Let's compare how DS9 handled emotional trauma. In one episode, Chief O'Brien was convicted of a crime he didn't commit on an alien world, and on that world punishment was given by implanting memory engrams of having served decades in a gulag rather than going through all the trouble of building and manning actual gulags. So by the time the Federation got involved, it was too late. The rest of the episode was Miles dwelling on what he was made to believe he went through. Miles tried to power through it, like the old war veteran he was. When that didn't work and he almost struck his daughter in a fit of rage, he ran off into an empty storage bay, stole a phaser from a security locker, and had a breakdown while sticking the phaser in his mouth. The kind of shit where you see a grown man cry and think "...damn", not roll your eyes and call him a faggot.
How will Academy handle emotional trauma? Have the character break down in tears at every little inconvenience, like the past two modern Trek shows? Red-Letter Media were right in calling old Trek 'competency porn', where the characters are meant to represent the best of the best humanity has to offer, so when they fail it's because they either didn't live up to that standard, or their circumstances were far beyond what a human should reasonably be able to endure. We don't get that with fat cadets who swallow their own com badges.
It's more than that. Shows used to write aspirational characters. They could still be relatable, but they were something you'd strive to be, not something you already were. And certainly not "he's literally me!" for some Reddit mod who stumbled into a studio writing gig.
But that seems to be a lost skill. The lack of characters like that in kids' shows is going to be especially disastrous in the long run.
Aspirational implies a higher standard, and having standards has long since been decried as problematic. Modern writing is all about validation, so the characters are all as debased as the writers and their intended audience.
Let's compare how DS9 handled emotional trauma. In one episode, Chief O'Brien was convicted of a crime he didn't commit on an alien world, and on that world punishment was given by implanting memory engrams of having served decades in a gulag rather than going through all the trouble of building and manning actual gulags. So by the time the Federation got involved, it was too late. The rest of the episode was Miles dwelling on what he was made to believe he went through. Miles tried to power through it, like the old war veteran he was. When that didn't work and he almost struck his daughter in a fit of rage, he ran off into an empty storage bay, stole a phaser from a security locker, and had a breakdown while sticking the phaser in his mouth. The kind of shit where you see a grown man cry and think "...damn", not roll your eyes and call him a faggot.
How will Academy handle emotional trauma? Have the character break down in tears at every little inconvenience, like the past two modern Trek shows? Red-Letter Media were right in calling old Trek 'competency porn', where the characters are meant to represent the best of the best humanity has to offer, so when they fail it's because they either didn't live up to that standard, or their circumstances were far beyond what a human should reasonably be able to endure. We don't get that with fat cadets who swallow their own com badges.
It's more than that. Shows used to write aspirational characters. They could still be relatable, but they were something you'd strive to be, not something you already were. And certainly not "he's literally me!" for some Reddit mod who stumbled into a studio writing gig.
But that seems to be a lost skill. The lack of characters like that in kids' shows is going to be especially disastrous in the long run.
Aspirational implies a higher standard, and having standards has long since been decried as problematic. Modern writing is all about validation, so the characters are all as debased as the writers and their intended audience.