Aristotle in Star Trek?

Last semester I took a public speaking class and learned the basics of writing a good, convincing and even persuasive essay. Earlier today I was thinking about these basics and the thought came to mind, "Maybe this is why Star Trek is so good; so engaging; so believable. Of course, my opinion of it being believable is pretty far out, but you must admit, Roddenberry did an awesome job of portraying human nature even in a futuristic world.

So what are these basics that I speak of? They are those elements of writing which Aristotle came up with: Ethos, Logos and Pathos (ethics, logic and emotion). Ethos describes how trustworthy a statement is, while logos explains how logical it is to proven fact. Pathos appeals to the emotions, even if the content is an assumption or completely falsified.

The statement, "We are miracles of God," is not necessarily a statement with strong ethos, simply because there is no basis for the statement. However, you could reword it and say, "According to the living word of God, we are His miracles." Now the statement has some origin which skeptics could reference your statement to to see if what you were saying had any basis.

Now I feel like I'm rambling. So I'll get to the point of this post: Star Trek. What made Star Trek so engaging and why does it still have a huge fan-base? I think it is partly because Gene Roddenberry heavily utilized these three tools in every single one of the episodes. He even personified them into certain characters throughout the multiple series that were created.

Example: Spock is obviously the persona of logic, or logos. Every statement he made was based off of a believable scientific or statistical fact. Kirk was the example of ethos. He could not have become captain of a starship without a good trustworthy background. And his crew followed him into every scenario even when at first glance, the decision seemed crazy, because they knew he could be trusted. And McCoy was a good example of pathos. Everything he did seemed to contrast to Spock, because he was a very emotional person. He based many of his decisions on how he felt at the time.

Of course, Next Generation equivalents would have been Data, Picard and Troi, respectively.

Now Roddenberry could not have created hundreds of episodes by making sure logos, ethos and pathos were present in every single one. No. In fact, I believe he intentionally reversed them in many cases. Recall the sadistic parallel-universe Kirk, or the time Picard was taken over by the electrical alien, making his crew extremely suspicious of his actions and even sparking mutinous feelings. In these cases, these leaders had lost their ethical credibility! So even a reversal in ethos, pathos and logos were used to create and add even more variety and interest to the world of Star Trek.

Comments.....

As much as I like comments, I really don't like them..here.

A few days ago I decided to change my comments display settings to show below the post, which involved activating post pages and changing a dumb little setting. And it caused all of my comments to disappear! What's up with that?

So anyway, I don't know if I want to complain or something. They say that for some cases, like when you move to a custom domain, the comments are still there, but they're not being displayed and it has to be fixed.. But nobody mentioned when you change display settings for comments.

5-3-10

Two new MAJOR developments in my life of social networking and/or online accounts:

1) I discovered a Christian guy named Steve McGranahan who calls himself "The world's strongest redneck." He's got all his videos and beliefs up at http://www.stevemcgranahan.com.

2) Also, even more recently (by a couple hours) I registered with Wikipedia as an editor. I don't think I'll do much there, but I like to try to keep modern stuff updated properly, since I had a good excuse today which didn't pan out after all. Simple profile page at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Depwl9992

That's all for now!

New Animations

I've just put up some five-second lego animations. They're a parody on Batman and the "BOY WONDERRRRR" except I wondered what it would be like if Boy Wonder (Robin) were a total fop.

The Boy Failure 01 - http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cCiu7-EOJEc
The Boy Failure 02 - http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aoMYWEaEawQ
The Boy Failure 03 - http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RK_W0gp4qTo

Commenting...

So since Andrea made HER blog, I gained a few people who were interested in MY blog. But now nobody comments!! I might go and pout or sulk or something.

PLEASE go comment? I really like REAL comments. All I get now-days are junk email-like comments advertising things. Or some foreigner who can't speak a lick of proper English telling me about a school assignment? Now THAT'S a confusing one...no name, no sense in the comment at all, but it isn't junk advertising either, so I don't know what to make of it.

All in all, I don't get worthwhile commenting at all! And I really want to hear what you have to say.

Done!

Bye.