[@shylarah]
Gonna save any comments about Romeo and Juliet until after I've spoken to my friend again, since they brought it up.

As for Data, you've sort of just emphasized my whole point I made previously about why something like this wouldn't be considered 'literary fiction'. First off, people who are interested in giving a compelling argument about equality don't give a shit about censors or about being controversial, so making it more 'television friendly' doesn't do anything but weaken the message. I didn't even think about the discussion of equality as relevant [i]because[/i] he's an android, so using an android doesn't inherently make people think about it. If it was about people, then they should've done it with people. It isn't that the discussion isn't there, but the subject matter hindered it being taken seriously if the details are considered, and 'literary fiction' is gauged almost [i]entirely[/i] by deconstructing the details.

The argument they presented with Data is borderline justification to say that my PC deserves to have equal rights to me -- my PC is an appliance, and only in the fictional universe of Star Trek is the android known as Data perceivable enough as a person to have equal rights, meaning the argument has very little weight if you actually deconstruct it and say 'yeah, but he's a robot and in reality robots haven't been proven to have souls - or even have real feelings, if you don't believe in souls, but this is semantics - so they shouldn't be thought of as people, so this discussion is meaningless and it's basically just a fantasy story'. It's 'genre fiction' in the same way that the Tin Man in The Wizard of Oz is just meant to be endearing rather than provoke thought.

This is a [i]perfect[/i] example of someone letting the genre weaken the weight of the argument. This discussion shouldn't have been done with Data at all, and if the writers were serious about being 'literary fiction' then they should've done this theme using an alien planet with equality problems instead of using an android, assuming they were too afraid to use humans. Then again, Star Trek exists in an escapist utopia where racism and prejudice - and arguably freedom - don't even exist in the human race anymore, so they couldn't use humans -- doesn't change the fact that having them go to an alien planet that's dealing with equality problems would've make a lot more sense.