Definitely not the same thing. For one thing, people at Comic-cons (and anime conventions, and science fiction conventions) are all warped. I speak from ample personal experience.
I wouldn’t mind so much if the author did something interesting with the human exceptionalism aside from them being plucky or something. In John Scalzi’s Old Man’s War series, the humans are exceptionally sneaky, underhanded bastards on the galactic scale, but that’s not what makes them unique. What makes them unique is that Earth, our mother planet, isn’t the human’s seat of power by choice. Presumably there are other species whose seat of power isn’t their home planet, but humans are the only ones who chose to place their seat of power elsewhere.
No, they werent that much in love- but they are naturally imitators, and they thought that was how the Earth wass.
But that just re-enforces his point. You go to Comic-Con, you see Klingons and Jedi and Naruto and Superman and everything all mixed together. Even if you go to something that’s designed to specifically copy a particular historical era, like a Ren Faire, you still get people showing up in Star Fleet uniforms. And that’s not even counting the majority of people there who don’t dress up at all. A whole planet where every single person not only buys into the “cosplay society” idea, but everyone’s completely on board with just doing 1930s gangsters, is pretty goofy.
Though I did like that one TNG episode, where the “society is based on a single Earth book” was set up by an AI on a dead planet, trying to create an environment suitable for a stranded human, and not having any other material to work with.
“The Royale.”
An amazingly bad episode.
In absolute terms, sure.
For Star Trek, it was pretty good.
I liked The Royale. But I like “mystery room” stories.
I felt sorry for that astronaut. I hope he got to date the hot chick at least. But the aliens may have set it up so poorly that, like some 80s computer game, he could only act in the one path. Maybe all the “npcs” wouldn’t be able to do anything but the simple actions. That would be horrible. Phil Connors had it better than that!
This won’t happen because humans are the only species in the universe who have artistic ability or aesthetic sense. All other species dress exactly alike each other until they encounter humans. They have no art museums, no artistic expression of note at all. I know it happens occasionally in science fiction and sci-fi, but nothing close to the level of creativity displayed by humans. The species that are far more technologically advance are really dull, they have no great authors, sculptors, actors, etc.
So it’s no surprise they become enthralled with human culture because it’s colorful and varied and the entertainment is superior.
Well, per the Doctor (in “The Doctor Dances”), humanity’s passion, once we spread to the stars, is to explore strange new worlds, to seek out new life and new civilizations, and to have lots of sex with them. According to that episode, humans manage to find a way to get their freak on with just about every species we encounter.
But a pretty good Eagles song.
Stranger
Of course there are humans who would. Enough to sustain a town of the size we see in Star Trek, no doubt. Just the fact that it’s not human would be enough of a draw for many (see: Otherkin)
You’ll always have an eccentric few. But these SF offerings I object to have the entire civilization devoted to copying human history or fiction. I’m sorry, but I just can’t buy it. It might be fun to imitate a sanitized version of Victyorian Britain, with aliens dressed up in period clothing and faux “bobbies” wearing those police uniforms, but unless you’re playing a promiment politician, or Sherlock Holmes (a la Poul Anderson’s The Adventure of the Misplaced Hound) you’re going to be pretty bored. And if you’re the street sweeper you’re going to resent your job.
Well, there’s Klingon opera…
I tend to view episodes of Star Trek like “A Piece of the Action” as stories written for fun. An alien planet run by 1920s Earth gangsters is a wild premise that isn’t meant to be the least bit plausible. The author just wants you to enjoy the ride.
I entirely agree. And the same with the Hoka stories of Anderson and Dickson. And the setup in Galaxy Quest gave a somewhat plausible reason for the events in that film. And so on.
But it still bothers me, on an intellectual level. There’s also an undercurrent of racism and classism and, nowadays, speciesism. The “they’re copying our culture” trope used to be a way of looking at other cultures, particularly nonwhite ones, and thinking “they don’t have any culture or civilization of their own, so of course they’ll gladly copy ours.” Really. You can see bits of this in old jokes and stories.
One of the lost opportunities that skirted this issue was the movie and later TV series Alien Nation, where the premise was that a ship full of bio-engineered slaves came to Earth without the “Overseers” present, and they had no culture of their own. So at first the “Newcomers” copy the local Earth culture because there really wasn’t anything else. I had hoped that we’d get to see them creating their own “Newcomer” culture from scratch, but as the TV series developed it turned out that they did, indeed, have their own shipboard culture, which asserted itself more strongly as the series progressed. But I missed not seeing them build something new from the ground up. As it was, it was good to see something besides blindly copying Southern California culture, and also gave us a nifty metaphor for different ethnic groups coming to the US and retaining their original culture.
In Star trek, TOS for sure, but a little in TNG, 23rd/24th century humans have no culture either! Kirk’s glorious future had no art on the walls of the ship, and minimal art anywhere. It’s like they were the aliens, and they were role playing ancient Sparta. And all their art was old. Nothing contemporary. (Yes, I know why, limitations of the medium, can’t come up with anything futuristic without looking too weird, etc, still, the 23rd century was boring, culture-wise.)
And the only think they like for entertainment is oldies. Riker likes his jazz (400 years old) but anything that new is the exception. No one listens to the Beatles, or Ed Sheeran (or contemporary. Same reasons as before). Just classical. It seems the only scripted drama anyone watches is minimalist Shakespeare.*
I’d like to fanwank that all the 20th/21st/22nd century culture got destroyed in WWIII and the aftermath. All they have is nothing except a volume of Shakespeare dredged out of a hole somewhere and copied. But that doesn’t explain Picard’s disdain for our culture, or Kirk’s comment on television (“I recall it was…similar.”) .
Maybe when you live on spaceships, Star Wars or the MCU seem like children’s tales, I don’t know. But does everything have to be Hamlet? How about a minimalist** revival of Casablanca? That would have resonated during the Dominion war.
*It was better in its native Klingon.
** and why is everything minimalist? You have the holodeck ***. USE IT!
***Captain Proton doesn’t count. because I said so! 
In the Kelvin timeline the Beastie Boys are quite popular.
Yet another reason I was right to not watch those movies!
Speaking of Scalzi, I assume everyone has read Redshirts? If not, shame on you–it’s this thread come to life and is simply awesome.