#especially when it comes to neirodivergency!

[deoidesign]

I need to know if I'm delusional and projecting onto random characters or if Adam and/or Steve are neurodivergent

You can project whatever you want on them, and I don't know that it's "canon" so to speak but I write them with neurodivergent intent in mind just based on my own life experiences!

so I'm projecting on them too, but it's up for debate whether that's coming across in the text.

Adam is autistic and Steve has ADHD. To Me.

[ichayalovesyou]

I don’t think Spock’s reaction is entirely just the influence of the k’war’ma’khon. It’s also up in the air whether they had evolved their psychic abilities enough to even have the k’war’ma’khon yet, at least one big enough to be sensed on the planet Spock & McCoy wound up on, during the time period they got sent to.

Vulcans aren’t inherently xenophobic, spoilers for Enterprise ahead. The reason that they have it so badly in Enterprise and they spend pretty much the entirety of the rest of the franchise recovering from it, is that they were infiltrated and purposefully destabilized Vulcan High Command. They encouraged false meritocracy and xenophobia within their culture to make them vulnerable to civil dispute and external attacks. They’re more predisposed to xenophobia because of their (hypothetical) evolutionary history, but it’s illogical to be afraid (not reasonably cautious of, but scared) of what you don’t understand, and Vulcans are all about logic. The othering of Spock may be a side effect of the marks the Romulan infiltration left as well.

Vulcans are very, very obviously not a hive mind, the way Tuvok thinks doesn’t affect how Vorik thinks. The way Sarek thinks didn’t encourage his Vulcan children to think the exact same way he does (thank god lmao). At least, no more than any parent can determine how/what their children think.

When it comes to the k’war’ma’khon it has to be a lot of Vulcans having the same, powerful emotion, say, anger or terror to affect an individual. It doesn’t affect what thoughts they have, but they do feel it. Which means the feeling can be out of place to what an individual was thinking or feeling before there was a powerful enough force to disrupt them. It’s many affecting an individual, not an indovual affecting many. The k’war’ma’khon is a loose mesh, Vulcans are not so insanely tied together that they’re all controlling each other at once, they just are capable of feeling together. They can only share actual thoughts and influence each other by touch unless they are exceptionally powerful, like Sybok.

If many Vulcans are feeling angry and possessive, a singular vulcan may feel or sense others feel that way, but label it with the wrong reasons. Thus Spock getting paranoid that McCoy is experiencing the emotions he’s feeling, and convincing himself he’s in love with the girl in All Our Yesterdays. While the Vulcans on their homeworld may be feeling angry/possessive en masse for an entirely different reason or reasons. Multiply Vulcans could be extremely angry for very different reasons, and cause a straggling off-world Vulcan to feel angry or sense that anger, but not be compelled to be angry for the same reason. They also don’t always feel the emotion directly through the k’war’ma’khon. Spock didn’t scream in terror with the crew of the Intrepid as they died, he just sensed their fear, and their deaths, but he didn’t feel the fear himself. It’s an awareness, not an all consuming intutive comprehension or impulse.

I think All Our Yesterdays is way, way more about who and what Spock is than Vulcans in general. Spock isn’t entirely Vulcan, he’s half human too, that and he’s not neurotypical by Vulcan or Human standards. He can never be. Every part of his body is a genetic hybridization of Human and Vulcan, that includes his brain. So if his Vulcan half is being influenced by the distant anger of the k’war’ma’khon of his homeworld, his humanity is going to react strangely to his vVulcan half lacking its usual constraints.

It’s like he’s stopped masking the turmoil, the neirodivergence, the otherness he usually feels. Partly through the influence of k’war’ma’khon, partly through the horrible situation he and Bones have found themselves in. It’s easier to give into your baser instincts, especially when other neurochemical/psychic factors are encouraging it, when you believe you’ve got nothing to lose. Thanks to the influence of ancient k’war’ma’khon, and the hybridized aspects of his brain crashing into each other in a highly unusual way, he has given up before McCoy. So Bones has to attempt to shake up Spock the same way Spock does whenever Bones has given up.

It’s also very possible Bones and Spock were just wrong about what was happening to him. It’s not like they had a tricorder to tell them what was up lol.

TL:DR: The K’war’ma’khon isn’t a hive mind, Spock’s biology is nuanced so his reaction to the change in the k’war’ma’khon isn’t going to be as simple as “all Vulcans react this way” to the circumstances he was in.

Okay, so I’m calling upon the expertise of @ichayalovesyou on my Vulcan-related theory- and please tell me if I’m WAY wrong. So I was thinking about how in All Our Yesterdays (3x23) of Star Trek, Spock travels back to a pre-Surak time for Vulcans and begins acting like a pre-Surak Vulcan. He’s possessive, more violent, more primal. That doesn’t make sense on the surface because he clearly remembers who he is and who McCoy is, and it’s not like McCoy is suddenly acting like a caveman. So, he remembers how he was raised, and he remembers being raised with logic. 

Now the show wants you to think that this is just another aspect of Vulcans- they’re a telepathic species; therefore, when Spock goes back in time, his mind is impacted by the telepathic thoughts and idk… vibes of the other Vulcan minds. They’re violent, primal, and possessive, so he is violent, primal, and possessive. And this is SO interesting. 

I think it explains why they’re all so low-key xenophobic in the modern Trek timeline and why they’re so intent that people control their emotions; I believe it even explains why they’re so wary of Spock himself. If it is true that Vulcans are deeply impacted by the general psychic energy/thoughts of all other Vulcans, then basically every Vulcan needs to be on the same page re: logic. There might be room for a few stragglers here and there, but if a third, or maybe even less of the overall population, does not control their emotions or views emotions differently, that will impact how every other Vulcan functions and thinks.  

Now in the AOS timeline, I think this could get REALLY interesting because there are only 10,000 of them left. That means each individual mind and person is going to have a vast, disproportionate impact on the vibe check of Vulcans. Especially if, for centuries, they’ve been used to having billions of minds to balance each individual person. 

On a more comical level, it might mean that they all become REALLY close- to the point where Spock might be chilling on the bridge and he’s like “oh, huh, I think a Vulcan just had a really really great orgasm two-star systems away” but it also obviously has insane implications where, in the wake of this absolutely terrible tragedy, they all need to be even more controlled which seems like a pretty big ask. So what if it starts deteriorating? Hmm…. (there is a fic here)