It even started a Civil War!

Hakuchimoya, these are words of my people or something.

Just Chakotay things.

That’s the thing, he’s trying to protect her from people who will take advantage of her. He literally saves her from a group of people who at the very least tortured her to try and figure out a way to get to her people. Whom they’d likely massacre and make slaves of.

The problem is that over-protectiveness can be just as bad, which is something he comes to realize over the course of the first couple seasons.

He got jealous over more than just Paris, it’s just none of the other ones were main characters. He also got paranoid and jealous because she knew which deck some male crew members rooms were on.

His jealousy was a flaw, but it’s the flaws are what make characters interesting. It doesn’t always make them likeable, but it certainly makes them more real. If he was perfect he’d be everything OP was claiming he was. Instead he was a much more real and deep character. His character also evolved over time to be less jealous and guarded as he came to trust his fellow crew members, including Paris. If he didn’t have those characteristics he’d be little more than a background character.

Those flaws aren’t the problem of bad writing, they’re a problem of good writing.

And if her age didn’t matter, why’d you mention it?

If we’re going to keep bringing up a literal age of the Ocampa as though it’s some gotcha we should also mention they never reach an age we’d consider adult. Most of them die before they even become teens.

We could blame the writers, or we could blame the puritanical mouth breathers who’d rather virtue signal their disgust at the mere concept of pedophilia rather than over the very real problems of child abuse and rape.

It’s not the internet if we don’t make broad generalizations for the sake of moral pseudo-superiority.

Will Riker without Sideburns. Also he’s stuck in a Cardassian prison or something.

Assisted a terrorist in almost blowing up the wormhole (against her wishes, mind).

Went to rescue a ship of Bajoran prisoners only to bring back Gul Dukat’s daughter.

Those are two more I can think of.

placed by the government in the custody of the Picard family

Is that something included in Picard? Cause it seems like a significant departure from the rest of the idea of the series. The government of the federation doesn’t allow people to do things at it’s whims, it facilitates people’s freedom to do what they want to better themselves.

His family has had vineyards for generations. Why wouldn’t they be allowed to? Space isnt exactly a luxury since they have dozens of worlds you can move to and have your own.

Keep in mind the “Gay Space Communism” isnt the soviet dictatorship kind where everyone is allotted their resources and you’re only allowed to do what the state says. Its a post-scarcity world where people can follow passions and personal drive just because they want to. (As long as you learn calculus) Something explicitly stated multiple times in the series.

They have the luxury of the philosophy of improving one’s self and the environment for others.

Honestly the only nu-trek show I’ve watched has been Prodigy. I even downloaded the first half of Discover season 1 back when it was airing, but never watched it. It just didn’t seem worth the time.

Odo (and I think someone else) do suggest reasons, like a virus or genetic engineering.

How did Enterprise plot out the changes?

Mind you, I’m not trying to imply that Enterprise didn’t have a unique and interesting storyline all its own. I think it did, but they absolutely followed in the footsteps of DS9s own homage.

I think, in the Enterprise episodes, they implied that only a small population of Klingons underwent that change. So there would still be Klingons who appear as they did in TNG (and the movies) and beyond while allowing for the more human appearance of those in TOS. I dont know about Discovery, as I’ve not watched it, though.

Technically there was a throwaway comment in DS9 before the Enterprise episodes. I only mention it because they basically took the lines from that episode and combined them all into one story.

Nog (and Rom) had the tooth sharpeners, Quark only had a wood chew stick.

It’s all that interbreeding with Jem Hadar I guess?

They had a conflict, sure, but by now means a major one. They made mention of other conflicts as well, like with the Zenkethi.

That doesn’t mean their society was all about war and conflict, it means they had border disputes. Conflict with smaller groups, like the Cardassians and Zenkethi, would not have nearly the effect as one with a much larger, much more powerful foe like the Klingons, Romulans, or eventually the Dominion (as shown in DS9).

With the latter, they have to specifically dedicate their resources conflict and war. With the former its mostly peacekeeping. Making sure their colonies and allies are defended while still being able to dedicate the majority of their resources to exploration and diplomacy. They won’t simply overrun the Cardassians, or the Zenkethi, as they’re likely potentially able to do (as im sure is implied with the Terrans in the mirror universe), as that is simply not part of their ideal.

Conflict with the Cardassians, or other smaller powers, is simply the price of being a large power. Conflict with a power more matched to their resource level, like Klingons or Romulans, would have more if an effect. Thus what you see in Yesterday’s Enterprise.

That story didn’t contradict established continuity, just added to it, right? Its not a situation of “we’ve always been at war with Eastasia”, it’s a situation of expanding on what already exists to provide more depth.

I think this kind of flexibility is good… but it also highlights problems I have with certain aspects of modern storytelling. Namely things like The Flux in Doctor Who and The Burn (which I, admittedly, have not watched stories for, only read wiki articles) which seem to fundamentally affect every aspect of the universe at once with far reaching consequences that fundamentally change the nature of the universe of that setting. They do so for the sake of one story, then everything after has to accommodate for this, not because of interesting storytelling elements… but because the storyteller wanted to raise the stakes.

I think the initiating premise of Picard had this, with the destruction of Utopia Planetia causing a massive shift in how Starfleet, and The Federation as a whole, operated.

Alternatively, something like the Dominion war, which had a similar effect on the universe, didn’t encapsulate it as a singular event meant to shake things up. Rather it was a slow build over time that actually showed what was happening as it happened. The story wasn’t “Oh no, thing happened, what do we do?” It was people living their lives as the world moved in a direction they had to deal with.

The distinction, or ignoring the distinction?

Prodigy?

Yeah, but then they’re so fractured that the right takes back power within a generation.