I'd have made Quark a space dwarf (loves gold pressedlatinum, short in stature) and I'd have made romulans space goblins (descended from space elves, evil).

Wesley certainly is annoying for his first couple appearances, but I don’t really think we should hold season 1 against any TNG character. He has good moments later, and The First Duty is a straight up excellent episode.

On the other hand, hobbits aren’t annoying either. They didn’t ask to get roped into all that nonsense. Elves are the annoying ones in LotR.

OP didnt do Wil Wheaton wrong, the writers that came up with Wesley Crusher were the ones who did Wil Wheaton wrong.

Mind melds, Q magic, and the Prophets from DS9 are all overt magic. Like why can only Vulcans do mind melds? If it were science you'd be able to create a technology that would be able to do it. But nah in Star Trek, they don't even try to develop technology to do mind melds because it's something everyone knows only Vulcans can do... because it's magic.

When Q was temporarily human, he mentioned being able to change physics constants. Geordi wasn't like "holy shit that totally changes how we think about science" he's just like "we can't do that because we aren't Q."

The powers that aliens have in Star Trek is treated as being magic by the people in the universe. Some aliens just have magical abilities and nobody questions it.

Meanwhile in Star Wars, all of the powers the Jedi have are explained by microscopic organisms that can be measured with a device. Sure nobody likes that, because we actually do want Star Wars to be fantasy and not science fiction. But (for better or worse) Star Wars is more science fiction and Star Trek is more space fantasy.

That is correct.

the Dwarfs in the original fairy tale lore of western Europe were just regular elves who liked mountains and mining.

Aye, lad.

Keiko is Gollum

Could have said "space horny (human)"

Only Star Trek fans that think it being science fiction makes it better than space fantasy keep saying that. But really both Star Trek and Star Wars are space fantasy, with Star Trek being more fantasy than Star Wars. It's basically Homer's Odyssey but with space ships. They're constantly meeting magical beings that put them into moral quandries.

In Star Wars there's only one magic, and in canon it's the result microscopic organisms that can be measured with technology. Yes it's treated as a religion, but science fiction is about how things affect a society, and people having mind powers probably would be considered like a religion. It's actually strange that (other than the Bajorans) nobody in Star Trek develops religions around the magical powers ever other alien race has.

So, orcs were corrupted elves, by Morgoth (who was Sauron’s boss,)

Which is why Sauron doesn’t have complete control over them- though Morgoth would have.

Same thing with the ferengi at least in DS9.

I dunno about LOTR goblins specifically, but the general mythology of them is pretty similar to Ferenghi culture. But I bet they allow their women to work and wear clothes.

never read the book

ARRRGGGGG!!!!!

dies inside

OK, yes in the films the Orcs make little to no sense and are nothing outside of comic relief cannon fodder, but in the books they aren't like that at all. In the books almost everything "evil" is an artificial or evil magic version of something else as a way to counter it, like the Nazgul were an attempt to fight against Eagles. Orc were actually the first elves to come into existence, and the evil bad guy who was Sauron's boss corrupted and tortured them until they were orcs. They are meant to be a counter to elves, but making people out of evil motives and discordant thinking isn't that great an idea, so they aren't very good at this. but they do have their own language and family units, not weird birthing pits, and make their own choices, there's a few longer parts in the books where you're just following the orcs along. after the war the orc's are pretty pissed they got roped into the whole evil army thing, and vow to never follow "big bosses" again. Also Aragorn gives them their own lands. The humans and other beings that fought for Sauron were all roped into it with his lies and cunning, and were pretty upset when they found out all the horrible shit Sauron was up to, in the books no one's really THAT evil, and the orc's and goblins can be pretty goofy, but also very normal humanoid type of things.

To be fair, Klingons were "just" Space Russians in the TOS era. It wasn't until after after Praxis/Chernobyl when the Soviet allegory ceased being topical, that they had to find other themes for them to embody.

Shadow of Mordor and Shadow of War actually explore orcish culture and morality, the latter game more than the former. Ultimately, they've spent all their lives in a Morgoth and/or Sauron cult. The ones that don't buy into it are more chill, and some show signs that they could be decent or even heroic in different circumstances. Eltariel is able to make some progress deprogramming a couple, but siding with Talion, Celebrimbor, or even Eltariel mostly just has the orcs cast them as their new Dark Lord. It's probably possible to get the bulk of the orc population into a better place, but it would take many generations of concerted effort at a massive scale. They'd have to replace their entire belief system and most of their way of life just to leave the cult. Additionally, even when not following a Dark Lord, the orcs culturally favor bloodshed to settle conflicts. This isn't too big of a problem with other orcs since they can take shockingly large amounts of punishment without dying, but it's a huge problem when interacting with anyone else. And even that's probably solvable without wholesale destruction of orcish culture, but everything would take so damn long that it's well beyond the scope of LOTR.

Star Trek sems to be doing a pretty good job of ruining Star Trek these days.

[Engineer]

Which one, Wil or Wes?