The new trailer for the upcoming Starfleet Academy show is awful. It’s the most terrible thing ever released. Star Trek is dead. Deader than Dead. Zombified. For real this time. Bad writing! No substance! Gene Roddenberry’s vision!!!

I mean, look at these comments:

Source: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VkBU8lvXm7M

Wow. Bad, right? I mean, how dare the people who put this trailer together? There is a motivational voice-over, unnamed characters laughing, stuff looking shiny. There’s no information about the actual plot and themes, and trailers can be massively misleading, but still, this is the worst Star Trek show ever! It’s the end of the world!

Okay. I’m going to get serious here, for a moment. Usually, I just leave a snarky comment and then leave it be. Because this? It happens every single time a new entry into the Star Trek universe comes out.

Every. Single. Time. The Millennial emphasis points show how much I mean that.

Five days after San Diego Comic-Con, the official teaser is sitting at roughly 21 K dislikes vs 6 K likes on YouTube – textbook “ratio” territory (Source: https://cosmicbook.news/starfleet-academy-trailer-backlash?).

The wording of the extremely bad “article” where I pulled these numbers from make the numbers in question look sketchy, but they aren’t really the point. The point, in fact, is that so, so many people who consider themselves part of this fandom do nothing but complain and wish failure on new projects … and a lot of them just don’t like seeing brown and gay people on screen. Sorry, guys, but it’s the truth. Look, I’ve got receipts.

On July 29, 2025, someone named Matt McGloin wrote the following for the abovementioned site, Cosmic Book News:

“Rumors offer the Paramount Star Trek will all be canceled and Skydance will do some sort of reboot. Star Trek: Starfleet Academy will reportedly get two seasons before its canceled. By the looks of the trailer, it looks like they knew the cancellation was coming and doubled down on all the wokeness before the axe hits.” Source: https://cosmicbook.news/starfleet-academy-trailer-backlash?.

To be fair, he sounds a bit like he recently suffered from a stroke, but the gist of the – ahem – article is clear: Matt, bless him, is miffed about changing societal norms and wishes for a simpler time to return, when women, brown people, and the gays knew their place and didn’t stand in front of a camera. You see, Matt is afraid of women, brown people, and the gays. Which is why Matt and many like him invent fictional future cancellation plans that, from an entrepreneurial point of view, make no sense. Whatsoever. At all.

Ever since Star Trek returned to the small screen in 2017, with Discovery, this rather loud subsection of “fans” has been larping as a terminally outraged Borg collective. They all complain about the same things and act like it’s objective criticism. Bad writing is a term that gets bandied about a lot, and some argue that it has lost all meaning. At the same time, these people like to pretend that it’s only the current Trek era that’s so enraging and a betrayal of Gene Roddenberry’s vision, blah, blah, blah. You know. All that jazz.

It isn’t. This has been going on since 1987, and I can prove it. Again, your favourite Xennial auntie has receipts.

So, in brief, I will explain why these complaints are nonsensical, how some folks have been angry about new Star Trek shows since the 80s, how rage bait is counterproductive, and what bad writing actually is. It’s an objective measurement of quality, not shorthand for “I didn’t like the thing”. Let’s get this over with, then.

A 2023 article published on Screen Rant states:

• “Star Trek: The Next Generation faced backlash from TOS fans who tried to get it canceled, fearing it couldn’t capture the magic of its predecessor.
• Despite a weak first season, TNG found its footing and became one of the best sci-fi shows of all time, actually living up to its predecessor.
• Hate and doubt from some fans towards new Star Trek series is not new; Star Trek has always been progressive and experimental, telling stories that reflect the society in which it was made.” (Source: https://screenrant.com/tng-ripoff-new-star-trek-shows-fan-hate/)

Here’s the original magazine covering the phenomenon:

Source: https://static1.srcdn.com/wordpress/wp-content/uploads/2023/08/star-trek-tng-criticism.jpeg?q=50&fit=crop&w=750&dpr=1.5

https://screenrant.com/tng-ripoff-new-star-trek-shows-fan-hate

The Original Series fans tried to get TNG cancelled before it was even released.

Sound familiar?

