the once and future fangirl

Both episodes involve Kirk smiling a lot through towering loathing, btw. Anan and Kodos present their Mass Murder for the Common Good through a performance of magisterial tragedy; Kirk is at least as performative, but relies heavily on a mask of smiling, zany charm or personable composure that leads virtually everyone to underestimate him.

Spock, by contrast, finds the policies on Eminiar and Vendikar appalling and repugnant, but without the same visceral, personal edge, even in a Vulcan way. It's not until Spock psychically registers the mass deaths of over 400 Vulcans in "The Immunity Syndrome" that he reacts with that kind of edge. For now, they're aligned ethically, but Kirk's contempt/hatred/glee at destroying this very recognizable system are clearly something deeply personal:

(My headcanon is that her hair was hacked off on Tarsus IV to hurriedly hide her among the boys, and after the starvation etc it took years to fully grow out again properly. And then as the difficult, off-putting, overachieving nerd at the Academy that TOS absolutely presents Kirk as, she has no interest in coddling the men around her—whether Finnegan types or "Court Martial" dude squad types—who can't keep up and can't handle being surpassed by a hot blonde who flaunts herself and isn't going to fuck them but does toss her hair in full what? like it's hard? mode while speedrunning the curriculum in two years. She is absolutely swishing around in her miniskirt and lacquered nails and hoop earrings and absurdly impractical hair. She is going to be the first woman to command a starship and she's going to make captain before any of the whiny men in her cohort and she is going to shove her 40s starlet appearance and girlish "who? me?" gender presentation in their faces the whole time.)

Meanwhile, despite everything S'paak has to deal with at the Academy, it's so many orders of magnitude better to be perceived so overwhelmingly as Vulcan in a way that satisfyingly overrides gender and defines her by the very thing that has been so contested her whole life, while definitely skewing masc by Vulcan norms. I imagine that at first, in fact, her presentation is extremely masc and extremely stark even for a Vulcan man, and as she gets used to so much more freedom and being more comfortable in her own skin, she ends up settling on the old school Vulcan aesthetics that you mostly see among very traditionalist Vulcan men, very elderly Vulcan women, and Romulans, so less plain than her first rebellion but also less clearly gendered altogether.