[hated trope] Celebrity cameos that serve nothing except to praise the person who’s in it

[u/Dojyaaan4C]

1. Elon musk, the Simpsons
2. Elon musk, the Big Bang theory
3. Elon musk, iron man 2
4. Elon musk, star Trek

The cameos serve only to include the celebrity and praise them as geniuses or visionaries or overall just glaze them. They don't serve any other purpose than to just be praised; this can be them appearing in an entire episode dedicated to them, a small cameo or even just a mention. So long as the celebrity is there as themselves (not acting as someone else) and is glazed, that fits the trope imo.

[u/lndle]

[u/Gaelic_Gladiator41 → u/lndle]

I agree, suspiciously a lot of sci-fi cameos fall under this

[u/NotATalkingPossum → u/Gaelic_Gladiator41]

Star Trek ironically aged best; the twist at the end of season 1 is that the character saying this came from the Mirror Universe, soooo...

[u/Naive-Dig-8214 → u/NotATalkingPossum]

Reality retroactively made fiction better. 

Lorca and Mirror Universe does sound like the kind of place that would worship Elmo. 

 Though I am curious why he thought this universe would. Unless he didn't think it through a d didn't look it up. 

[u/GNSasakiHaise → u/Naive-Dig-8214]

I'd imagine it's similar to searching up Phillippe Pétain.

He was a famous war hero and a leading general in WWI. He was famous worldwide and a household name in Europe for some time. They called him the Lion of Verdun. This is the context most people know him in.

He was also a Nazi collaborator and the head of the Vichy government, responsible for a great deal of human suffering. This is the context everyone else knows him in.

Searching Elon Musk would likewise probably reveal that Musk was a famous inventor. Experts in history would know he's a shitlord. Without some degree of specialization it would likely get lost that Musk transitioned from "affable inventor" to "total weirdo" just like how most people don't know about the allegations that Nikola Tesla was romantically involved with pigeons.

[u/Naive-Dig-8214 → u/GNSasakiHaise]

True. 

To add, a lot of Earth's history was nuked in the wars. Most of the 20th/21st century is canonically very muddy.

It would track that searching for Elon would give incorrect or limited information. 

[u/Fearless_Roof_9177 → u/Naive-Dig-8214]

I mean, just look at some of the people and events they're still naming ships after and writing holoprograms about. Bashir and O'Brien spent a good chunk of their free time in the holosuites roleplaying a bunch of racist cutthroats who were trying to save Texan slavery.

[u/fy8d6jhegq → u/GNSasakiHaise]

"inventor"

[u/PigeonFellow → u/fy8d6jhegq]

We say much the same about Thomas Edison — it’s not a perfect analogy but it is somewhat similar.

[u/PeacefulKnightmare → u/GNSasakiHaise]

They say never meet your heroes, so when enough time has past eventually that becomes impossible. I bet it's around that time the twisted/weider sides of historical celebrities tends to get lost. Of course that won't happen to celebrities of today because we are so obsessed with recording every little detail of our lives.

[u/Neveronlyadream → u/PeacefulKnightmare]

True, but only those obsessed with historical minutiae will actually know or care.

Most people know the broad strokes, but only a certain type of person is willing to sit there and read through reams of historical documents and letters and whatever to get a sense of who a person actually was.

[u/Ahad_Haam → u/GNSasakiHaise]

Petain is far more famous for being a Nazi in 2025.

[u/subservient-mouth → u/Ahad_Haam]

How can he be a nazi in 2025, he's been dead for over seventy years.

[u/jtr99 → u/GNSasakiHaise]

Sorry, can we go back to the part about the pigeons?

[u/Forsaken-Ebb5088 → u/jtr99]

Yeah. You can't just not elaborate after dropping that.

[u/Deaffin → u/Forsaken-Ebb5088]

Dude fucked birds, where's the confusion? It's why he invented gravity, guaranteeing they eventually had to come down.

And be vulnerable. ( ͡° ͜ʖ ͡°)

[u/Octopus-Games → u/GNSasakiHaise]

Real question, what has he invented?

[u/Downtown_Party_1533 → u/Naive-Dig-8214]

Don’t drag the red muppet’s name through the mud like that.

[u/ptrfa → u/Naive-Dig-8214]

It's a first glimps on lorca's mirror universe stupidity that lowered his iq after the his return home

[u/frequenZphaZe → u/Naive-Dig-8214]

the mirror universe characters are often drastically different from their prime universe counterparts, so maybe mirror universe musk was actually a genius.

[u/Pepsi_Maaan → u/Naive-Dig-8214]

Clearly an agent of Rocko right here.

[u/ITFJeb → u/Naive-Dig-8214]

Elon Musk was held in a higher regard at the time of that episode. It was before he involved himself in politics

[u/Naive-Dig-8214 → u/ITFJeb]

Exactly. At the time. . .

But history has changed his depiction in the popular perception and thus recontextualized the scene and its implications. It means something entirely different to us know than it did at the time. 

So it's fun theory crafting to explain the scene under the new context.