#it's so...90s yet...not dated...futuristic but...

Really enjoyed Shell.

Please don't read this if you haven't seen it yet.

I'm not going to self censor on my tiny blog no one reads.

Go watch it, it's streaming on Fandango at home.

Spoilers ahead!

This took forever (sorry) but thank @artist-issues for Unlocking the Brainrot yesterday when I have not thought about this idea in like... four months. Also she told me forever and a day ago she wanted to hear it too so here is is my fren I'm tagging you now after all this time asldfjaskdfjah sorry I took forever. Its once again consumed my thoughts and now we're gonna try to figure it out again.

This is going to be very confused ramblings- if it makes any sense to you- GREAT! Tell me what's happening because I have no idea what I'm thinking or where I'm going with half of this. Also it doesn't help I haven't looked at these notes in quite a while and I'm now scratching my head over them, trying to figure out what they mean.

ANYWHOOOOO-

When the game first released, Cyberpunk 2077 was an absolute mess on consoles. Caught in the throes of a lengthy playthrough of Assassin’s Creed: Valhalla, I decided that I would wait for a few patches to come through before attempting to take on Night City with Keanu Reeves Johnny Silverhand by my side. This was not the norm for me. Often, when big budget shiny titles come out, I play it quite close to the release date. But after seeing the furor online and hearing a couple of horror stories from some of my gaming friends, in my infinite wisdom, I saw the silver lining of trying to get through some of my backlog of smaller titles that had previously escaped my notice.

Almost a year later, with a whopping 90-110GB amount of space being taken up on the hard drive of my PlayStation 4 Pro, I finally found a small gap in releases (to the disappointment of many of my friends, I decided to skip out on the remake of Pokemon Brilliant Diamond and Pokemon Shining Pearl - primarily because I had played it on my Nintendo DS and had never truly fallen in love with it. My interest waning before I’d even reached the last gym). 

Booting up my console, I finally decided to step into the shoes of V, a former corporat (although your personal background can also include being a nomad or a kid raised on the streets of Night City) turned mercenary, with a strong friend in Jackie Welles. And, of course, my first terrifying moment with the game was when I was customising my character just as my mother was pacing around the lounge that is my gaming den. Thankfully, she never glanced towards the screen as I was selecting breast size and other endearing body parts. If she had...well...it’s hard to say what she might have thought I was playing. I’m sure if developers wanted to, they could pivot games into an entirely different direction.

Yet despite the marketing of how ‘edgy’ it was to pick one’s how large one’s endowment could be, such choices had little impact in the game itself. Except, of course, when they clipped clothes back during the buggy days when the game first released.

The story of Cyberpunk 2077 is a simpler tale focused primarily on V’s dilemma of having a piece of experimental technology shoved into their head that is slowly overwriting their conscience mind and body. This isn’t a grand tale of saving the world. Nor is it truly about fighting corrupt megacorporations (no matter how much Keanu Johnny Silverhand tries to tell the players otherwise). It’s more personal. Even though a lot has clearly been put into building Night City and the futuristic world that players find themselves in.

Hints of Blade Runner and other pioneering science fiction novels permeate the world. I might not have read the likes of Hardwired or Neuromancer just yet, but I can definitely see how they might have informed the world. The aesthetics of East meets West, the neon and the chase for meaning in a world that is more concerned about consumption of goods.

But while I felt many of the characters in the main storyline were quite well written - Panam, Judy, Rogue and Johnny, I was disappointed to find that so many side quests or gigs/ NCPD hustles were very lacklustre. Yes, picking up shards to fill the character in on the complex relationships between the various gangs was a nice touch, but I couldn’t have cared less about it. V certainly wouldn’t have given a gonk’s arse about the politics that were brewing underneath the surface of Maelstrom.

It was this that disappointed me first and more about the open world nature of Night City. Everything felt very bare bones. Go to objective. Clear the camp of enemies. Watch as eddies drip into bank account. Over and over and over and over again.

