Thinking about marriage/women's rights on Vulcan
Some may think that T'Pring not being allowed to divorce Spock was because he was going through the pon farr but if she were allowed to divorce him at all she probably would have done that a long time ago, confirmed by T'Pol when she's speaking with Koss, who isn't suffering from the pon farr. She says that he can choose another mate (without invoking a fight it seems: note the difference between a 'mate' and a 'challenger') and after he makes it clear that nothing she says will change his mind about marrying her, she finally threatens to declare a kal-if-fee.
It's clear that Vulcan women cannot divorce/refuse to marry a man they've been betrothed to under any circumstances if
A) He himself doesn't consent to ending their marriage or
B) She doesn't have someone else waiting in the wings to be given to in his stead. Though, if the challenger she selects fails to win the fight, she'll have to marry her betrothed anyway unless (again) he decides he doesn't want her after the challenge.
That seems like an incredibly unfair system, heavily biased towards men.
SNW is an alternate universe in many obvious respects but most egregiously in that T'Pring has a lot of non-canonical agency over her relationship with Spock.
It's interesting to me that Vulcan society has women in many positions of power and treats women as equal to men from what I've seen despite these laws.
We don't really see Vulcans exhibiting a misogynistic attitude towards women in general but in TOS (perhaps because of its general writing style but it's still interesting to note) both Sarek and Spock take on patriarchal attitudes specifically regarding wives.
Amanda says that 'of course' Sarek commands her because "he is a Vulcan and I am his wife." It's worthwhile in my eyes to note that she specifies 'wife' instead of attributing this attitude to women as a whole. Again, with TOS' writing style it wouldn't be out of place for her to say "he is a man and I am a woman."
Spock, while in a pon farr induced irritation, states that it's "undignified for a woman to play servant to a man that isn't hers" - again implying that there's something specific about being a Wife in Vulcan society which is different from being a woman in general and demands subservience to a husband.
This could perhaps stem from the extreme sense of ownership that Vulcan law has permitted men to have over women. A woman legally cannot point blank refuse marriage. There is no option which guarantees she won't have to marry her betrothed other than death. When T'Pau speaks of T'Pring she refers to her as being 'property' and Stonn, before being interrupted, states he's made 'the ancient claim' - we don't know what this is because he gets cut off but it's obvious they're both using the language of Vulcan law.
Men are permitted true freedom to choose. If a woman wants to choose someone else to be with there is no option available to her other than the kal-if-fee which might result in the death of the one she wants to be with. And, if her lover fails, her husband can still just decide he wants to marry her and she'll be forced to. T'Pring gives two scenarios: One where Spock 'frees' her and one where he doesn't - it's still ultimately his decision which is clear when he ends the conversation with "Stonn, she is yours."
This again isn't just because of the pon farr as T'Pol also goes through this. Koss can choose another mate and when the option is talked about there's no implication that this would result in any sort of fight (both by the casualness of its mention and by the fact that there's no formal word for it unlike the kal-if-fee.)
Also, the fact that Koss does eventually grant T'Pol a divorce and it's all fine means that T'Pol isn't lawfully required to have another man waiting if her HUSBAND doesn't want her. It's ONLY required if SHE doesn't want her husband.
Tradition must take precedence over individual desire UNLESS!!! You're a man. Then it's fine. Like, your parents might not be happy but legally you're golden.
Oh wow, so many interesting posts! I just want to add two pennies of my own.
First, I don't think SNW makes anything "less bad" (I'm writing this having seen up to episode 2 of season 4). We see that T'Pring is the one who proposes, but we know from TOS that they were betrothed as children. To me this reads like Vulcans get betrothed as children, BUT the woman is supposed to propose thus giving the whole thing a veneer of free choice. Now, how free this choice is seems to depend on the young Vulcan woman's ability to think for herself, resist society and her parents. At least in T'Pring's case she seemed to be enamored with Spock and her preference and society's demands were aligned. However, from SNW we know that her father wants the marriage too for a connection to Sarek. So there's reason to suspect that T'Pring's free choice to propose isn't that free and is influenced by her her family and society. But! Since she made the choice and proposed, subsequent unwillingness to go through with the marriage is "her own fault" and "illogical", as she is supposedly the one who initiated the commitment. As we find out later, her "free choice" can still be voided if her parents decided so during the engagement dinner. But yeah, let's give the little girl and illusion of choosing and being chosen, she'll be more docile that way.
Second, I don't think that logic is separate from koon-ut-kal-ifee, but the struggle between logic of everyday life and the barbarity of pon farr serves to obfuscate the misogyny of Vulcan society, making it harder to challenge. Pon farr is some illogical, taboo thing, but the woman is expected to still behave logically. One of the most important tenets of the Vulcan society is "the needs of the many outweighs the needs of the few, or the one", making selfish behavior illogical. So, if she calls for battle, she is risking the lives of two people for her own needs, which is illogical. We can see this when Koss tells T'Pol that were she to challenge, he would have to kill her challenger. I think this shuts up T'Pol not because she believes his absolute strength against any unknown opponent, but because she doesn't want Koss to die either, and the society demands a Vulcan would prioritize others above themselves. During pon farr, the woman is supposed to be the logical one, but since Koss isn't in pon farr, we see that this societal norm has been applied to weddings in general.