The exact same thing happened when Deep Space Nine was announced, which as of now is widely considered one of the best – if not the best – Trek show. There were a lot of complaints that also sound like stuff we hear about every newer Trek show that’s been released since the cancellation of Enterprise in 2005: It’s not optimistic and thus doesn’t feel like Star Trek. It’s on a station, not a ship, and doesn’t explore strange new worlds – and thus doesn’t feel like Star Trek (Source: https://www.polygon.com/23547617/deep-space-nine-star-trek-ds9-watch-analysis/).

As Dylan Roth wrote for Polygon (2023): “But, for a franchise whose heroes champion ‘infinite diversity in infinite combination,’ Star Trek’s fanbase has a predictable habit of dismissing the new and different” (Source: https://www.polygon.com/23547617/deep-space-nine-star-trek-ds9-watch-analysis/).

Whenever people complain about how new Trek isn’t real Trek, and that it should immediately be cancelled, remember that this has been happening since 1987.

The funny thing is, the new shows do, in fact, pull in numbers and awards. Otherwise, the powers that be wouldn’t keep pumping money into the franchise. In 2021, Star Trek: Discovery was the 15^th most in-demand streaming show, which was the only one on Paramount+ that made the top 20 (Source: https://www.businessinsider.com/top-original-streaming-tv-shows-wandavision-the-witcher-2021-12; https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Star_Trek%3A_Discovery). Discovery also was nominated for a bunch of awards and even won some of them, such as several Saturn Awards and Emmys (Source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Star_Trek%3A_Discovery).

So, what gives? We now know that this type of behaviour – decrying new instalments of a beloved franchise and pretending that the type of pile-on is new – has been happening for a very long time. Star Trek isn’t the only offender, and there are psychological reasons why this kind of behaviour is so prevalent in more geeky franchises, if you will.

A main motivator, if not the main motivator, is nostalgia. Recent research supports this notion. Let’s take a look at a few timely publications: A 2023 study by de Oliveira Santini et al. shows that “nostalgia enhances consumers’ sense of pleasantness, self-continuity, attitudes, and behavioral intentions. [They] also identif[ied] several moderators that shape the effects of nostalgia, namely nostalgia activators, culture, and individual characteristics” (Source: https://doi.org/10.1002/mar.21872). Helen Piper (2011) cites cultural theorist Svetlana Boym (2001): “At first glance, nostalgia is a longing for a place, but actually it is a yearning for a different time – the time of our childhood, the slower rhythms of our dreams. In a broader sense, nostalgia is rebellion against the modern idea of time, the time of history and progress. The nostalgic desires to obliterate history and turn it into private or collective mythology, to revisit time like space, refusing to surrender to the irreversibility of time that plagues the human condition” (Source: https://www.euppublishing.com/doi/abs/10.3366/jbctv.2011.0047).

Elgenius and Rydgren (2022) directly link nostalgia to nationalism and regressive politics: “Nostalgia is (..) associated with loss, displacement, and longing to return home or longing for an imagined or idealized home“ (Source: https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/pdf/10.1111/socf.12836). Ottemo et al. (2025) go deeper into what they call ‘geek nostalgia’: They “argue that geek nostalgia represents a clinging on to a ‘constitutive wound,’ allowing the geek figure to mobilize masculine victimhood in ways that simultaneously underpin geek privilege and allow the geek to continue operating as a white male gatekeeper of geek culture” (https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/pdf/10.1177/14614448241232067).

“Within fandoms, gatekeeping practices such as delineating authentic from fake fans filter out certain identities. While the types of fans excluded vary by fandom, mainstream digital games culture–and the hegemonic, masculine groups within it–frequently leverage gatekeeping tactics like harassment to silence or churn others (i.e., women) from participating”, according to Tompkins et al. (2024. Source: https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/15554120241244416).

These behaviours can very well lead to the development of what Cynthia Vinney (2023) calls ‘toxic fandoms’, whose gatekeeping practices can “range from impassioned negative responses to a reboot of a particular pop-culture property to bullying other members of a fandom or those involved with the creation of a movie, TV show, video game, song, or book, to antisocial behaviors such as making death threats, rape threats, or doxing (publishing a person’s private information)“ (Source: https://www.verywellmind.com/what-is-toxic-fandom-5214499).