Nor did it help with the sheer amount of NCPD Hustles there were scattered all over the map. As a self-regarded completionist, or, at the very least, someone who prefers to see what the side content is available as I make my incredibly slow way through main story quests, it felt like I was checking things off a list. None of it was very engaging. And what morsels of world-building that was contained in the shards I found on dead gang members and corporate guards were instantly dismissed to the back of my mind.

There are only a few sidequests that caught my eye. These were Delamain, everyone’s favourite AI taxi service, and the creepy storyline of Jefferson Peralez. These were able to weave in world-buildling with likable and charismatic characters. It gave me more to chew on than a one-and-done gig of retrieving someone’s car or assassinating someone that looked at one of the fixers funny.

Though the game is much more playable than it was at launch, Cyberpunk 2077 still has a myriad of problems. Not all of them are bugs or glitches.

First and foremost is the driving. Most of the cars handle terribly. The turning circle on bikes are far too wide. Whenever V slowed down to turn, the entire vehicle seemingly drifted on its side. After 70+ hours of gameplay, I also learned that there was a handbrake option (but even this wasn’t very effective).

The second major gripe I had was the melee combat. More specifically, the fist fights. They were probably the worst aspects of the game that I had to suffer through because all of V’s opponents had huge health pools and hit like trucks. None of it was fun and I probably should have grabbed some eddies to throw the fight against the final contender.

Still, misgivings aside, the story of Cyberpunk 2077 left me with much food for thought. When I had initially looked up the separate endings, I was of a mind to simply hand V’s body over to Johnny. The more I played, however, and the more people I met (such as Judy and Panam), the less it seemed a viable choice when I reached Mikoshi. Much like a few of my friends, it seemed right that V ally themselves with the Aldecados. They might have been amateurs compared to Rogue and Johnny, but if I was going to attack Arasaka Tower, I wanted my V to do so on their own terms. Without the old guard stepping in. In my mind, their time had come and gone. It was V’s time to step into the limelight and to do what needed to be done.

The choice to stay with the friends V had made along the way also felt right. In my playthrough, V wasn’t exactly afraid of dying, per se. They were afraid of being rewritten. After all, who isn’t afraid about their core essence being taken over? Change can be hard but seeing one’s decline so quickly and knowing that you won’t be yourself anymore can be even more terrifying than a quick and clean death.

And even though I couldn’t give everyone a happy ending (please forgive me Takemura-san and Hanako-sama), I tried to do what was best for the character that I embodied.

In fact, my playstyle was quite different from how I usually tackle these open-world behemoths. The truth was no longer such a simple thing to dole out. Looking up the epilogues and resolutions of many quests, it felt like trying to be the paragon and do-gooder would only net my clients a world of pain. This was particularly true with the end of the Peralez quest line and how best to proceed down the slippery slope of brainwashing and political puppetry. 

While Cyberpunk 2077 is no longer the disaster it was when it first released, I still felt as if the game wasn’t quite finished. As if CD Project Red bit off more than they could chew with the title. The joy and warmth I felt in The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt is lacking in this neon-drenched science fiction world and I’m not sure if that was because of the direction of the game or the fact that it was rushed out of the door. 

Don’t get me wrong, there are still parts of Cyberpunk 2077 that are great, but if the game was a person, they’d gone through Soulkiller and their engram was implanted into someone else’s body.

Pairing: 1995!Reggie x Reader

Word count: 1.5K

Warnings: some swearing?

Plot: Ok so, it’s a pride parade/riot/demo, in 1995 (or so), and the boys go to support Alex, but surprise! There’s music there too! And Reggie likes the person playing the electric violin at the march. But like it starts to rain and they gotta stop with the instruments and get off the stage but they don’t stop singing. So anyway Reggie is in first row and the band was singing a cover of We Will Rock You and Reg of course knows the lyrics as does everyone. So they start singing and dancing very energetically and passionately in the rain. At the end the violin person gives Reggie their number

A/N: nonbinary reader (they/them pronouns) The link to the electric violin cover of we will rock you without the lyrics. Also. This is the first one-shot I’ve ever written and stuff so please be nice :) yes I accept constructive criticism too.

