Answers to Unnecessary Questions: What's your choice, Star Trek or Star Wars?

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On Quora, member Thomas Tisher asks:

 What's your choice, Star Trek or Star Wars?

 My reply:
That’s way too binary.
I mean, seriously. Why would anyone even have to choose between the two? The two franchises have different storytelling styles, and even though they tell stories that involve space travel and strange planets, they’re not even in the same genre.

Star Trek is a utopian, optimistic vision of how Gene Roddenberry and his creative airs see humanity’s future. It’s not hardcore science-fiction, partly because the franchise began as a TV show in which the tech was loosely based on scientific principles but was mostly made-up for the sake of storytelling.
In addition, Star Trek allowed Roddenberry and Co. to comment about social and cultural issues (especially war, sex, the Cold War, racial equality, etc.) on television without interference by the network censors. The trick, of course, was to present stories with social commentary added to the mix under the guise of sci-fi/action-adventure tales.

Star Wars was created in the mid-1970s to give young people of the era a replacement myth for the Westerns and action-adventure serials of a bygone time. Though it, too, features space travel in its stories, the franchise does not pretend to be science fiction. It’s space fantasy, and none of its hi-tech aspects are grounded in real scientific principles. Its depiction of spacecraft, warfare, and weapons is based on nothing but cartoon logic, which is why I find tech-related dissections of The Last Jedi or Solo: A Star Wars Story to be both ridiculous and unnecessary. As George Lucas or any other writer involved in making Star Wars movies and TV shows, labeling Star Wars as science fiction is absurd. It’s a galactic fairy tale, plain and simple.
Thus, it’s rather silly to ask people to choose between Star Wars and Star Trek. One can be a fan of both and not have to pick which one they like better.

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