Gene Roddenberry wasn't a saint. He is constantly glorified and credited for countless things that were never done by him at all. Star Trek had several writers, and most of the main things that Trek ended up being famous for weren't Gene's ideas. He did a lot of good, I'm not denying, but there's no sense in making up stuff. Especially to put down a POC (Orci), who wrote STID and who actually said they didn't cast someone Brown for Khan to avoid terrorrist stereotype and racism. It's not fair.
I was specific about the fact that nothing gets a free pass from criticism. I also state that when we’re challenging the narrative, it’s still impacting the story. Roddenberry fucked up a lot and I want to hold his legacy accountable for it. But as many problems as the original series had, reboot has them worse because it doesn’t even talk the talk that Roddenberry did, much less walk the walk to same the miniscule extent. Reboot squandered the opportunity to do better than Roddenberry because it chose money over being better and pretended Cumberkhan was an innocent choice. Or the best choice, instead of not writing about Khan at all.
I am well aware that Roddenberry didn’t write everything (eg he got story credit for “Charlie X”, one of my favorite episodes, but it was actually written by Dortha Fontana). But he undeniably both developed the fucking philosophy that guided the show and had a hand in a lot of what other people wrote. He definitely had a hand in Khan. Two other writers created versions of the character but Roddenberry got involved when Montalban was cast. The resulting version of Khan is rooted in anti racism explicitly. I discuss that in this post, btw.
At no point did I make anything up to put Orci specifically down or even directly reference him, but if you have a beef with a specific statement I made, please indicate which one so it can be properly addressed.
But if you want to talk about Orci, I’ll oblige you. If he wanted to avoid racism, he could have written about any fucking white/white coded alien in the fucking Star Trek franchise that he wanted to because Cumberkhan is fucking racist in the first place. There is no way to have a white person play a canon person of color and avoid it.
