Not To Mention Just Spock And T'pring Interacting In The First Place - Tumblr Posts
snw spock rant
i've been watching strange new worlds recently, and the prevailing feeling i always leave with, no matter the episode, is that i would like it if not for spock.
don't get me wrong; i'm a tos fan to my core. star trek launched me into a love of sci-fi and space fiction and is the whole reason i'm in university studying astrophysics, why i'm writing a book using said inner astrophysics nerd, why i have any sense of purpose to me, cliche as it is to say. star trek was an integral, important part of my upbringing, and continues to be one of my main interests to this day. i love jim (and i love snw jim! especially after aos kirk (shudders)) and i love bones (i really hope he joins snw soon....leonard mccoy save us....save us leonard mccoy...) and i love scotty and i love spock. but not snw spock.
here's the thing about spock: his internal character conflicts have always had some sort of root in him being not enough/not vulcan enough/not human enough/etc. his struggles with relationships as a result – because, lets face it, both humans and vulcans are social creatures and need friends otherwise society as a whole wouldn't be a thing on either world – make up a core part of his character. in tos, his relationship struggles were nearly purely platonic, with a few offhand remarks about stray crew members having crushes on him (uhura in early first season, chapel in amok time).
s1e4 "the naked time". spock, right before losing his figurative Marbles, sees "love mankind" written on a wall. later, he goes on to say to jim: "when i feel friendship for you, i'm ashamed." other posts have done and will do better jobs of explaining it, but in conjunction with "sinner" written on the turbolift near jim (about not being able to form lasting relationships with other crewmates because its too much of a power imbalance), the writing on the wall (literally) is that spock is inherently ashamed of his humanity. he has been raised on vulcan to be a vulcan.
his internal conflict is always about him struggling with his human side. he struggles with friendship, he struggles with his humanity, he struggles to be something that people don't immediately deem wrong. as a gay man, and certainly as a young queer child first watching tos, i felt closest to spock not just because of feeling ashamed of part of my cultural heritage, but also because of repression. spock represses these feelings of insecurity, of friendship, of the need for connection in others in a certain way, so much that it causes him pain. growing up gay, his pain was very real to me. writing on the wall. he’s silly and a cool character of course, but he resonated with me in a way that, at the time, i didn’t have anything to resonate with.
what does this all have to do with me hating snw spock so much? i want to preface this by saying i went into snw really wanting to love it. i saw the intro and the planets and the nebulae and the black hole and the music and was like "damn, this is fucking cool." star trek, to some part of me, was also about the space exploration aspect as much as the characters. the whims of wacky crewmembers and sentient rocks. the impossibly infinite things nature can form on its own. snw looked fun. i really wanted to like it. and you know what? i almost like it.
except for spock. quite literally the only character i have any quarrels with is spock. dehydrated, glistening, oiled up spock. wtf. why is he in a relationship with t'pring? why does he (almost) cheat on her with chapel? and why chapel??????????? chapel has a one-sided (VERY CLEARLY ONE SIDED) crush on him in tos. why is it two sided now.
what, and i can't stress this enough, the fuck?
and don't come into my house and tell me "oh you know, it makes sense, because, because then spock gets all hard and Logical and shuts himself off and obviously the reason for that is a breakup–" No!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! no no no no. i don't care if it makes “sense” it feels so intrinsically wrong to his character. i’ve had much more character development from losing life-long friends than ending barely a year long relationships. spock wouldn’t immediately shut down because he kissed a girl once and then she said “acshually sowwy my work is more important” when that’s the exact sentiment he echoed to t’pring when they broke up.
more importantly, snw spock barely has friends. he calls pike a friend once or twice, but i hardly believe that they're friends. he barely interacts with la'an or erica, he has a few passing conversations with uhura in season 1 on episodes about her that don't really carry into season 2, and otherwise he's just There. he doesn't have friends in snw. the writers are prioritising him having a romantic relationship over a friendship. snw spock needs a friend way more than he needs a bone buddy. and it really rubs me the wrong way the way the relationship with chapel was portrayed to be first friendly and then romantic. i never believed for a second that he and chapel were friends – despite the screenwriters trying. every time they talked prior to s2e5 there was this odd undercurrent of sexuality that seemed to follow them. lingering looks, touching fingertips, long pauses – it was so unbelievably awkward and obvious that they were setting up a relationship between the two. i mean, for fucks sake, s1e1 uhura calls chapel "spock's girlfriend." boy did my blood boil when i figured out that was where the show was going. s1e5 was actually painful for me to get through (chapel sits down, gives spock relationship advice, giggles, smacks him upside the head, and calls him an idiot. 2017 wattpad is calling, they want their material back) and i had to take two full days to get through s2e5 because i was in anguish the whole time. it was a constant mental barrage of "spock wouldn't say that," and "spock wouldn't do that," and "this is not spock."
