For my part, I think these particular Klingons are rather ornate. The Sarcophagus ship, the armour, the ceremonies. Nothing out of place among Klingons about death, armaments, and lengthy speeches; but these guys seem like... Game of Thrones Klingons if you will; lords and ladies and bastards of noble houses, all at least half highborn.

Maybe their noble DNA is significantly different from the commoner population. They could be less symptomatic of the Augment virus. Knowing Klingons, some probably have immune systems that could be considered weaponized.

Another way of looking at them would be that they were infected with a mutated form of the Augment virus.

>>875
It's Star Trek, anything's possible. I wonder why T'kuvma has the only sarcophagus ship in the Klingon Empire and why it's the only ship equipped with a cloaking device. Maybe his crew's isolation has something to do with their appearance; Voq is treated like a leper; other Klingons seem to look down on the lot of them and there are some odd looking (like different species looking) "Klingons" in the crowd in a few scenes.

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>>878
A bad regex quantum singularity ate my post:

Ash is Voq, and he's on a mission to undermine both the Federation war effort and Kor's control of the Klingon Empire.

I have an actual, far-fetched fan theory to add to this obvious ploy. Through his interactions with Michael Burnham, Voq will come to sympathise with humanity. I expect him to succeed in his mission to usurp Kor and quite likely destroy Discovery, but rather than take command of the glorious annihilation of the Federation, he will sacrifice himself to effect a deescalation of the conflict.

>>879
*Kol's control of the Klingon Empire

I genuinely thought this was Kor, Dahar Master, in his earlier years but I must have misheard. The guy with the two red marks on his face is Kol.

If I had to guess, I'd say their changed appearance is probably going to be some response to the Klingon augment experiment that quite literally went viral in the Enterprise timeline.

Given that this show is supposed to have occurred around 10 years before the original Star Trek, there's not a whole lot of time for Klingons to revert back to their human (augment) appearance.

I'm betting this is an anti-augment faction in ascendancy at this point and the augments are still around, doing their own thing while these mutants/plastic surgery horror shows run around freaking out, eventually the augments will kick their asses and take over by the time of Star Trek.

It was interesting to note the pain booths were in the mirror universe, which seems to indicate its the mirror universe from Enterprise.

>>899
There were a lot of tie-ins with Enterprise and some with the reboot movies (meeting the NX-01 under Captain Pike at the end). The reboot movies also mention ENT (particularly it comes up near the end of Star Trek Beyond). I suppose we are to percieve this as a new cannon, probably breaking from the original timeline during the Temporal Cold War. Although things seemed to resolve nicely in ENT, there must have been permanet alterations (losses to Xindi, etc). The premise of the first reboot Star Trek movie further establishes that the timeline can be and has been irreperably altered.

The thing is, despite how interested I am in Star Trek and its cannon, I don't really care all that much. I'd be just as satisfied if they never tried to explain--in-universe--changes that were made for practical, real-world reasons (refreshing the look of the series, updating characters backgrounds, etc). For reasons I cannot understand, the creators--and many of the fans--seem bent on forcing all the different shows and movies into one coherent universe. Seems like a waste of effort, but then again if this timeline undoes the events of TNG, DS9, and VOY (especially VOY), they actually have a chance to do it.

Youtube  >>901
I've never entirely understood the requirement that everything that occurs before and around the time of the original series has to look like it was made by a 60s props department on a shoestring budget. That seems to have been alleviated slightly by the reboot universe since TOS ships no longer look that way. Which is good, Enterprise didn't look that way either. Hell the first warp-capable human ship from that TNG movie looked more advanced.

The coherent timeline and sequence of events, that I get, and I'm willing to live with some inconsistencies (apparently the Rules of Acquisitions in DS9 reused rule numbers for different things on multiple occasions), but an overarching thread between shows... that I can live with, although I'm not going to obsessively fixate on the minutia.

Though when others do the results can be amusing.