Thus, we’ve got a mix of deeply insecure people who long for the imagined comfort of days gone by, and who will be their most obnoxious selves online just to defend that image of the past and what role a franchise played in it. What I’m trying to say that this is all a psychological mechanism that has very little to do with the actual, tangible quality of a given franchise output. Star Trek: Discovery is a good example. It had a solid viewership. It was critically praised. It received a respectable amount of awards. But that doesn’t matter, because whether she show is objectively good or not has never been the point.

There’s another aspect we shouldn’t disregard, either, and that’s the draw of manufactured outrage. It’s been studied and confirmed that YouTube algorithms push content that draws engagement, and that a lot of it plays a role in creating outrage and “encouraging online radicalization”, as Ledwich and Zaitsev (2019) have observed (Source: https://arxiv.org/pdf/1912.11211).

Ribeiro et al. (2020) note that videos with controversial topics tend to flourish on YouTube (Source: https://arxiv.org/pdf/1908.08313). Habib and Nythyanand (2019) confirmed that negative emotions are reinforced through YouTube recommendations (Source: https://arxiv.org/html/2501.15048v1). Meanwhile, the TSP Institute (2025) contends that it isn’t so much negativity that gets reinforced but strong emotions, “simply because we, as users, pay more attention to them” (Source: https://www.tspi.at/translations/en/2025/03/15/socialmediaharmful.html#gsc.tab=0). Hence clickbait and claims of “this is the worst thing ever!”. It gets people to click, to watch, to either passionately agree or disagree. It fosters engagement.

So, while we can ascribe a lot of fandom gatekeeping and nostalgia behaviours to the aforementioned psychological mechanisms, some of it is definitely nothing more than the exploitation of these sentiments – and the only people who win are those channels who produce brainless, unfounded slop content meant to stir feelings of rage, insecurity, and infringement on one’s hallowed rosy glasses.

Some might wave it off by going the “It ain’t that deep” route, but I disagree. It is that deep, because it poisons the well and makes engaging with fandom a bloody chore. It’s exhausting and joyless, and I wish people would take a step back before unloading their precariously justified grievances onto everyone and their pet targ.

But wait, you might be saying. What about actual criticism? What if the shows are really badly written? Can’t we criticise anything, anymore?

To which I respond: Sure, you can. But if you’re going beyond “I don’t like it because it doesn’t fit my fanfiction”, you need to be able to explain what you mean when you play the BAD WRITING card.

What, then, is bad writing, and how do we spot it?

I’m so glad you asked.

In 2022, a Reddit user lamented the fact that “bad writing” has “become shorthand for ‘I don’t like it and neither should you’” (Source: https://www.reddit.com/r/television/comments/10e9to5/has_the_phrase_bad_writing_become_shorthand_for_i/).

Often enough, if someone yells about bad writing in a comment section of a video or thread or whatever that’s dedicated to a certain show, book, movie, and you ask for an example of said bad writing, the person in question does not reply anything coherent. You’ll either not get an answer, or it’ll be something insulting, or maybe even an inane comparison to an older entry in the franchise.

Maybe some misguided individuals will start complaining about brown people in fantasy villages, like a YouTube person I won’t name did regarding the Wheel of Time TV adaptation. That was basically his entire video, trying to make his distaste for brown people and gay people sound rational. You get that a lot.

That’s not to say that nobody who complains about bad writing doesn’t know what it is or what exactly is bad about the writing in question. So, how can we make our distaste for something sound more objective?

When it comes to books, you can look at grammar, orthography, whether there are too many filler words or the descriptions are too vague. You can also comment on characters, for instance, if their behaviour is consistent with their established personality, or if they suddenly start acting like idiots to keep the plot going, even though the audience was told they were super geniuses. The latter goes for TV shows and movies, too. Game of Thrones comes to mind a lot, and what the show did to the character of Littlefinger, who was supposed to be extremely smart, only to die in the most ridiculous manner – because it served the plot.