After practice, Alex had finally mustered up the strength to ask his best friends/bandmates,

“So, there’s this gay thing, on Saturday, and I wanted to ask if it you guys wanted to come with me?” The three other guys were listening closely to him, while fiddling around a bit with their instruments.

“It’s okay though, if you don’t.” Hadn’t even given them time to react, let alone answer. “If you don’t wanna come, I mean.”

A second of silence, the three of them surprised, exchanging looks, the blond one dreading the answer.

“No, yeah, dude.” Luke finally said, leaving his guitar on the stand. “We’ll totally go with you!”

“Yeah! We were just shocked that you’d wanna go.” Bobby said, because he and the two other guys had heard about it but weren’t going to bring it up if Alex wasn’t.

“We’re really proud of you, bro,” Reggie said, hugging his neck from behind. Kinda looked awkward. “I wish I was half as brave as you.”

With the whole AIDs thing, the President, his parents, and you know, the anxiety he lived with, Alex couldn’t really live his whole truth most of the time without fearing for his life, so yes, going to a Pride thing was no small feat for the boy.

“Yep, you can let me go now, Reg.” He chuckled, or coughed, because Reggie wasn’t exactly a spaghetti build person, and was hugging his neck rather tightly.

“So when’s the date bro?” Luke sat down on the couch, spreading himself out like pancake batter on a pan.

It was Saturday. Somehow, Reggie convinced them all to paint lil rainbows on either their cheeks or hands. They all looked adorable, sitting in the metro pressed together like anchovies, all with backpacks loaded with water, their respective lunches, and whatever the hell more fitted in the backpack.

Once they got to the station, they went out, following another group of people dressed for a parade, and in a bit more than five minutes, they were smack in the middle of the parade, chanting something in favor of LGBTQ+ rights.

“Do you hear that?” Reggie asked Alex, but like, screaming.

“Yeah, its about to storm, or something.” He said, looking at the sky, which was getting grayer by the minute.

“Not thunder, it’s like,” The black haired squinted in thought. “it’s like, music, I think. Queen.” He said. “Imma go, be right back!”

Reg disappeared in between the queers at the parade, following that sound.

“Reg, no! Shi…” Alex opened and closed his eyes in disapproval and desperation. “Luke! Bobby! We got a rogue bassist!” Bobby and Luke’s reactions to that were similar to Alex’s.

Meanwhile, Reggie had successfully found the source of the music. At a nearby park, was a stage, like those kinds of stages that can be built in like a day, and on top of it, a rock band.

Said like that, it probably doesn’t sound too special, but the thing was, they were playing a We Will Rock You cover, with an electric violin, or that’s what he could tell from a hundred feet distance from the actual stage, so, continuing squishing himself through the crowd, feeling some droplets of rain on his face, he got closer to the band, until he reached a six feet distance.

Shit, the violin was so incredibly pretty, like, it looked like some sort of futuristic weapon. The guy was loving it. The person playing it though, divine; the way they moved their arms and feet and carried themself. Also, yeah, probably the prettiest person Reg had seen to date.

The band, apart from having the violinist, who also was the backup singer, had a drummer, a bassist, and a guitarist, also the lead singer.

Anyway, the scene, everyone stomping their feet on the ground, singing the song with the band, remembering the now dead Freddie Mercury and how iconic he was, the energy of all those people, together in the fight for freedom and equality. The revolution. And the fucking rain.

Droplets were suddenly drops, which then started falling faster, and suddenly the band started panicking a bit, they couldn’t break up these vibes, these people.

So, the three with the string instruments put away the instruments, amps, cables and everything as fast as they could, and the drummer rushing his music cylinders into safety, the only ones carrying the music were the people, among which was Reggie, tearing out his vocal chords singing along the various hundreds of people singing too.

