Month: May 2016

prettyarbitrary:

fuck-uhura:

I like to imagine new father Sarek being completely baffled by Spock’s human emotions as a toddler (before he was old enough to really repress anything).

Like he lightly scolds him one day for something and little Spock’s lip just trembles before he bursts into tears and Sarek just immediately backs away, horrified, like, “Amanda I require immediate assistance. I have made a grievous error and am an unsatisfactory parent.. Amanda, please cease your laughter, I am unsure of what to do.”

This is hilarious. 😀

But if I may, the whole Vulcan logic thing is actually so much more interesting than this!

It starts with the idea that Vulcans are actually natively so PASSIONATE that it’s really easy for them to get way wound up and violent.  In fact, the history of Vulcan is so saturated with war and violence that even Earth history is pretty darn impressed.

So way back when, this Vulcan dude named Surak came around and said, “We have to get control of this or we’re going to exterminate ourselves.” And he taught Vulcans how to 1: use logic to temper their emotions and 2: respect the hell out of all life and honor the unique experiences, perspectives and contributions of every individual lifeform such that the idea of killing without extreme need becomes anathema.

So the whole Vulcan logic thing is a learned, cultural behavior.  Not all of them do it really well, either.  Some of them miss the point and try to suppress their emotions–which is counterproductive.  What you’re suppressing, you aren’t really learning to deal with.  Some of them use logic as a blind, a lot like you’ll get Nice Guys trying to ‘play by the rules’ in order to get laid.  But by and large, Surak’s way has been so ingrained in Vulcan culture and education that they’ve gotten pretty good at intervening and educating people who wander into these blind alleys.  The real idea is to learn how to intervene in your own thought processes and apply a rigorous intellectual process of logic to your emotional reactions. In doing so, you nip off reactions that are unfair, unreasonable or poorly thought out, and you gain a deeper, more thought-out and advantageous result to the ones you keep.  You can have all the emotional reactions you want, basically; you just don’t do anything about them till you’ve thought them through.  (But Vulcans are by and large really really smart, so they tend to do this very quickly.)

The fact that Vulcans are infamous as pointy-eared ice queens who show no emotion is more of a cultural inclination toward extreme privacy.  Although there also seems to be a cultural inclination toward snarky bastardness that probably means they think it’s hilarious that it drives other species up the wall.  They’re the kind of benign trolls who’d refer to that as a “teaching moment.”

But it does mean that Vulcan rugrats are probably expected to be wild little hellions till their parents take them in hand.