#vulcans never share scientific info about themselves (implied: because they're xenophobis isolationists)

[koalas-koalas-everywhere]

It’s really something how, especially after the 2009 movies, but before that, too, the Star Trek TOS fandom will write Vulcans off as racist, xenophobic and bigoted at their root, a problem the society has at their core, even though it goes against their beliefs*, but will bend over backwards to explain away Spock’s distaste of McCoy and his “potions” that “turn his stomach” (some of those explanations including being studied, if I’m allowed the expression, inhumanely, as a science experiment, in Vulcan - although it seems like this intense research never even succeeded, since the usual explanation for the second issue is that most medicine for either species won’t work on his hybrid physiology and so McCoy’s just shooting in the dark, even though he’s clearly similar enough to a full Vulcan that 1) he has a Vulcan blood type, 2) he can donate blood to his father and 3) he’s similar enough to a full Vulcan to be similar enough to a similar species to use drugs designed for them**), totally ignoring how, when Spock says that in The Apple, McCoy answers with “Well, If your blood were red instead of green, you wouldn't have an upset stomach.” Like, “I am so sorry most if not all medicine I give you has unwanted and undesirable effects on you, have you considered being human?” 

You might say, “well, it could mean they got the human/Vulcan balance in the kind of medicine a hybrid like him would need wrong!” Nope, he specifically says he’d need red blood. “Could be he only brought down human medicine for that mission” one, and that’s not racist??? Two, Spock says all of McCoy’s “potions” turn his stomach. Either for some reason he only or mostly gets treated on away missions and Bones never brings anything suitable for a Vulcan (refer to point one), or there’s nothing aboard suitable for someone who doesn’t have “red blood” (... actually, refer to point one again). It just... really bothers me, because general consensus seems to be that Spock only finds acceptance once among humans and, while other reasons for this are paid lip service, at the end of the day most humans are shown as accepting while most Vulcans are shown as bigots, and the fault for his isolation seems to lie with the people who have IDIC as a main tenet and who reached out to humans in the first place (once they developed a warp drive, so it seems like they followed some sort of Prime Directive, created so that cultures would have the chance to develop some sort of identity before being met with and possibly swallowed by another one, showing, once again, a respect for diversity on their part)... but never on us, right?

(To be clear, while I don’t like it, necessarily, because I’m a TOS and Vulcan fan first, I’d never criticize AOS mainly fans for this attitude, since it’s just canon in those movies. Same for Disco, which borrowed mainly from those movies, because of intellectual property rights stuff or something like that, although who knows if they’d have done differently otherwise.)

*And this is not a comment I make about how it doesn’t make sense for fandom to believe this (aka, it’s not me saying “how can they be bigoted if their beliefs go against that?”) -  this hypocrisy on their part is often an essential part of how fandom and even recent canon interacts with Vulcans, because it leads to a select few of them, usually outworlders or others influenced by them, especially humans, having to point out those flaws and teach the rest of Vulcan society the true meaning of Surak’s tenets. 

**All of this is from Journey to Babel. In it, it’s revealed that Spock has T-negative blood, just like his father (although with some “human blood elements” in it that need to and can be filtered out), and that, to produce enough of it to donate to Sarek for his heart surgery, Spock has to take a drug meant for Rigelians... and it works. And that’s without getting into how, every time there’s something typical of Vulcans, it applies to Spock - telepathy, having no salt in his body, the second eyelids, the visors with which to look at a Medusan that only work on Vulcans, Pon Farr... I think people look at the whole half-human/half-Vulcan thing in a too literal way, not recognizing that, in his expressed DNA, and in where and how he was raised, Spock’s much more Vulcan than human (and that’s without getting into how... US- and neurotypical-centric the definition of “human behaviour” can get. Let’s have a toast to that one time the Star Trek fandom, despite multiple references to the contrary, convinced themselves that money doesn’t exist there because Kirk didn’t know what a dollar was).