Another important aspect of good writing is narrative pacing (you can look that one up right here: https://industrialscripts.com/narrative-pacing/). How quickly do events in a story unfold? If something feels too rushed or unearned, then that’s a sign of bad writing. That is why the transformation of Daenerys Targaryen from freer of slaves and protector of civilians to genocidal fascist felt so incredibly jarring. It was unearned and happened way too quickly. That is bad writing.

Dialogue that sounds unnatural, motivations that make no sense, contradictions in show-internal lore, math failures (writers are especially bad at counting, which is a pet peeve of mine) are also signs of bad writing.

Again, look at the back half of Game of Thrones. We’ve already talked about unearned endings and baffling character developments. Math failure is another one. At some point, people just teleport throughout Westeros, as if travelling from A to B wouldn’t take weeks or even months. That’s bad writing.

Alexandrea Callaghan (2023) wrote for the website GEEKS, that if the show doesn’t stick the landing, it fails (Source: https://vocal.media/geeks/what-makes-a-movie-bad). Game of Thrones arguably had the worst last season of any major TV show that had any impact on pop culture. The characters turned into caricatures of themselves who teleported across the map like it was nothing. Entire plot points were forgotten, and the world felt so, so small. What even happened to House Bolton? Are we supposed to believe that the entire House was just like three people? All dead, no more House? Who’s governing their lands? That’s the kind of thing that makes writing bad.

Battlestar Galactica (2003) was very guilty of this. From one moment to the other, they forgot that the Cylons had a whole planet, and now, they only had one resurrection hub that managed the Cylon copy downloads. Because the plot needed that to get blown to smithereens. But it contradicted established lore and made the Cylons look like idiots.

Also, they had no plan. That was a lie.

Also, also, don’t even get me started on how the fake-out Earth thing contradicts the revelations of the Tomb of Athena. They saw the starry sky as if they were standing on Earth, and then the clues led them to an irradiated Earth, and the one they actually ended on was completely random? Also, super many thousands of years in the past, so that the constellations wouldn’t even remotely look the same, even if Earth 2 had been the one advertised in the Tomb of Athena? None of the last season makes sense. It’s like watching a different show that got a concussion. That’s bad writing.

So, what’s the takeaway:

• Characters need to make sense.
• The plot needs to be coherent.
• Pacing needs to focus on the right things.
• Established lore within the show must not be contradictory.

Star Trek TOS pulled the last one a lot. It contradicted itself all the time. Just look at Uhura’s mind wipe in The Changeling, which was never mentioned again. Also, was Vulcan conquered or not, like McCoy suggests? Later canon contradicts this. Let’s not even get into the James R. Kirk versus James T. Kirk business. Yet the so-called purists don’t pop any pimples over any of that.

Seeing brown people and lens flares that you dislike is not bad writing. Star Trek has plenty of crappy episodes, contradictions, and questionable outcomes, but this isn’t what the hate engagement is targeting.

Again: If you can coherently formulate your criticism and explain, without insulting people, what you dislike – or if you can just openly admit that you dislike something for no reason, and that your feelings are subjective – then go for it. But pretending like your feelings are a substitute for critically engaging with media is silly and deeply unserious. There are things I don’t like, but I make it a point to differentiate between my subjective emotions toward media and my objective criticism of it.

I like the Snyder cut. Is it good? Probably not. Is it super silly? Yep. I don’t care. I enjoy it. I also enjoy Star Trek: Nemesis, and that movie has objectively bad writing. The pacing is weird. What even was that dumb chase scene at the beginning? The characters are inconsistent. Why is Worf in a Starfleet uniform? Troi gets telepathically assaulted for no reason. That scene sucks so bad. It makes no sense, takes up too much screentime, and makes the villain look like a moron. See? Bad writing, right there. And I still enjoy most of the movie, minus that bit, which is just so unnecessary and evil.

The Wrath of Khan is an objectively good movie, which I don’t particularly care for. I don’t like watching it. The villain doesn’t work for me, and it’s not fun. For me. In my opinion. But that’s not bad writing. It’s actually very good writing.

See what I mean?

In the end, I don’t really care if some people are so diseased with toxic nostalgia, they will shit on anything Star Trek that has come out in the past two decades. What I do care about is the poisoning of the discourse, how subjective maladies get painted as objective criticism (This is the part where I advertise my editing services, so check out the link), and how thoroughly this kind of attitude ruins fandom spaces. Maybe these people just need to be more honest with themselves and admit that they hate the new because they so desperately need to cling to the old, as the world around them unravels.