So logic works to further bind women into these marriages where even if they theoretically can refuse, in reality refusal is illogical and goes against societal beliefs - the importance of others' needs and against your own logical decision made years ago when you proposed. And nobody sees the misogyny behind it all.
I hope I'm making sense.
I think any Star Trek show that has to do with Vulcans in the 25th century will have to mention just what a feminist revolutionary T'Pring was.
[Note: this post is grumpy and eventually also about Star Trek, it just takes longer than usual to get there and is generally rambling.]
There's something tickling my brain about how my main fandom—to a large degree, sole fandom—for years was Pride and Prejudice, and one of my most intense and long-lasting, yet niche grievances with Austen fandom fanon was over Lady Anne Darcy. It was specifically around the fandom image of her as this absolutely idealized mother, a sort of Madonna figurine brought to life.
I've talked about this many times, but: we know little about Darcy's mother in the book, and that little doesn't really suggest this ideal modest, easy-going, selfless, soft maternal figure. Multiple people in the novel allude to her teaming up with her sister, Lady Catherine de Bourgh, in arranging the betrothal of Lady Catherine's daughter to Lady Anne's son to consolidate the status and property of the sisters' husbands, as well as their own aristocratic ancestry. Lady Catherine is really the only one who goes out of her way to mention Lady Anne. Late in the novel, Darcy very carefully talks his way around filial respect towards his dead parents while also trying to explain how they affected him, insisting they were good people while adding that they not only allowed, but encouraged ("almost taught" him) his arrogance and narrow preoccupation with his family circle. He also specifically says that his widely beloved father was the more generous and pleasant of the two.
It's a small thing in some ways: Lady Anne is an incredibly minor character who is dead before the novel starts and whom we only hear a little about that's easy to overlook. At first (long ago), I didn't care about individual fics or headcanons or whatnot working to distance her from Lady Catherine (and even Darcy himself), and instead envisioning her as a sort of generic maternal ideal. But it was impossible to avoid noticing what seemed an oddly pervasive fannish investment in this quasi-Madonna image of her, even though a) we hear so little about her and b) it doesn't fit very well with what we do hear.
And honestly, Lady Anne being the more abrasive and haughty parent, whom Darcy resembles more closely, makes perfect sense with her background and with the structural mirroring of Elizabeth-Mr Bennet and Darcy-Lady Catherine (each parental figure embodying extreme versions of each lead character's flaws and in some ways, warped versions of their virtues).
But it's not just that there's no reason to assume she was so utterly dissimilar from and superior to Lady Catherine, and that both Lady Catherine and Wickham are independently manufacturing the Pemberley family's cooperation with the planned marriage between Darcy and Anne, or to think that Darcy's implication that Lady Anne was the more difficult personality is mistaken. The thing that always puzzled me is why so many P&P fans want to idealize her this way in the first place, when she's barely referenced in the novel. Why would so many fans care so much about this dead offstage aristocrat being defined entirely in terms of Being a Good Mother (maybe even a perfect mother) despite the obvious unnecessary complications this creates around the characterizations of her sister and son?
It was never a universal fanon, to be clear, but common enough that I couldn't help noticing it and finding it strange. Like, did this whole weird fanon arise solely because Lady Anne is Darcy's mother, and marginal and ambiguous enough to allow fans to default to the most comfortably gendered image of female parenthood? Is it related to the hyper-gendered interpretations of Elizabeth and Darcy themselves, even though both are most strongly associated with cross-gender parental figures in Mr Bennet and Lady Catherine?
(A tangent, but for the record: I'd also argue, and have before, that Elizabeth is most temperamentally similar to Darcy's male friends, while Darcy himself is far more like Jane and Charlotte than like Bingley or Fitzwilliam. And just about every time that either Elizabeth or Darcy makes an assumption about the other based on generalizations about men/women rather than particulars of each other's personalities, they get proven very wrong. So understanding either of them wholly in terms of masculinity/femininity seems dubious in the first place.)
There are probably other possibilities for why there's this investment in idealizing Lady Anne, but in any case, the reason I'm rambling about this is because a lot of the sense of Amanda Grayson's character post-"Journey to Babel" that I've seen reminds me a lot of Austen fandom's representation of Lady Anne.
It's not as baseless with Amanda, for sure. She is initially somewhat set up that way only for that image to get painfully undercut later, when she tells Spock she'll hate him forever if he doesn't step down from his responsibilities to risk his life for Sarek's (she also hits Spock in this scene, though "I'll hate you forever" feels worse to me! ymmv!). And later official ST productions have moved more and more aggressively towards this "Madonna" image of Amanda (while Spock himself has also been increasingly stripped of the messy, complicated ways that TOS Spock himself interacts with gender, in-story and out of it).
