#spock meta

But I've read stories of people who can smell when someone has a certain illness or is pregnant or about to get their period.

That should be explored. Especially with Amanda living among Vulcans.

You ever think about how the reason Spock is so disdainful of emotions and his humanity in general is probably because he’s grieving?

He’s hurting, a lot. Within the span of less than a decade he:

Loses his sense of linear time and almost his sanity, institutionalizing himself after his first five year mission on Enterprise.

Loses Michael, who was his first and strongest link to human friendship and familial love (aside from his mother). Due to circumstances beyond his control. His visions, his needing Michael, indirectly leads her to fulfilling her destiny, and being forced to leave him behind.

Has a falling out with T’Pring, because she feels he does not value their relationship or his Vulcan heritage enough. Which he internalizes as not being Vulcan enough period. A confirmation of what he already believed.

Has a falling out with Chapel, because she’s in love with the humanity in him which he has come to resent, and cannot be what she wants/thinks him to be. He is not human enough among humans. A confirmation of what he already believed.

He loses Chris, his captain, his best male role model (cuz he’s not getting that from Sarek and his only brother has been in rehab most of his life). Pike, who accepts him as he is and cares about him. Who sacrifices himself because he knows for a fact Spock will go on to do greater things. In doing so, also ends up parting ways with Spock.

He spends 90% of his young adulthood losing people.

Spock’s Vulcan ties reject him, and every human he has ever loved enough to reach out for so far has seriously hurt and/or been hurt by him.

He associates emotion with his humanity (even though Vulcans do feel), and his humanity with the humans that have touched his life.

It hurts to love, love is a human emotion, the logical solution is to further reject my humanity and connection with humans so that I do not feel this pain again.

“I am a Vulcan, there is no pain.”

Is it a wonder that he’s so disdainful of humanity by the time we see in in TOS? Not just from human vs Vulcan prejudices (because damn they hostile to each other constantly), but because being condescending and rude and aloof keeps people from reaching out to him or finding him approachable. If you think about it, that persona, the one we don’t see formed yet in SNW, is a deliberate product of all of that.

Logically, if you don’t want friends, if you don’t want the inevitable pain that love causes, the most direct course of action is to project a persona that people don’t want to be friends with. Evidence suggests that bad things happen to the people who accept him as he is. The last thing he wants is to be loved and to be hurt by another human, another person, right now. Not after what happened to Michael, to Hemmer, to Chris.

You know the two people aboard who immediately see through that and start chipping away at the ice from the moment they meet him?

Jim and Bones

“Listen closely little brother, this is the last advice I’ll ever be able to give you. Find the person that seems farthest from you, reach for them.”

He gets along with Kirk so incredibly, reality bendingly well. It scares Spock! He keeps trying to avoid it but Jim has him pinned and isn’t going to let him go. “When I feel friendship for you I am ashamed” goes beyond the inherent embarrassment of a Vulcan feeling an emotion, it’s the shame of getting attached and believing whole heartedly that it will end in suffering. So much so that he leaves and attempts Kolinahr rather than chance that bond deepening further! Which ultimately fails because, while Chris and Michael both loved and needed Spock, not nearly the same way, the same soul wrenching intensity, that Jim needs him. It’s the stuff that myth is made from.

And Bones, like the saw for which he’s nicknamed, makes it his business to cut through Spock’s bullshit. He forces Spock to acknowledge his humanity, that well of love and of pain and loneliness, where Spock would otherwise deny it. Bones sees through the Vulcan-isms that Spock is hiding behind and sees the truth, a truth so obvious to him and foreign to Spock that it actively pisses him off. Bones confronts, challenges, goads, dares Spock to feel. Bones accuses Spock of being so far gone he can’t feel, just to make Spock prove him wrong. He knows what he’s doing and it’s working. Which is what makes them as inseparable as Jim and Spock, rather than two coworkers who hurl casual insults to each other. Bones KNOWS him, and in his own way needs him for the same confrontational nature he dishes out.

Neither of them could get Spock to heal on their own. Jim isn’t confrontational enough, and Bones is too prickly. Which is one of the many, many reasons the Triumvirate is such a powerful trio.

Love is going to hurt, it always does, but the love is always, always more important than the pain of losing it. Where Nyota’s character arc begins, is where Spock’s ends.

Like Hemmer says

Anyways uhhh thoughts on this?

Any interpretation of the song is cool with me, but I wrote “let him down” because these verses are supposed to be repetitive to show that he's getting fixated on the past & that these are seemingly inescapable cycles. Sometimes, stoicism only prevents people from speaking out about their pain.