Once all the electric shtick on stage was cleared up, the whole band jumped down from the stage, joining the crowd, singing and stomping.

Buddy you’re an old man poor man

Pleadin’ with your eyes gonna make you some peace some day

The violinist, which had seen Reggie look starstruck at them and later on give his all to the music, joined him to sing (and stomp).

They were almost dancing, doing a duet, smiling like children on Christmas morning, being completely soaked through with the rain, and looking at each other with a feeling I can only describe as electricity (and if they looked at each other more electricly, they would have electrocuted themselves along the way.)

You got mud on your face You big disgrace Somebody better put you back in your place

The violinist shot him a wink, he tried to not get flustered, and in return winked back.

We will we will rock you

One last verse to the song, everyone still as excited as they were at the beginning. And yet, this one was sung with intention, with motive, as if they were shouting at the world that they’d rock it to achieve their goal.

We will we will rock you

And that was it. After a couple of seconds, the crowd calmed down and scattered.

“Hey, what are your pronouns?” The violinist asked.

Reggie remembered both the dictionary meaning of pronoun and the context in which it was asked (which Alex so kindly explained to them earlier), “He/Him, I’m Reggie.” He smiled.

“You’re in that band, right? Sunset Curve?” They asked.

“Tell your friends!” I’m pretty sure you can imagine how exactly he said this quote. “I’m the bassist.” Ah yes, and now the important question, “What about you, pronouns and name, I mean.”

“Oh, yeah, that.” They thought for one second before blurting it out, “They/Them, the name’s Y/n.” Y/n stretched out a hand, he seized it and made a mental note to ask Alex about those pronouns after, “So, what brings you here today?”

“Oh, well, my best friend’s gay, but,” He leaned closer to their ear, “I’m like, 90% sure I’m bi.”

“Damn boy, same!” They laughed.

“Anyway, I gotta go now, the instruments are only safe from the rain, not from people,” Y/n scratched the back of their neck. “But, in case I’m not only bi and yearning,” They whipped out a marker from their pocket and scribbled their number on Reggie’s forearm, “give me a call. Maybe we can try to rock out again together.” Wow, so full of confidence, must be the adrenaline that implied losing their instrument over getting a cute bassist as a date.

“Uh, yeah sure,” Y/n was already walking away, smiling at him.” I’ll def give you a call!” There was no answer to that. Only a distant holler.

“Yo! Reggie!” Luke.

“Coming!”

And he did walk over, fishing from his backpack a piece of dry paper and a pen to write down the number on something a bit more permanent. Anyway, he found the guys.

“Remember when I told you I might be bisexual?” He asked, copying the number.

“Yeah, when we were watching Indiana Jones, why?” Alex remembered. Indiana Jones is hot, that’s so not up for discussion.

“Yeah, well” He ripped the page with the number out and stuffed it in his pocket. “now I know, I’m bi.”

OH MY GOD I HAVE SO MANY!! It really depends on what genre you’re interested in and what you like; I’ll sort of try to break it down that way (and not just rec every gay book I’ve ever read lmao)

General fiction:

 Aristotle and Dante Discover the Secrets of the Universe by Benjamin Alire Saenz is about two Mexican boys growing up in El Paso in the late 1980s and the writing style is absolutely incredible. It was the first Gay Book(tm) I remember and I spent months of 2012-2013 trying to find a copy and it was 100% worth it.

Simon Vs. the Homo Sapien Agenda by Becky Albertalli. We know it, we love it, I wanted to include it anyway.

The Gentleman’s Guide to Vice and Virtue by Mackenzie Lee is a historical fiction (leaning on fantasy) romp about a boy in the 18th century going on his grand tour with the best friend he’s in love with; the sequel stars his aro/ace sister. Bi lead, Black gay love interest, and a sequel about the importance of girl friendships.

I’m on page four of Gail Wilhelm’s Torchlight to Valhalla but I love the writing style and the fact that it’s a lesbian book from 1938 that apparently ends happily almost made me cry so there’s that.

anything by Virginia Woolf, but especially Orlando, which is a love letter to her girlfriend.