But even versions of Amanda that appear almost exclusively based on TOS Amanda seem to lean heavily into an image of her that reminds me much more strongly of fanon Lady Anne Darcy than the Amanda of "Journey to Babel." And I guess it's one of those things that I not only disagree with but don't really get the appeal of. I like both Lady Anne and Amanda quite a lot, despite all of the above—or rather, because of it. They seem to be difficult, imperfect figures within messy family dynamics—great! Messy family dynamics are a lot of fun, and being good mothers is not the only metric by which to engage with female characters who have children.
I don't think either Lady Anne or Amanda are good parents, but they're no worse at it than their husbands, and I find both of them more interesting to think about than their husbands. One of my first fanfics ever was a trollish little fic about Mr Darcy cheating on his wife, who has returned to her father's house with a premature baby nobody expects to live, only to increasingly hint and then reveal that the betrayed wife is Lady Anne and the supposedly doomed premie baby is Darcy himself. There's a TOS-only concept that regularly plays in my head about the cut "City on the Edge of Forever" scene where Spock invites Kirk to Vulcan to rest and heal for some indefinite length of time, only it happens at the end of the five-year mission when Kirk is even more ground-down than he transparently is becoming in S3, but this becomes interwoven with Amanda as this personable but ambiguous figure, and with the complications around how she relates to Spock, Sarek, and even Kirk.
Anyway. I don't know if there are other fandoms where people have noticed that drive to idealize rather than villainize flawed mothers, but I was very struck by how much the cleaned-up Amanda reminded me of cleaned-up Lady Anne.
Soviet Union was not a nation state, it was a multinational state. This was because actually it was a totalitarian empire that illegally occupied a bunch of nation states and caused immense amounts of suffering.
william shatner transforming into the actor of his generation for the look in immunity syndrome when he realises spock is still alive. u can see the grief he hasn't had to carry for a lifetime lift from his shoulders thru a single exhale. this man would not have been happy for the rest of his days and he makes u live that just by a miniscule shift of his face. the birth of the first stars like dawn breaking in a universe devoid of light
being an adult is just saying to yourself “this is the weekend i’ll clean my [x]” and then proceeding to not do that because it’s the weekend and you deserve to relax, goddamnit
i think we should start openly mocking male creatives who can't figure out how to write women. like actually i think it's embarrassing that it took elliot page transitioning for christopher nolan to give him a good role. why did it take like ten years to get the first female lead in a marvel movie? why is it a Known Fact that stephen king can't write women? why is 50% of the population omitted from large ensemble works? i asked my friend to name a movie directed by a man with a majority female cast and he said ghostbusters 2016. ghostbusters. ghostbusters. g
Tbf asimov famously wasn’t good at writing fleshed out characters period - there’s a reason the premise of his best series is that individuals are interchangeable on a large enough scale.
i think we should start openly mocking male creatives who can't figure out how to write women. like actually i think it's embarrassing that it took elliot page transitioning for christopher nolan to give him a good role. why did it take like ten years to get the first female lead in a marvel movie? why is it a Known Fact that stephen king can't write women? why is 50% of the population omitted from large ensemble works? i asked my friend to name a movie directed by a man with a majority female cast and he said ghostbusters 2016. ghostbusters. ghostbusters. g
theres something so sinister about how many ai influencers there are and all of them, and I mean every single one of them are oversexualized women with eerily perfect symmetrical faces and exaggerated body proportions
I don't get that and there are other things I'm not seeing that people complain about is "everywhere". Like, I saw very little football world cup content and didn't even know about the Norwegian guy. I wonder if it's because I don't have TikTok (I watch reels on Instagram), live in EU, or my algorithm is just dope. Or all of the above?
I think Gaiman is very direct in Good Omens season 3. He has God say that you should let the stories end when the book ends. I think it was intentional, because he knew that the story was antithetical to the original book. I think he, despite allegedly being an awful human, who has hurt a lot of women, is also very into art and treasures the art he's written. And I also think he's greedy and ambitious, and vain, and agreed to seasons 2 and 3 for fame. The inner conflict was inevitable. I think he thinks the fans "made" him do Aziraphael/Crowley. And that line was a message for these fans, as a lesson of "this is what happens when you rape the muse". But he doesn't realize that he himself did it.
Season 2–3 is a product of greed. We see this greed and vanity in the Sandman episode where Gaiman is also very directly talking about raping the muse and for a while being the successful author whose works are being made into movies. Gaiman is talking about himself there, at least in part. Trying to find good bits in seasons 2–3 or explain them away somehow, is meaningless.
I'm getting back into playing guitar. I used to play 20 years ago, but then dropped it and have now picked it up again. It's really struck me how the internet has changed. Back in the day, you'd just find chords online, print them or play them from your PC and that's it. People used to upload chords that they themselves had written down and then discuss whether their chords are correct. Now the websites ask you to register and pay for the chords by users and I doubt users see a penny. Oh, there are nifty features, like, it can open up a youtube video and play the song for you without you leaving the site, wow, but oh my god, monetization smh my head.
stormborns
s-u-f-j-a-n-s-t-e-v-e-n-s
areudirty
vaporwave
