Star Trek: Titan/YMMV

Everything About Fiction You Never Wanted to Know.


  • Character Derailment: Due to the whole Wangst matter below.
    • Riker, as mentioned below, went from a Kirk-esque Badass who had a talent for making decisions and being secure in his identity to an insecure, depressed man who spends a lot of time hiding in his ready room being gloomy.
    • Troi went from the competent, strong woman she developed into over the course of TNG and her appearances in Voyager to being an irrational, snappish woman who pretty much starts out the series being a Damsel in Distress.
    • Tuvok, too, has become exceptionally gloomy and dour... for a Vulcan.
    • Oddly enough for a character that was only introduced with the series, Ranul Keru starts off okay... but is eventually reduced to nothing but an excuse to remind us that the helm officer from First Contact was gay. It comes up in almost literally every scene Keru is in that he's sad over Sean, his very male lover, dying aboard the Enterprise fighting the Borg.
  • Continuity Porn: The first few novels alone have Call Backs to previous films, series and books, including locations and characters from Star Trek: The Lost Era. One particular mission by Captain Sulu of the Excelsior is a massive part of the second book's plot and backstory.
  • Crowning Moment of Funny: Xin Ra-Havreii at the climax of Over a Torrent Sea:

"I always knew I'd be killed by nature!"

  • Crowning Moment of Heartwarming: The ending of Over a Torrent Sea.
    • Plus the end of Synthesis, when Second-Gen White-Blue returns, declaring his intention to join the team for good:

" I don't know what to say".
"Say yes"

  • Darkness-Induced Audience Apathy: The series can essentially be summed up as "personal pain-melodrama-genocide-repeat".
  • Ensemble Darkhorse: Minor character Torvig Bu-kar-nguv has become rather popular, and his role in the series expanded significantly. The author who created him has expressed his pleasant surprise.
  • Unfortunate Implications: The novels can sometimes come off as an extended exercise in white guilt, extended to white male guilt, taken to an extreme with white male human guilt. Riker spends almost an entire chapter bemoaning that he comes from "a culture built on rape and conquest"... ignoring that this could describe practically every culture on Earth. Even assuming that's what he meant, as opposed to just white Americans, it ignores that most other Star Trek cultures have similarly warlike pasts, despite the airs they put on, and a lot of the rest of his current ship's crew have practices that are just as immoral to an outside observer as rape and conquest would be.
    • One of the characters behaves towards one of the others in a way that's blatant sexual harassment... but seems brushed off due to Values Dissonance. This is happening during Riker bemoaning his race's barbarism, so apparently it's only wrong when white humans treat someone else like sexual meat.
  • The Woobie: Troi, Jaza, Vale, Tuvok, Riker, Keru, Ra-Havreii, Ree, screw it THE ENTIRE CREW.
    • The problem with this is that it effectively neuters them as protagonists in what is still theoretically an adventure series. It's especially bad with Riker, who goes from being the strong, confident man of action he was in the series to a mewling, cringing wimp who spends a lot of time brooding in his ready room.
  • Wangst: And we're talking Buffy levels of it, here.
    • To expound: Everyone's either mourning a dead lover, trying to hook up with a new one and miserable because they're failing, Riker and Troi's marriage has distinctly unhappy (read absolutely miserable) overtones, most of the crew's backstory is full of pain and angst and ostracism. It seems the series believes True Art Is Angsty... but it's so unsubtle and all-consuming that it's impossible to take seriously.
  • White Man's Burden: Whether Riker is an actual example of it as the white human captain of an almost totally non-human/non-humanoid crew is debatable. The fact that he spends most of his time in the novels wringing his hands worrying that people will think this of him isn't.