Soft Place to Fall by Ba Tortuga is a fun gay cowboy romance; it’s dumb and sappy and predictable and fantastic.

Sci-Fi / Fantasy

THIS IS WHERE I THRIVE this is my wheelhouse so sorry if I get carried away lol

anything by Sarah Gailey. Their Upright Women Wanted is about queer librarian spies in a futuristic wild west. The American Hippo series (River of Teeth and Taste of Marrow) is about queer hippo wranglers in an alternate 19th century. Magic for Liars is a murder mystery set in a magic school, perfect if you’re trying to ditch She Who Must Not Be Named but still want your fun magic school itch scratched.

Nottingham by Anna Burke is a lesbian retelling of Robin Hood; I’m still working through it but I’m pretty sure all the merry men are queer women and I couldn’t be happier about it.

Cemetery Boys by Aiden Thomas is absolutely fantastic; it’s got an entirely Latinx cast with a trans lead and a ghost love interest; 15/10 almost made me cry.

Six of Crows by Leigh Bardugo has that casual queer rep that I absolutely adore. Like yeah sometimes you need a book about Being Queer but sometimes you also need a heist where the badass gunslinger casually goes “oh yeah not just girls” and steals a tank, you know?

This is very I’m A Child Of The Late 90s/ Early 2000s but Tamora Pierce was huge for me growing up. She clearly stuffed as many queer characters into her world as publishers would let her, and recently she’s confirmed fan theories about even more queerness (ace/aro characters, trans readings, etc) in her work.

Ursula K. Le Guin’s The Left Hand of Darkness was published in 1969 and treats gender as a fluid thing; I haven’t read it yet but it’s on my bedside table and I’m very excited to get to it.

Poetry

all of it straight people don’t get poems

Badger Clark was a gay cowboy poet; I love his stuff so much. “The Westerner” made me absolutely feral and “Others” gutted me.

Wilfred Owen is best known for his work about WWI, but “Maundy Thursday” and “How Do I Love Thee” are absolutely incredible.

Whitman wrote poems about being gay and was one of the more iconic queer voices of the 19th century, at least in literary circles.

Byron was an icon and also incredibly queer.

Sappho is the iconic one; Anne Carson’s translation of her work (If Not, Winter) is fantastic and the one I’d personally recommend.

Classics

If you’re down to read between the lines do I have some books for you

Stoker was gay (and wrote thirsty letters to Whitman), and no one can convince me that Dracula is a straight book. Arthur and Quincey were dating thank you for coming to my TEDx talk.

The Iliad is long and complex but also Achilles and Patroclus wanted their ashes mixed when they died (fellas...)

anything by Wilde but especially A Portrait of Dorian Gray.

Les Miserables has a character who “admired, loved, and venerated” another man, and who “took great care not to believe in anything” but said other man (fellas...). There’s also an entire page about how the lead has never felt any form of love other than familial (fellas... is it aro to spend a whole page talking about how you’ve never loved anyone).

I haven’t read Moby Dick but I know there’s like three pages about how much the narrator loves his crewmate (fellas...)

Nonfiction

A lot of people are scared of nonfic but I’m gonna let you in on a secret: you don’t have to read the whole book. Pick and choose chapters that interest you, put it down for a year, whatever. Nonfic’ll be there for you.

Portrait of a Marriage by Nigel Nicolson is a look into his parents’ open relationship and his mother’s relationship with Virginia Woolf; it’s a gorgeous exploration of the various ways that love and marriage can be flexible and it changed how I look at relationships.

A Queer History of the United States by Michael Bronski is a good intro to queer history.

We Are Everywhere by Matthew Riemer and Leighton Brown is a great look at the Stonewall Era and the time after especially, and it’s full of incredible pictures. They also run @/lgbt_history on insta and 10/10 for that.