for the most part, i couldn't figure out why spock and chapel's relationship specifically bothered me so much. i mean i have my quarrels with la'an and jim, and i really don't give much of a care about pike and batel so why was spock and chapel grating on me so badly? was it because it was being shoved in my face? was the writing that much more atrocious than the others? was it the decimation of spock's character?
it was, i found, a product of all of those and the issue of queerness.
look; i've survived sherlock bbc, i’ve survived the golden age of quotev fandom in 2016, i've bared witness to so much queerbaiting in my life that i don't even bother trying to hope for any sort of main character queer representation anymore. we’re going to be a footnote until someone does something about it. unfortunately, that’s not going to be me because i’m not a film director. so i look the other way and steam about it on twitter or tumblr or whatever hoping that i, like many other frustrated queer people, get noticed one day in the far future when it’s ok to have a queer romance in mainstream, it’s ok to have a queer main character, and it’s ok to let it simmer slowly and burn instead of jumping into it to say “look guys we’re woke!!!!!” (star trek literally was the pioneer for most of these things back in the day. but that’s another discussion on the heterosexualisation of progressive media that i wont get into. it just feels bitterly funny that this is happening to star trek of all things.) these days i just pretend the relationships dont exist and skip over them when they happen. i've developed a sixth sense for when weird, forced heterosexuality is about to be shoved down my oesophagus. i've just gotten used to it.
but sphapel (or whatever it's called) burned through me. i've never felt quite this angry at an on screen relationship. and, trust me, i saw AOS. i didn't like spuhura then and i don't like it now but i wasn't angry so much as i was just tired and annoyed. but spock was – and always is to me, confused, queer 10 year old me – a queer character. his struggle with humanity, with friendship, with fitting in, with just being as a perceived "other" was what made him an interesting character to me to begin with. he was a certain outlet to vent that frustration for being "wrong" in society no matter how hard you try to conform one way or another. the knowledge that even if you are different, you still have people backing you up. his fucking friendships, guys. jim and bones. yes i know his friendship with jim is also inherently romantic dont worry im spirk #1 shipper but that’s not relevant here because, and forgive me for being pessimistic, i don’t believe for a second that these writers are going to lean into spirk anytime soon. their relationship went beyond friendship or romance or any of that stuff. coughs in the roddenberry footnote.
what i’m trying to say here, in layman’s terms, is that giving a friendless character a romantic relationship is exactly how you alienate a character. name one person you know in real life that can survive healthily with one single relation, that being their romantic partner that they have no friendly base of. you can’t. that’s a toxic relationship. that’s not romance, that’s alienation. that’s isolation. that’s loneliness. and that’s the OPPOSITE OF WHAT EXPLORING SPOCK’S HUMAN SIDE IS SUPPOSED TO DO TO HIM .
by stripping spock of his friends, and forcing his arc to be purely romantic, you have essentially stripped the character of all he is. i'd be mad if chapel was a dude, too, honestly speaking. but beyond that, corralling spock of all people into a heterosexual romantic relationship is – well. it's a choice i don't think i can ever agree with. the best way i can describe such a choice is like a dissonant chord – you can pluck the notes and they'll sound fine on their own, but when you put them together they will clash. there is nothing you can do with your fingers to play the same notes and not cause the clash. they will always clash. it is dissonance ringing through you, an inherent wrongness coupled with writing that is lazy and clearly meant for a very specific audience. snw spock is bad writing, fanservice, and extraordinarily out of character. notes i can tolerate on their own, but strung together – dissonant.
i really want to like snw. fuck, i love la'an, i love erica, i love jim (!!! thank you paul wesley for making him a nerd, and kind (glares at AOS), and generally a jim kirk that i can look at and say, "yeah, that's jim alright"), i love uhura, i love una, i love m'benga and i love pike but i hate spock. i really, truly, cannot like snw when i have to pause the show and take an irritated deep breath in every time i see chapel approach spock. it's – frustrating, and alienating, and wrong. so, so wrong.