those same lines, think of the two characters we met who were genetically altered in the ST franchise: Khan, and Julian Bashir in DS9.

So...there was some sort of strange racial profiling going on in the original series with regards to eugenics and manipulation.

Da

Another way of looking at it is that they were genetically altered because they were seen as genetically insuperior to white people and it was someone playing with their genes to improve them in the way white people believed black people were savages who needed to be brought civilisation. That's kind of what happened with Bashir, I think he was born mentally disband his parents mucked around with his genetics to make him 'normal'.

I think Khan is referenced as a Sikh in Space Seed and used to wonder if that was because of Sikh mythology but I don't know enough to back that thought up in any way. I used to have a book about the making of each episode which probably said something about Khan's origins.

Yeah, it's an incredibly thorny issue. However, I still think the original take is better, if purely for the reason that it deliberately disproved the fundamental argument of old-school eugenics: that whiteness was fundamentally and biologically superior. Which, considering that the original Eugenics Wars supposedly happened in the 1990s, probably would have been the driving force for them. Khan was a middle finger to all of that.

The argument made by the character of Khan decoupled race from biological supremacy, and by making Khan a villain also made the point that biological supremacy isn't necessarily desirable even in its own right, since dividing people into weaker and stronger automatically creates an unfair society even if race isn't a part of it. I mean, it wasn't perfect (still the 1960s here), but it was doing a damn sight better than just having the same old 'eugenic white superman as the villain' plot.

SA

Trying to clarify. The problem with the standard 'eugenics is wrong because it produces evil white superhumans' narrative is that it perpetuates the assumption that any quest for genetic superiority will always result in a white guy. It doesn't actually undermine the base narrative of eugenics, that whiteness is genetically superior, it just says that the quest for genetic superiority is morally wrong. It still assumes white is better, it just says that for the good of all we shouldn't pursue the realisation of that superiority.

The character of Khan hit that in two ways. It posited that the quest for genetic superiority might result in a superhuman who wasn't white, thereby knocking the 'superiority is always white' neatly by the wayside, while separately dealing with the 'eugenics is morally wrong and we shouldn't try to divide humans into artificial levels based on genetics'. It separated those two concepts out into different issues, allowing the exploration of both without overtly getting caught up in 'white man's burden' or the legacy of 19th and 20th century racially motivated eugenics.

It really was a massive step forward, as clumsily realised as it was in the research and casting departments.

This is beautiful. Can I have your name to quote you in an essay? (If you don't want to give me your actual name just tell me to make one up.)

Edited 2013-05-18 19:10 (UTC)

AYRT

I'm a bit paranoid about anonymity (possibly uselessly). Use any name you feel like. :) I hadn't realised it was something worth quoting.

This is a good comment.

The original character conception poked at two of the biggest unexamined assumptions behind most pop science fiction, first that the politics of the future will remain primarily eurocentric. (Cyberpunk wasn't immune to this, since the Pacific-Rim references were mostly driven by 80s anxiety about Japanese industrialization.) Second, the perpetuation of socially constructed ideas about race into the the future.

It pops to the top of my mind because I just finished Karen Lord's latest novel where she spends an entire chapter deconstructing the ideology that you can use cosmetic phenotypes like skin and hair color to distinguish your ruling and slave classes. Those phenotypes are completely unrelated to the genes you might consider important. (See also Slonczewski's Highest Frontier, in which, the genetically engineered and carefully bred heir to the Kennedy political legacy is half Cuban.)

So of course, if you're going to create the biological ubermensch with the best genes for intelligence, health, strength, and longevity, you need to start looking at PoC because more than half of human diversity is in Africa alone, and the rest is spread out over Europe, Asia, the Americas, Australia, New Zealand, and the Indian and Pacific Oceans.

Now of course, that argument against eugenics is more technically demanding than LOL Nazis. Galton and the white supremacists turn out to be the flat-earthers of genetics and anthropology. Which might be why Abrams backed away from the more complicated anti-eugenicist argument posed by Khan, even though the methods that falsify white-supremacist anthropology beyond any possible doubt came in the 1980s rather than the 1960s. LOL Nazis just isn't the cutting edge of that bioethics discussion, which makes it pretty uninteresting science fiction unless you fluff it up with a lot of special effects.

At any rate, the idea that the best, brightest, and most morally ambiguous superman came from North India, and created the largest, most stable, and paradoxically least oppressive government of future history in Asia and Africa certainly was a radical notion for 60s television. His name is perhaps a deliberate nod to Genghis, who, depending on your historical perspective, was the best or worst thing to happen to Asia.

So yeah, I think changing the character's history changes things, and probably not for the better. It's probably not a deal-killer because the best thing you can do with a Star Trek movie is go in with extremely low expectations.

Nope, actually he was originally supposed to be a Viking type named Ragnar Thorwald. The casting director liked Montalban, so they re-named and re-tooled the character for him. http://io9.com/inside-secrets-of-the-making-of-star-trek-ii-wrath-of-457250013

[ SECRET POST #2327 ]

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