Love and Resistance: Out of the Closet and Into the Stonewall Era by Jason Baumann is fantastic too; it’s got pictures and short descriptions of what’s happening in them. Maybe not a first place, but if you know the general scope of the queer rights movement it’s a fantastic thing (or if you don’t and you’re ready to google lmao).

My Dear Boy or anything else by Rictor Norton is incredible. My Dear Boy is a collection of gay love letters; he’s also got books on queer culture in 18th century London and queering the Gothic. You can find a lot of his stuff online here and My Dear Boy specifically here.

so while lazily scrolling the tags again, i didn’t see much new stuff except the same old things (which, tbh, is what my anxiety needs rn so thanks). yet this is not what i am up to talk about again so let’s cut to the chase:

my personal input to the whole “s 3 is total trash“ debate. 

first of all, as long as people don’t bother each other about their preferences, i couldn’t care less.

people are entitled to their own opinions and it’s fine like that. that’s how discussions are made and encourage us to share more ideas and dwell deeper into matters. however, some of my friends that recently watched psycho pass (because I need more people to talk about it and convinced them to giving it a try. though I had them all skip s2 out of worry to loose them there ahah) have kept asking me in regards of the commonly used argument against s3, namely being the lack of literary input. and as a local lit/phil major, this is up my alley to answer I suppose? i’ll try to keep it short and watered down.

The Eugenics Wars supposedly happened in the 1990s. The Star Trek original series ran from 1966-69, so this would have been about 25-30 years in the future at the time; the 1990s were for 1960s people what the 2050s are to us in 2020. So, not a bad time frame for events that were supposed to be near-future-ish but not immediate.

Or, another way of looking at it, from the viewpoint of 1960s people, the Eugenics Wars would have been about as far in the future as WWII was in the past. I get the impression history felt faster in the ‘60s, because of proximity of the great upheavals of the earlier twentieth century, and because the space race and the counterculture were ongoing big things, and because after 1970 or so technological progress slowed because a lot of the technological “low-hanging fruit” was picked. Think about how much the world changed from 1940 to 1967! People expected that pace of change to continue in the future. Thus all the middle twentieth century expectations that we’d have moon colonies and commercial fusion power and so on by the early 2000s; the sort of expectations you see in science fiction like 2001. The original Star Trek series was very much part of that trend, projecting manned space exploration of the other solar system planets and suspended animation technology and genetically engineered superhumans in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. There’s a line in Space Seed when Kirk, Spock, etc. are first taking a look around Khan’s ship, that went approximately “Yeah, they used suspended animation in exploration ships back then cause back then it took years just to reach other planets of the solar system, interplanetary travel with faster ships that didn’t need suspended animation only started in 2018.” As somebody sitting in a timeline where it’s now 2021 and Luna is still the most distant world a human has walked on, hearing that sure made me feel something!

I remember somebody once commenting that Star Trek TOS’s vision of the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries reflected an idea, common during the ‘60s, that very soon we’d either get our act together or blow ourselves up. And I think what that comment was getting at was... There was an expectation that failure to do the former would quickly result in the latter so it was going to be one or the other. Something like our timeline, where we just sort of muddled through for the next fifty years, wasn’t expected; they’d have expected a scenario like that to have ended in the blow ourselves up outcome by now.

I think later Star Trek tried to kinda soft-retcon the timeline of the Eugenics Wars but never committed to explicitly changing it. According to First Contact, the “Third World War” happened around the 2050s (and this was building off stuff we saw in TNG). I think the implication is supposed to be that WWIII was the Eugenics Wars, but that requires ignoring some very explicit statements of dates in Space Seed and Wrath of Khan, and as I said, they never explicitly committed to a retcon. If we take what we see in the show at face value we’d conclude the Eugenics Wars and WWIII were two separate conflicts separated by about 50 years. Which makes it seem a bit weird that the Eugenics Wars apparently weren’t counted as a world war; based on the descriptions of them in Space Seed they were very destructive! Maybe the United States and the rest of the Americas and Australia and the Oceania nations stayed neutral, so they’re considered technically not a world war? Maybe they were less a single big war with two clearly defined sides and more a big mess of smaller interconnected conflicts like IIRC the Hundred Years War and the Thirty Years War?

