Star Trek vs. Star Wars

Joe * and I have started watching the original Star Trek series...in order, of course. When we were watching the third episode--"Where No Man Has Gone Before," written by Samuel A. Peeples--there was a scene near the end when Kirk gets into a knockdown dragout with his former friend Gary Mitchell, and Kirk gets roughed up a bit:

Joe turned to me and said, "Captain Kirk has blood on his face. Do Star Wars characters have blood?"

And I had to stop and think. Do Star Wars characters "have blood"? The only scene I could remember seeing blood in was early on in The Force Awakens when  FN-2187 gets a swipe of bloody hand across his helmet. But despite remembering a high overall body count, I couldn't remember any other blood in the other nine (including Rogue One) Skywalker Story Arc films. I'm sure that I'm overlooking some stray details, but I think the greater point remains: Star Wars is pretty bloodless.

And although I never thought about it before Joe posed his question, maybe that's part of why I've always preferred Star Trek. Wildly improbable and / or fantastic things happen in both it and Star Wars, but Star Trek is more grounded in reality. You won't find some waif picking up a weapon for the first time and wielding it expertly against a master of the art, knowhatahmsayin'? It's got the blood of reality flowing beneath the surface of the story. If a character is trapped in a soggy trash compacter, you can bet that his hair will be wet in the next scene. Star Trek is "that kind of movie." So to speak.

And that works for me. You can't get too wildly fantastic in my opinion, but when you do, you take the human with you. You may be on Megatroy 73, but you still need to eat, you still need to sleep, you still want to make love to a beautiful _____ (fill in the blank with the object of desire of your choice). 

You still bleed.

* Who is autistic...which, for him **  means that he is extraordinarily observant and has a capacious memory, but his language skills are not always commensurate with his age, and sometimes his expressions are a bit skewed from the norm.

** "For him," because experience has quite vividly shown me that autism is a vast spectrum, and that abilities and proclivities vary widely in people who have this diagnosis. Saying someone is "autistic" is pretty much like saying someone is a person: it tells you very little beyond the basic outline.