‘Making someone proud’ is usually active; it requires you to do something. ‘Not letting them down’ is seemingly passive- all you have to do is uphold their values every single day without slipping, but if they aren't your own values or they're especially strict, eventually the pressure will get too much. I don't think Spock believed Amanda when she said that he was enough.

It doesn't matter that Amanda supported his decision to join Starfleet, because he was still driven away due to bullying. I think he could cope with it when it was ‘just children’, but by the time he was a young adult he'd realized that these issues were more systemic & if he joined the VSA it would be more of the same.

And of course the irony is that Sarek's “fully Vulcan” son, Sybok, suppresses his emotions far less than any other family member, so Sarek has failed as a parent by his own standards.

In Who Mourns For Adonais when uhura has to fix the communications panel he tells her "I can imagine noone, better equipped to handle this, miss uhura."

At first i thought it was a subtle way to show spock and uhura's friendship, especially bc he calls her "miss uhura" and not "lieutenant", which he usually does.

And while i still think that is partially true, he does that same thing in The Tholian Web. When chekov and uhura are released from sickbay and he comes to the bridge he says "I am glad your back" and "your presence has been missed" (or something to those words) to them.

He obviously cares about the enterprise crew and always seems to make sure they hear how important they are. My guess is that he took a psychology class back at the academy but I also believe he knows how it feels like to believe you are never enough due to his half human status on vulcan and his alien status in starfleet. He never wants the people under him to feel like that so he tells them whenever he can. It also helps keep the crew morale up.

For a while I've been turning over in my mind the common aspect of the modern sex pollen trope where the only thing that's going to cure the condition is sexual contact with another person. The more I get familiar with my own aegosexuality, the more that seems like it must be a rule with exceptions in any realistically diverse world.

I mean I'd believe a story where the stuff just straight up kills some ace people rather than making them immune but I also think that version would come from a different place motivation-wise than most sex pollen stories, which tend to romanticize and exaggerate sexual desire - the "I feel like I will die if I don't get this" thing I've heard so much about.

And any fuck-or-die story that would keep the same mechanic for ace people as for allos, the idea just leaves an icky "corrective rape" feeling in my head.

Anyway I was contemplating the need for fuck-or-die stories with exceptions for ace people when I realized one of the archetypal fuck-or-die stories, Amok Time, literally shows the exception rather than the rule. And I started to wonder how that might relate to acespec identities.

Maybe asexuality is even less common among vulcans than humans, and one of the reasons Spock thinks he might escape the pon farr is that he thinks he might be ace. But perhaps it turns out that he's demisexual.

This is where Clint/Coulson comes in.

I'm pretty sure I've read more than one fic where one of these two is pretty sure they're never going to go into heat/rut/whatever the special intense sexual mode is for them in the au, but then they spend time with each other professionally and that close relationship awakens something in them and they get to experience the state after all, which to me is a sort of analog for demisexuality.

Anyway the thing that occurred to me was that Spock could be demisexual, and working closely with Jim might have been one of the reasons the pon farr actually happened to him despite not previously having shown any tendencies in that direction.

The other thing with Clint/Coulson that I associate with spirk in this context is the way their professional relationship shapes their emotional relationship and how attached they get to the professional dynamic as a result. Like, given their personalities basically the only way to get any of these people to connect with each other in a profound way like this is to make them work together, make them have to trust each other.

So that professional dynamic is both the inciting event for attraction and a thing that gets in the way of taking any action about it because they get attached to the status quo. What a great time for a fuck-or-die element to introduce itself!

And yet from canon, we could still consider Spock ace, maybe demiromantic ace, because there was no physical consummation in his story. There was a more emotion based resolution, one in which Spock was forced to confront how much he loves Jim and how much that shapes his life.

Anyway I think the point, if there is a point, is that as much as I love the smut that arises from similar fuck-or-die scenarios, I haven't seen much that matches the original for creative nonsexual solutions to the problem.

That’s what Michael says Sylvia when she’s trying to figure out what is happening and who, or rather what. “May” is.

But think about those words for a second, about how Michael’s face goes from smiling to seeming to barely keeping back tears as she goes on, “I know, I’m a xenoanthropologist”, trying to joke about it, make light of the situation.

Michael who was crying moments before, Michael who were herself a teenage girl once. Michael who was so alone on Vulcan, even more so after having driven Spock away. For his safety, she told herself. So he’d live. So he wouldn’t be in danger because he was close to her and half-Vulcan himself.

But oh that must have hurt. Knowing she’s had a friend in this lonely place, a friend her own age and now she didn’t. Couldn’t. Because he would be in danger if they were.

“Show me a teenage girl who haven’t cried.”