Strange New Worlds: A Look at Ghosts of Illyria

[stryke]

3. The primary fear of humans being replaced by mutants is the fear of parents being replaced by their children--and thus completely stupid.

I always thought that was more a play on the rascist/classist they'll outbreed us thing until there's no one like us left. So still completely stupid but playing on nastier tropes than parental angst given the whole mutants trying to be a metaphor for various minorities.

[TGLS]

Its like the Mutant Registration Act in X-Men. ''Don't fear mutants, even though there is OH SO MUCH to fear about them and will continuously prove why they are to be feared in every movie.''

To be fair, there's a certain real life idiocy to that:

1. Registration is a perfectly rational thing to want--except the government has people who plan to use any registration as a way to commit genocide and have even helped the evil government Canada build a mutant death camp.

2. Mutants are really the only people who can go after mutants as we see with the X-men being the onky people who can stop Apocalypse (The Avengers exist but they have their own problems). So pissing mutants off by treating them as second class citizens, is just not practical.

3. The primary fear of humans being replaced by mutants is the fear of parents being replaced by their children--and thus completely stupid.

There's a lot of stupid that comes about when combining "threatened minority" tropes with supers tropes. Random minority people don't accidentally vaporize Times Square.

[CharlesPhipps]

I always thought that was more a play on the rascist/classist they'll outbreed us thing until there's no one like us left. So still completely stupid but playing on nastier tropes than parental angst given the whole mutants trying to be a metaphor for various minorities.

Yes, the general assumption is that "your kids" won't be breeding into THEM.

[CharlesPhipps]

There's a lot of stupid that comes about when combining "threatened minority" tropes with supers tropes. Random minority people don't accidentally vaporize Times Square.

*waves hand*

Eh.

Because a lot of racist language ranging from the UK to the USA talks about minorities as a violent threat. That they're a bunch of degenerate criminals and terrorists or super predators or whatnot. It's just in comic books its super exaggerated.

Before it became popularized, the X-men's rough (and I do mean very rough) plotline of, "Humans fear mutants, humans abuse mutants, mutants become terrorists, humans fear and abuse mutants more" cycle would be called today radicalization.

[TGLS]

Before it became popularized, the X-men's rough (and I do mean very rough) plotline of, "Humans fear mutants, humans abuse mutants, mutants become terrorists, humans fear and abuse mutants more" cycle would be called today radicalization.

If the end state was "Kid bullied for a long time then they incinerate a bunch of people and/or they join up with Magneto", then sure it would fit. If it's, "Everything's fine then one day a classroom is incinerated" then it doesn't really.

Tolerance could probably help with the first problem but couldn't do jack about the second. A registry may very well exacerbate the first but it would definitely help with the second.

[CharlesPhipps]

If the end state was "Kid bullied for a long time then they incinerate a bunch of people and/or they join up with Magneto", then sure it would fit. If it's, "Everything's fine then one day a classroom is incinerated" then it doesn't really.

Yeah, well, Professor X is the guy who finds mutants that way. Also, I think, "mutant powers = disaster" is a terrible idea artistically.

[Frustration]

Random minority people don't accidentally vaporize Times Square.

That's what the gay blind black Jews want you to think.

When you get right down to it, the whole "superheroes are stand-ins for minority groups" arose because members of those groups not only felt obligated to defend their normal humanity in response to wider society's condemnation of them, but felt a need to balance by asserting their superiority. It's part of what makes minorities turn oppressive and tyrannical when they gain freedom from others' domination. And the wheel turns...

[Mabus]

But based on this episode, somehow the Federation ban extends even outside the Federation space!

The Illyrians can do whatever they want. They just can't join the Federation because they're filthy bio-engineers doing filthy degenerate bio-engineering.

But what's their measure on what genetic augmentation is compared to simply environmental adaptation?

People who carry the gene for sickle cell anemia have high resistance to malaria, but displaying sickle cell anemia will make your life miserable, since your body doesn't receive enough oxygen. If one were to genetically introduce that trait to develop resistance to malaria, it would hardly be an augmentation, since you still have to deal with the side effects, unless you only make yourself a carrier of the gene. But due to how genetics works, if two people who carry the SCA gene have a baby, the baby will develop SCA. Unless you remove that gene, at which point you're back to square one. It's never stated if the Illyrian genetic augmentations have any side effects, but I highly doubt they'd be near-perfect.

An the second issue, how long do you have to go back to be considered "de-augmented"? 100 years? 200 years? That's why I said the total bad doesn't make any sense, since alien genetics aren't like humans, so where did they draw the line?

[CharlesPhipps]

But what's their measure on what genetic augmentation is compared to simply environmental adaptation?

People who carry the gene for sickle cell anemia have high resistance to malaria, but displaying sickle cell anemia will make your life miserable, since your body doesn't receive enough oxygen. If one were to genetically introduce that trait to develop resistance to malaria, it would hardly be an augmentation, since you still have to deal with the side effects, unless you only make yourself a carrier of the gene. But due to how genetics works, if two people who carry the SCA gene have a baby, the baby will develop SCA. Unless you remove that gene, at which point you're back to square one. It's never stated if the Illyrian genetic augmentations have any side effects, but I highly doubt they'd be near-perfect.

An the second issue, how long do you have to go back to be considered "de-augmented"? 100 years? 200 years? That's why I said the total bad doesn't make any sense, since alien genetics aren't like humans, so where did they draw the line?

I mean the whole point of the episode is attacking the very concept of the law. These people wanted to join the Federation so much that they ended up doing horrific genetic experiments on themselves to meet a certain criteria that backfired horribly--you know, the reason that the ban on genetic augmentation was created in the first place (or one of them).

The Federation wants to be anti-eugenics and anti-Nazi, which is absolutely good, but they have somehow bumped into anti-medicine.

[clearspira]

Speaking of Sickle Cell Anaemia, I think its worth noting that even in the Federation they do allow genetic engineering to remove diseases and treat inherited conditions. They just draw the line at unnecessary augmentations. In fact now is a good time to refer back to this episode of VOY:



In ''Lineage'' we are presented with two things.

1) The Doctor corrects Miral's deviated spine using genetic engineering.

2) He draws the line at removing racial traits.

That's flipside of this whole thing. It isn't just about stopping the creation of the next Khan. Its about designer babies. Its about stopping parents from deciding that Geordi shouldn't have been born AKA ''The Masterpiece Society''. Its about stopping Kardashian-esque parents giving their daughters huge stupid lips and oversized boobs. Its about stopping parents from deciding that they want their black baby to be white. Its about stopping ''Gattaca''.

I think this conversation is far deeper than it seems to be typically presented in Trek who seem fixated on breeding super soldiers and nothing else.