#cannibistic deconstruction

[junewongapologia]

I know it's been lost in the many, many annoying years of ST writers deciding Vulcans are bad and contemptible for having what amounts to just really visible cultural differences from humanity, but I really like how... Culturally Vulcan Spock is.

His colleagues have like a fixation on his mother's heritage but... he grew up culturally Vulcan on Vulcan and his human mother all but states in Babel that she's basically assimilated into Vulcan culture because she agrees with its ethos. In all of TOS Spock considers himself Vulcan.

He's... very well adjusted and settled in so he is, he's a guy who sacked off the VSA to join a pseudo-military against the wishes of his pacifist dad and on the ship he plays Vulcan musical instruments with his human colleagues, and keeps a room full of Vulcan cultural artefacts that presumably remind him from home. (I get that this is half-retconned in the movies - most explicitly in ST V 🙄 - and also pretty inconsistently written in TOS but it's still there!)

Idk it's kind of sad to me that the Vulcans are literally the innovators of IDIC and they've been flanderized into these isolationist bigots because the stoicism/pacifist vibes can be kind of confused and off-putting to people.

Like. List of Vulcans we actually meet in TOS:

Spock

Spock's dad, ambassador to Earth, married to a human in some weird 60s sitcom couple dynamic, in-text reason he is estranged from his half human son is literally stated outright as being because he thinks Starfleet is too militaristic and he's a pacifist - like most Vulcans.

T'Pring - Spock's fiancée/wife, breaks up with him because it seems like too much of a hassle to be married to a celebrity, never seems to have any issue with his parentage, clearly thinks he's Vulcan since she divorces him via Vulcan ritual (logical, fight to the death) and not Human ritual (illogical, loopholes/contacting your local divorce lawyer)

Stonn - has two lines, neither of them are about Spock.

T'Pau - kind of maybe says something bigoted ("they say thy Vulcan blood is thin"), but then pulls strings to get the Enterprise off the hook for disobeying orders at the end of the episode, presumably as a favour to Spock, who she knows is going through a rough time, or out of respect for Not-Really-Dead Jim.

Surak - from a war torn civilisation five hundred years ago, still less bigoted towards other species than McCoy lmao

I might be so wrong about this but idk I just like Spock's room full of unabashed Vulcan shit, and I think ST has ignored and wasted opportunities for interesting stories bc they're kind of obsessed with deconstruction of everything about TOS/the ST universe to the detriment of anything else including the actual original ethos of Starfleet.

#cannibistic deconstruction #is what id call it #star trek #star trek critical #vulcans #i for one think the vulcans are NEAT #also something something people's inability to read good faith intentions into a society that is very pacifist #is uhhh telling #pacifism is not inherently good!! obviously. #but it's not inherently sanctimonious and isolationist especially from a society that consciously adopted it in response to a violent past #I think people read vulcans in tos having closed cultural practices as being isolationist? #lads theyre in the ufp they're obviously not that isolationist #youve just reinvented the romulans in science vessels #i am very open to being told i am the wrongest person in st fandom about this #please help me understand i do not have encyclopaedic knowledge of the show