Which... Star Trek has a reputation as the big optimistic science fiction, but this is making Star Trek Earth’s history from 1950 to 2070-ish look rather dystopian! We won’t be able to fully judge their history against ours until 2070 or so, but so far our post-WWII history looks more peaceful than their post-WWII history! One of the defining and good features of the post-WWII age is that it’s a long period of relative peace; it doesn’t sound like the people on Star Trek Earth would be saying the same thing from the vantage point of their 2021. I guess civilization blowing itself up every two generations would still be an improvement on the early twentieth century pattern of civilization blowing itself up every generation...

I think there have been some Star Trek novels written about the Eugenics Wars, and they squared it with real history by portraying it as a covert conflict that most people are the time were completely unaware of, kind of like the stuff that happens in Stargate and Men In Black? Eh, the descriptions of the Eugenics Wars in Space Seed really don’t fit with that idea. And I’ll just say that I don’t really like that “it’s all secret and the regular people have no idea any of this happening” trope; it’s OK in the right context but it’s got implications that limit storytelling and undertones of elitism I don’t like and I think a lot of the time it’s kind of lazy. If I were to just roll with the dates given for the Eugenics Wars, I’d take the approach of just leaning into the Star Trek universe being an honorary alternate history setting; I’d headcanon Star Trek Earth’s later twentieth and early twenty-first centuries as being 2001-ish, with commercial fusion power and moon colonies and crewed expeditions to the other planets of the solar system and lots of “futuristic” stuff (like, y’know, the process that created Khan) by the ‘90s and ‘00s. Admittedly I’m not sure how to square this with Star Trek: the Voyage Home, which mostly takes place in a 1980s that seems real-world-ish; it’d take some creative interpretation to reconcile them.

And, y’know... In some ways, Star Trek Earth’s late twentieth and early twenty-first century look better and more interesting than ours. Their world is clearly much more technologically advanced! Their space program is far more advanced than ours! On the other, looking at the descriptions of the Eugenics Wars ... if we had to choose, I think it might be a good thing that we got our history and not their history. Khan Noonien Singh sounds like a guy who’s inflicted a lot more death and suffering than Donald Trump and COVID19 ever will. Compared to Star Trek Earth’s late twentieth and early twenty-first century, our late twentieth and early twenty-first century is kind of boring, and sometimes boring is good.

And all this makes me think of something Chris Wayan (the Planetocopia guy) said about the Randomia principle:

“Let's say you're contemplating Randomia, an alternate Earth no better or worse than ours, with roughly the same biomass, same amount of arable land, about the same population... just re-distributed. Now, what regions will you notice the most? First, your home, of course, and then, other well-known regions--and well-known means inhabited.

Randomia will always look inferior! For, by definition, most readers will be from our world's high-population zones. Random changes will, on average, degrade them. And the lands that improve, that become the heartlands of Randomia's civilizations, are likely to be barren obscure lands in our world, mere names (if that) to non-Randomian readers. The Turnovian version of Europe is cold (millions of European readers groan), while the green Sahara nurtures great civilizations (a handful of Saharan readers cheer). If you love civilization, Randomia will probably kill or cripple the ones you love, and plant its greatest civilizations in places you associate with backwardness.

So the grass always looks browner in a parallel world--because what you value most, what you KNOW to value, is generally lost. This principle makes it hard to see alternate worlds fairly.”

The long post-WWII peace is something that hadn’t happened yet in the 1960s, therefore when Star Trek writers wrote a future history that didn’t contain it, they didn’t know they were writing a history that didn’t contain something important and good about the real history that was actually going to unfold. From the vantage point of 1967, it was optimistic to assume there wouldn’t be a nuclear war in the 1970s or 1980s! We, in 2021, can look back on the post-WWII period of relative peace that stretches 70 years long behind us, and know that our timeline contains this important good thing.