And that’s okay.

Just don’t trauma dump on the rest of us.

I’ll be looking at episodes from different shows I love and will analyse whether they are, indeed, badly written or not. By doing so, I hope I can help give people the tools to identify bad writing but also to talk about shows they love in toxic fandom spaces. This advice will also be geared toward aspiring writers, so stay tuned for that.

Until then, I wish you all a happy infinite diversity in infinite combinations.

References:

Business Insider. (2021, December). Top original streaming TV shows: “WandaVision,” “The Witcher,” and more. https://www.businessinsider.com/top-original-streaming-tv-shows-wandavision-the-witcher-2021-12

Callaghan, A. (2023). What makes a movie “bad”. Vocal / GEEKS. https://vocal.media/geeks/what-makes-a-movie-bad

de Oliveira Santini, F., et al. (2023). Nostalgia’s psychological and behavioural effects: A meta-analysis. Journal of Consumer Psychology, n.d. https://doi.org/10.1002/mar.21872

Elgenius, G., & Rydgren, J. (2022). Nostalgia, nationalism, and imagined homes. Sociological Forum, n.d. https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/pdf/10.1111/socf.12836

Habib, H., & Nythyanand, R. (2019). YouTube recommendations reinforce negative emotions [Preprint]. arXiv. https://arxiv.org/html/2501.15048v1

Industrialscripts. (n.d.). Narrative pacing: The keys to mastering your screenplay’s pace. https://industrialscripts.com/narrative-pacing/

Ledwich, M., & Zaitsev, A. (2019). Encouraging online radicalisation via YouTube’s algorithm [Preprint]. arXiv. https://arxiv.org/pdf/1912.11211

McGloin, M. (2025, July 29). Starfleet Academy trailer gets torpedoed by fans. Cosmic Book News. https://cosmicbook.news/starfleet-academy-trailer-backlash

Paramount Plus. (2025, July 25). Star Trek: Starfleet Academy | First look teaser [Video]. YouTube. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VkBU8lvXm7M

Piper, H. (2011). Longing for slower rhythms: Nostalgia and television. Journal of British Cinema and Television, n.d. https://www.euppublishing.com/doi/abs/10.3366/jbctv.2011.0047

Polygon (Roth, D.). (2023, January 11). Deep Space Nine broke Star Trek for the better. Polygon. https://www.polygon.com/23547617/deep-space-nine-star-trek-ds9-watch-analysis/

Reddit user u/—. (2022, January 6). “Has the phrase ‘bad writing’ become shorthand for ‘I don’t like it’?” [r/television thread]. Reddit. https://www.reddit.com/r/television/comments/10e9to5/has_the_phrase_bad_writing_become_shorthand_for_i/

Ribeiro, M., et al. (2020). Controversial topics and YouTube popularity [Preprint]. arXiv. https://arxiv.org/pdf/1908.08313

Screen Rant (2023, August 7). “TNG was a rip-off”: Why every new Star Trek gets fan hate. Screen Rant. https://screenrant.com/tng-ripoff-new-star-trek-shows-fan-hate/

Star Trek: Discovery. (2024). In Wikipedia. Retrieved April 15, 2025 from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Star_Trek%3A_Discovery

TSP Institute. (2025, March 15). Social-media algorithms and harmful content. https://www.tspi.at/translations/en/2025/03/15/socialmediaharmful.html#gsc.tab=0

Tompkins, J., et al. (2024). Gatekeeping the gatekeepers: Transformative games fandom & TikTok algorithms. Games and Culture, n.d. https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/15554120241244416

Verywell Mind (Vinney, C.). (2023, June 10). What are toxic fandoms? Verywell Mind. https://www.verywellmind.com/what-is-toxic-fandom-5214499

Violo, G. (Series creator), Kurtzman, A., & Landau, N. (Showrunners). (2025). Star Trek: Starfleet Academy [Television series in production]. CBS Studios / Paramount+. (Series information quoted from Wikipedia entry dated Aug 2025).