2d ago

One Bad Mother? In Defense of Star Trek's Lwaxana Troi

Many fans complain about Lwaxana Troi's StarTrek episodes but there were always those of us who loved her. Yesterday, Matt Baume shared his explanation of his own love for this character brought to life by the wonderful Majel Barrett.

Matt is a queer journalist. Much of his work focuses on how queer people influenced popular culture. His latest book is Hi Honey, I’m Homo.

(And Matt has no idea who I am or that I'm sharing his video on Threadiverse. 😹)

21 comments

jesus christ why do some of you people even watch the show

Shes a serial sexual harasser who uses her high position in society to avoid repurcussions for her behavior. Fuck Lwaxana, give her the Harvey Weinstein treatment
- Can you expand?
  
  She is a narcissist, talking herself up and putting down the people around her. Constantly bulldozing over clearly established boundaries by deliberately misnaming Worf, harassing Picard and Odo after they've made it very clear they aren't comfortable with her advances, and just completely dismissing almost everything her daughter says. It's clear she just does what she wants and expects everyone to go along with it, making a dramatic scene if anyone objects.
  She's a rich bitch that doesn't care about anyone except herself and only really seems to help people when it already aligns with what she wants. It's understandable that Deanna only talks to her mother when pushed into it.
  
  That's pretty much her entire character in every episode she's in. I can't think of a single example of her respecting boundaries or consent
  
  I could but others p much already covered all my points

The Timicin episode (S04E22 "Half a life") always makes me tear up at the end. The emotional struggle that Lwaxana had is heartbreaking, and speaks a lot about the role that we give our elders in our society. It's something that we still struggle with more than 20 years later.

https://memory-alpha.fandom.com/wiki/Q-in-Law
I'm not a giant fan of the books, but this one is great.
Q gives Lwaxana a portion of his powers, with results that suprise even him...
- RIP Peter David, who died yesterday.
  
  Peter David
  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peter_David
  
  Oh shit! 😭
- I haven’t gotten all the way through it yet, but I have very occasionally come back to it as a hobby project over the past year because I have been trying to collect a dataset of Majel’s lines in order to train a text to speech voice.
  Usually, I’d find that a bit unethical, but in this case, they literally tried to collect a dataset before she died, which I think is as close to consent to such a reproduction as most passed actors could give. Also, it’s mostly for fun for something like HomeAssistant on Raspberry Pi.
  
  It is an interesting point. I once heard an anecdote that Jimmy Cagney hated being impersonated in Warner's cartoons, but Bogart got a kick out of it. The same with Weird Al, some folks love getting parodied and others refuse to have him touch their songs.
  Personally, I think it would be pretty sweet if some spaceship three hundred years from now was using her voice .

♥️ Lwaxana!

21 comments