Editing Star Trek (section)

== A Composite Creation ==
This is a general note that one should consider: Star Trek was created in pretty much the opposite way as The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings. Tolkien worked out a bunch of linguistic stuff and general history of Arda in his spare time over the course of years, then decided to use that as the basis for some stories that he eventually gave to some publishers which in the end sold quite well. 

Roddenberry, by contrast, pitched a very broad general idea (it's the future, things are good, we got some guys on a ship exploring space; a "wagon train to the stars") to the networks and eventually Lucy from ''I Love Lucy'' made it happen. Roddenberry then worked with a variety of writers and actors (and some later on in later series) who added to this rough skeleton of an idea in a process that would continue on to this day. 

This is not to knock either approach, but both have their advantages and disadvantages. In regards to Star Trek, a franchise which relies mostly on an episode of the week format (until recently, apparently) that's been going on for more than half a century, there were numerous people at the helm and many of them had often very different ideas about what should be done that were just thrown out to see what stuck, many of which were contradictory, meaning that the canon is a fucking mess ([[Warhammer 40,000|Kinda sounds familiar, doesn't it?]]). Some of which we'd frankly rather forget (Data being possessed by a mask, for instance). In general fans and fluff writers have been spending a whole lot of time trying to straighten things out and much of the lore is basically a [https://memory-alpha.fandom.com/wiki/Portal:Main rough consensus of what people like and what fits in with it]. Later series got more systematic about this, but there are still points of contention and a lot of flat out contradictions due to its scattershot nature.

You know, like [[/co/| comic books]].